[...] The cerebral drain of running High Temp Products being minimal, Brian spent his executive afternoons noodling around with computer code and Fourier analysis, blasting on his presidential boom box certain cult California bands to which he was partial (Fibulator, Thinking Fellers Union, the Minutemen, the Nomatics), and writing a piece of software that in the fullness of time he quietly patented, quietly found a VC backer for, and one day, on the advice of this backer, quietly sold to the W— Corporation for $19,500,000.

Brian's product, called Eigenmelody, processed any piece of recorded music into an eigenvector that distilled the song's tonal and melodic essence into discrete, manipulable coordinates. An Eigenmelody user could select a favorite Moby song, and Eigenmelody would spectroanalyze her choice, search a recorded-music database for songs with similar eigenvectors, and produce a list of kindred sounds that the user might otherwise have never found: the Au Pairs, Laura Nyro, Thomas Mapfumo, Pokrovskys wailing version of Les Noces. Eigenmelody was parlor game, musicological tool, and record-sales- enhancer rolled into one. Brian had worked enough kinks out of it that the behemoth of W——, belatedly scrambling for a piece of the online music-distribution action, came running to him with a big wad of monopoly money in its outstretched hand.