Adaptive Curmudgeon

The One was a mysterious entity known only to and discussed only among the very small and freakishly smart population of geniuses to which Eugene had genetic membership. The One was said to be a tutor. Not a mentor. Not a friend. A trial by fire in human form. Yoda was a cuddly Muppet trainer for mediocre farmboys but “The One” was merciless. He would beat your mind like a blacksmith at the forge.

The One was supposedly able to coax the peak ability from a true genius. Geniuses scoured the world looking for just such a lifeline. Mired in a hedge fund and seeing little else on the horizon, “The One” was a beacon and a life raft to a man like Eugene. He needed a genuine Plato; someone with sufficient horsepower to shepherd his Aristotelian mind from the mud of Idiocracy.

The One was said to provide (or perhaps the word is inflict) a mental workout the likes of which only exceptional people could handle. The One did not deal with normal beings, or as Eugene’s mental equals called them, “Muggles”. There were rumors that The One’s methods were unconventional, possibly even dangerous. It was assumed that a “Muggle” under The One’s tutelage would be dead or mad in a matter of hours.

The One was exceptionally secretive. Eugene personally interviewed anyone who had or claimed to have seen The One. He was fairly confident “The One” existed but the rest was inconclusive. The One’s training regime could be experienced, but not explained. Anyone who’d met “The One” clammed up and never discussed the event’s specifics. It was Fight Club of the mind.

Nor did anyone share information on how to find “The One”. Presumably, if you were ready, the universe would put you in contact. Finally, just as he approached his wit’s end, Eugene unearthed a dark web entity that proposed a contract with The One.

The entity was as mysterious as the whole idea. From it, he received a secretive and somewhat threatening contract. The contract was not even remotely legally binding. It was ominous and invasive. It was also written in Sanskrit; as if to say “if you’re the kind of person who can’t translate Sanskrit, you’re too dumb to help. Go watch TV with the other chimps.” At least that’s how Eugene interpreted it. He could afford to hire a translator but elected to learn Sanskrit just to read the document. Take that!

Before pulling the trigger, Eugene contacted one of the firm’s lawyers. He asked for a meeting and carefully explained that he had a document that needed reviewing. He insisted that if even one word of it got leaked, Eugene would use all his resources, mental and financial, to make sure said lawyer never worked again. Then he handed over a heavily redacted English translation of the contract.

The lawyer scanned it and practically threw it across the room. It was disgusting! A mess! It sounded more like a deal with Satan than an educational opportunity. Anyone who’d associate with lunatics who’d write such a thing deserved whatever they got. He counseled Eugene to quit hanging out with freaks on the dark web and find other interests. Take up golf. Get laid. Do some heroin. Anything but pursue such madness! (Frankly Eugene made the lawyer nervous under the best of conditions. Showing him a contract that sounded like heavy metal lyrics made it so much worse. The document was proof the man was going to wind up, sooner or later, in a padded room.)

That sold Eugene on the enterprise. Anything that makes sense at three standard deviations will royally piss off a “normie”. Now he was sure.

That night, he completed the contract on a darkweb interface. It was an unforgiving multi-phase affair. It started with specific instructions about banking transfers, all of which sounded sketchy.

He scribbled the details on a notepad. He noticed the ultimate fee was not specified. If you have to ask, you can’t afford it?

Then he was faced with several buttons. He clicked “yes” them all. He affirmed that he’d read the contract (no mention of Sanskrit), he agreed to it, he knew what he was doing, he had no reservations about the matter, he was single, and he didn’t have heart issues or physical maladies that would cause him to die under stress. This made him pause a bit before pressing the button, but he carried on. More buttons; he wasn’t currently high, he wasn’t psychotic, neurotic, dissociative, or a serial killer. Sheesh! The last button was the strangest. It literally said “I’m not just jerking around and I won’t pussy out”. He shrugged and clicked it too.

Then he had to provide health records. It took a half hour to find the right records but Eugene did as requested.

Finally, when he thought he was about done, an ad-hoc pirated version of the Reynolds Adaptable Intelligence Test launched onto his screen. Eugene was no stranger to IQ tests but this one was sprung on him with no warning! The interface merely prompted him with a question and a timer. The clock was already ticking! After a few normal questions, he was given 26 seconds to determine how many blocks were in a three-dimensional, multicolored, irregular, rotating shape. Then he was prompted to solve a mathematical formula that was constantly changing with time, as were the available answers. This one had a 73 second timer. It may have begun as a standard test but now it was entirely different; a loopy experimental questionnaire. But he didn’t have time to ponder the overall situation. As soon as he answered one question another would pop up… all with timers. He waded through hundreds of questions.

At the bottom of the screen a scrolling warning threatened that if he did poorly he’d never meet The One. It also warned that restarting, pausing, or retesting were all instant disqualifiers. There was no mention of cheating, but the timer was so fast that fiddling about with Wikipedia searches or whatnot would’ve been counterproductive. The warnings about restarting, pausing, and retesting were repeated in irregular patterns. Was it the Fibonacci Sequence? He couldn’t tell.

The test took hours but it was fun. He was a genius after all.

Immediately after the last question, the screen went blank. The location where he’d been working (on the dark web) vanished. Poof, gone! He couldn’t re-establish contact. There was no way to know he’d completed the application, no confirmation number, no receipt, nothing.

He was crestfallen. It was probably an elaborate phishing setup!

After a well-earned pee break, he took all the steps that had been outlined in the earlier stages. He established a private numbered Swiss bank account and wrote the number on a slip of paper. On the paper he added the passphrase he’d been given. He retrieved a Krugerrand from his safe and taped the paper to it. Then, sheepishly, he put the Krugerrand in his pocket.

He felt silly, like a kid trying to find the tooth fairy, but the instructions were clear. He was to carry the gold coin with him day and night for the next 30 days. Miss even one day, and he was disqualified.

Then he was done. The One would contact him. Or “The One” didn’t even exist.

It was an unsatisfying situation. Likely, he’d done nothing but set himself up for the mother of all muggings. Yet, he had hope. A desperate man will do desperate things and that’s far better than mere resignation.

Three days later his private cell phone received a text from an unidentified source. It was a dollar amount with no other information. The number was unreasonably large! There was no indication this was from The One. He’d never provided this phone number to anyone other than professional contacts. In fact, he was quite secretive with it. Yet the text was there. On a hunch, he deposited the amount in the numbered account. What’s the point of being filthy rich if you can’t piss it away on stupid ideas? Also, is getting hosed by an elaborate hoax any worse than marrying a gold digger and getting cleaned out in every few years? (Of the seven men that called themselves Eugene’s boss, there were a total of 16 divorces. Eugene estimated that his work supported no less than 16 ex-wives, 9 illegitimate children, and three legal “settlements”.)

Despite his willingness to part with a small fortune, he was worried. If this didn’t work out, he was done for.

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”.

Mike radioed for an extraction. The helo had initial stabilization issues but soon all was well. He hopped on board, did a little cleanup of a messy “Area of Operations” and embraced the beginning of a new path. Twitch was the first of many temptations he would encounter in this new life. The fool needed a righteous attitude adjustment upside the head. Yet Mike had let him escape in his ridiculous vehicle. To have overcome him was a good sign! It was proof. He was a changed man.

The day Mike would let an unemployable milquetoast mistake “magazine” for “clip” and live; that was Mike’s day zero!

“Everything before was before and everything after will be after.” Thought Mike. He’d forever have a boundary in his life; a boundary of bear spit and ursine armpit. “Nobody”, he thought, “has had such an abrupt and profound transition as I.”

He couldn’t be more wrong. We turn now, in an abrupt and profound transition to the story of Eugene Snodavik. Eugene’s world is about to experience its own day zero; as if upended by the vagaries of a selfish and lazy author who decided “this story isn’t going to sell without more sex”.