[Moscone Center — January 2014, Morning]
The badge said OBSERVER in block letters, which was accurate in more ways than the organizers intended.
Ethan clipped it to the front pocket of the button-down shirt — the nicer of the two he'd found in the dead man's closet — and stepped through the main entrance of Moscone Center into a wall of noise. Hundreds of people. Maybe a thousand. The main hall was a canyon of exhibition booths and standing desks and oversized banners advertising companies with names like "Synaptiq" and "CloudNova" and "DisruptR." A DJ played electronic music from a booth near the entrance, because apparently nothing said "serious technology conference" like a Skrillex remix at nine in the morning.
Ethan moved through the crowd with his head down. The instinct was strong — stay invisible, gather data, don't interact. He was a ghost at this event. Nobody knew his name, nobody expected his presence, and that was exactly how he wanted it.
The startup pitches were happening on the main stage. A massive screen displayed the TechCrunch Disrupt logo behind a podium that looked too small for the room. Rows of folding chairs faced the stage, already half-full with investors, journalists, and founders who hadn't gotten booth space and were sitting in the audience hoping to network during bathroom breaks.
Ethan found a seat near the back-left. Close enough to see. Far enough to be invisible.
The first three pitches were what he expected. A food delivery app — "Uber for meals." A social fitness tracker — "Fitbit meets Instagram." A B2B SaaS tool for managing employee onboarding. Each team presented with varying degrees of polish. The VCs on the judging panel asked standard questions: total addressable market, customer acquisition cost, monthly burn rate.
His Talent Resonance pinged lightly with each presentation. The food delivery CEO: a four. Charming, good at fundraising, shallow technical understanding. His CTO: a five — competent, not exceptional. The fitness tracker team was similar. Fours and fives. Solid B-players who might build decent businesses that would either get acqui-hired or quietly die in eighteen months.
Then Richard Hendricks took the stage.
The man was smaller than Ethan expected. Thin, hunched, wearing a hoodie that looked slept in. He gripped the podium with both hands and stared at the audience like someone who'd accidentally walked into the wrong room and was too polite to leave.
"Hi. I'm, um, Richard Hendricks. And this is Pied Piper."
The delivery was painful. Richard mumbled through the introduction, lost his place on the teleprompter twice, and at one point started explaining the mathematical foundation of his compression algorithm in a level of detail that made the front row's eyes glaze over. A VC on the panel checked his phone.
But the code behind it — the compression — was real.
Richard ran a live demo. A file. Standard benchmark. The existing industry standard compressed it to a certain ratio. Pied Piper compressed it further. Significantly further. The Weissman Score flashed on the screen: 5.2.
The audience didn't understand the number. Most of them didn't know what a Weissman Score was. But the judges did. One of them leaned forward. Another removed his glasses and cleaned them, which Ethan recognized as the universal academic gesture for "I need a moment to process what I just saw."
And Ethan's Talent Resonance flared.
Not a gentle ping. A full signal, strong and undeniable, like a searchlight cutting through fog. Richard Hendricks: nine. A nine. In a room full of fours and fives, surrounded by Uber-for-laundry founders and social media optimizers, Richard Hendricks was a nine.
The number sat in Ethan's awareness like a bell that had been struck. He'd expected it — the show had made Richard's brilliance central to the plot — but experiencing the confirmation firsthand was different from knowing it intellectually. Richard's nervous presentation, his terrible posture, his tendency to vanish into technical jargon — none of that changed the fundamental signal. The man was extraordinary.
The pitch ended. Scattered applause. Richard practically fled the stage. A large man in a blazer who'd been watching from the wings — Erlich Bachman, unmistakable even from the back of the room, radiating the kind of confidence that occupies three chairs — clapped Richard on the shoulder hard enough to make him stumble.
Ethan's ability read on Erlich: three. Maybe a three and a half, charitably. Technically negligible. But the man had presence. A charisma that the talent number couldn't capture. The ability only measured technical potential; it was blind to the intangible quality that let someone like Erlich command a room, close a deal, or convince people to give him ten percent of their company for providing a couch and a WiFi password.
---
[Moscone Center — Afternoon]
Gavin Belson took the stage for the keynote at two o'clock, and the energy in the room shifted. People who'd been checking their phones straightened up. The press section, half-empty for the startup pitches, was suddenly full.
Gavin wore a fitted gray suit with no tie. His hair was perfect. His smile was the kind that had been workshopped with a media coach until every tooth was calibrated for maximum approachability.
"We are at an inflection point," he began. His voice filled the room without apparent effort. "Hooli isn't just a technology company. Hooli is a platform for human potential. And today, I want to talk about what happens when we stop building tools and start building ecosystems."
The speech lasted twenty minutes. Ethan counted seven uses of "synergy," four of "making the world a better place," three of "paradigm shift," and one deeply confusing metaphor about a river learning to be an ocean. The audience applauded at each pause, trained by years of keynotes to clap when the CEO raised his chin and held the silence.
Ethan tried to read Gavin with Talent Resonance and got static. Not a number — just noise. Gavin wasn't technical. He was a political animal, a corporate creature, and the ability had no framework for measuring what he was good at. Which, judging by the rapt attention of a thousand tech professionals hanging on every meaningless phrase, was quite a lot.
Ethan took notes instead. Not on the speech — the speech was content-free. On the man. How he moved. How he paused. How he used silence as punctuation. Gavin Belson was the antagonist of the show, but from the back of this auditorium, he looked like the most powerful person in the room. Because he was.
The keynote ended. Applause. Gavin shook hands on his way out, each handshake a transaction. Ethan watched him stop near the press section, say something to a journalist that made her laugh, then glide through the exit flanked by two assistants who materialized from nowhere.
That's who I'm building next to, Ethan thought. Not against. Not yet. Just next to. In the same city, breathing the same air, while I try to build something that will make his Hooli look like a typewriter factory.
The afternoon pitches resumed. Ethan shifted in his folding chair — the metal frame was cutting into his back — and scanned the room during the break. People milled around the coffee station. The catering was mediocre: burned drip coffee in paper cups, cookies that tasted like they'd been baked by committee.
He grabbed a cup anyway. The coffee was bitter and barely warm. He drank it standing by a pillar, watching the room.
That's when he noticed her.
Three rows ahead of where he'd been sitting, slightly left of center. A woman in a blazer, late twenties, dark hair pulled back. She was writing in a notebook — not a laptop, an actual notebook — while everyone around her typed on phones or MacBooks. Her badge was turned at an angle, but when she shifted to cross her legs, he caught the text.
Monica Hall. Raviga Capital.
Ethan's breath caught. Monica Hall. Peter Gregory's associate. The one who actually understood the technology, who would eventually champion Pied Piper when nobody else at Raviga wanted to touch it. In the show, she was the bridge between the VC world and the engineers — smart, strategic, genuinely invested in the technology rather than just the returns.
Talent Resonance gave him a reading: seven. High, but not for engineering. The number confused him until he thought about what the ability actually measured — technical potential. Monica wasn't a coder. Her seven wasn't about writing software. It was about understanding technology at a structural level. She could read a pitch deck and see through the buzzwords to the actual product. She could evaluate technical teams without needing to read their code.
A seven in technical comprehension, deployed in a world of VCs who couldn't tell the difference between a neural network and a fishing net.
She was watching the stage with the same quiet focus she'd shown during Richard's demo. No phone-checking. No whispering to a colleague. Just attention, directed and complete.
Ethan looked away before she could catch him staring. He dropped his empty cup in the recycling bin and returned to his seat.
The afternoon passed. More pitches. More fours and fives. One team earned a collective three, delivering a presentation so buzzword-laden that Ethan's Talent Resonance practically flinched. The judges were polite. The audience clapped. The machine ground forward.
And then, in the final round, Pied Piper returned.
Richard was marginally less terrified this time. He ran the demo again. The numbers held. 5.2 on the Weissman Scale. The judges conferred. The audience waited. Richard stood at the podium gripping it like a life raft, his face cycling through expressions that ranged from nausea to controlled panic.
Pied Piper won.
The room erupted — not unanimously, but the applause was real. Richard's face went blank, then confused, then something that almost resembled joy before terror reclaimed it. Erlich Bachman charged the stage from the wings, arms spread wide, accepting the victory as if he'd personally written every line of code. Two other guys — one thin with glasses, one bearded and expressionless — followed at a distance. Dinesh and Gilfoyle. Had to be.
Ethan stayed in his seat. He didn't clap. Didn't stand. Just watched.
Richard Hendricks had just proven, in front of Silicon Valley's most important people, that compression ratios could be shattered. That the accepted limits were wrong. That one awkward genius with the right algorithm could rewrite the rules.
And in that moment, a calculation completed in Ethan's mind. Richard's compression algorithm. Ethan's AI models. Data compressed small enough to move fast, fed into neural networks powerful enough to understand it. Two technologies that, in the original show, existed in parallel but never intersected.
What if they did?
The crowd was dispersing. People shook hands, exchanged cards, clustered in groups. Ethan stood, tucked the notebook under his arm, and walked toward the exit. He didn't approach Richard. Didn't introduce himself to Monica. Didn't network, schmooze, or hand out business cards.
Not yet. He had nothing to show. No product, no demo, no proof. Walking up to Richard Hendricks and saying "your compression is beautiful, want to hear about a neural network architecture from the future?" was a one-way ticket to being dismissed as a crank.
First, build something. Then talk.
The evening air hit him outside Moscone Center. Cold, sharp, carrying the smell of street food from a cart on the corner. His stomach growled. He hadn't eaten since a granola bar at noon.
He bought a burrito from the cart. Ate it leaning against a lamppost, watching tech workers stream out of the conference into waiting Ubers. The tortilla was warm. The salsa had actual heat. In his previous life, he would have eaten this without a second thought. In this one, standing in a body that wasn't originally his, in a decade that wasn't his, in a world that was a TV show, the simple act of hot food on a cold night grounded him to something real.
Richard's compression plus a Transformer. The math worked. He could see it — not with his architectural ability, just with the regular engineering intuition of someone who'd spent a decade in ML. Compression reduces data overhead. Transformers need data. Compressed data pipelines feeding attention mechanisms. Faster training, lower bandwidth, smaller models that punched above their weight.
A future collaboration was possible. Not now. Later. After proof existed.
Ethan finished the burrito, crumpled the foil, and started walking home.
Author's Note / Promotion: Your Reviews and Power Stones are the best way to show support. They help me know what you're enjoying and bring in new readers! You don't have to. Get instant access to more content by supporting me on Patreon. I have three options so you can pick how far ahead you want to be: 🪙 Silver Tier ($6): Read 10 chapters ahead of the public site. 👑 Gold Tier ($9): Get 15-20 chapters ahead of the public site. 💎 Platinum Tier ($15): The ultimate experience. Get new chapters the second I finish them . No waiting for weekly drops, just pure, instant access. Your support helps me write more . 👉 Find it all at patreon.com/fanficwriter1