Gilda and I are sitting in a bar in San Francisco. It's 2 am, two hackers are intermittently coding, talking, dozing on the couch in facebook t-shirts, laptops on their stomachs. Another guy is at the table across from us, working on his personal sound system that takes ambient noise as input to create distortions in live video feeds. Downstairs a couple people are sitting at a large table in the kitchen working & chatting. Also downstairs another couple, the owners, are discussing finances, housekeeping chores, and what's in the attic that they should clean out. The desk where we're sitting is scattered with failed IDE connectors, a couple tiny CPUs, resistors of various sizes, voltage regulators, wire scraps. Someone is building what looks like some kind of robot. I don't actually see the robot itself, but I see evidence that a robot is being built.
Somehow the word "asymptote" comes up in conversation. One guy admits he doesn't really know what an asymptote is. Gilda bounces up and down. What? You don't know? It's when something converges but doesn't quite get there. It's when you have a theoretical limit, that's never attained except at infinity, the limit itself is the asymptote.
"So", one guy from the couch pipes in, "an asymptote is like my sex life?"
"I wouldn't call sex an asymptote", says Gilda.
I roll my eyes, such infantile conversation. I see what they're trying to do, fish for goods on each other's sex lives. Maybe get to hear a juicy story. If one's lucky, find out that so-and-so has a crush on you. And if it's really one's day, that so-and-so will happen to be there in the room, and one thing will lead to another.
"Don't tell me, your sex life isn't like an asymptote?", taunts one guy to Gilda.
"My sex life is not", says Gilda taking the bait. "I have sex all the time. There are plenty of guys who find me attractive. I had sex just the other night with my roommate, and we were watching BG together".
"What's BG?" asks some other person in the room.
"You don't know BG?", Gilda is bouncing up and down again. "Battlestar Gallactica. We had sex watching TV. Battlestar Gallactica is the only show you can watch with the possibility of sex afterward."
"How come the more I watch TV, the less sex I have?", says the same person. I think TV is another asymptote, away from sex. The more TV I watch, the less chance I have of getting any."
"Then TV isn't an asymptote", I say, "because TV you attain. Sounds like TV is a stopping function. When you flip the TV switch on, your sex life switches to off." I've joined their conversation. It's mind-numbing in a peaceful sort of way, keeps me awake enough in the early morning. The more I tell myself I'm above their conversation, the more I can focus on my writing. This is good for me, otherwise I'd have a hard time finding the will-power to focus.
"Not for me," insists Gilda.
I heave a big sigh, "I have a huge stopping function".
"What are you talking about?", says Gilda coming into the next door cubicle room where I'm sitting.
"I love that we're friends, and I love talking to you, but I'm a writer. I need some conflict, climax, a resolution. I can't just hang out and talk with an alien from another planet, well planetary satellite, all the time. Readers won't go for that. They need tension. Here's a question for you. 'With all your travels, what makes you stay here in San Francisco? What are you hoping to find?'"
"First of all, I have no intention of staying here with you", Gilda said. "I haven't decided if I want to stay. If I find a place agreeable, I'll stay. But if I find a place agreeable, I might leave because I'm tired of it being so agreeable."
"What would you like to find here?", I persisted.
"Ideally, I'd like to find a solution to the blighted eyes problem back home, that makes us virgins have to wear these earrings all the time, that keeps us from getting a good night's sleep because they're too bumpy. If I found that, I could take it back home, and our teams of interplanetary agricultural researchers could stop their never ending travels.", Gilda said.
"What's the blighted eyes problem?", I asked.
"Since we are all made of materials close to potatoes, we had a problem of black spots. These black spots could eat up our bodies, killing us. It turned out it was caused by spots on potatoes that grew underground, transmitting messages to each other, and in so doing caused blights on our bodies. The only solution was to destroy all the tubers, but we needed them for food, so we couldn't do that. Finally we discovered a ritual involving 2 virgins. The ritual interfered with tuber eye signals, and allowed us to get rid of our spots. After that, virgins had to wear tracking earrings, so one could be found at a moment's notice to perform the ritual wherever & whenever it was needed. We're also branded with identifying tattoos, part of the retrieval/identification method." Gilda looked meaningfully at my tattoos.
The guy from the couch was peeking through a crack in the wall where Gilda and I were talking. We'd forgotten other people could hear us. "So you're an alien?" he asked. "I knew it! I want to have sex with an alien!" he said jumping up from the couch where he was laying on his back. Simultaneously there was a general rustle, everyone was hurrying forward for a look. As the couch guy passed through the doorway slamming it shut behind him, faces pressed chins and noses against the door's glass.
It was a small room, all white surfaces, no windows except the tiny one in the door filled with faces. Gentle reader, I should not now describe a sordid scene; better, with my writing skills, I can provide a quick exit from the situation. Gilda took one of her earrings out of her ear, and between a pixel orbiter switch on a plasma display, or as we earthlings call it 'a blink of an eye', the intergalactic wardens from Gilda's planet came and fetched her, because to her home planet she was still viewed as property. During the hubbub that followed, I quickly escaped through the crowd and out onto the street.