The Principles of Theory: Forward [sic]

The Principles of Theory: A Systematic Approach to Ideas is considered the masterwork of Dr. Carlton Farthington and a colleague whose name has since been redacted by request.  The text was culled from emails sent between the two men as they conducted a controversial summer "pilot program" at a prestigious Midwestern university.  This letter, sent by their student, Steffi, was originally used as the work's "Forward" [sic].

October 20, 19--

Dear Professor [NAME REDACTED],

I was there in the tunnels.

This was after the university canned the pilot program and had supposedly sent us home.  I heard about the beast.  They all told me about it.

We didn’t care about college credit anymore.

We had made it to the third subbasement and next floor down was the entrance to the subterranean caves, which, in turn, led down to the center of the earth, safe haven from all the turbulent reversals we thought so imminent.

The whole group of us were down in the tunnels, constructing long corridors of cardboard tied with twine—“tunnels within tunnels” he called them, and via these passageways, he theorized we would pass over safely into the “new physics.”

I myself caught glimpses of the terrible beast Farthington had warned about, sometimes swaggering in the distance up ahead of us in the dim intermittent rays of our flashlights, sometimes turning around suddenly to face us, its human physiognomy smiling to reveal a terrifying array of lion's teeth.

Many of the students stayed on well into the next school year, long after I’d decided to go back to Oberlin.  The university tried its best to cover up what happened to them.  That they had all been devoured by a lion and that the lion had been found and shot and there was a vague mention of a nearby zoo.

That they are dead and gone is indubitable Professor [NAME REDACTED].  But that summer lives on in my memory and in these brief electronic transmissions of which I have honor of laying claim.  May the brilliance of this unheralded mind cast a light through the befuddled corridors of multidimensional learning, what Farthington before his death so fondly referred to as “The Principles of Theory.”

Steffi