A Script for A Theory of Dissolving Spoons

He blinked, certain his eyes, sixty-eight years old and prone to the occasional floater, were deceiving him. He leaned closer. There were five cubes now, arranged in a perfect line. As he watched, a sixth cube twitched, lifted onto its edge, and slid smoothly into place beside the others. It was absurd. A draft? The table was perfectly level; he’d checked last week with a spirit level app on his phone, much to the amusement of the staff. Vibrations from the city outside? No, the movement was too deliberate, too precise. It was as if an invisible hand was playing with its food.

He fumbled for his phone, his fingers trembling slightly. He had to document this. Proof. He wasn’t going mad. He snapped a photo. Then another. He looked at the screen. The pictures showed a bowl of sugar cubes and five or six scattered randomly on the table, as if knocked by a careless sleeve. Nothing like the neat, impossible line he was seeing with his own eyes. It was observer effect on a macro scale. The universe, it seemed, was camera shy.

“Forgetting what sugar is for, John? It goes *in* the coffee, you know. Dissolves. Entropy. Your favourite subject.”

Terry arrived with his customary cloud of smug rationalism. An engineer by trade, Terry believed the world was a machine that could be fully understood, taken apart, and reassembled. He treated John’s field of theoretical physics with the affectionate disdain a plumber might have for a poet.

“Look,” John whispered, pointing a shaky finger at the table. A new set of cubes had begun to form a second line beneath the first.

Terry squinted. “I see sugar cubes. On a table. I also see a man who has clearly forgotten to take his medication this morning. Are you building a little Stonehenge? Worshipping the caffeine gods?”

“They’re moving, Terry. On their own. They’re forming… an equation.”

Terry peered closer, his face a caricature of clinical assessment. “Ah, yes. I see it now. ‘Two plus two equals fish.’ John, you’ve finally cracked it. Your Nobel Prize is in the post.” He sat down heavily. “Honestly, if you’re this bored in your retirement, I can lend you a lawnmower.”

The Barista's Constant

John ignored him, his gaze fixed on the unfolding tableau. The symbols were becoming clearer. A Planck constant. A Schrödinger wave function. It was elegant, beautiful, and utterly impossible. It was a physical manifestation of the language he’d spent his life speaking.

Linda, the young woman behind the counter, came over to wipe a neighbouring table. She was a philosophy student, John recalled, with tattoos of constellations up one arm.

“Everything alright over here, gentlemen?” she asked, her smile pleasant.

“John’s having a conversation with the condiments,” Terry said, not looking up from his phone. “He thinks they’re doing his quantum homework.”

Linda’s gaze fell upon the table. John expected amusement, confusion, perhaps a concerned offer to call someone. Instead, her eyes narrowed with an expression of intense, professional interest. “It’s the superposition,” she said matter-of-factly. “They can’t maintain a coherent state when you try to record them. Collapses the wave function every time. You’d need a different kind of observation.” She finished wiping the other table and walked away, leaving a stunned silence in her wake.

John and Terry stared after her. Terry was the first to speak. “Did… did the barista just explain the observer effect?”

“She… I think she did,” John stammered. He looked from Linda’s retreating back to the sugar cubes on the table. The equation was still growing, faster now, more urgent. New symbols appeared, ones he didn't recognise at first. They weren’t physics. They were values. Numbers. Coordinates and velocities.

“What the hell is that?” Terry asked, his cynical armour finally showing a crack. He leaned over the table, his phone forgotten. “That looks like… a vector analysis.”

“It is,” John said, a sense of dread dawning. “It’s a trajectory. Mass, velocity, angle of incidence…” He traced the line of the final calculation with his finger. It pointed directly at the large plate-glass window at the front of the shop. The numbers resolved themselves into a final, terrifying clarity.

“It’s a countdown,” Terry breathed, his face pale. “That number there… it’s changing. Decreasing.”

“It’s not a countdown,” John corrected, his voice barely a whisper, his eyes wide with a terrible understanding. “It’s a prediction. A calculation. The numbers describe the precise physical properties of an object that is about to… arrive.”

Terry looked from the table to the window, watching the mundane procession of buses and pedestrians. “Arrive from where?”

As he spoke, a high-pitched, metallic screech tore through the air from the city outside. People on the pavement stopped and looked up at the sky. John didn’t need to look. He knew what the equation was predicting. It wasn’t a car crash. It was an impact. He grabbed Terry’s arm, his grip surprisingly strong.

“Get down,” he hissed. “Under the table. Now!”