When Yeats Waltzes With Agnesi

A man born with a dream is born with a curse.

What kind of Last Judgment, he ruminates with hatred, would have kept so open the possibility of tethering itself to the vagaries of your fellow creatures, each inescapably flawed and vulnerable? What providence would sweet-talk you into upturning the vertical relationship between head and heart while praying that the honesty of emotions that ensues finds by fortuitous coincidence a happy place in the honesty of economics? What wretched destiny is it to have coursing through your veins a demonic compulsion to take one particular road, when you could have been just at peace in the many other wooded roads and seen them equally grassy and in want of wear? Raw and relentless whisperings and serenades within the chest may be, these oppressed times demand its enslavement to Profit in all the body's productive hours in exchange for any hope of remaining sensate. Denizens of this city barely have time for any little beings that emerge from their bellies, let alone for make-believe entities as devoid of legal status as uncircumscribed dreams. Do not tell him either that dreams oftentimes are ethereally beautiful precisely for the rarity of occasions they come true and hence challenges to relish, because what those helplessly dependent on you need is certainty. Yet she has named him, someone unwisely cold to profitable enterprises, her new dream.

"Spicy turkey meatballs made from animal cells cultivated in veggie-based media! Just what you need in this cold morning air! Come pair them with yogurt lovingly cultured through an AI-perfected recipe!" Her voice rings out from the crowded pavement in front before he even sees her.

"Buy either or both to support the Albinus School of Engineering and Applied Sciences' fundraising drive! One small box of meatballs for the office gang in exchange for one small load off the shoulders of a needy freshman! One tiny tube of yogurt for yourself in return for one tiny tube of medicine for an orphan disease on a future pharmacy shelf!"

Only seconds later does her back come into view. How refreshing that she is not steering some sort of wheels this time. She turns around and spots him. A wicked smile flickers on her moist, cerise lips.

"Male colleagues, especially, will appreciate free breakfast, even if not all of them admit it. It's said that the way to a man's heart is through his s—"

"His sight, perhaps?" A man with combed-back hair in a spiffy black leather jacket and blue jeans, who looks to be in his early twenties, saunters up to wrap a muffler around her neck. "See this reflection in my eyes? I think one hateful woman sneakily used me as a guinea pig for apple cell culture in vitreal medium when I attended her class."

"Ha! If you'd not already gotten your college diploma by now, I'd deduct twenty points for flirting with your TA. That's sure one heck of a mesophilic lactic culture."

"Gee, I suppose parallel-universe me would be shaking in my shoes! Look what I queued up for eight hours for this woman in return last night—a silver acetylcholine motif bracelet just released by Castellane & Laurent as part of their Winter 2017 collection. I want to be in her eyes too even in her dreams."

A distance away from the pair, his scowl grows deeper. She hardly seems to notice as he strides past them.

Lunch time. He steps hurriedly out of a sandwich joint, turning up his collar as a chilly wind swirls up and taking occasional nibbles of a paper-wrapped pork roll. She is already on the street corner, tsk-tsking at his cold cut.

"I didn't have to track you to figure out your lunch habits. That's a pretty consistent personality you've got. You look like you need more charity for yourself, just as our school's kids need charity from you. Try this breathtaking creation," she rummages through her rolling tote bag. "Mozzarella casserole [10] created with bioengineered yeast-derived milk proteins and TomTato hybrids that yield cherry tomatoes and potatoes on the same plant, and ... for dessert, let's have a 3D-printed raspberry confection modeled after a cubic close-packed ionic crystal lattice [11]!"

She starts to fish out a couple of boxes, but someone from behind taps on her shoulder. She spins around to see a broad-faced man seemingly in his 40s and wearing a light brown V-neck sweater over a cream shirt, who smiles gently at her.

"Can I have that lunch set instead? Don't work too hard to force science down people's throats. I know of a biotechnology trade fair that is being held just a few blocks away. The boxes will sell faster there. Along the way, we can talk about this living necklace from an ocean-inspired jewelry collection I want to show you which dinoflagellates-containing pendant glows in response to movement [12]. It has an enchanting neon blue hue just like the glittering sea of stars we saw in Maldives during the conference trip last year. Let's see if I can finally persuade you to join my lab," the debonair scientist pulls over the roller bag and whisks her away. Back at the street corner, he takes a hard bite of his sandwich in the cold wind. 

Later in the evening light, he looks over a bridge in pensive silence as small boats sail to and fro underneath. Slowly, forlorn musical notes emerge. Over his shoulders, a familiar apparition plays a violin while teetering without a care in the world on the opposite railings. In this immense world, only he and himself seem to exist. 

A smooth-skinned hand suddenly rattling a small transparent box of green cubes in front of his eyes shakes him out of his reverie. He turns around to see her lithe figure beside a bike.

"Chewable green tea cubes [22]."

"Haven't you been told that you should go somewhere where you will have greater odds of financial success?"

"I'm giving them to you for free this time anyway, to make up for the previous occasions. Besides," she takes in the view of the river, "If you've been deeply moved by the sights and sounds of a habitat, wouldn't you want to share its beauty with people who aren't as well-acquainted with it?"

"Take them," she hands out the transparent box again. "Two are equivalent to a good strong cuppa. They're light-weight and avert accidental spills."

He tentatively starts to take over the box while counting down. Four. Three. Two. One. Still, whom he sees catches him by surprise.

A youngster looking to be around 15 or 16 years of age zips by on another bike, waving one arm wildly in the air. Dangling from his raised hand is a pink-gold earring that features a spiral inscribed within a tiled rectangular frame [13]. The setting sun glints off the twirling delicate structure, giving it an especially dazzling glow.

"Mega spoiler alert for tonight's dinner! Uncle Max's gifting this ultimate expression of the universe's most beautiful ratio from one Pheodora collection to the girl with the most bio-culture harvesters on her thighs! Boohoooo!"

"Just watch where you're going, derkhead!" She leaves the box in his hand without a second look and yells after the boy.

Holding the box, he inhales deeply and glares at the sky overhead, "All the jewelry houses in town must be erecting a statue in honor of you." 

"Let's see ... the restaurant is half an hour's ride away. Should I run some errand on the way there? Hold on, the jazz meetup with Jonathan at eight-thirty almost slipped my mind," she mumbles to herself as she scrolls through her phone. 

He is about to leave when a blinking speck of light on the railing catches his eye. Upon closer inspection, he sees inside a gap a carnation pink cloth button interlaced with threads the color of ripe wheat. Since when has it been here? He turns back to see loose golden threads hanging from a sewn hole on her sleeve. 

"Don't walk into any snobbish dining establishment telling one and all how much of a March hare you are inside. Out there in the world, there are a lot of enemies of March hares [14]." He gently pulls over her hand and tucks the button firmly into her palm.

A strange beat passes before her eyes grow wide.

"Did you see that?" She exclaims. 

He tilts his head in puzzlement.

Pointing to a bright fleck in a patch of dirt on the button, she goes on, "Spherical and crusted with glass-like coating [15]! It's probably the next micrometeorite—you know, extraterrestrial dust particle that survives its journey to Earth [16]—I've been hunting high and low for for my collection. Why didn't I think of combing gaps on bridge structures? More than 4000 tons of cosmic dust that date from the solar system's birth rain down on Earth every year without burning up [17]. Each spherule carries a fragment of the wondrous story of the planetary system's history and composition [20]. These celestial gems are everywhere—in the air we breathe and the lettuce we eat [17]. It's just tremendously hard to look for them [17]. Now I only need to confirm its details. Tell me the restaurant holds Mad Hatter tea parties that oblige it to keep a good microscope on standby! When it comes to micrometeorites, a microscope is essentially a telescope [17]."

"But already, you've made my day! THANK YOU SO MUCH!!" Before he realizes what will happen, she closes in for an emotional peck on his cheek. Boats continue to travel underneath. The rippling water acquires iridescent hues. From the land, a flock of larks soar and pass overhead.

As she beams again at the button clasped in her palm and their coats flutter in the wind, thoughts arise in him: 

"When one dream meets and aligns with another, can they break free and lift each other?

Can I finally start to live?"

On the opposite railing, his apparition plays a spirited tune on the violin, this time accompanied by an apparition of her skiing and gyrating on the water surface.

Behind-the-Scenes Science:

At the time of writing, growth of animal cells for food products using plant-based culture media is still in the works [1]. It is hoped that such media will successfully substitute the fetal bovine serum, which extraction entails draining blood from cows' fetuses until they die, currently used to optimize animal cell culture in the creation of lab-grown meat [1]. Similarly still under development is cheese made with bioengineered yeast-derived milk proteins [8]. Unsurprisingly, on the other hand, yogurt production aided by machine learning algorithms has already become reality [2]. 

Both yoghurt- and cheese-making traditionally involve mesophilic or thermophilic lactic cultures [3] [4]. In a nutshell, lactic cultures are bacterial cultures that convert the milk sugar lactose into lactic acid, resulting in milk souring [3]. This and other possible chemical reactions shape the texture of the intended dairy product [5]. Thermophilic lactic acid bacteria can ferment lactose at 20 to 50°C, whereas mesophilic ones can do so at lower temperatures of 10 to 40°C [4]. 

Also in existence are potato-tomato plant hybrids, achieved by grafting the two plants at their stems. The goal of such grafting in general is to combine desired flowers/fruits from the upper plant with the lower plant's tough roots. Most of the time, the two plants must be of the same genus, as with tomato and potato plants. [9]

Acetylcholine is a neurochemical hugely responsible for bringing on rapid eye movement sleep (REM sleep) [6], a phase in which dreams are normally most vivid [7]. But of course, the idea that gifting a model of acetylcholine will influence a person's dreaming pattern in any way is pure superstitious thinking!

Micrometeorites, the chief guest stars of this chapter, have varying mineral compositions, metal distributions, crystal structures and porosities. These properties are influenced by (i) the chemical makeup (e.g. oxygen concentration) of Earth's atmosphere at the time they interact with it [18] and (ii) the speeds at which they enter the atmosphere, which affect the extent of cosmic material melting and metal oxidation [19]. Most verified discoveries of micrometeorites have taken place in remote locations like Antarctic ice, ocean beds and deserts [20]. No urban micrometeorites had been confirmed until a project to find them, initiated by Norwegian jazz musician and amateur geologist Jon Larsen, started to bear fruit in 2015 [17]. Within two years after figuring out how to classify urban detritus and pick out particles with the highest odds of possessing cosmic origins, he built up a collection of around 500 micrometeorites from roof gutters with the assistance of university researchers, who verified their identities and co-wrote a refereed academic paper on the findings [17] [21]. While micrometeorites in areas distant from human civilization have the advantage of being less contaminated, those in urban spots like gutters with known cleaning patterns can be far more precisely dated [20]. 

References:

1. Thieme, N., 2017. The Gruesome Truth About Lab-Grown Meat, Slate, viewed 14 January 2014, http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2017/07/why_is_fetal_cow_blood_used_to_grow_fake_meat.html

2. Brodwin, E., 2017, 'An eggless mayo startup is out to beat Hampton Creek — here's the verdict', Business Insider, 16 September, viewed 14 January 2014, http://www.businessinsider.com/eggless-mayo-startup-out-to-beat-hampton-creek-taste-test-2017-9/

3. FAO. 1993. Small-Scale Dairy Farming Manual, Volume 1. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, viewed 14 January 2018, http://www.fao.org/ag/againfo/resources/documents/Dairyman/Dairy/V1U10_1.htm

4. Johnson, M.E., 2013. Mesophilic and Thermophilic Cultures Used in Traditional Cheesemaking. Microbiology spectrum, 1(1). DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1128/microbiolspec.CM-0004-2012 

5. Water, J.V. and Naiyanetr, P., 'Yogurt and immunity: the health benefits of fermented milk products that contain lactic acid bacteria' in Farnworth, E.R.T. ed., 2008. Handbook of fermented functional foods. CRC press. URL: https://books.google.com/books?id=gpcXqE-j6gEC&pg=PA131&dq="fermentation+of+milk+with+lab"

6. Watson, C.J., Baghdoyan, H.A. and Lydic, R., 2010. Neuropharmacology of sleep and wakefulness. Sleep medicine clinics, 5(4), pp.513-528. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jsmc.2010.08.003

7. National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke 2017, Brain Basics: Understanding Sleep - Dreaming, National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, viewed 14 January 2018, https://www.ninds.nih.gov/Disorders/Patient-Caregiver-Education/Understanding-Sleep#5

8. Davis, N., David, R., Corbyn, Z., Buchan, K., and Gates, S., 2015, 'The future of food: from jellyfish salad to lab-grown meat', The Guardian, 13 September, viewed 16 January 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/sep/13/future-of-food-what-we-eat

9. ''TomTato' tomato and potato plant unveiled in UK' 2013, BBC News, 26 September, viewed 23 January 2018, http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-24281192

10. Des n.d., Tomato, Potato and Mozzarella Bake, Life's Ambrosia, viewed 23 January 2018, https://www.lifesambrosia.com/tomato-potato-and-mozzarella-bake-recipe/ (Casserole with normal mozzarella, tomatoes and potatoes)

11. Burton, B., 2017, 'Geometric 3D-printed cake molds look tasty squared', CNET, 3 July, viewed 16 January 2018, https://www.cnet.com/news/geometric-3d-printed-cake-molds-look-tasty-squared/ (Inspiration behind the ionic lattice cake above)

12. Stinson, E., 2016. This Living Necklace Glows With Bioluminescent Algae, Wired, viewed 23 January 2018, https://www.wired.com/2016/04/living-necklace-glows-bioluminescent-algae/  

13. Boutique Academia n.d., Fibonacci Earrings, Boutique Academia, viewed 23 January 2018, https://www.boutiqueacademia.com/products/fibonacci-earrings (Earrings with design very similar to the one described in the passage)

14. Australian Broadcasting Corporation 2008, Spiritual Classics: Hasidic Tales - Transcript, ABC, viewed 25 January 2018, http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/spiritofthings/spiritual-classics-hasidic-tales/3293216#transcript (Hasidic tale that informed character's comment)

15. Hackett, J., 2016. How to Find Tiny Meteorites at Home, Scientific American, viewed 26 January 2018, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-to-find-tiny-meteorites-at-home/

16. Genge, M.J., Engrand, C., Gounelle, M. and Taylor, S., 2008. The classification of micrometeorites. Meteoritics & Planetary Science, 43(3), pp.497-515. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1945-5100.2008.tb00668.x

17. Broad, W.J., 2017, 'Flecks of Extraterrestrial Dust, All Over the Roof', The New York Times, 10 March, viewed 26 January 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/10/science/space-dust-on-earth.html

18. Tomkins, A.G., Bowlt, L., Genge, M., Wilson, S.A., Brand, H.E. and Wykes, J.L., 2016. Ancient micrometeorites suggestive of an oxygen-rich Archaean upper atmosphere. Nature, 533(7602), p.235. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature17678

19. Kohout, T., Kallonen, A., Suuronen, J.P., Rochette, P., Hutzler, A., Gattacceca, J., Badjukov, D.D., Skala, R., Böhmová, V. and Čuda, J., 2014. Density, porosity, mineralogy, and internal structure of cosmic dust and alteration of its properties during high‐velocity atmospheric entry. Meteoritics & Planetary Science, 49(7), pp.1157-1170. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/maps.12325

20. 'Finding micrometeorites in city gutters' 2016, The Economist, December 17, viewed 29 January 2018, https://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21711633-amateur-enthusiast-advances-planetary-science-finding-micrometeorites-city 

21. Genge, M.J., Larsen, J., Van Ginneken, M. and Suttle, M.D., 2017. An urban collection of modern-day large micrometeorites: Evidence for variations in the extraterrestrial dust flux through the Quaternary. Geology, 45(2), pp.119-122. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1130/G38352.1 

22. Domanico, A., 2015, 'Don't have time to drink your coffee? Chew it with Go Cubes', CNET, 20 August, viewed 30 January 2018, https://www.cnet.com/news/dont-have-time-to-drink-your-coffee-chew-it-with-go-cubes/ (Inspiration for chewable green tea cubes mentioned in the story)

23. In 2017, there was a contemporary art exhibition with the tagline 'The most terrifying thing in the world is to have a dream'. See Nam, Y.H., 2017, '[TF Photo Gallery] 'Shy Writer Gu' Gu Hye-sun opens solo exhibition', The Fact, 4 January, viewed 10 April 2018, http://news.tf.co.kr/read/photomovie/1671538.htm