So when he died, the billionaire’s sole bequest was the establishment of a secret trust to support similarly struggling writers. The money from this trust wouldn’t go directly to writers in the form of grants and awards, though. Instead, the billionaire set up the Polonius Foundation. Through a complex system of money laundering that no single sworn-to-secrecy man involved in the operation thoroughly understood, this foundation funded…studies.
“Studies” in…what? That didn’t matter. Researchers who submitted grant applications through legitimate academic channels (applications that sometimes, somehow caught the attention of Polonius apparatchiks) quickly figured out that the more banal their thesis, the more absurd their methodology, the more likely they were to receive the funds they’d requested.
Because what these researchers didn’t know was that the true purpose of all these “studies” wasn’t to study (let alone solve) any real-world problems, save one.