Take 3872, No Go

I will be the first one to admit, that I have no idea where this week’s six-sentence story came from.  Based on the prompt of structure, it rapidly took on a life of it’s own.  So go ahead and read the story of our narrator, who also has had something he was working on take on a life of its own. 

---

He answered a question, just one, and in that time he looked away from what he had been working on, which is of course when it all went to hell.

There had been a zig, where there should have been a zag, and the entire experiment had gone off the rails, as the structure he had been working towards had been abandoned for something entirely less stable.

There was nothing he could do now though, just let this little exothermic reaction continue until it ran out of fuel and he ended up with another puddle of goo.

It was the 3872^nd time he had run this experiment, and each time it went catastrophically wrong, but in a different way.

Hopefully his recorder had caught whatever event had precipitated this particular collapse, as he wanted to avoid whatever it was next time around.

He sighed, as he ran the numbers to see how long it would be, and thought, that maybe, just maybe his sister was right after all, humans were not capable of forming a stable civilization.