1989.
I was nobody.
Just a fourth-semester engineering student, living in the smelliest lab in the corner of campus.
The vacuum lab.
It was there I first understood that empty space could be denser than a professor’s skull.
The rotary pump hummed like an unfinished prayer.
That Pyrex tube stood silently in front of me.
There wasn’t much I could do but stare, take notes, and pray that nothing exploded that night.
Sometimes I played Gainsbourg’s *Je t’aime... moi non plus* from a borrowed cassette.
Sometimes I talked to myself.
Not because I was mad.
But because in that room, the only thing that listened was the machine.
The years passed.
Now I work in structural management.
There's air conditioning.
There are ICT budgets, servers, licenses, and networks to guard like an eldest child.
But on certain nights, I still remember that room.
The smell of lubricant.
The silence.
And that Pyrex tube...
In my mind, I sit before it once more.
Alone.
Praying in silence.
Just once...
For a quantum leap to spark from nowhere.
For the universe, just once, to defy its straight line.
And if that leap must erase a cat from two worlds at once,
so be it.
That's a price worth paying for one miracle.
I used to want everything to be certain.
Like Newton.
Then Schrödinger arrived.
Then came the articles, theses, and stale scientific hoaxes spreading like expired instant coffee.
And I got sick of Schrödinger.
Not the man—
but the idea that everything is only probability.
I want the quiet void inside that Pyrex tube.
I want Heisenberg’s uncertainty made visible.
I want to sit again before that vacuum tube,
without demands,
without spreadsheets,
without meeting minutes,
without KPIs.
I want... a small miracle.
And if I can’t find it in this world,
then let me search for it in the Pyrex tube,
in the silent empty space,
inside a prayer I never finish typing.