Teresa was approaching her seventh millennium of research.

Per her afternoon routine, she sun bathed in the veranda. Her mind buzzed with hypotheses and thought experiments. Perhaps her spectrometer had been miscalculated this morning. Or perhaps an insect found its way inside and threw off the measurements.

Perhaps fate conspired to make the answer she sought unmeasurable.

She studied how boxes of long strands, when shaken, form tight knots. She had measured the rate of heat transfer from hot areas to cold, and found no insulator that could stop or reverse that trend. She recorded how plants grow and wither in the horticulture wing.

The arrow of time was clear. The world was approaching a definite end. And it even has a hypothetical beginning, five billion years ago. But when did humans begin, and when do they end?

The workings of the universe were so plainly laid out. Math was the language it spoke, and most truths could be derived from only a few basic observations. If one began with only the natural numbers, it quickly becomes apparent that the system wasn't closed; certain divisions, like three divided by two, "leaked out." So the space is quickly expanded to track "ratio numbers."

A few millennia ago, one of Teresa's close colleagues spoke of an even greater space of numbers that even ratios couldn't satisfy. She was one of many who tried (and failed) to construct a circle and square of equal area on paper. Rather than admit defeat, she declared the problem unsolvable, and spoke of incommensurable numbers that could never be written. She was ultimately exiled from the citadel, and her works ionized.

Teresa's research into statistical mechanics put her at risk for insanity and suicide. Others in her position ended their careers rambling of incomprehensible truths that they couldn't prove, and so declared them impossible for anyone in this universe to prove.

The hum of electric motors rapidly approached her side, then stopped suddenly. "The atom smasher is ready" said the electric butler. Teresa opened her eyes, let out a sigh, and wordlessly propped herself up on her feet. Unsatisfied with her spectrometry data last night, she decided to put her blood in the atom smasher to see what came out.

Perhaps this world and humans were incommensurable all along.