Ladies and gentlemen, mesdames et messieurs. Thank you for being here in such large numbers. What you're seeing right now is not just a conversation. It's a look in the rear-view mirror, a look that questions the power of truth. Does the truth come from the figures? Do those who lie tamper with figures then? If you make a mistake by copying a measurement made by the voltmeter in your laboratory, are you a liar?

I think I was mistaken. Looking back on this I think I was. 15 years ago, I was in a different perspective of life. There was a clue though. A handful of clues. Nice hints presented to me by trees and plants, invisible paths in the underwood. Yet also misunderstandings, when you think you understand, when you’re convinced of that. When you're convinced that you can access any form of truth, that it's just a matter of time, patience and even determination. These hints that are usually frown upon by scientists. You know what I’m saying. Blissfully unaware of what was going on.

I was pigeonholed and yet I wanted to straddle. There was an ocean to cross, not just a river. Things you find on the other bank, must be substantiated in the rest of your life. This is destiny. Fateful decisions in life sometimes yield the best.

I was terrified by the idead that the things around me might be behaving strangely behind my back. The idea of a conspiracy of things, a planetary conspiracy, the very idea of things feeling solidarity with each other. For a scientist, this idea means death. Things must behave according to the rules, principles and laws of physics, chemistry and biology.

It all started with a series of beliefs. That I could reduce everything living organism to a series of measures. That bodies are mere numbers. That pain and joy are mere numbers. That anger is mere number. That frustration is mere number. That coincidence is mere number. That misunderstanding is mere number rounding. That coincidence is mere random number generation. That pulse is mere number OUT OF RANGE.  That you can get away with murder when digits are only what’s left behind.

She started something and then she set about vanishing behind polygons. Her feelings were subdued. Logic was paramount. Logic and equations and variables and constants and for-loops and if-then-else and functions and classes and modules and packages and privacy and protected methods and functional programming and models and datasets and anomalies and standard deviations and variance and expectation values and statistical moments and averages and Bayesian approaches and Markov chains and Hidden Markov Chains and maximum likelihood.

And … fail. Shit. Fuck. Bummer. Double bummer. Hey John, there was a failure in the system. There was a bug. We’re stymied. We dunno what to do. What should I do? Whom should we call? Where’s the IT service? I don’t get it John. The model was perfectly tweaked. We don’t understand. We can’t fathom out.

Temperature is rising but I’m frozen. What’s looming large? What’s lurching outside in the garden? Is it prowling without us noticing, like a stalker loitering in a remote village?