Really Wild Things

Chapter 8

Without a doubt, the most brilliant scientist who ever lived in this Galaxy or any other was Albin Treedeebee. He it was who first discovered the principle of Finite Improbability. He it was who created a mathematical equation that proved the existence, not only of God, but of many other lesser-known and less appreciated deities. His mind calculated the very fabric of space and time itself and advanced scientific knowledge a thousand-fold in his short lifetime. But by far, his greatest creation was spawned by an unhappy love affair.

While still a young man, Treedeebee met and fell in love with a beautiful woman called March Fird who worked at a mucous bar around the corner from his flat (his species drank fermented mucous extracted from the Splorch Worm of K'Rnn). Treedeebee spent months romancing March Fird, taking her to the finest restaurants and Hummpa Fights, showering her with flowers and expensive perfumes, and declaring his undying love for her until the day he met her sister Auga and fell in love with her instead.

Treedeebee ended up breaking his engagement to March, an act that led to a quite furious row with March's brother that led to Treedeebee's imprisonment for a week on the prison moon of Trazz. When he was released, Treedeebee rushed to March's sister Auga's side, but she rejected him because of his prison record. Treedeebee tried to return to March, only to find that she had become engaged to another man she had met at a Hummpa fight the week before. Treedeebee found himself alone and having lost two women in the span of a week.

Treedeebee spent quite a bit of his time afterwards pondering how he wished he had done the whole thing differently, how he wished he hadn't broken up with March or better yet, wished he had gone after Auga instead of March in the first place. While he was at his day job, processing applications for Hummpa fighting competitions, Treedeebee was using correcting fluid to fix an error on one of the forms. It occurred to him how wonderful it would be if he could use correcting fluid to fix errors in his own history. The more he thought about it, the more the idea consumed him until he sat down with a piece of paper, did some calculations, and discovered to his surprise, that it could actually work. Thus was born his greatest creation, the Chronological Correcting Fluid.

The Chronological Correcting Fluid worked just like regular correcting fluid, except that instead of blotting out mistakes on a piece of paper, it would blot out time itself. One swipe of the Fluid and whole swathes of history would be gone.

Of course, the implications of such an extraordinary invention were monumental, and Treedeebee became concerned about how the Fluid would be used. His concerns were multiplied when he used it to blot out his love affair with March and ended up erasing her from history altogether. Treedeebee decided that the Fluid was too powerful for any being to handle, and made sure to put it somewhere it could never be used again.

The existence of the Chronological Correcting Fluid became a closely guarded secret until Treedeebee's death, when the formula for its creation was discovered among his notes. Other less clever scientists have tried for centuries to re-create the Fluid, but the notes are incomplete because Treedeebee blotted them out with correcting fluid.