There once was a man who believed in serendipity, the idea that things that seem like marvellous coincidences are in fact willed by the universe to happen, that nothing is a result of chance alone. His life, of course, was destroyed by a thing that was entirely a result of chance, but it was an odd enough thing that it is worth recounting here.
It happened like this: the man who believed in serendipity was a chemist by trade, and invented many marvellous liquids that could teach plants to speak or mountains to breathe. Because of this he was a very famous chemist, and he was regularly praised by the people who read about him and feared by the people who were in power. Despite this, the man was not entirely happy, because none of the chemicals he created could be used to teach himself to do anything remarkable. If, he reasoned, he could create a substance to get a chair to write a poem, it surely followed that he could make something that would allow a man to do things that were truly unheard of- and he saw no reason why that man should not be him. And sure enough after many years he did indeed make such a chemical, and after a day examining its structure and bonds he decided it was safe enough to swallow.
He had intended that his substance would make him all powerful, but this was not the case. Rather it made him all-seeing, and in a flash he saw the world as it truly was. He saw that for every wonderful coincidence that had led him to become the man he was there were a thousand near-coincidences that had never happened, and he saw how many times his one true love (God rest her soul) had been on the bottom floor of a shop he was in, or had entered a cafe a minute after he had left. He saw, too, how the order he had always seen in chemistry was dependent on a world of chaos lurking just below it, and that every reaction that ever took place sat beside many millions who had failed. It was all too much; after an hour he was howling for it all to stop, and after a day he was too distraught even to howl any more.
After that, the man who once believed in serendipity stopped making chemicals, and retired to be as far away as possible from anything related to science or society. The world was sad to hear of it, because they saw him as someone truly special -a truth, the man now realised, that was entirely down to coincidence- but before long they were interested in the man who believed angels governed gravity, and the former chemist could retire in something that was miles away from peace. Quickly he forgot his former life and his former creations, for -while he had created both- he no longer felt either had ever belonged to him.
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