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”
    â€œWho is he, Yoda?” I asked. “The man speaks in riddles. What do you think it means?”
    My father smiled. “I have no freakin’ idea.”
    So there we were, in Princeton, New Jersey, in a vast and expanding universe, exhilarated, trespassing, half real, realizing that what once had been a hobby had now become a mission.
    We sat for a few moments steeped in the heavy silence. Then a car pulled up, and we ran.
    ----
    * Since then, a new
Manhattan Magazine
has come into existence, but it has nothing to do with Rick.

2
The Perfect Alibi
    When I returned to New York, I had an epiphany.
    I was staring up at the Science and Ultimate Reality press pass that hung on the wall above my computer as a souvenir of the conference and, with “
Manhattan
Magazine” printed proudly beneath my name, as a kind of inside joke. The badge contained an image of a pixilated sphere with a 0 or a 1 marked in each pixel. I was pretty sure it was one of Wheeler’s drawings—but what did it mean? I quickly sketched it in my notebook with a reminder to myself to find out.
    It was amazing how powerful that thing was. A piece of laminated paper on a string could give you access to ultimate reality’s inner circle? It was like the golden ticket to cosmology’s chocolate factory—find one and you win the chance to attend every lecture, talk with every physicist, even enjoy the lunches and banquets.
    If we wanted to crash the ultimate reality party in the hopes of finding some answers, a press pass was clearly the way to do it. Still, I was pretty sure that my little scam wasn’t going to cut it for long. Eventually someone was bound to look up
Manhattan
magazine and realize that it had nothing whatsoever to do with physics and that the magazine’s ontological status was … well, anyone peering inside that box was going to find a dead cat.
    If only there was some other way to get press passes.
    A cartoon lightbulb lit up overhead.
    I called my father. “I’m going to be a journalist.”
    â€œOkay …”
    â€œThink about it! If we want to figure out the nature of reality, we need access to the best physicists around, the cutting-edge data, the meetings, the journals, everything. And if you’re press, it’s all yours! When we have a question about cosmology, we won’t have to dig through twenty books to find the answer; we’ll just ask a cosmologist! It’s the perfect alibi!”
    â€œThat’s a great idea,” he said. “Maybe you could get some kind of internship. Or do you have to get a degree first?”
    â€œNo, no,” I said, “you’re missing my point. I’m going to become a journalist
today.
”
    â€œSorry, what?”
    â€œYeah, I’m going to call
Scientific American
and ask if I can write something for them about the symposium. Then we’ll be golden.”
    â€œListen,” he said, “I don’t want to burst your bubble, and I think you could make a great journalist someday, but you can’t just call
Scientific American.
”

    Our golden tickets to the ultimate reality party
W. Gefter
    â€œOh, yeah?” I said. “Watch me.”
    I knew I sounded a little nuts. After all, I hadn’t gone to journalism school. Hell, I had never taken a physics class. But who cares, I thought. I would just have to learn on the job. Besides, I didn’t need a degree and an internship and job experience—that would be like going to culinary school just to open a restaurant as a mob front. I wasn’t trying to win a Pulitzer; I was just trying to scam some press passes.
    I hung up the phone and dialed the number for
Scientific American
’s news editor. Voicemail. When I heard the beep, I cleared my throat and tried my best to muster up a voice that would sound like that of a professional colleague, not a twenty-one-year-old girl. “Oh, hey, Phil, this is Amanda