Sill opened the door. We stepped into a cavernous room, brightly lighted from above. The pings and bells and whirs of machines filled the air. There was an array of ductwork and above that a grid of shining steel catwalks. There were men and women dressed in sky-blue lab coats. It was the smell of seawater that drew my focus to the central feature of the cave. This was a submarine bay and parked in the center of it was in fact a submarine, but not like any picture of a sub I had ever seen. It was sleek, perhaps twenty meters long, with a squat conning tower that did not taper like a normal sail. Instead of sail planes, flat fins encircled the tower and the hull of the boat and so it looked like a kielbasa wearing a flared skirt.

“Nice sub,” I said. “Did you buy or is it a lease?”

“Built it.” He wiggled his fingers in the air. “Isn’t she beautiful? I have no idea why boats are always female, but so be it. Even the USS Abraham Lincoln is a she. I thought of calling this boat the Mary Todd, but she was crazy and tod means dead in German, so you can see that wasn’t going to fly. Or swim.”

“Why do you have a submarine?”

“I’m a supervillain.”

“I forgot.” I looked around. The staff, the crew, the technicians, whatever they were, all young, Black, and beautiful, moved from machine to machine, from terminal to terminal with deliberation and focus. “Where is Eigen?”

“She was tired after her tennis lesson. Tennis is an exhausting pastime. Went right to sleep.”

“Really?”

“No, I drugged her.”

“What?” I asked.

“Well, you know, she kind of follows me around. Piaget and all that. She’s cute and everything, but her non sequiturs are killing me. You’re a little bit tedious on that front as well, I’ll have you know.”

“She’s a genius,” I said. I felt I had to say it.

“Jesus, Wala, I know that. That’s why she’s here. But the non sequiturs.” He blew a breath of frustration through his lips. “We were having sex this morning and do you know what she said?”

“Oh my God?”

“I wish. No, she said, ‘If I were wearing shoes right now, do you think they would match?’ Then she screamed, ‘Assume x is a Kähler manifold.’ That was her orgasm, if you can believe it. Now, don’t get me wrong, that’s pretty hot, but hell, I don’t even know what that means.”

“Hodge conjecture,” I said. “It states that certain de Rham cohomology classes are algebraic.”

“Shut up.” Sill folded a stick of gum into his mouth. “Want one?” I shook my head no. “Come on, nothing man, come see what the latest in superfast submarine technology looks like.”

“I’m not an engineer,” I told him.

“I know that. You’re as bad as Eigen. What do you say when you orgasm?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“That was a rhetorical question, but that was quite an answer. Very telling. A bit disturbing.”