She had spent forty years looking at the same problem from countless different angles. The instruments improved. The models refined. The data accumulated beyond any single mind.

It hadn’t helped.

She sat in the empty lab. Late. The building breathed the way old buildings do.

The problem wasn’t the data. The problem was that the data always ended precisely where the question began. Every measurement pointed inward or outward toward something that could not be measured. Every model ended up at the next door.

She thought about them. Ones who simply sat with plants and asked different questions or no questions at all. The observer and the observed, one. Who laughed probably at the idea that there was any other way.

She had doubted them.

She opened her notebook. Forty years of notation. Precise. Reproducible. Peer reviewed.

Closed the notebook.

Outside the city. Beyond it, darkness.

Old light coming from sources that did not exist anymore.

She sat with what he hadn't asked. What she could not.

How the ones who knew, knew differently.

Turned off the light.