You Get What You Deserve, Eventually

The misspelling had seemed innocuous at first. Reversing an i and an e hardly seemed a travesty. Sure, she received a 97 instead of a perfect 100, but she was only in fourth grade. Her chances of getting into Harvard would hardly be affected.

Deterministic chaos renders long term prediction of complex events impossible, despite the lack of random elements. Only with hindsight can omniscience be achieved.

Therefore, it was impossible for her to know at the time, for anyone to know, that a simple misspelling would eventually lead to the extinction of the human race.

In hindsight, she deserved an F.

No Surprises

Sherlock Holmes perfected the art of deduction to the point that he wielded a peculiar form of omniscience over existence. Through his careful, some would say obsessive, calculations and observations, Holmes anticipated even the most esoteric of events before they occurred.

Centuries later, chaos theorists would pour over his extant journals. They became fascinated by his predictions, sometimes so specific that his diary entries anticipated their own research into his system of ideas.

But what they saw as a nearly divine intuition of the universe, Holmes viewed as a curse.

He lived his life bereft of the pleasure of surprise.