SUMMA TOTALIS

This is Laplace's story. and Laplace's story is his people's story.
 He is the product of a society 
that never got the 12 step program it desperately needed. 
Known to others as the 'Calculators' and 
referring to themselves as, 'the Species', 
they are an insular lot, governed by (sometimes literally) 
binding cultural practices but few formal rules.
Bitter socio-political skepticism gives the Species
 a grand unifying project to sustain them 
through a multi-millennial history.
 If determinism holds, a complete mathematical description of 
the universe is possible. With a detailed schematic in hand,
they need only adjust the numbers so 
it all works out perfectly.
The species longs for the promised utopia. Their elite strive to 
complete the calculation in an unregulated, interactive model of
 global events, so far without 
success. A heretical suspicion that something is off
with the entire project troubles Laplace.
As he enacts a scheme to refute or validate his suspicion,
the effort exposes him to his life's havoc 
through its victims as he struggles with novel practicalities
surrounding a God's requisite 
martyrdom and the wrath it evokes in the deity's
eschatological sect of worshipers. He succeeds 
more than he dared hope, but his discoveries are hard to accept.