That’s why one of my favorite forums was Aworld.

Back in the day, it was quite a Bald Mountain, a bunch of wacky indigos, witches, sorcerers, energy vampires, and mediums of all descriptions (including those dyed sky-blue pink speckled with pretty white dots).

It was there, in the section on Stalking and other Castaneda stuff, that I first learned of the Patience of Medici (PM for short).

That the PM was a way of controlling the future and theoretically could help you do anything escaped my notice entirely.

What first caught my interest was that the PM has a terrifying number of combinations with an enormous number of zeros while it has a very low convergence, making it almost impossible to add it up manually, a feature that appealed to me as a combinatorial mathematical problem — an unsolvable one.

It was a challenge to my intelligence and a way to infuse at least some interest into my boring existence on this God-forsaken planet.

A couple of weeks later, thanks to a few sleepless nights, a box of cigarette packs, and lucid tips from the Guide in my dreams (to spur my mind), I composed a first algorithm for laying out the Patience of Medici.

I couldn’t help writing “a first” for “my first.”

I always say that everything I’ve learned about the PM is something I just happened to see or hear elsewhere or compiled or appropriated from what I’ve read in a variety of sources, ranging from the Murzilka magazine to the Akashic records.

Sources written by people who have chewed it all and spat it out many, many times before and who have attained much more than this sinner. While I researched the PM, I quite often used — as I still do — channeling and conscious dreaming, rereading time and time again over the years what I had written.

So, a working algorithm for PM addition was at my disposal years ago — I figured it out

in just two weeks from the day I first heard of PM.

The algorithm was so primitively simple that I was able to lay out my first patience several times on the floor of my lonesome student apartment, late at night, with everyone else in the building sleeping peacefully (something they rarely did).

Then I tested the PM in my practice, and I made sure it worked. I’ll never forget the feeling it gave me, of being a puppet, of being on a train that had found its way onto the track, of the world around you rolling as scheduled, and yourself rolling along to the destination like a bowling ball.

But the algorithm called for me to be attentive in laying out the cards as rewrites often resulted in errors. Playing the PM in real life, I sometimes was quite frustrated to find rewrite errors after spending a couple of weeks practicing.

After a few months of playing that way, I remembered it was the twentieth century: there was a PC and a printer sitting on my desk at work. That’s how it occurred to me to automate the boring chore by delegating it to the PC.

I harnessed all my laziness (harnessing my willpower was something of a problem), reminded myself what the vulture in Wings, Legs, and Tails said — “Getting there by air in all of five minutes is worth spending a day learning to fly” — and went about writing “my” first PM app.

I wrote it in about two months with Delphi 5 or 6, tapping into my then-rudimentary knowledge of that platform. The app had a terrible interface that looked like a kid’s IT project, and it didn’t even have card images. I called the algorithm Leap Frog (its nuances warranted the name); and the app, Apples and Oranges.

But the app did what I wanted it to do. It guaranteed to lay out an error-free patience with any target cards and neatly stored the layout in a text file easy to print and carry around as a cheat sheet to practice the PM in the physical world.

In fact, it was the first and only app (at least among those officially known on the Runet) that did not verify solutions but laid out a PM guaranteed to converge.

As a friendly creature, I uploaded the app to Aworld for other people to join the fun.

I had expected comments of admiration (as who wouldn’t?) in the spirit of “Here it is at last, brothers — hallelujaaaaaaaah!” I’d thought people would scream with excitement, cry snottily for joy, and pay me in cash and by card, and I pictured myself mobbed by fans (especially female ones with curves pleasing to the eye and hands). And, if truth be told, I’d expected much more serious and mystical consequences. But none of that happened.

The web and Aworld just continued the way they were, and only the occasional comment mentioned in passing “a cool app worth checking out.”

The feedback from those who tried the app in practice — as opposed to the kung fu theory — confirmed that it worked both as an algorithm and as the PM, but that was all I got.

None of the folks who downloaded the app said thanks, even online. That quenched, to put it mildly, my eagerness to throw the open-source algorithm all over the place.

In the meantime, I immersed myself still deeper into the PM — the practice, myths, legends, theory, and history of the game. As I wanted to improve the algorithm and make it more efficient and effective, the very mystery of how the PM worked pulled me further into the intricacies of esotericism.

And the Russian joke “The deeper into the forest, the fatter the partisans” showed itself in increasingly more perspectives as I went.

Year after year, I kept being surprised to find that the PM was much more amazing than the online descriptions let on.

Like a paleontologist who only had a few ancient bone fragments, I amassed knowledge on the PM, conscientiously reconstructing the big picture from what information I was able to find.

And then came the day I felt