Chapter 1

My name is Bill Summers. The first thing you should know about me is that I'm not a genius.

To be a genius you must possess two qualities. The first quality of a genius is to think differently. Merely being smart is sufficient to make amazing breakthroughs, but the ability to make frequent, significant breakthroughs requires a different mindset in order to overtake the hurdles that non-geniuses encounter. Geniuses are often misunderstood by the people around them and frequently have problems in school or throughout life. For example, Tesla disliked touching round objects. More humorously, he would not hold a convention without having a tesla coil firing electricity around the room. Needless to say, this often scared the crap out of his audience, despite his promises of safety. I do not have the ability to think differently.

I do possess the second quality, which is the ability to think efficiently. I have what I like to call an eidetic short term memory. It would be more accurate to say I can think of a lot of things at once. A normal man can hold a telephone number in short term member, I can store a book... if I'm willing to read it in one sitting. This might sound inferior to true eidetic memory; I will not remember the text later. However, I can think of the whole book at once! Imagine trying to write a book on the theme of birds and being able to recall exactly quotes and pages for every mention of birds, magpies, swallows, or any other word for bird.

As a young child, I quickly understood the limits of my strange ability. True, I could easily ace a spell test by looking over the word list for two minutes before a test. However, only a fraction of the words would actually be recalled later, and I'd soon pay for it when angry teachers encountered the words, spelled incorrectly, in my sentences. This is not to say I actually memorized the words to take tests. I merely kept a list of words and glanced over it before class. The teachers got the last laugh, since all those glances added up to me leaving the class knowing all the words. Still, I was almost always several months behind my classmates in knowledge, despite my consistently flawless performance.

The ability to store a giant chuck of a information in short term memory ensured I was frequently offered jobs consulting on complex tasks like programming, finance, and statistics. Most businesses stuck to keeping such work in house (with the workers who were actually familiar with the source code), but the word was out: "If you're need a bug found or a problem solved, call Bill Summers. I could solve pretty much any problem within 24 hours.

I point all of this out to justify my claim that the oil lamp which was sitting in my kitchen cupboard had appeared there out of nowhere. True, I had not actually looked in my cupboard for several hours, but I knew that when I had looked in it earlier, the lamp was not there. A normal man may have assumed the cleaning staff had snuck it in and it was unnoticed on the first look, but I knew exactly what I had seen in that first look. If you still aren't laughing at my crazy stories, you'll laugh now. The lamp was a genie's lamp.

After a bit of staring at the lamp, I honestly did think there was a small chance it was magic. Having full confidence in my own memory has afforded me the ability to trust in my own thoughts, and I could not think of any likely scenario for how the lamp got there. The most likely scenario was that a cleaning person had installed a silent motor under the lamp that propelled it into sight while the cupboard was closed. Noticeably more likely than the lamp being magic, which I figured to be about a 0.05% change. But I did not discount it.