PART SIX – World Traveler

Chapter 6: Time Out in New York

“How was your day, J.J.?” Jeff asked. He was escorting me from my interviews at Columbia University back to the hotel, where I’d have a chance to freshen up and rest before dinner. I wasn’t sure where I’d be having dinner other than that it was a high-end restaurant at Hudson Yards, and I’d be having dinner with the key executives who would make the decision on whether or not to hire me. I wasn’t looking forward to dinner at all and frankly would’ve preferred skipping it altogether. I hadn’t been told who would be attending, so I wasn’t able to look them up in advance. High-end restaurants were always problematic as I didn’t want to appear overconfident by ordering the most expensive items from the menu, but I didn’t want to appear to be desperate either by ordering something cheap. Frankly, I’d have rather gone to a diner.

“It was a good afternoon,” I related as we drove down the West Side Highway. “The department chair is a real character. He’s an older guy whose brain seems to be in a thousand places at once. He has a serious case of ADD, but he’s brilliant and one of the true pioneers in the field. He deserves a huge amount of credit for building a department from scratch. He’s put together a top-notch faculty, too. It’s a very young group and a diverse one. I could learn a lot from them.”

“Would you have to take courses up there?” Jeff asked.

“Because I’d be working in Midtown full time,” I answered, “they’d be willing to let me do the coursework online. I’d only need to take a half-dozen courses in any case, and those I could get through in a matter of weeks. I’ve always been able to make quick work of my courses in school. There’s no skipping the weekly departmental seminars, though, so I’ll have to schlep up there at least once or twice a week.”

We’d been making good progress on the West Side Highway until then, but it was rush hour and we seemed to hit a wall of traffic when we reached 55^th Street. Fortunately, it didn’t take long to reach 46^th Street, which moved surprisingly quickly for a crosstown street during rush hour, but there were turning restrictions that limited the backups that often resulted from the competition between turning cars and pedestrians. We soon turned right onto Fifth Avenue, and then right on 37^th Street, where I was dropped in front of the hotel.

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“A lot of the better restaurants in New York didn’t make it during the pandemic,” Dr. Ingram began. “No sooner had Hudson Yards opened than the first cases were reported, so the restaurants and shops didn’t even have a chance to get on a secure footing before they had to close. Allowing outdoor dining didn’t help the restaurants with a view, but it was a godsend for places like this one, particularly with the extensive outdoor dining space that was central to the design of the development. This place thrived as a result. More moderately priced restaurants couldn’t achieve the volumes needed to pay the rent, but the best of the high-end restaurants didn’t need to fill seats to break even.”

We were seated in a very attractive restaurant with elegant furnishings and white tablecloths. Having dinner with me were Grace Ingram, the director of informatics for Applazon’s New York corporate headquarters; Larry Cohen, the deputy chief of artificial intelligence; and Terrance Simon, the director of data management. I would be meeting with all of them and a number of other key players tomorrow during my Thursday interviews, but for now I was ‘enjoying’ a casual dinner with the people who’d likely be my superiors. The one wild card was Dr. Cohen. I was meeting with the deputy director rather than the director because they hadn’t recruited a director yet. Clearly, Dr. Cohen assumed I was being considered for the position, but I wasn’t qualified. My Ph.D. was in general computer science, not A.I. I was going to be working toward my Ph.D. and probably wouldn’t finish for at least three or four years. I had much to learn, and the last thing I wanted was to get bogged down with administrative responsibilities. The fact that I was a good fifteen years younger than Dr. Cohen wasn’t helping the situation, either. I could almost feel the resentment coming off of him in waves.

The menu for Chez Josephine wasn’t extensive, but the single page of a la carte items provided a selection of elegant, French courses. There were no prices on the menu, and if any of the items were more expensive than the others, I couldn’t tell. My guess was that portions were tiny, but incredibly rich, and the expectation was to order an item from each course. That was fortunate as I wouldn’t likely be spending any more than the others.

Dr. Ingram ordered a bottle of red wine for the table. She poured me a glass without hesitation.

The lobster bisque was an easy choice. It was one of my favorite soups. I noticed that the appetizers included something called Escargots à la Bourguignonne. I’d never eaten snails before, but I’d heard that escargots were heavenly, so I decided I’d give them a try. The downside was that if I didn’t like them, I’d still have to eat them. I was always game to try new things, however. The entrées included something called Lobster Cassoulet, which was described as scallops, shrimp, salmon and black beans in a light shellfish bouillon. God, that sounded incredible, but it was probably one of the most expensive items on the menu. However, if I was going to have a seafood stew, did I need lobster bisque, too? The soup du jour was a puréed potato leek soup, so I ordered that instead. Finally, the sides were a la carte, and I figured a veggie and a starch would be usual. I chose the garlic-chili spinach and the truffled mashed potatoes.

It turned out that Dr. Ingram and Dr. Simon both chose the Lobster Cassoulet, too, so I didn’t feel guilty in ordering it. Dr. Cohen was the outlier, ordering the Filet Mignon au Poivre with Pommes Frites. I wondered if he knew that pommes frites was French fries. We all ordered the soup du jour, but I was the only one that ordered escargots as my appetizer.

Once we’d placed our orders, Dr. Ingram asked, “I understand you were responsible for the design of the new data mini-centers we’re using for our work.”

“If it’s a round cylinder with what looks like a refrigerator on top, I designed the basic structure in an evening.”

The server brought our soups, and we began the meal.

“I heard there was an explosion,” Dr. Cohen interjected.

Taking a deep breath, I responded, “You can’t imagine how many times I’ve questioned if there was something I could’ve done to have prevented it. I could have easily been there when it happened. Some of my friends and colleagues were incinerated in the resulting fire, including my boyfriend’s father, who was the chief project engineer. Applazon has largely blamed him for the explosion, but it was truly an accident. I’d warned about the risks of storing the oxygen byproduct of liquid-nitrogen generation, but the risk of something like that happening was so small. I often wonder if I might have been more insistent. Regardless, I lost my boyfriend over it. He blamed me for losing his father, and I felt guilty, too.”

“Is there still a risk of something like that happening again?” Dr. Ingram asked.

“Not at all,” I replied. “The cooling system is now inside the Dewar vessel that houses the servers, and any explosion would be contained by the vessel. And now we vent the oxygen so it can’t accumulate.”

A busboy removed our empty soup bowls and our server brought us our appetizers. The origin of the escargots was obvious, with snail shells arrayed around a dish designed to hold them in place. There was a miniature two-pronged fork that I assumed was to be used to extract the snail meat from the shell.

“You’re a fan of escargots?” Dr. Cohen asked.

“Actually, I’ve never had them before,” I said, “but I’ve heard they’re heavenly, so I thought I’d try them. I traveled all over the world and never hesitated to try anything – with one exception.”

“What was that?” Dr. Simon asked.

“Something called Zuì Xiā, which translates as, Drunken Shrimp. It’s a delicacy in China. They serve live shrimp in wine and let the alcohol in the wine slowly poison the shrimp until they stop moving, so that they can be eaten live. Perhaps if it was brought to the table after the shrimp stopped moving, but seeing the shrimp jumping around was a major turnoff.”

“People eat oysters live,” Dr. Ingram pointed out.

“I’ve never tried oysters, but then the risk of parasites is to me an unacceptable risk,” I explained. “Oysters are much more of a risk than sushi, which I love. There’s a Japanese delicacy made from a kind of slime mold and another made from jellyfish. They’re both vile, but I did try them.”

Sticking the little fork into the opening in one of the snail shells, I extracted the contents, which didn’t look like much of anything in particular, but it smelled incredible. Everyone was watching me as I popped it into my mouth and must have experienced six orgasms as I savored it in my mouth and then swallowed. When I opened my eyes again, everyone was still staring at me in anticipation.

Rather than tell everyone how good it was, I said, “You’ve got to try these.” There were only six of them on my plate, which meant that I’d be giving half of them away, but it was the right thing to do. I flagged down our server and requested forks for the others, and then used a spoon to place a shell on each person’s plate.

“You’re right, this is incredible,” Dr. Cohen agreed. Giving away half my appetizer had apparently earned me some brownie points. “It’s not often we’re sent a candidate from corporate in Seattle,” Dr. Cohen continued. “When I was hired, I was told I’d have complete autonomy to form my own team, completely independent of the one in Seattle —”

“You were also told you might receive resumés from qualified candidates from inside Applazon,” Dr. Ingram reminded Dr. Cohen, “and Dr. Jeffries certainly is qualified. Besides which, he has nothing to do with the idiots who fancy themselves experts in A.I. that run the show in Seattle.”

“But that’s just it; he doesn’t have any credentials in artificial intelligence or machine learning,” Dr. Cohen countered. “I should’ve been consulted before he was granted an interview.”

“You also declined the directorship position,” Dr. Ingram pointed out. “You didn’t want to be burdened by the administrative headaches that came with the position —”

“But I expected to be consulted in the decision-making process for filling the directorship,” he countered.

“And you will be,” Dr. Ingram explained, “which is why you’re here tonight and why you’ll be interviewing Dr. Jeffries tomorrow. The decision on the directorship is mine, and the decision to invite him to interview was mine. Tell me you wouldn’t have invited him yourself if he’d applied from outside of Applazon?”

“He still lacks any credentials in A.I.,” Dr. Cohen replied, “but given his credentials, of course I’d have invited him but not for the directorship. I don’t want to be forced to hire someone because he’s Mr. Barlow’s candidate.”

“Mr. Barlow is giving us a quarter-billion-dollar super­conducting supercomputer,” Dr. Ingram responded. That was news to me. “You would’ve hired Dr. Jeffries anyway, simply because he designed the thing.” The busboy returned and took away our appetizer dishes, leaving us to continue sipping our wine.

“Just a quick reminder that I’m right here,” I interjected with a smile. “I didn’t ask to crash your party. It was Jitendra Moorthy who suggested I pursue research in A.I., that it would be through A.I. that I’d be able to manage the supercomputers I had designed. I’d built self-contained data mini-centers, but the software that ran on them was conventional and algorithmic and treated the individual servers as independent, networked computers. However, now I have the makings of thousand-node supercomputers that are ideally suited to A.I. I started out in web design and software development and got into server design because I saw a better way to design a data center, and now I’ve come full circle, and I need to use A.I. to get the most out of the hardware I designed. By the way, I noticed you didn’t seem to think too highly of the A.I. division in Seattle,” I added in curiosity.

Laughing, Dr. Ingram responded, “You picked up on that. Let’s just keep this among us, but we don’t think too highly of what Applazon has done in A.I. so far, and we think it deplorable that they actually marketed software used to identify crooks and to make decisions on job promotion, hiring and firing based on unproved concepts. People’s lives were ruined as a result.”

“I didn’t know about that,” I replied. “I thought it was just about selling inferior merchandise.”

“There’s an excellent documentary that you should watch when you have a chance,” Dr. Ingram continued. “It’s called Coded Bias and it outlines the faults of everything from facial recognition, which works very poorly for African Americans, to teachers being denied tenure because of algorithms that no one truly understands. People are capable of interpreting what they learn and applying knowledge from ‘outside the data set.’ Machines only respond to the data they’ve been fed. Using decision-making algorithms that have never been tested against the actual cases they’re used to interpret is inherently problematic. For example, there was a middle school teacher in Texas, as I recall, who sued and won because he’d received dozens of teaching awards and yet been labeled as an inferior teacher and denied tenure. People have been jailed because of false positives from facial recognition, and Applazon has been a significant part of that.”

“I didn’t realize it was that egregious,” I responded.

“One of the reasons we’re forming a division of A.I. here in New York, about as far from Seattle as you could make it, is that Corporate is beginning to recognize the role that traditional machine learning and A.I. have played in causing significant harm, posing an unacceptable risk to the organization as a whole. We’re charged with taking A.I. in a different direction, focused more on the science than on producing marketable products. The idea is that if we develop the science first and perfect the technology based on the science, marketable products will follow – and even then only after the tech is mature enough to be reliable.”

“I agree with that approach wholeheartedly and would love to be a part of making it happen,” I responded earnestly.

“I’m just worried that with you coming from Seattle, you’re already contaminated by the horrid mentality that pervades the work done there,” Dr Cohen said.

“Actually, I’m not, coming from Seattle,” I replied. “Other than for an occasional meeting, I’m based in Omaha, and it was there that I developed the first liquid-nitrogen-cooled server technology. When the pandemic hit, I ended up spending my time upgrading servers all over the world and yet managed to develop the next generation server. I’m sure that all of you have probably spent more time in Seattle than I have.”

“Your ability to diversify so easily is admirable,” Dr. Simon interjected. “Don’t pay any attention to Larry, J.J. May I call you J.J.?” I appreciated being asked and nodded my head. “You can call me Terri, by the way. Anyway, don’t listen to Larry. He’s just jealous of your abilities, and he doesn’t want a young kid to be his boss.”

“I don’t particularly want to be anyone’s boss,” I countered. “When I was in charge of concept design for the data mini-centers, I oversaw the project by letting the project manager do his job while I worked with all of the groups to ensure everyone was on the same page. That’s why I feel so guilty about the explosion, because I didn’t intervene when the project manager failed to take the risk of oxygen storage seriously. It was my one true mistake. I wasn’t directly his boss, but as Dr. Moorthy put it, I lacked the experience to know that I should have bypassed the project chief and brought the issue directly to him.” Then turning to Dr. Cohen, I asked, “May I call you Larry?” He nodded his head.

“Larry, I asked to come here. I don’t want the headaches of being the boss, either, but I’ve done it before, and I know I can. I already have an excellent working relationship with Jitendra Moorthy and Andy Jenkins and a good if not somewhat contentious relationship with Jeff Barlow. As he’ll tell you, I’m not afraid to speak my mind, even when I know it’s something you don’t want to hear. I also have met a majority of the directors of data management in Applazon around the world, and I speak most of their native languages. You won’t find anyone better qualified for the position than I. That said, I’ve never been on a power trip. I’m the kind of person who, when given a leadership position, leads by deferring to the expertise of those who work under me. That’s what I did when I was in charge of concept design for the data mini-center, and that’s what I’d do if hired for the directorship here.

“I don’t need to take a position here, but I want to. The University of Washington in Seattle is ranked in the top five departments for A.I. in the U.S., along with Stanford and M.I.T. Given my druthers, I’d choose to locate in Pittsburgh and affiliate with Carnegie-Mellon, but I hear the chairman’s a real asshole —”

“He is,” Larry agreed. “I’ve never met anyone so self-centered in my life.”

“So yeah, I could start from scratch and set up my own A.I. division at corporate in Seattle, but the head of the current division would always be looking over my shoulder. It would be a poisonous relationship. It would be counterproductive. New York is supplanting the Bay Area as the quintessential brain trust for the tech industry. Barlow has recognized that and invested billions and is willing to invest billions more to develop A.I. and machine learning the right way. This is the best place for me to be, and I believe I can add a lot to the team. I know the hardware better than anyone else in the world, particularly with regard to quantum computing using room-temperature super­conducting ceramics. That’s entirely my design, down to the channel widths of the components.”

After a lengthy pause, Larry responded, “You’re not at all what I was expecting, J.J. Given your age, your credentials and your relationship with corporate, I expected you to be full of yourself. The last thing I expected was someone who’s actually personable, self-deprecating and deferential. I think we’ll have a lot to talk about at your interview tomorrow.”

Our server arrived then, bearing the main course, and so our conversation was interrupted as she placed the plates in front of us. Grace ordered another bottle of wine. When did I finish my glass?

Three of us had ordered the lobster cassoulet, and I’d also ordered the truffled mashed potatoes and the garlic-chili spinach. We all agreed that the cassoulet was outstanding. Larry was the one outlier who’d ordered the filet mignon with pommes frites. Actually, the restaurant’s version of French fries is more like what Americans call American fries, which are round and flat and fried in a skillet. Larry had ordered his steak rare, which was just the way I liked it, and I had to admit that it looked good. “How’s your filet, Larry?” I asked.

“It’s outstanding, J.J. I wasn’t sure how well it would be with the pepper on it, but the flavoring is much more subtle than you might think. How’s the cassoulet?”

“Incredible,” I responded, and everyone nodded their heads.

“To beginnings?” Larry offered as he raised his wine glass. We all echoed his toast and sipped the wine. I’d not had much opportunity to drink wine before, and although it was a lot stronger than beer, the aroma and taste were smooth as silk. It wasn’t at all sweet the way I’d been expecting. I realized this must be what was called a dry red wine.

“Where do you all live?” I asked to make for polite conversation. I was not only curious about where they lived but was looking for ideas where I might live if I moved to New York.

“I think I’m the only one who lives in Manhattan,” Larry replied. “I actually grew up here, on the Lower East Side, in Co-op Village, and I still live there with my wife and son.”

“Co-op Village?” I asked, “Where’s that?”

“The Lower East Side is the eastern-most portion of Manhattan,” he explained.

“I brought my boyfriend here for his sixteenth birthday,” I interjected, “back before his dad was killed in the explosion – back when we were still together. I’m familiar with the Lower East Side, and I took him to breakfast at Russ and Daughter’s Café. I’m familiar with Katz’s Deli, too, but there wasn’t time. We did have dim sum at Jung Fong in Chinatown, too, which is right by the Lower East Side —”

“It’s such a shame that Jung Fong closed,” Larry interrupted.

“It did?” I asked. I was incredulous. “They did such an outlandish business for dim sum, it’s hard to believe they couldn’t make a go of it.”

“They still do takeout, but they couldn’t justify such a huge dining room that was always empty,” Larry explained. “There wasn’t room for outdoor dining, and even with limited indoor dining, the model of dim-sum carts wheeled around the dining room on Sundays and communal dinners with food served on lazy Susans in the center of the table just didn’t work during the pandemic. Chinatown used to be a destination for New Yorkers to eat Chinese. Now there’s outstanding Asian food just about everywhere in America. Chinatown’s become an insular community and an anachronism that attracts only tourists. A palace-style restaurant wasn’t viable anymore, and Sunday dim sum was the only thing keeping Jung Fong going. The pandemic finished it off.”

“That’s a real shame,” I replied. “We really enjoyed eating dim sum there, but it wasn’t cheap. It wasn’t the kind of thing to do on a regular basis.”

“That was an old-style dim-sum restaurant,” Grace threw in. “Most modern dim sum is served in restaurants that only serve dim sum, and it’s served on conveyer belts that move past all the tables, so patrons can take whatever they want. With much lower labor costs, they can afford to charge a more reasonable, fixed price.”

“You were talking about Co-op Village, Larry?” I asked.

Laughing, Larry answered, “Co-op village is a series of high-rise apartment buildings at the east end of Grand Street, right by the East River. It was built by the garment workers’ unions after the war to replace dilapidated tenements that were considered a blight on the neighborhood. The irony is that the tenements that weren’t torn down are now worth a small fortune. However, the garment workers built a series of four complexes of twenty-story apartment buildings with affordable apartments. They’re co-ops, which differ from condos in that they’re tenant-owned corporations, and when you buy an apartment, you buy a share of stock, and instead of paying a monthly maintenance, you pay a rent to the corporation. The effect is much the same, but it’s the tenants and not investors that own the building. It’s not the glitziest housing, but it’s relatively affordable, and the views are among the best in Manhattan. I can take the F train, pretty much door-to-door.”

“How about you, Terry?” I asked.

“Well, I’m single and can’t afford anything decent in Manhattan,” he replied. “I rent a two-bedroom in a modern high-rise apartment in Hoboken, across the Hudson from here. I can take a PATH train almost the whole way. It’s not quite door to door, but close. I take a shuttle bus to the PATH station, and if it’s raining, I’ll take the F train within New York; otherwise, I walk.”

“What about you, Grace?” I asked.

“I’m the only real commuter here,” she replied. “I live with my husband and three kids in New Rochelle, and I drive in every day. Without traffic, it only takes a half hour but during rush hour, it can be double that. If I took Metro North, however, it’d take an hour on the train, most of it standing, plus I’d have a mile-and-a-quarter walk to the station.”

“What kind of car do you have?” I asked out of curiosity.

“A Lexus NX,” she replied. “It’s a small SUV that’s good for transporting the kids and comfortable for my long commute.”

“That’s supposed to be a nice car,” I commented. “It got high marks from Consumer Reports. I get much better mileage, though,” I added.

“What do you drive?” she asked.

“A Tesla Model 3,” I answered.

“Depending on where you live, charging could be an issue here,” she responded. “You’re young, gay and single, and I’d be willing to bet you want to live in Manhattan, but only a tiny handful of parking garages have EV chargers, and most of them aren’t fast chargers. You might have to consider Jersey City, where there are fast chargers, or live in a house with off-street parking, where you can install your own charger.”

“I’ll have to consider my options, then,” I replied. “The way people drive, I might take public transit anyway. It’s just that a car would sure be convenient for getting to Columbia.”

Laughing, Grace responded, “Driving in Manhattan is a skill, but at least it’s nothing like driving in Boston. People are civil here. You just have to be tolerant of people who cut you off, because you may have to cut someone off sometimes if you want to get anywhere. Plus, you have to be tolerant of dings and dents.”

I pulled out my phone and pulled up my Tesla app, which showed me all the chargers in the area. “Hmm, there are plenty of chargers, but they’re all level 2, which means charging overnight. But it looks like I can find one near any place I’d like to live, be it The Village, Chelsea or the Upper West Side. Oh, there’s a Tesla Supercharger in Brookfield Place, in Battery Park City. Hmm.”

“Battery Park City isn’t exactly the place for singles,” Terry interjected. “Not unless you like babies. The place is overrun with young families and baby strollers.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” I replied with a smile.

The server returned and asked, “Could I get you some dessert? We do a wonderful crème brulée.”

“That sounds good,” I replied. “It’s been a long time since I’ve had it.” We all ended up ordering the crème brulée, which was flamed at the table. It was excellent.

I was supposed to call Jeff to escort me back to the hotel when I was done, but I wanted to try taking the subway. The 7 train ended right at Hudson Yards, and it went right by Bryant Park and the Public Library, near where I was staying. I still had a Metro farecard in my wallet from the last time I was in New York, but it was obsolete; I was able to use my phone with tap-to-pay. I called Jeff when I got back to the hotel and told him I’d walked back. He sounded shocked, so I told him that actually I took a 7 train. I think he had a heart attack when he heard that.

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“Oh, that smells incredible,” I exclaimed as Lyle walked into the hotel room, carrying three pizza boxes with him. “Three pizzas?” I asked.

“They all looked so good I couldn’t resist. Whatever we have left, we can eat for breakfast. They’re all vegetarian, so they’ll keep overnight without refrigeration. I picked up a Montanara Truffle pizza, which is fried dough with mozzarella and truffle cream, Pizza Pianeta, which is a fried pizza filled with broccoli rabe and topped with ricotta, grape tomatoes and basil, and Quattro Fromaggi, which is —”

“Four cheeses,” I completed, “and we do have a refrigerator in here.”

“Yeah, but it’s filled with drinks and snacks, and, thanks, I wasn’t able to memorize the names of all four cheeses. They’re imported and I never heard of them before, except for the buffalo mozzarella, that is.”

I had him set the boxes down on the table, and when he sheepishly told me he forgot to bring plates, napkins or silverware, I called down to room service and asked if they could bring up some stuff for us to use. I gave the kid who brought them up a generous tip.

“Shall I grab a couple of cans of pop?” I asked.

“Pop?” Lyle asked, amused.

Laughing, I replied, “You know exactly what I mean. In the Midwest, what you call soda we call pop. It’s hard to change old habits. I grew up calling what you call dinner, supper, but that’s more a rural versus urban thing. It took me forever to stop calling it supper.” Then, opening the fridge, I said, “We have a large variety of Snapple products, including apple, orange, lemonade, diet lemonade, iced tea, diet iced tea, lemon tea, diet lemon iced tea, peach iced tea and diet peach iced tea. Oh, and bottled water.”

“You do realize they charge for those,” Lyle asked.

“Yeah, and the price list’s in the binder on the desk. It’s ten bucks a bottle, which is outrageous, but Applazon’s paying for it, so what’ll you have?”

“Peach iced tea,” Lyle responded.

“That’s my favorite, too,” I added as I got out a couple of bottles from the fridge.

“Why don’t you get comfortable while I set the table and get comfortable myself?” I suggested.

“But I am comfortable,” Lyle replied. “I’m wearing a polo and khakis. You’re the one wearing a dress shirt and slacks.”

“That’s a couple of items of clothing too many,” I countered. “I also see shoes and socks, and I’m betting you’re wearing boxers too. That’s all too much for casual dining.”

“Nude dining?” Lyle asked.

“When else do you get a chance to dine in the nude with someone you like?” I asked.

“Point well taken,” Lyle agreed as he toed off his sneakers, pulled off his khakis, shirt and socks and dropped his boxers. In the meantime, I removed and hung up my shirt and slacks, then pulled off my socks and briefs. I set the table and set out the pizza boxes on the table. We sat down next to each other, opened our bottles of iced tea, and then I opened the boxes of pizza and we both dug in. I took a slice of each pizza onto my plate and, oh-my-god, they were all heavenly. Of course, we got a bit silly, feeding each other slices of pizza, which only got pizza sauce all over our faces, with some falling onto our chests and other body parts. In any case, we had fun getting each other clean afterwards. We had a wonderful evening together, and a wonderful night, but it still was nothing more than a hookup. How I still longed for a real boyfriend.

Before going to bed, I confirmed my return trip to Omaha. I’d checked in and downloaded the boarding pass before even leaving Omaha, but then I had a thought. Logging into the airline website, I noted that I had several times the frequent-flyer miles needed to upgrade to first class, and so I did. Technically, those miles belonged to Applazon and not to me, so I sent off a quick email to Jitendra to explain what I was doing and that my legs didn’t fit into a conventional economy seat. I got a reply back right away, thanking me for acknowledging that my ‘miles’ belonged to Applazon. Apparently, most employees did not and when caught were sometimes fired for theft of property. Yikes! He noted that for future reference, I should clear it with HR first and should try for an economy-plus seat before booking first class. Apparently, business class was allowable, but if a flight didn’t have business class, as was the case for most domestic flights, first class was permitted only if economy plus was full. I responded that the policy seemed fair and I would abide by it with all future flights. In return, he told me how to enter into the HR database and explain that I was unable to sit in standard economy. That way my tickets would always default to business class or economy plus.

My time in New York once again was way too short, but at least this time there was a very real prospect of moving to the city permanently. What a strange thought for a boy who grew up in Southern Indiana in a dilapidated shack in the middle of nowhere as the kidnapped victim of a pedophile. Thanks to the largesse of others, I’d thrived and gone on to achieve great things, with my efforts being recognized by the richest man in the world. When I’d met with him, he was all in when it came to space exploration, and it was increasingly obvious to me that he saw my efforts in computer design and artificial intelligence as a critical component of our future in space. I just wanted to be able to build something great without blowing anyone up again. And I wanted to dream without having nightmares.

The people I met at Applazon’s New York headquarters were in many ways kindred spirits. We had a drive to make something great, and Applazon’s founder supported that drive and was funding our fundamental advancement of technology. Much as Wall Street had become the hub for the manipulation of wealth for wealth’s sake without regard for the actual generation of that wealth in the first place, New York’s new place as a center of technology was coming to represent the development of technology for technology’s sake without regard to where that technology would take us. I was in the middle of that. I hadn’t been offered a job, but I felt confident that one would be offered, and I would accept it. I was a good fit for what Applazon was hoping to accomplish with its expansion plans in New York. Once again, I was in the right place at the right time. And, who knew, as one of the major centers of gay culture, perhaps I would find a boyfriend there?

Even so, I couldn’t help but think there was something I was missing that was right in front of my eyes.