Nachos

Someone at the table was already halfway through a schooner and two bad ideas.

“…sets, mate? You’re still on about sets?”

“Not tennis sets, you clown.”

“Well you said sets, and we’ve just had the bloody Australian Open shoved down our throats for three weeks. Every time I turned on the telly it’s some bloke in head-to-toe neon lycra doing wrist stretches like he’s auditioning for Cirque du Soleil.”

“Sport now is just Fortnite skins with cardio.”

“Oi, don’t disrespect Fortnite skins. Some of those cost more than my ute.”

“Exactly! Sports turned into catalogue shopping. ‘In today’s third round: Tiffany Blue defeats Lime Zinger.’”

Someone snorts beer.
Someone else pretends not to have seen it.

“And don’t start me on the ads,” another says. “‘This point is brought to you by ANZ Home Loans.’ Mate, the only point ANZ ever brought me was the point where they told me to piss off.”

“Anyway,” someone tries to drag the conversation back, “sets — I meant pretend sets. Maths sets. Logical collections. Not fucking Sinner vs Djokovic.”

“Oh yeah,” someone else cuts in, “Kornikova. Proof you don’t need a backhand if you’ve got a sponsorship deal and cheekbones that make producers faint.”

“Kornikova walked so influencers could run.”

“That’s vodka-deep.”

A plate of wings materialises. No one knows from where.
No one claims them.
No one sends them back.

“Right,” someone says, “you reckon sets aren’t real.”

“You said sets aren’t real.”

“No, YOU said— you know what, fuck it. Doesn’t matter. Point is: pretend sets. You carve out a chunk of reality and call it a thing. But the slice doesn’t match the loaf.”

“You hungry or philosophical?”

“Both. Can’t tell anymore.”

A moment.
Someone gestures vaguely at the chaos of the universe.

“Name something finite, then.”

Immediate answer:

“An apple.”

“…you’re a galah.”

“No, really — finite on the outside, infinite on the inside. Like a Kinder Surprise but legal.”

“You can’t use Kinder Surprise as a metaphysical example! Americans choke on those things and sue gravity.”

“Zoom in on an apple and suddenly quarks are doing interpretive dance.”

“That’s not what quarks do.”

“Well whatever they do, they’re not finite.”

“So nothing’s finite?”

“No, finite’s just the plane where YOU stop looking. Where your brain goes, ‘Yeah nah, that’s enough recursion for today.’”

“So like the ‘quiet please’ signs at the Aus Open?”

“Exactly. Doesn’t actually stop the noise.”

The waiter appears holding nachos like a sacrificial offering.

“These yours?”

“No.”

“Someone’s.”

“Not ours.”

“I’ll just… place them here.”

He retreats before physics drags him in.

“So anyway,” someone says, pointing a half-eaten chip like a sceptre, “finite and infinite — different planes.”

“Oh Christ, planes again.”

“Finite plane: no cause, no effect, no time. Eternal. Like Greenland before climate change.”

“Or my ex’s heart.”

“Infinite plane: motion, entropy, everything losing its shit constantly.”

“So how do they connect?”

“They don’t. Parallel planes. Like Jetstar and professionalism.”

Pete arrives mid-rant, coat half-on, hair at war with itself.

“…the fuck are you idiots talking about?”

“Finite became infinite for a bit.”

Pete stops dead.
“That’s… that’s not a sentence, mate.”

“No no — listen. Finite can’t cause anything, right? No cause, no effect. But infinite needs cause-effect. So infinite starts from finite even though finite can’t start anything.”

Pete stares like someone just handed him a live eel.

“That’s cooked.”

“Nah, that’s physics.”

“Physics? That’s not even Centrelink-approved logic.”

“Look, look,” someone says excitedly, “finite wasn’t nothing. Nothing can’t exist. Finite’s full of structure, just no motion. No time. Static. Eternal.”

“So how’d infinite start then?”

“John 1:1.”

“Oh piss off.”

“No, the LINE. ‘In the beginning was the Word.’ That’s the external trigger. The spark.”

“That’s John, not Matthew.”

“I don’t read the footnotes, mate.”

“Point is,” the philosopher continues, “eternity flicked into infinity — for a while.”

Silence.
A fork drops.
A beer wobbles.
Someone sighs in spiritual exhaustion.

Then someone mutters:

“So eternity sneezed and the universe fell out.”

“Exact-fucking-ly.”

Pete sits down like gravity gave him no choice.

“Alright,” he says, “but where’s Greenland in all this?”

“Glad you asked!” someone yells with far too much joy.
“It’s like that Trump–Greenland thing — bloke thought you could OWN a continent. Proper finite-plane thinking. Real land keepers know you don’t own land — you keep it alive.”

Pete rubs his face.

“You lot shouldn’t be allowed near philosophy.
Or beer.”

“Beer’s the only reason philosophy works,” someone replies.

“That checks out,” Pete sighs.

The table wobbles in solidarity.
Possibly eternally.
Possibly infinitely.
Hard to tell from this plane.