Richard decided not to respond to that one. As much as he liked Corvallis, he dreaded going on tours of high-tech companies. He tapped the words “Pompitus Bombasticus.” The lavish tonalities of a full symphony orchestra, backed up by a choir and fortified by a driving modern percussion section, filled his ears. Pompitus Bombasticus was Richard’s favorite group. Apparently it was just one guy working alone in a studio in Germany; the philharmonic, the choir, and all the rest were faked with synthesizers. This guy had noticed, some years ago, that all inexpensive horror movies used the same piece of music—Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana—in their soundtracks. That opus had become a cliché, more apt to induce groans or laughs than horror. This German, who had been living the starving-artist lifestyle while trying to establish a career as a DJ, had been struck by an insight that had transformed his career: the filmmakers of the world were manifesting an insatiable demand for a type of music of which Carmina Burana was the only existing specimen. The market (if the world of composers and musicians could be thought of as such) was failing to respond to that demand. Why not then begin to make original music that sounded like the soundtrack of the sort of movie scene in which Carmina Burana inevitably played? It didn’t have to sound exactly like Carmina Burana but it needed to evoke the same feelings. The German gave himself a new name, which was Pompitus Bombasticus, and put out a self-titled album that was enthusiastically ripped, torrented, downloaded, and stolen by innumerable aspiring young filmmakers united by a common sentiment that if they heard Carmina Burana one more time they would shove pencils into their ears. Since then, Pompitus Bombasticus had come out with five more albums, all of which Richard had legally downloaded and merged into this one long playlist. The breathtaking sweep and emotional bandwidth of the music made unloading the dishwasher seem as momentous as the final scene of 2001: A Space Odyssey. In this case, it cast a haze of fake poignancy over this text from C-plus (as Dodge called Corvallis). He did not wish to come out and say as much directly, for fear that C-plus would take it the wrong way, but, in the later phases of their professional relationship, C-plus’s role had become less all-around tech expert and more general intellectual sidekick and helpmeet. When it came to all of the stuff that Richard had omitted to learn during his extremely colorful late teens and early twenties, Corvallis Kawasaki was Virgil to his Dante, Mr. Peabody to his Sherman.