"Run the simulation again, Berta."

The graph is not a neat spike. It’s not a flat line. It’s a strange, lopsided bell: it rises sharply from zero, peaks, and then falls away in a long, gentle curve toward infinity. It never quite touches the bottom.

That night, the spores rest in their warm chamber. Carlos looks at the empty sugar crystal. A few heroic, fast-moving spores reached it and fed the whole colony.

Mya nods. "You are seeing the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution. The most probable speed is the peak. The average speed is a bit to the right of the peak. And the root-mean-square speed is further right still."

Berta is already poking the Data Slate. "The slate says their speeds aren't the same, Arnie. Look." She pulls up a graph. The horizontal axis is labeled . The vertical axis is labeled Number of Spores .

Dina squints. "The areas… they look the same. The hot one is just stretched out."

Arnie finally has his aha moment. "So the 'average' spore isn't the one doing the work. It's the rare, fast spores in the tail. And temperature doesn't just speed up the average—it populates the tail ."