Michael was worried. It was the job of a theoretical physicist to wrestle with insoluble problems and to tease answers out of the clues mother nature was kind or careless enough to leave behind. As such it was not unknown for them to spend months or years stuck on a single problem, a career defined by a single formula produced. The media and the university publicity departments would talk about genius and flashes of insight driving the sum total of human knowledge forward.

They ignored the thousands of hours of thought and guessing that went into that sudden moment. Lots of people spending lots of time working away on a problem. He had been staring at this equation for the best part of three years now, it had all the trappings of a mythic moment. A solitary genius working alone for years. He had absolutely no idea what he was doing, the damn equation was haunting his dreams but he was getting nowhere. Worse than that he had run out of ideas to pursue. He was basically defrauding the taxpayer. He was a fraud.

Morgan had given him hope that his explanation about nanites would give him an avenue but in all honesty it had not helped. Two days ago he had gone through a transcript and replaced the word nanites with pixies. It worked, as did replacing it with wishes or magic. He had spent the rest of the day making paper airplanes and the cleaning staff were giving him strange looks.

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He had been a senior researcher for decades and had to deal with burnout before. How would he advise a doctoral candidate failing to produce results? Put that way the answer was obvious. Take a break then see if you can restate the problem. Security recorded his notes and photographed his workings anyway so he decided to literally start with a blank slate. Suddenly driven he set off looking for a cleaner.

The young man who followed him into the lab was no Will Hunting so started to wash the blackboards clean without complaint. When he got to the whiteboard though he asked a question that made Michael stop. “What do you mean should you wash both sides? I only ever use one side.” He approached the board and flipped it over. Sure enough some amateur had tried to copy his work.

Laughing to himself he followed the mistakes. That stopped almost straight away. This was his problem restated, but no that couldn’t be right. Could it?

The cleaner waited for instruction. He waited and he waited. Eventually he left, the mad boffin did not need his help to stare at a whiteboard and mutter to himself.