A little push, a little nudge - and from here and there some very subtle grudge. Pluralized, then personalized. Doesn't take much, and before you know it you are digging up evidence in a search for a method to become immortal. Sometimes literal evidence, things you can touch with your hand. Things that can end up touching you back a bit too literally after you push all the right buttons. You end up being amazed in retrospect at all the guesses that ended up later looking like the shrewdest of strategies but at the time felt like the most desperate of blunders.
Hard science paves a lot of roads all leading to new university campuses where become endowed soft plush new chairs interpreting the long steps and scrawls of the most direct practitioner. The same practitioning toiler who years before on more than one night propped himself in front of the lab table on the steady prod of one hard stool to finish all of another review of slide and dish samples looking for that one aberrant protein. Two hard stools on some nights.
Now we just get some interns to do all that crap.
