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hallway, up at the ornate crown molding, and realized what he was doing. Without even considering it, something lurking in his brain, the monkey on his back, was requesting a few hits of meth to make everything all better.
    He hung his head and sighed. Would it ever get any easier?
    Stepping inside his apartment, he closed the door and paced in front of the window. He listed everything in his life that was getting better. Every step that took him closer to a life where he could be with Sean and make a living solving technical puzzles was a good step. Any step out that door in search of a chemical nightmare was a bad step. When he finished, one thing stood out: he had a room in a nice house in a good town and, if not a bed, at least a soft, warm place to sleep.
    Ryan lay back down and pulled the sleeping bag around him. Visions of the past mixed with hope for the future. He thought of his old friend and wondered where Foster was now. Probably sleeping peacefully with his wife—he ended up marrying the aerobics instructor. Ryan wondered if Foster knew that a university had bought the rights to their patents.

T he way that mathematical symmetry appears in nature is as elegant and beautiful a thing as there is in the universe.” Professor Emmy Nutter loved teaching the first term of senior-level quantum physics. Thirty of the University of California’s finest faced her in an auditorium with a capacity for three hundred.
    “We’re going to take our time with this derivation, okay? I want you to feel this. It’s what art students feel when they study Renoir, what music students feel the first time they play Brahms, what computer science students feel when they learn—I don’t know—queuing theory?” Emmy smiled, giving the class permission to laugh. Turning back to the board, she tossed her long wavy hair out of her eyes. Her hair was currently brown with blonde streaks. She’d been dyeing it different colors since she was ten and wasn’t sure what its natural color might be—blonde like her mother’s, brown like her father’s, or black like her brother’s.
    She drew symbols on the whiteboard with a black pen, symbols in a language as arcane to most people as druidical runes, but this really was the language of nature. It was this mathematical purity that had drawn Emmy to physics.
    “We start with a general wave function.” She scribbled a Greek letter on the whiteboard. “Let this symbol describe the evolution of a system in space and time. It could be a hydrogen atom, a blackhole, the mold growing on your roommate’s pillow, anything you want. Now watch, multiply it by this function of time.” She turned back to face her class. Two young men, Mike and Rob, sat in the front row, overachieving A-students wearing Society of Physics Students sweatshirts with an image of Einstein and the caption “I’d have written this in four dimensions, but I didn’t have the spacetime.” To Emmy’s left, Tran, a thin, pale Asian man in a pressed Oxford shirt with a razor-sharp part in his hair, stared back. A month ago Tran had been tentative, afraid to demonstrate ignorance. Now, when he had a question, he blurted it out as a challenge without even raising his hand. Lori, the only female student, sat ten rows back in the center of a cluster of young men. Lori disappointed Emmy. No stranger to being the only woman in a room of men, she hoped Lori would grow into a scientist. Instead, she sat there playing soap opera games with her boyfriends.
    Emmy said, “The function of time resets the clock. That’s all. You can think of it like daylight savings time. Can you think of a reason that the system should behave differently by resetting the clock?” She watched the class, encouraging them with a smile here, a little nod there.
    Mike and Rob whispered to each other.
    Emmy turned back to the board. “Let’s see what happens when we apply the principle of least action—remember from last year? The universe is lazy. In