Lost amidst a sea of jostling tourists and south Belfast’s designer pram pushers, Paul wasn’t sure why he had thought going to the Tropical Ravine would make him feel better. What strange twist of plant evolution, he wondered, had meant the Fire Wheel tree with its radiant-hued flowers was well suited to being transplanted half way round the world, installed in a Victorian red-brick and then surviving a couple of cold, grey northern winters while the Ravine was being renovated? It was not the strongest species that survive, he reflected, it was the most adaptable.

He’d spent the morning deep in procrastination: answering non-priority emails and drinking so much grimy filter coffee that he’d had to take a fistful of antacids before eleven am. Paul did not adapt well to change, a fact that in his forty-ninth year was only now becoming clear to him. Nor did he thrive under pressure. A return to furlough or, better yet, a greenhouse to bunker down in for winter, in fact, with a constant ambient environment seemed ideally suited to his current predicament. In there he could avoid decree nisi letters, the social media deluge of pro-science outrage, and strident Young Earth politicians indefinitely; all the while enjoying plenty of heat, plenty to drink, and not too much direct sun.

The crowd passing through the Ravine was starting to thin a bit, school pick up time was fast approaching and Paul, he supposed, had better return and pitch something. Pitch himself - or the Chairman - off the bird habitat balcony on Level Three, perhaps. He’d lost the plot; launched headfirst into the yawning abyss of insanity he had often suspected lurked just beneath the surface. This is what madness feels like; he laughed aloud at the realisation, startling a bearded German with an expensive camera. He couldn’t have an existential crisis today; the timing was less than ideal. He’d take a quick perambulation around the Gardens for a bit of fresh air: since he hadn’t come up with anything that morning - or, in fact, that whole week - ten more minutes at his desk weren’t likely to make the difference.

Yet with geometrically determined precision, as Paul wheeled out of the Ravine in search of increasingly elusive oxygen, three members of the Board came trotting along in pinstripes and intersected with his projected escape arc, prevailing on him to join them in the Museum café before the meeting began. Some combination of the heat in the Ravine, the copious antacids still floating around in his gut and pure, blinding anxiety made Paul feel like his head was floating at a distance of just an inch or two above his body; his tongue was swollen and useless, his mouth resolutely, uncompromisingly arid.

“Just a water, thanks”

“Keeping the powder dry, are we? Big plans, big plans, without a doubt.”

Paul felt his eyes flick once from side to side, looking for an escape route which did not exist. Fight or flight. Was there a third option – disappear? Dissolve? Let his floating head float untethered and wend its way skyward?

“Are you sure you won’t have a wee scone or a traybake, Paul?”

That was Caroline, ever-solicitous, ever-alert for an opportunity to somehow gain the upper hand. Her coiffed platinum hair gleamed like an exo-skeleton.

“Just the water. Thanks”

“Very quiet today, playing your cards close, am I right?” Derek joined in. Derek, with his tan leather messenger bag and the weird cuff bracelet he wore, was the worst of the lot. He took notes on an iPad during meetings, as if carrying a pen would reveal his age.

“Sure, Paul will share the headlines with us before we go in, we’re among friends here.” Caroline again.

He remembered how gleefully she had let him know when he’d accidentally copied one of the Project Officers into a Senior Management Team communication, her one just very slightly arched eyebrow making it clear to him simultaneously that he was both incompetent and not worthy of a true dressing down.

“Well, it’s not the only item on today’s agenda”

Paul looked with some gratitude at Brian, a fastidious accountant with a tendency to repeat himself often in meetings and talk your ear off on the topic of Big Data, who appeared to have thrown him a bone. Or at least bought him a very short reprieve.

The issue was simple; the solution, however, was not.

Following months of protracted negotiations,

           a long stretch of political deadlock,

                        a short period of undesirable Direct Rule

                              a global pandemic

                                   followed by an uneasy truce following yet another election the previous quarter,

local government Ministers had all swapped portfolios. There were now two newly appointed Ministers in very prominent government departments; education and communities.

                                                    Museums   s t r a d d l e d   both.

Paul attempted, and failed, to not imagine the Chairman in a compromising position, legs akimbo, straddling these nebulous entities. The two newly appointed Ministers shared not just a political party but an evangelical Christian faith and a wholehearted endorsement of Young Earth Creationism. The Museum was, therefore, in a very delicate position - Paul again tried, unsuccessfully, not to picture the Chairman straddled; delicately. They were about to unveil a very expensive, much delayed project that had been beset by adversity throughout: a new, Natural History and Earth Science wing, filled with curated exhibits, top of the line interactive visitor attractions, and a research hub shared with the two local universities in a Knowledge Transfer Partnership.

The launch was only ten days away. The new Ministers had been announced on Monday. Their staff teams had been on the phone to him by Tuesday, relaying Important Concerns. An emergency Board Meeting was then arranged for Friday for Paul to pitch his negotiation strategy as Project Director: a strategy that would somehow not offend the Ministers responsible for the government departments largely responsible for their on-going core funding, which paid their staff wages and essentially kept the doors open. But neither could he afford to upset the universities and science community stakeholders and private sector funders, nor could he allow the media to perceive any hint of a scandal. The BBC, however, were all over it – there had been no shortage of Freedom of Information requests pinging into the office.

Today was Friday. Paul had no strategy to present. No forking paths to be fruitfully explored. Every way he looked at it, events were now en route to an inevitable, bloody collision. Whoever he placated in the launch event and accompanying literature – which had, in any event, already been sent to the printer’s weeks ago – and website, he would inevitably offend someone else. People’s jobs were on the line. His job was on the line. And all he could think about today was plants. All he’d done for the last three days was drink coffee, pace the building and stare into space. His hands were damp. He pressed them discreetly against his trouser legs, leaving ghostly imprints on his polyblend grey slacks.

If nothing else that week, he’d done some interesting reading on cryptids: certain creationists held that living dinosaurs may still survive in isolated spots, which would, apparently, account for alleged sightings of monsters. So that was something new. Nothing he could really work with, of course, unless the universities would be interested in funnelling some of that KTP cash into an on-site cryptozoology lab. So, essentially, he’d come up with nothing. And he was about to go into a meeting with the Museum Board and Senior Management Team and present them with exactly that: a perfect, pristine, lack of strategy.

He realised Caroline, Derek and Brian had stopped talking among themselves and were looking at him expectantly, three faces all inclined in the direction of his face. He wanted to drink from his water but was afraid his damp hands would fumble the glass. “If you would just excuse me for a minute, I’ll see you inside,” he managed to choke out, rising from his seat in a gesture perfectly mirroring the tilt of Caroline’s ever-nuanced eyebrows. He rummaged in his jacket pocket for his phone, hoping to fake a call, before realising in fact that he had eighteen missed calls from over the past hour, three from his assistant, five from other Senior Management Team members, two from the media office, one from his solicitor and seven (seven) from his manager.

The meeting would start in twenty minutes or so. It was too late to return any calls now. He was supposed to be in the conference room setting up; making sure the mic was working, that catering had delivered the required tea, coffee, and shortbread victuals. Glad-handing the Board as they arrived, projecting confidence, an assured successful outcome. Being seen. It’s not that Paul was unaware of where he needed to be, he just didn’t want to be there. He found he missed Zoom and the convenient ability to fake connection issues at critical moments.

He contemplated a quiet lurk in a toilet cubicle and decided against it; Derek would only come looking for him. Instead, he pressed onwards, across the foyer and into the gift shop. It was a bit exposed in there, all glass walls, but no one would be expecting him to be in there so he could hide in plain sight. Buy himself five more minutes. The problem, he realised, amidst the balsa wood dinosaur jigsaws, was not how old the world was. Four billion years or so; six thousand years. Nor who or what had created it: Big Bang or Yahweh. Whether it had evolved or was all set in place in the space of a week. No, what was really of some pressing concern to Paul today was whether any of it actually existed at all. And it was this thought, this hypothesis, this undeniable epiphany that caused a sudden and most unexpected descent of equanimity on Paul after the week of unendurable turmoil. He turned his back on the hand-painted silk scarves and art books on display and walked, with purpose and serenity, down the hallway, crossing the border from the modern glass edifice of the atrium, across the black and white checkerboard tiles, into the older, shadowy neo-classical depths of the building.

Could the building be said to encompass evolutionary theory itself, Paul speculated, giddy with his new-found peace of mind: the Museum had started off as a project delayed by WWI, a U-shaped Portland stone edifice that remained unfinished until the 1960s brutalist re-boot which spliced itself onto the original frame in a glorious intertwined melange of style. And then he remembered that Francis Pym, the visionary architect behind this cubist tours de force, gave it all up to become an Anglican priest and write books challenging Einstein’s theory of relativity.

So maybe it’s not evolution, then, he mused, as another wave of cold panic broke through his sea of tranquillity: maybe it all comes full circle, everything becomes and recurs eternally - escape is impossible!

And this is how Paul found himself at the front of the room, sort of half on and half off the podium, a laser pointer dangling redundantly between his fingers.

“So, to sum up. We could all be a dream. In the mind of a robot.” 

Philosophy of Identity module at Queen’s in 1989.

But what came next – something about a demon of delusion? Dreams in the mind of a robot, Simulacra and Simulation, demonic hallucinations: it was all much of a muchness.

“Who here can claim, without a shadow of a doubt, that any of this corporeal plain of existence is in any way substantively real?”

The room remained mostly silent. Someone – he thought it was Brian – cleared their throat. He smiled gently at everyone; these were, after all, not easy thoughts to process. They needed time for the information to percolate.

“And if all this,” Paul gestured expansively with the laser pointer, “- is, potentially, not real, or just another repetition, or a small variant of the infinite variations of the multiverse, then why does the curation of a new wing in what is merely a fantasy museum construct matter in any way?”

And what really did it signify, he thought to himself, freed now from all anxiety, if his wife ceased to be his wife but did not cease to be altogether and, in fact, continued to exist but as someone else’s wife?

“Why can’t cryptids, conspiracy, even creationism, be as plausible as democracy, science, GDP? It’s all relative, if you see what I mean.”

The room seemed to sort of flicker and sway.

Yet further proof of what I’m saying, Paul thought, or maybe shouted. The very fabric of reality is bending; the matrix is coming undone - leaving behind the vestiges of sanity is the only rational response.

The projector screen behind him, however, remained a solid, steady block of blue.

                                                   No Input Detected,

                                                     the screen read,

                                                             long

                                                                                                            after

the

                                room 

                                                                                                    had emptied