Flying Colors
Chapter II
Genti vid’ io allor, come a lor duci,
venire appresso, vestite di bianco;
e tal candor di qua già mai non fuci."I think it's femmoid."
Katzbube shook his head ever-so-platonically upon a pair of recently activated mammaries.
"No, no, it's fee-moid. Has to be. It's derived from female and there's no reason the Great Vowel Shift shouldn't continue to operate in that word."
"But consider femboy."
"You will be glad to know that I have little trouble considering femboys at this particular cuddle puddle."
"Wouldn't it have to be feemboy?"
"Femboy has a closed syllable while femoid has an open one; and secondly it's a contraction of feminine boy while femoid comes from female. If it were femmoid it would be written with two m's."
A thoughtful silence fell upon the cuddle puddle.
“Does anybody have any Adderall?" asked a brunette with vaguely elf-like features. "I'm supposed to finish rewriting payment integration by the end of the week."
"Down to my last week's worth, sorry," said the girl embracing her.
"Mrow," replied the brunette with a slightly mournful air. An arpeggio of sympathetic meowing noises chimed in response.
"Are you from the Bay?" asked a girl with her head on Katzbube's hip.
"Boston. I work at Parentologist."
"Ooh, what's that?"
"Well, I worked at Parentologist while finishing my dissertation. We just went under last weekend. We provided AI agents to prep schools that autonomously read and reply to parent emails on behalf of administrators."
"Couldn’t find customers?"
"Oh no, we found customers just fine. No, we accidentally deployed a work-in-progress branch to prod and twenty thousand parents up and down the East Coast received emails from the principal informing them that their child had been caught with edibles in math class. It was bad. Apparently we're the tenth-most disastrous coding error in history measured by the total amount of damages being sought in court. One ninth-grader thought it was real, turned over her edibles to her parents, and is now suing us and her school out of her own pocket on the grounds that we've torpedoed her chances at getting into her dream program."
"Did she actually get caught in math class?"
"Her attorney is arguing that she does not remember that specific math class but that she could not possibly have been caught by her math teacher because she had eaten all the edibles in her backpack by the end of French the preceding period. She is seeking five million dollars in damages to compensate for lost lifetime earnings she would otherwise have achieved after graduating from Drexel's program in fashion entrepreneurship."
"What was your role? AI engineer?"
"I was the in-house private-school whisperer. The CEO made a fortune in crypto and started an AI company after hearing about a friend from college who worked in the dean's office at Drote and was drowning in parent emails. We were running ten million in MRR before the incident."
"Still a damn good line on your résumé. I'd guess you weren't behind the fatal pull request."
"I was out on the Cape trying to sell Slater on it when the emails went out. My CEO was a good egg, saw the writing on the wall and dispensed most of the cash on hand as quarterly bonuses before the inevitable happened."
"How'd you get the private school-whispering job?"
"Fac brat, my dad's the chaplain. I grew up free-range on a campus in Vermont."
"Lucky you."
“Oh I have stories,” said Katzbube.
When Katzbube reached the dinner line, which was at the top of the hill, he paused and looked back at the rectory just coming into full view below him.
“Have you been here before?” asked the bearded man ahead of him.
“I—” said Katzbube, and paused.
He had been here before; first with Lola Zieber and Banquo Elbers nearly twenty years ago for summer camp on a cloudless day in late June, when the ditches were speckled with irises and the dry air of the West Coast in summer transmuted, as now, to gold in the alembic of the sunset. It was a day of peculiar splendor, and though he had been there four more summers, in all the moods of adolescence, it was to that first visit that his heart returned on this, his latest.
He made himself a pair of tacos with black beans and carne asada, accompanied by a can of cheap lager, a pile of tortilla chips, and a small bunch of grapes from a corner of the dessert table. Here, discordantly, came a rabble of anons unmasked, some hundreds strong, twittering on the great grassy ridge, pleasure-seeking, drinking hard seltzer flavored with cucumber; pushed about to view, in the flesh, followers they knew only as “Based Haplogroup Appreciator” or “Psychonauts for Lee Kuan Yew”. A printed notice taped to an oak tree informed the attendees that there would be a dance at half past eight that Sunday evening next to the old barn.
“Are you going?” asked a girl next to him, her eyes shining with an invitation that Katzbube entirely failed to notice.
“What could anyone possibly want with dancing?!” he demanded to know.
“Well,” she said, her voice strumming, “you’re certainly dressed elegantly, and I’m planning on going.”
“It’s—it’s obscene,” said Katzbube, beginning to lose combobulation. “I can’t, in any case. My proprioception is atrocious. No, I think I’ll see if I can find some people to play whist over at—”
Still looking at the space next to her ear, he set his fork down on his plate and extended his right hand to point towards the rectory, where card games had been scheduled for that evening in a room conveniently located one floor below the immovable feast of the cuddle puddle. His arm, fifteen degrees from fully straight, found itself suddenly blocked by the smooth but rigid texture of linen canvas on muscular backing, followed shortly thereafter by an unpleasant splash of red wine.
Katzbube and his unfortunate victim froze in their tracks, deer in the headlights of an inescapable interaction they both desired with the utmost intensity to avoid.
“I—I rest my case,” Katzbube spluttered to the lady as the man turned around at a speed calculated to maximize menace. “See, I really shouldn’t—”
“Good evening,” said the man, his cream linen suit now enlivened with a dark purple stain across the chest pocket and left shoulder, orbited by lighter burgundy splotchlets and a streak down to the waist-buttons where he had smeared the escaping drops with his handkerchief. Katzbube, paralyzed by fantasies of honorable seppuku, found himself mute but for the quietest and most unbecoming of squeaks.
The man’s dark eyes, set in a handsome Mediterranean face, glanced at Katzbube’s navy blue jacket, then at his tan trousers, then, after an eternity, back at his tortured expression. The length of the stare emanating from Katzbube’s eyeballs suggested that the encounter had somehow dredged up unpleasant memories of mustard-gas artillery shells and limbs lost to gangrene.
“I gather,” said the man, with an accent that suggested an education at a series of expensive international schools, “that you of all people probably don’t need a lecture on the damage done to my jacket.”
A shorter eternity followed before Katzbube found himself sufficiently composed to speak again. Oh God, he thought. The only other person here who’s not in a T-Shirt and I’ve ruined his suit…
“I am dreadfully, dreadfully sorry,” he replied at last, his stare relaxing to perhaps eight hundred yards. “I didn’t…”
“No,” said the man, “it’s—well it’s not fine, exactly, but these things happen. And in any case, as I’m sure you know, Hacole Havèle is not Paris’s most exclusive purveyor of bespoke linen suits by any stretch. They have even stooped to opening an office in LA, as it happens, so I can simply pop down I-5 to get new measurements taken and have a replacement made without crossing the pond again. Though,” he added, removing the ruined article to inspect the damage, “perhaps the time has come for them to start a line of linen designs inspired by abstract expressionism.”
“With more artistic vision put in, one presumes,” replied Katzbube, finally groping towards the conclusion that he was not about to be pummelled.
“Doubtless. And what is your name?”
“Winthrop Katzbube,” replied Katzbube. “Winty for short.”
“Mehmet von Pfiff,” said the man. “You know, I find it difficult to get angry at the only other man here with good taste in linen. What brings you to World of Vibes? Surely,” he remarked with the most subtle of sneers, “not the food.”
“It’s certainly edible. Everyone’s here for the people.”
“I would at least advise against the grapes. They’re not even ripe yet, I tried them earlier. If you do enjoy the fruit of the vine I am happy to offer you more wine in a more…orderly fashion.”
Von Pfiff opened a leather bag to reveal a bottle of 2018-vintage Château Houellebecq and a stemless wineglass of unusual thickness and sturdiness.
“Travel wineglass?” asked Katzbube.
“Borosilicate,” replied von Pfiff, pouring Katzbube his portion. “Now this is from one of the very few vineyards to escape the nineteenth-century phylloxera epidemic entirely. No Californian rootstock at all.”
Katzbube took a sip. It reminded him agreeably of the house red at The Evicted Hellenist in Cambridge.
“But in any case…” von Pfiff continued as he recorked the bottle.
“Well, my employer just went bust and I decided it was time for a vacation,” said Katzbube. “I worked as a…as a consultant for private schools.”
“Most interesting. I manage my uncle’s chain of car washes in Miami, but, you know, they’re not terribly complicated enterprises and for the most part they take care of themselves. I’m getting into angel investing and am mostly here for the startup pitches on Tuesday.”
Katzbube flipped over the fifty-second card to reveal the seven of diamonds, which he added to his hand. Mostly low cards and only one other trump; not ideal. The man to his right led with the five of hearts.
“Remind me how the scoring works again,” said his partner, following suit with the eight.
“One point for each trick taken in excess of six. Play to ten points.”
“And then?”
“Well, we play another round, or go do something else.”
“Would be more interesting with a prediction market.”
“There’s contract bridge,” said Katzbube, playing the four of hearts and losing the trick to Elmer, a thin, sallow man to Katzbube’s left with a thin mustache and a shoulder-length mullet.
“Do you know how to play that?”
“I’ll learn one of these days,” said Katzbube, responding to Elmer’s king of spades with the four. “It’s somewhat more complicated but does have a betting market of sorts on how many tricks you think you’ll take…”
“I think,” said Elmer, “that we could make all kinds of card games much more exciting by adding a prediction market.”
“That just sounds like more to keep track of.”
“Not really. Say each pair of partners had to put in $50 on YES and $50 on NO at game start. Then you’d just have to move money between the YES and NO piles as the game went on, and at the end the winner gets all the money from the YES pool and the loser gets all the money from the NO pool.”
“But then you’d just try to throw the game.”
“But then your opponents would notice this, and move all their money to YES.”
What was it with these people? Katzbube mused.
He played, at last, the seven of diamonds from the initial deal and took the last trick. Nine to four in Elmer’s favor.
“Let’s do it this way for the next round!” Elmer pulled out a piece of paper and drew four columns for YES and NO for each pair.
Katzbube sighed.
“Feel free to try it out if you want to find someone else. I’m going to…—well, good evening.”
He took his leave and left the card-game hall.
The door to the cuddle puddle room opened, and a man in glasses and a checkered grey vest poked his head through the doorway.
"Is there someone named Winthrop here?”
“That would be me,” Katzbube called out. “Unless you’re somehow looking for another Winthrop.”
“I was told you were playing cards.”
“I was. The conversation was…it could have been better,” he replied, pausing thoughtfully.
“Oh, were you at the whist table? They said the guy organizing it ragequit. They’re busy working out an extension of Black-Scholes for a version of contract bridge with American call options.”
“Oh. Of course they are,” said Katzbube, rolling his eyes at nobody in particular.
“You do know this whole event is sponsored by Ascended Degen?” said a voice two head-on-pelvis linkages away.
“I’m well aware. It’s still sports gambling for people who got a 780 on their math SAT.”
“Anyways,” said the man, checking his watch, “Telemachus Clockjob will be hosting a Diplomacy game this week. We have space for one more player and you’ve been nominated. Fall orders due by 9 AM each morning, new builds by 9:45 AM, spring orders by 7 PM."
"Clockjob is hosting it? That Telemachus Clockjob?"
"I'm unaware of anybody else by that name."
"Well, sure, what the hell. Who else is playing?"
"Interesting people, I'm sure—but that nearly goes without saying here."
"Well," replied Katzbube, "there are a few people who seem to be around mostly to sell AI-powered B2B SaaS."
“Ahem," came a voice from somewhere within the cuddle puddle.
"My company went under; I have no AI-powered B2B SaaS to sell."
"Valid," the voice replied, and returned to an affectionate purr.
“You were nominated by an Austrian fellow who said you ruined his jacket,” said the man.
"Ah! Was I indeed…?" said Katzbube. "Sounds intriguing. When’s it start?"
"We'll draw countries at 6:45 tomorrow evening in the back garden.”
"Is there a prize?"
"I believe Telemachus has mused about equity in an upcoming project of some ilk."
Equity in a Clockjob startup. The mind reeled. Oh, what the hell, he’d never been a terribly skilled player.
“Go ahead and let him know I’m in.”
"Will do. We'll see you tomorrow.”
Continue to Chapter III.