Chapter 1

There are three things you should know before you can understand what happened. The first is that I am significantly smarter than average, not that it does a lot of good, but in school they held out Bill Gates and Albert Einstein as recommended role models. The second is that I haven't had any success with girls. When the nerds and geeks think you are strange that happens, especially when your parents are divorced and you have sworn never to put your kids through that. The third is that I don't drink or do drugs. I always preferred clarity of thought to intoxication. So you can imagine my surprise when I woke up with a hangover in an alley behind a bar.

Although in many ways that morning is where things truely began, I didn't realize it at the time. The alley and the bar were in a mountain town that was not as quaint as they appeared, because their major source of income was tourism. Skiing in winter, hiking and camping in summer and conventions whenever they could, which was why I was in town. As A bicycle camper I found this town entirely too touristy for my tastes, but the opportunity for back to back conferences was hard to resist especially when I had a paper to present at one and the other had a paper on "biological applications of information systems" that I really wanted to read. Apparently my presentation of my paper went over well, but I have no memory of presenting it.

I woke that fateful morning expecting to be late to day two of the conference on math, because I needed a shower after sleeping in that filthy alley, and glad that the paper I was presenting that day was in the afternoon. My memories of the previous day included two papers on friendly numbers (one established a new lower bound for a possible odd friendly number and was fairly dull the other was more interesting and on their common prime factors. I told you I was a geek.) and I recalled them perfectly, and dinner with fellow attendees where we were debating the theological implications of infinite sets over drinks (and I drank water). So it was quite a rude surprise to discover that not only was the mathematics conference over, but it was the last day for the genetics conference.