Pentober 2026 - Day 2: Handshake

Ok so, what is Pentober? Promptober? It's a writing tradition that's been around the web for a while where you write up a short story every day in October based on prompts. Some go for pen and paper, some digital; everyone has their own style. I'll be posting here, and I'll be using the prompts from https://www.topinfiction.com/p/pentober-2026 

House rules are that I vomit-write the story; no planning, just taka taka taka on the keys. I get ONE edit at the end of the draft, then we post it. House rules also say that I get to play catch up and do multiple days separately on one day or combined if work gets wild and I can't write. Get it? Got it? Good! Here we go. This is another quick one, before I have to catch a flight.

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"So we have a deal, then?"

"Yes, I think so."

"Shake on it?" Louis Bohtling stuck out his hand and waited for mine.

"Shake on it," I grasped his and gave a firm shake; his hands were paper dry and slightly rough to the touch. It was an unpleasant sensation. That was new. Last we had shook hands, he had been warm and smooth to the touch.

"We'll be seeing you, then. Good to catch up in person, Derrick." Louis and his team, a gaggle of number-crunchers, paper-pushers, and devils-advocates from Bohtling, Greef, Oppen, and Zelingit LLP, one of the world's largest investing services firms, left my humble little office outside Denver. They had come to see me.

I knew Louis from undergraduate at Columbia. We were roommates that first semester and had stayed acquainted ever since. He was the son of Bohtling's founder, but had earned his position. He ranthe startup investment arm; under his tenure BGOZ LLP invested in nine of the last ten hyperscaled startups, netting them over a trillion dollars in balance sheet revenue.

I was surprised when Louis came knocking. It started out with a text; he was curious what I was working on and had seen some news on LinkedIn about it. I had studied biology at Columbia before going onto complete a PhD in neuroscience at MIT while getting an M.Div at Harvard. That led me to complete my PhD by researching entheogenic, god-creating, neural pathways in the human brain and how they relate to real-world experiences: drugs, sudden sensory overexposure, brain trauma, and the like.

All this research culminated in a few papers and an app. The app was called Taurest. It leveraged my research on optical overstimulation to create sensations of the devilish and divine for app users. It had a learning algorithm that the user fed data, so that the output got better. Effects for a 'generic' overstimulation were nil to mild, but as you tested more specific combinations, you began to build a specific profile on the user's optical-neural-spiritual pathway. The app had some success with casual users looking for a niche, non-drug pathway to feel something akin to many party drugs, and also had success in psychotherapy spaces. It earned enough in monthly fees to pay for my humble lifestyle and my research.

Louis' initial investment in Taurest 10x'd that sum. It wasn't even an investment, in truth. They just wanted to pay for exclusive API access to our data lake. I was happy to give them that for more than half what their initial offer was.

Later that year is when things started getting interesting. Louis flew me into his office outside of Boston for a private meeting with him and one of BGOZ LLPs contract researchers. The research was one Marie Heyfield, a PhD out of Misquimac University. They had done their bachelor's at Styx in phenomenology, a Masters at Chattaqua in geoinformatic statistics, and their PhD was in a branch of physics I couldn't pronounce. It was a seriously weird, seriously impressive academic history. I was able to understand some of the papers they had written, mainly the ones from their time at Styx, but quickly got lost past some of the practical parts in geoinformatics.

"Derrick, this is Marie. You know her resume. One item that isn't on it is that she's also an adjunct researcher for Miskatonic University, not too far from here. We bough a wing in an new building there, recently." Louis looked even more tired and dry than last time. Regardless, his hair was still in a perfect slick-back, and the gold watch on his wrist caught the light in a way that made his blue and white chalk stripe suit seem to glimmer.

"Marie, very impressive! Nice to meet you." I stuck out my hand to shake, she did. She was a tall woman, olive-skinned with dark hair and square features. She had a quarter-zip on with the Miskatonic logo on it; her nails were beat up and chipped in a way that betrayed long nights and days furtively banging on a keyboard and nail-biting. She seemed energetic and excited.

"You too. Did you know your data is mapping the shifting presence and nature of god as it passed through our 3d space?"

"I...what?" I didn't sit down. I took off the brown herringbone sport coat I was wearing and hung it on the coat rack. I could tell I was going to have to button up my sleeves for this one, so I did.

"I can show you. Hold on." She began pulling out a laptop and plugging in cables. I looked over a Louis, visibly confused, intrigued, and incredulous.

"Derrick, imagine how much money we could make if we can predict god. Welcome to hyperscaling. We're going to need a new term for it with this one."