Not being a mathematician myself, I’ve always found chaos theory a bit of a chaos. This book helped a bit, but much of the content was beyond me. I offer my microfiction below as an example of what I think the world might look like if chaos theory became a social reality:

CHAOS
A wife is a little confused – instead of her car, she drops off her husband for a change of oil and a tune-up. So this husband sits in the waiting room until they call his name, then he reeves up his legs and flops on the hydraulic lift as the mechanics, also a little confused, hoist him up.

They take his teeth for the grill, his hands and feet for the tires. The man keeps himself flat, he’s more than a little confused, having been hoisted up on his belly by the hydraulic lift. His arms and legs dangle, his heart is pumping, a heart the confused mechanics take for an engine.

One of the mechanics opens the man’s mouth and takes his tongue for a cylinder and his throat for the radiator. He announces to the crew, “Needs new points and plugs.”

“How much longer am I going to be up here?” the man asks.

One of the confused mechanics shrugs his shoulders and whispers, “Everyone is in such a rush these days; they should know this stuff takes time.”

When the mechanics are through, thee man has a couple of incisions in his back, the front of his head is shaved, his pants are pulled down, his balls smeared with grease and an inspection sticker plastered on the right cheek of his ass.

The confused mechanics lead him out to where he will squat on the oil-stained asphalt between a truck and a convertible until his wife comes back to pick him up.

The wife returns and asks, ”How’s it running?”

“Shouldn’t give you too many problems” says a mechanic, “now that we gave her the once over.”

The wife leads her husband away on a leash and when she passes another mechanic, the one who did most of the work, he tells her, “Lady, keep an eye on that stick shift of yours. It’s acting kind of funny. Try not to grind through the gears or you’re really gonna have problems.”