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.

I took a quick shower, and snuck into the back of a presentation on mytocrondial locomotion slightly distracted with confusion as to how I ended up in that alley and regret about the papers I had missed. This was not a session I had planed on attending, given that It was not one of my interests, but there was nothing else in this time slot any more interesting and I wanted to make up for lost time. Memory loss was not an explanation I had yet contemplated particularly as I was having no trouble following the presentation in spite of a headache and that this was a ground breaking paper in a field that I hadn't payed any attention to since my early teens. (My mother was a microbiologist, and I had a tendency to break into tears whenever I saw a microscope since the divorce.)

It was durring the breaks between sesions that I realised that memory loss was not only possible, but probable. I was approached a number of times about things I had said in the last two weeks that I did not remember saying. This is not to say that any of the things I was reported to have said I would disavow. There were even a few questions about the paper I had presented the previous week. With this on my mind I took time during lunch to schedule an appointment with a doctor as soon as possible, and skipped the last session of the day to head to the local hospital to meet with a neurologist. His conclusion was that I should never drink that much alcohol again. He got no argument from me.

The next surprise was an assignment. The company I work for was in negotiation for a major sale, and I was sent to survey the existing system and location. So here I was thousands of miles away from home (and the nearby tourist trap where the conferences were held) in a town I had never heard of, walking into a restaurant with the most powerful man in town, the plant manager Mr. Robert Thompson, to meet his family for lunch, when I got the greatest surprise of my life.

There were two good looking women sitting at the table we were walking towards, a gray haired matron and a redhead with a great backside. The matron spotted us, waived, and called out, "Over here, Bob." The redhead, turned saw me, jumped out of her chair raised at me screaming, "Dite, Dite," jumped into my arms, and started kissing me.

Between kisses scatered across my face, she said, "I'm so glad to see you, why didn't you tell me you were coming," and if that wasn't enough to knock a man off his feet, she dropped two more bombshells, "I'm pregnant, we all are." Fortunately the last was two were whispered into my ear.