Morgue Files

It is sometimes said that probabilistic combinatorics uses the fact that whatever happens with probability greater than 0 must happen sometimes (Wikipedia)

The probabilistic method is a nonconstructive method, primarily used in combinatorics and pioneered by Paul Erdős, for proving the existence of a prescribed kind of mathematical object. It works by showing that if one randomly chooses objects from a specified class, the probability that the result is of the prescribed kind is more than zero. Although the proof uses probability, the final conclusion is determined for certain, without any possible error. (Wikipedia)

…right from the beginning, we — unlike other animals — have wanted to make things more complicated than they need to be.
Neil MacGregor, Director of the British Museum, A History of the World in 100 Objects, Episode 2, "OLDUVAI STONE CHOPPING TOOL"

***

Of all the departments at Stark Industries that wanted to murder Tony, probably weapons research and finance would get into a fistfight over which hated him more, and therefore who was more worthy of eating his still-pulsating heart. Tony was solely responsible for more stock volatility and 3 a.m. conference calls with their ratings agencies than U.S. government contracts, the decimation and revival of the commercial paper market, the presidential elections, and the death of his father combined. There was a reason that Stark's CFO and treasurer worked out of New York and Tony generally kept himself safely cloistered in California.

Except when Pepper kidnapped him out of his bed — still hungover — stuffed him pantsless onto his jet, and delivered him directly into a closed-door financing meeting on the 70th floor of the tower while he was still clutching, alternately, his head and the fly of his slacks, which he only barely got on.

"Tony," said Helen, his CFO's executive assistant. She was 46 years-old, had enough Restylane in her face to smooth a gravel driveway, and as far as Tony could tell, she'd never forgiven the karmic injustice of the universe for hiring her to work for Denis, who managed to marry being aggressively Russian with a level of emotional fragility that made Tony look almost stable in comparison.

He struggled with the button on his fly for another few seconds before he said, "Fuck it," zipped his pants shut, and said, "Hi, Helen. Is he waiting for me?"

A tremendous crash came from behind Denis's office door.

"Yes," Helen said.

***

Denis had been one of the raft of new hires Tony had been forced to make immediately after Obadiah's small-aircraft fiasco over the South China Sea. The engineers that had been the worker bees of his betrayal had been — for the most part — alternately too valuable or too benignly harmless to discard, and it was hardly like Obadiah would have been having extensive conversations with the back office, HR, marketing, or communications about his evil plotting and double-dealing or treason. But money trails needed laundering and auditors needed to be misled, and in between announcing he was Iron Man and getting a new asshole ripped into him by his independent directors, Tony spent a lot of time holed up with internal recruitment and external consultants restaffing the entire financing arm of Stark Industries with violent efficiency. Denis had been kidnapped like a gypsy bride from some No. 2 position at some company ("GE Capital, Tony," Pepper liked to remind him. "You stole him from GE Capital.") and installed in Stark Tower, anointed with Helen, and given the shattered FEMA zone that had been Stark's financial future, post weapons manufacturing.

The consultants and HR had winnowed the list down to ten good candidates, most with solid backgrounds in oh-Jesus-Christ-so-fucking-boring-cakes garbage that Stark needed. He and Pepper had ended up play rock-paper-scissors-lizard-Spock over their final choices for hire: Pepper gunning for a bombastic shouter with a devilish gray streak in his otherwise dark hair and a smile that made Tony wish he was a nubile young thing to be exploited, and Denis, who'd openly clutched at his inhaler during the final interviews.

"Potts, I can't believe you'd discriminate against that poor ethnically Russian man for a health reason," Tony had said. "He's like 14 different checkmarks on that bingo square HR gave me."

"Give me one compelling reason to hire that wheezing basketcase over Carlton," Pepper had retorted. "And HR better not have given you an actual bingo square."

"Oh my sweet mother Mary, his name is Carlton," Tony had marveled. "That's two. That's, 'his name is Carlton,' to go with 'you seem sexually interested in him,' as my two compelling reasons."

The argument had actually gone on, through two additional courses of dinner, before Pepper had said, "Jesus, fine, let's do this," and paper had disproved Spock twice in a row, leaving them at a dead tie, before Pepper had greedily played her Roddenberry hand again and allowed him to be poisoned by the lizard, foolish ginger.

"Hi, Denis," Tony said, first conquering the subject of the button fly of his pants and then settling himself into a leather wingback chair. He almost wished he could rescind the sign-off on Denis's corporate decorating expenses, because the seats were a fucking monstrosity, perfectly combining rococo pretension with being exquisitely uncomfortable, and Tony spent most of his time in them keeping his toes anchored to the carpets — imported probably with trafficked children in them or something from Astana, they'd certainly cost enough to include some illegal virgins — to keep from sliding out of them. "How are you today?"

Denis, clutching his head behind the satinwood behemoth of his desk, twitched violently.

"I am bleak, Tony," Denis told him, and slapped at his desk phone. "Helen, where the fuck is everyone else?"

"Being drag-asses, sir," she reported sweetly. "Do you want me to grind another Xanax into your vodka?"

Denis slapped at the phone again, all the lights going off dutifully. Tony can't actually help but be impressed that Cisco made phones that could stand constant abuse of this magnitude; Denis worked out sometimes with that guy who was Vladimir Putin's judo partner. "That woman has a throne in hell just waiting," he snarled.

"In theory, if you actually hated her, you could fire her," Tony suggested. He fired like, 40 people a week.

Denis looked genuinely horrified at the thought, and made some offended Cyrillic noises, which Tony figured translated into, You spineless cretin, Helen, for all of her icy terribleness, is the singular point of joy in my otherwise crushingly unhappy existence.

The desk intercom chimed. "The underwriters and Gareth are here," Helen said.

"Where the fuck were they before?" Denis demanded.

"Down on 60, in a conference room that our internal systems claim that you booked — "

Denis hung up on her. "Crazy woman. Crazy."

This was amazing. Tony had never been more grateful for HR and their literal, actual, printed-out bingo square. He was gearing up to ask, "So, seriously, that level of volatility — there had to be a fluid exchange involved. Did she master you? Whip you as you thanked her for punishing you?" when the door to Denis's office opened and shut without any proclamation, which could only mean that when Tony turned around, he was going to see a skinny white guy with a baby face and smudged glasses, a small mountain of files, and nothing but aggrieved, wet-eyed looks for Tony.

Tony waved at Gareth. "Hi, Gareth."

Gareth just stared back. The last time Tony had seen Gareth it was during an analyst call a fiscal half year after Tony had deep-sixed the weapons manufacturing business, and he'd looked like someone had murdered his children in front of him, shaky, with four emptied bottles of 5 Hour Energy discarded among his wrinkled nest of financial figures. To be completely honest, Tony wasn't actually sure what Gareth did, but it was boring and hard and involved long hours with Denis, so whatever Tony paid the guy, it probably wasn't enough.

"Leave him alone," Denis muttered, rifling around his drawers for something.

"What, come on," Tony protested, flashing Gareth his best smile. "People like me — Gareth likes me, right?"

Gareth clutched a binder against his chest like a shield. "Mr. Stark, in 2008, I had a brief psychotic episode where I drove my wife's Windstar over our son's toy car 46 times," Gareth said. "I only stopped because of a stress-induced pain that incapacitated my left side. I thought I was having a stroke."

Tony said, "Uh."

Denis came up with a pill bottle, orange and half-empty, saying, "See, I told you, leave it alone." Tony wondered what it meant that most of his company's financing personnel were on the verge of committing mass suicide, or pooling their resources to pay off Rhodey and have Tony killed, but then $56,000 of menswear and £80 billion of douche tumbled inside Denis's office.

"Mr. Popov," Helen drawled from the doorway, "the gentlemen from Goldman Sachs are here."

"Denis, fucking jazzed about this, man, really fucking excited," said one of them with brown hair, unsettlingly white teeth, and a Tom Ford tie. He'd traveled directly across the office, seized Denis's hand, and had started wrenching it like there was oil if he just worked it hard enough. Denis endured it mostly by continuing to look miserable, and Tony started getting a sick feeling in his gut.

"Yes," Denis agreed. "Very excited." He looked over Tom Ford Tie's shoulder. "Is this the rest of your team?"

"Best and the brightest," the man agreed. "This is going to be the best fucking bond roadshow in history."

"Oh," Tony said, "fuck no."

***

The combined effects of 58 tornadoes over the American midwest grounded both StarkJet 1, which Pepper had been trying to fly out to LA with, and StarkJet 2, which Tony had been prepared to chase her with, primarily to whine. She gives up hoping against hope after a while, and then Tony sits in the car with her and whines as they wind back through Manhattan toward the gleaming phallus of Stark Tower.