Eugene was a statistical oddity. Theoretically, 99.7% of any population lies within three standard deviations of the mean for whatever trait you’re measuring; height, weight, IQ, or penis length. Exceed that distance and you’re a genuine freak of nature. Sadly for him, Eugene was normally sexually endowed. (His life would’ve been more interesting had it been otherwise!) Eugene’s abnormality was his intellect. He was three standard deviations smarter than any human that could rightfully be called “average”. He was, non-ironically, a genius.
He was also, as is common in such cases, an annoying and confusing pain in the ass to everyone around him. This wasn’t intentional. Eugene was only a pain in the ass to people with a vastly lesser intellect. It wasn’t his fault this meant everyone.
Intelligence is a boon, but only to a point. The first standard deviation or so grants academic achievement, workplace success, and a tendency to avoid obviously bad decisions that cause the downfall of so many. (See: extended warranties and unwanted pregnancies.) Somewhere around the second deviation, there is a point of diminishing returns. By the third deviation you’ve skated too far on the thin ice of Godlike intelligence; you’re scarcely human. As such, you suck at human society.
Eugene was trapped amid a vast sea of people with whom he could never comfortably interact. It had always been this way. In grade school he was miserable, but then again so is everyone. In college, things deteriorated; his professors hated him (which was appropriate since Eugene hated them back). Now, fully chained to the world of work, he was bottoming out.
He was very good at his job but was just too weird to get along. Think about your job, do the bosses reward high performers and excellence? Of course not! That would interfere with head games and toadying. Eugene never got respect for his accomplishments and was perpetually the victim of swarming freeloaders that followed him like pilot fish on a shark. He’d do mental powerlifting and they’d get by just making the motions. He wasn’t so much an employee as a brain yoked to a harness. Awkward and alien, frightening in his insight and strange in his deductions, he was cursed to be a highly profitable beast of burden in someone else’s stable.
He was the main quantitative analyst in a very exclusive firm that specialized in making rich people richer. The firm made nothing, sold nothing, and produced nothing. Eliminating even the pretense of producing goods and services turns out to be a fabulous way to focus exclusively on money accumulation; provided, of course, you’ve got a genius on a hamster wheel to drive the system. Eugene supported the careers of no less than seven hedge fund managers and a veritable herd of underlings. There were yes men, HR harpies, whiners, paper pushers, red tape huffers, dastardly lawyers, tax dweebs, sycophants, cretins, the stunningly incompetent, the mildly incompetent, the criminally incompetent, and a handful of decrepit and sorrowful burned out crispy nuggets left from when the company actually had a point.
There were other quantitative analysts at the firm but they were irrelevant. Normal human beings of normal insight could never be the lever to move the world or the fulcrum upon which the lever resides. Eugene was the key. He was the whole shebang; lever and fulcrum, seer and oracle, genius and loser, all in one unpopular entity. If they were truly honest with themselves, every employee in the firm would admit their dislike for Eugene was mostly jealousy. Nobody likes to know, deep in their heart, they’re scarcely evolved apes in the presence of a wizard. Everything Eugene did, from pouring coffee with his left hand while writing with his right, to sniffing out the likely effect of a new oil field discovery on the interest rate in Kazakhstan, reminded them he wasn’t “normal”.
The staff was so numerous that Eugene ignored them. He only interacted with the seven “leaders” who formed the informal oligarchy driving the firm’s army of mediocrity. The seven were mildly abnormal too; most were bright (though orders of magnitude less than Eugene), all were exceptionally handsome, and two lucky bastards were hung like a horse. Compared to Eugene, they had better communication skills, unflappable sales pitches, and excellent hair. Thus, they got to be on the cover of magazines read by rich financiers and eat at fancy dinners with heads of state. Eugene was only let out of his virtual cage for occasional presentations to investors. In these situations, he was trotted out like a show pony but carefully shuffled away from the microphone lest he lay too much knowledge on the “normies”.
At first, Eugene was resigned to the situation. He was well paid and being rich is a great distraction. His pay was a sound investment. The firm was impressively mismanaged yet stayed afloat. This was Eugene’s doing. Everyone knew where their bread was buttered. Keeping the money rolling in was especially concerning to the firm’s highest reaches; they couldn’t carry on their lifestyle of supercars and trophy wives and ensuing expensive divorces and supercar repair bills without Eugene. He earned almost (but not quite) as much as their own ridiculous incomes.
Eugene initially sought meaning in his work. Sniffing out inequalities in international commodities markets amused him. He would choose when, where, and how to strike. At his word, the rest of the staff would attack like sharks in a pack and congratulate themselves on another victory. In all likelihood, any gaggle of monkeys could have made money following Eugene’s advice.
Inevitably, the novelty wore off. Eugene would occasionally mumble “there’s more to life than making money”. Heresy at a hedge fund! Every time he did this a generalized panic ensued. To calm the situation, one of the seven hedge fund “leaders” (presumably the one that drew the short straw) would stampede to Eugene and try to calm his foolish notions.
When the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. So, whenever Eugene grumbled, they’d deliver a bonus or raise. This was meant to mollify the gifted freak but it accomplished quite the opposite. It’s easiest to say “money isn’t everything” when you’ve got more than you’ll ever spend.
Eugene’s unplumbed depths were killing him. If he didn’t turn his overpowered mind to something other than bringing in another boatload of unearned money, he was going to lose it. Nikola Tesla wound up talking to pigeons. Howard Hughes became a reclusive germophobe. Eugene was thinking of starting a religion based on Legos.
As a last resort, he took on the genius version of intellectual BASE jumping. He hunted for and eventually contacted “The One”.
