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Bash’s miraculous process added merely hundredths of a cent to each piece of paper processed. For this token price, one ended up with a sheet of proteopape that possessed magnitudes more processing power than an old-line supercomputer.

In effect, Bash had created flexible, weightless computers practically too cheap to sell.

But the difference between “practically” and “absolutely” meant a lot, across millions of units.

I2—the age of Immanent Information—was about to commence.

A visit to the same canny lawyer who had helped his parents survive bankruptcy nearly twenty years earlier insured that Bash’s invention was securely patented. Anyone who wanted to employ Bash’s process would have to license it from him, for a considerable annual fee.

At this point, the nineteen-year-old Bash went public.

By the time he was twenty-one, he was the richest man in the world.

But he had still never even ventured out on a date with any member of the opposite sex who was not his cousin Cora on his mother’s side.

3

The Breakfast Club

Dagny Winsome resembled no one so much as a pale blonde Olive Oyl. Affecting retro eyeglasses in place of the universal redactive surgery to correct her nearsightedness, Dagny exhibited a somatotype that evoked thoughts of broomsticks, birches, baguettes and, given her predilection for striped shirts, barber poles. But her lack of curvature belied a certain popularity with males, attributable to her quick wit, wild impulsiveness and gleeful subversiveness. Her long pale hair framed a face that could segue from calm innocence to irate impatience to quirky amusement in the span of a short conversation. Dagny’s four years at MIT had been marked by participation in a score of famous hacks, including the overnight building of a two-thirds mockup of the Space Shuttle George W. Bush resting in a simulated crash in the middle of Massachusetts Avenue.

Bash stood in awe of Dagny from the minute he became aware of her and her rep. A year ahead of Bash and several years senior in age, yet sharing his major, Dagny had seemed the unapproachable apex of sophistication and, yes, feminine allure. Often he had dreamed of speaking to her, even asking her on a date. But he had never summoned up the requisite courage.

Dagny graduated, and Bash’s senior year was overtaken by the heady proteopape madness. For the next decade he had heard not a word of her postcollege career. Despite some desultory networking throughout the IT community, Bash had been unable to learn any information concerning her. Apparently she had not employed her degree in any conventional manner.

So in Bash’s heart, Dagny Winsome gradually became a faded yet still nostalgia-provoking ghost.

Until the day just two weeks ago, on June 11, when she turned up on his doorstep.

Women were not in the habit of showing up at the front entrance of Bash’s home. For one thing, Bash lived in seclusion in a fairly well-secured mansion in the exclusive town of Lincoln, Massachusetts. Although no live guards or trained animals patrolled the grounds of his homestead, the fenced estate boasted elaborate cybernetic barriers wired both to nonlethal antipersonnel devices and to various agencies who were primed to respond at a moment’s notice to any intrusion. Bash was not particularly paranoid, but as the world’s richest individual he was naturally the focus of many supplicants, and he cherished his privacy.

Also, Bash did not experience a steady flow of female callers since he remained as awkward with women as he had been at nineteen. Although not technically a virgin any longer at age thirty, he still failed to deeply comprehend the rituals of human courtship and mating. Sometimes he felt that the shortened form of his name stood for “Bashful” rather than “Basho.”

Naturally, then, Bash was startled to hear his doorbell ring early one morning. He approached the front door tentatively. A curling sheet of proteopape carelessly thumbtacked to the inner door conveyed an image of