Doctor Phinheas nodded at Thina as she adjusted her tight lab coat and stepped aside for him to look into the microscope at the bizarre specimen. It only took the doctor but a glance into the tiny little mirror of the microscope to immediately recoil in shock.

"Sorry, Thina, it just smells absolutely terrible. When is the last time you've cleaned it? There must be glowing eye gunk all caked over it."

"Sorry, I'll make a note to clean up your microscope later," said Thina with a sigh and a roll of her eyes. "Regardless, will you please just find a way to move past that and look into the microscope? Please, Doc?"

The doctor rolled his glowing eyes and sighed. He stroked the unconvincing goatee that lightly poked through the living wood on his face and took a deep breath. Then, he held it as hardly as he could, and he leaned back over to glance into the microscope.

What he immediately saw was darkness, blackness, absolutely nothing. He adjusted the nozzle a little bit to change the aperture of the mirrors and lenses that made up the scientific tool, but all it seemed to do was distort and contort his vision without really defining how, exactly, he could find whatever it was that Thina was so adamant that he look at.

"Thina - EUGH!" The doctor cleared his throat of mucus before continuing. His allergies had been flaring up quite terribly as of late, but that had noting to do with this affectation he was currently putting on. No, the real reason Phinheas was having this reaction in the present moment was that he was embarrassed of the fact that, over the course of the two years he'd spent with Thina as his assistant, that he'd almost lost the muscle memory necessary to properly orient the microscope to his vision without her assistance. "Sorry about that. Ehrm, Thina, would you please help me with the microscope. It seems to be... malfunctioning..."

Thina was all too happy to oblige. From Thina's perspective, it was just one more thing to keep the good doctor from deciding to move on from their partnership. Laboratory positions, even as an assistant, were not easy for her to come by. Thina greatly dreaded the thought of entering the job market to find a new path forward.

But really, Thina hadn't meant to force the doctor to ask her to help him adjust the microscope. In fact, him realizing he needed to ask her was the exact opposite of what she truly wanted. What Thina wanted was an expectation that the microscope just worked for the doctor, when in actuality she had been working tirelessly to make it work for him without effort on his part. What Thina had failed to do accurately in this moment was to adjust the microscope for the doctor after using it herself to stare at the horrors it contained. And of course, Thina couldn't admit that to anyone but herself, because due to departmental policy, she was not even supposed to touch the microscope, much less look into it and try to glean anything.

Phinheas leaned over again to look into the microscope after Thina had adjusted both it and her round, thick glasses, which just did not sit correctly on her face.

And then, he looked. And this time, he saw.

What Phinheas saw was at first just one, single black speck in a cold sea of light blue, almost like a floater in one's vision standing out against the sky.

"Well? What's the big idea here, Thina? I just see a speck!"

"Oh, good, you see the speck. Alright, I'll get the test data now!"

Phinheas waited impatiently as Thina walked over to the fridge and pulled out a baguette.

"Is that supposed to be there?" asked the doctor.

"Of course not," said Thina. She took a tough bite and swallowed with a smile. "But we're using it for testing, so it's fine." She blinked a few times in a way that seemed to signify that maybe it wasn't completely fine, but that Thina definitely wished and wanted, that is to say she desired for it to be completely fine.

"Okay," said the doctor as he tore off some bread for himself and took a pleasing chomp. It was tough, but at the same time, it was a wholesome amount of flavorful and flavorlessness that hit the spot just perfectly. Truly, this bread needed nothing but to be eaten to succeed. "So why did you need to get the bread out, Thina?"

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Thina simply tore off another piece of bread, off that piece she tore yet a smaller piece, and from that piece she shook off but a crumb. It was then that she produced a pair of perfect, steel medical tweezers and picked up this minuscule iota of a piece of bread. She placed this on the slide that Phinheas was viewing, knowing that this would be enough to convince him of significance.

And it was. The doctor gasped as he was the small bread crumb be placed on the slide. The unassuming black speck from before instantly found itself attached to the bread crumb, and before the doctor could do so much as blink, the crumb was gone, and all that remained was the black speck.

"What is happening?" asked the doctor. "Is this... eating the bread?"

"Not eating," said Thina. "It's not using the bread to power itself in any way, and it's not even processing the bread through any sort of a primal, simplified digestive system, instead, it's doing something completely different. It's taking the matter that is the bread and it's... well, it's removing it."

"Removing matter, Thina? What does that mean?"

"It means, well, you know how matter can't be destroyed or whatever?" Thina adjusted her glasses and tried to make a cute face, as she could tell that Phinheas was getting frustrated.

"Yes, gods, of course I know that! It's like one of the first things that are covered in the Big Book of Science and in all subjects in science school."

"Okay, well, Doc, here's the thing. This little black speck, whatever the hell it really is, seems to be whatever the closest approximation of destroying matter could possibly be as soon as it collides with it. But, of course, destroying in actuality is impossible, so what it's doing is, well, it somehow on contact finds all connected atoms of a given object and... tunnels it away."

"Tunnels it away?"

"Yes," Thina once again adjusted her glasses. She really needed to either get those things fixed, or buy herself a new pair! It was almost getting distracting.

Regardless, Thina went on to explain to the doctor that somehow this small, black speck had a specific property to itself, something she defined as a preliminary dispersion field, or a pdf, that would on impact with an eligible type of matter send it tunneling to some random location. Only, this was not the common sense meaning of random, instead, it was a very specific kind of random. See, what the point of matter did was, it would send through tunneling any piece of matter it collided with to a a point in space, time, and dimensionality that was only inhabited by pure mathematics, a hard, cruel existence that was often left at least partially undefined.

With that, the timer would start ticking. See, the black speck had a motivation, or at the very least a function it was fulfilling, by forcing matter it collided with to tunnel away.

Tunneling matter away to dimensions and spaces of pure mathematics had a number of effects on said matter. First, of course, there was the preeminent destruction that was required in order to convert a piece of physical matter to theoretical data points that both did and did not exist. Second, there was a rush of absence in the place of the displaced matter, which the black specks would often absorb as a type of strange little sustenance. Third, was the time principle.

The time principle was a theorem developed fifty five centuries prior by a time theoretician known only as Timeo. It was often debated whether Timeo was a nickname, or if time itself was named after Timeo. Usually, the debates ended in agreeance that the former was most likely the truth.

The time principle stated, among other numerous things, that time travel could only be done from the present to a later present, that memories were never accurate, that time paradoxes were impossible, and that timelines were more like string beans than they were like balls of noodles. These suppositions, in effect, informed a lot of Nomachiatan understandings of time and the concept of something that was sometimes still argued to not even exist at all.

Regardless, one thing was clear to Thina, and as she explained it to the doctor, it became abundantly clear to him, too. The process to change matter from a normal state into a state of pure mathematics, of pure data while dissolving the corporeal form yet not at all destroying it and its information, was a tedious and painful process for the matter and for the universe at once.

And yet, all that said, it worked for the black speck every time. A small amount of time would pass, and suddenly there would be a bit of a kickback, and another black speck would appear beside the original speck.

"Is this... I mean, Thina, did I just witness these things procreate?"

"It's difficult to say Doc. It's more your place to define what it is they're doing. But this is a serious problem. This is something that will affect a hell of a lot more than your algae crops."

"I'll say," said Phinheas. "Hell, if I didn't know better, I'd be worried that this strange thing would end the world or something! Where'd you say you got this sample, again, Thina?"

"At the bottom of the Pit of Despair, sir," she replied with a smile and a wink.