Like everyone else they knew of course about electromagnetic fluctuations caused by the dramatically different effects of weak coupling systems versus strong coupling systems. Among the billion to the billionth of hotblooded organisms in the infinitely paralleling multiverse they too had observed the breakdown of manageable calculations of musicated taut string connections as the coupling constant outgrew reasonable proportions. Well, who ever said things would stay reasonable?

Could they have, with enough fortitude or imagination, held out for the elusive M moment, with its murky muzak promises of moonlit mountains and matriarchal mozartian marigold meadows miraged in melodious mist?

Ah, but why couldn't they get the bosons of force and fermions of matter, those darn wayward sprites, to cooperate despite their careful ongoing compactification of undesirable spacetime dimensions? It was no longer a matter of simply choosing open or closed string configurations, oh, no, no, everywhere they looked, string options proliferated, crazy cats' cradles in concentrated convicts' cells, shifting shadows on shale, eerie echoes in eleven gzillion to the gzillionth empty eggshells..

It was the theory of everything they had chanced upon all right, but without supersymmetry, what indeed was the point of it all?