Quantum Life

It was only a matter of months after the Staedtler Nanoscope was developed that Aldous Lexington made the discovery of life at the quantum level. This was the kind of thing that changes entire universal perception, so he was careful not to announce it before he was certain. As Lexington would have explained it, the implications were as macroscopic as they were microscopic: possible ecosystems within certain atoms, with the nucleus acting as a sun and electrons acting as orbiting planets, meant that our own galaxy was merely an atom in a much larger system.

Lexington observed the same electron for the rest of his life but never found any evidence to support his claim. He understood that time at the quantum level is fractional to what we experience, so decades went by – thousands of millennia for the electron – but his theory remained only a possibility. When life did finally emerge, there was nobody there to see it. Lexington told no one about his work and died unexpectedly in his office. Four days passed before his body was found, which was a few centuries for an electron, and barely registered in time for the inconceivable being watching it all unfold under its own Nanoscope somewhere… else.