Once upon a time – a Friday afternoon in late spring of 1999, actually – there was a young lady named Pollyanna Vermeilens. This miss was a corn-fed and resplendently healthy teenaged specimen from the gods-fearing, upstanding heartland of a mighty nation. Her treasures were those with which nature had endowed her: ruby lips, pearly teeth, sapphire-blue eyes, and burnished gold tresses, all displayed to advantage in a cheerful, beaming countenance.

However, despite these many precious stones of the metaphorical variety, Pollyanna’s circumstances were somewhat less rarefied. She was, in point of fact, a milkmaid. Fortunately for our heroine, to help her through the vicissitudes of fickle fate and modest birth she had one other jewel-like quality: a mind of diamond brilliance.

Pollyanna had been a milkmaid for some years already, having known her way around the trade since she was knee-high to a milkwort stalk. Toddlerhood had introduced its share of chores, little tasks around the house and yard, but she had shown such a rapport with the three dozen cows on her family’s dairy farm that she’d soon been relegated solely to caring for them and learning how to properly process, store, transport, and vend the crucial product. By the time she was nine, her daddy, Rashleigh P.S. Vermeilens, had even let her accompany him to the Farmer’s Market. By mid-adolescence, she was trusted to handle the barter and cash transactions herself whenever other business detained her father elsewhere.

On her fifteenth birthday, the aspiring businesswoman had been given a cow of her very own. The cost of feed and supplies for "Miss Egla" came out of her own pocket, but the proceeds were also hers alone.

By the time of this tale’s telling, Pollyanna was seventeen going on eighteen, and had managed to do pretty well for herself in this bargain. The regular daily output from the other 36 cows was transported into town in a refrigerated tank truck, having been pasteurized and filtered with the most hygienic, modern technology available (or affordable) to the farm. Miss Egla’s milk, however, was personally processed by the maid (churned by hand), and the butter, curd, cheese and other dairy products were sold at an organic foods co-op a couple miles away. Two-plus years of this activity had earned a tidy little sum.

As one might have assumed, this entrepreneurial success had lent Pollyanna poise and confidence. Possessed of an abnormally resilient good nature and a boundless imagination, the milkmaid foresaw herself getting ahead in the world through a blessed conjunction of hard work, ambition and luck. One might also have assumed that the combination of those traits--and her comely appearance--would have contributed to popularity and ready friendships among her classmates. Here, though, one’s supposition would have erred.

Every society must needs have its scapegoats and pariahs, and none moreso than the artificially compressed and cliquish hierarchy that is the average high school. To her peers, a milkmaid was among the basest of menial laborers. Working with cows was considered lowly work, having pride of place over few other occupations save, perhaps, slopping hogs and mucking out stables. Small wonder that cowgirls got the blues.

Pollyanna, always an exception to the rule, had affected not to hear the jeers and taunts of her school peers (and they with only slightly more exalted teenaged vocations, such as ploughboys and ranch hands, were even worse than the children of the town’s gentry), for their cruel comments were mostly drowned out by the din of her own big plans and extravagant flights of fancy.

Of course, being ostracized from all the school groups stung a little, and she did occasionally dream of being well-liked and even of showing up some of the other girls. "By gadfly-goaded Io! Wouldn’t that jolly well serve them right, those jealous . . . jealous . . . ahem." After all, calling them ‘jealous cows’ merely would have insulted all the perfectly nice cows of her acquaintance.

On the whole, however, Pollyanna was used to doing things by herself. And, although she was as extroverted as the next girl, she did not require the support and approval of a group to plan and execute her own objectives. As her father was fond of telling her, "The gods help them what helps themselves!"

Those words, her daddy maintained, came to him straight from the mouth of the sublime Herakles. Apparently, one day in his own youth, when his milkwagon had become hope-lessly mired in the intractable ooze of a spring thaw, he had slumped moaning on the seat and had begged for divine assistance. In response, the musclebound, lionskin-clad Olympian himself had appeared with a stern admonishment to push first and pray later.

Once Rashleigh had jumped down into the shin-deep sludge and started grunting and shoving, the demigod had graciously lent one hand, giving a nudge which had practically flung the cart and its yoked brace of oxen up out of the sucking mud and onto a drier patch of road. Since then, Mr. Vermeilens had firmly believed that any problem could be solved by the application of sufficient quantities of elbow grease and faith.

To get ahead, therefore, one had first to put one’s shoulder to the wheel or to whatever job was at hand. So, in childhood, Pollyanna had initially determined to be the very best milkmaid she could be. She had practically memorized the biographies of Louis Pasteur and Gail Borden, marveling at their advances in dairy processing and breakthroughs in packaging and line management. She had read all she could find in her local library about modern methods of milk production, and scrupulously had followed much of the current advice. For example, her family’s dairy barn had been the first (and, so far, only) one in the region to use hydro-inflated rubber mats as cattle bedding.

Her schoolmates smirked at this crazy idea at the Vermeilens place . . . cows on waterbeds! Who’d ever heard the like? What next? Bovine pedicures? Pollyanna, though, just smiled to herself--an Elsiesque sort of smile. A rested and stress-free cow was a more contented cow, and her more contented cows’ lactation was up 41%. Put that in your Elmer’s Glue and sniff it! thought she.

Happily, outside the school and its environs, Pollyanna did not encounter any other anti-social or standoffish treatment. On the contrary, she was very well-liked in her profession and always looked forward to an annual Yuletide gig with seven other milkmaids from the surrounding area. They got to be part of a caroling pageant during the first five days of January every year.

She was also a favorite at THETA events and county fairs, where she had taught her amiable cows to low an abbreviated rendition of an old Beatles’ tune while she accompanied on cowbells and sang the words, "Something in the whey she moos / Attracts me like no udder lover..." Still, she wasn’t going to be a milkmaid forever. Pollyanna had always had a rare grasp of numbers. In the sixth grade, she’d loped through texts on planar and spatial geometry, algebra, and trigonometry. She had already begun studying The Calculus by the eighth grade. In high school, she had added courses in data processing and computer programming to her curriculum, exploring the possible applications of otherwise esoteric equations. By her senior year, she frequently pondered how intricately-constructed mathematical proofs might be practically applied to real-world problems, and had most recently begun contemplating getting into software design. She presumed, however, that this goal would have to wait until after she had completed college.

In the meantime, Pollyanna had decided that she needed to get some more detailed experience in the arena of business. Of course, she felt she must continue to learn anything that might be valuable to a young entrepreneur. The perspicacious student was interested in many aspects of e-commerce and corresponded regularly on the Web with a loose affiliation of other techies. To gain some hands-on transactional savvy beyond the straightforward simplicity of the Farmer’s Market, she was very active in the local chapter of Juno Achievement.

In her sophomore year, Pollyanna also had taken a weekend class at the community college on Internet investing. So she’d been socking away her trickle of savings in penny stocks for the last couple of years and was finally looking to start an enterprise of her very own.

In the spring of our narrative, a brand new health food shop had opened in the area and was looking for a weekly supply of fresh, unpasteurized milk. The seemingly guileless girl had managed to negotiate a premium price from them.

"By the blood-red, stolen cows of Geryon, this is a godsend! With no associated time or cost for processing, the milk from Miss Egla will be purer profit," thought Pollyanna. She could cut out even more expense by carrying the milk to the store herself rather than using the family truck. Driving was a convenience, but her daddy, ever the businessman, required that any fuel and maintenance expenses be repaid to the farm for the privilege. Walking, however, cost nothing.

There was an old, tree-lined rural path, almost never used, which ran straight (as the crow flew) from her family’s property to the nearer edge of town, where the shop was. Two kilometers would be nothing to a strong, strapping girl like herself, although it meant that she’d have to lug the milk the old-fashioned way: in a container balanced on her head. But that seemed an inconsequential burden when the toting of her milk-can overhead could . . . eliminate her overhead.

The day had come. Pollyanna’s first delivery was due, so she needed to make an excellent impression with timeliness and good product. She had no qualms about that, though, and her mind was already racing ahead to consider how she might use this increased income.

Just the night before, at the Optimists’ Club, she had heard an inspiring debate, "The Best of All Possible Worlds: Secular Fortune or Sacred Gift?" The two speakers, a visiting Doctor Pangloss of Westphalia and the dear old Vicar of nearby Wakefield, had bantered warmheartedly over the existence (or lack thereof) of a Sentient Will behind the affairs of the world, but they’d been in perfect agreement that with honesty, toil and perseverance, things always worked out absolutely for the best.

Since this comported with Pollyanna’s own view of life, she had decided that very morning that it was time to branch out: she would get into egg production! One of her electronic penpals, a Spiro Sparrow, had been raving about the egg business, and it certainly seemed a logical choice for her! After all, when people store any loose change at home for petty expenses, they refer to it as their "butter and egg money." Well, she already made money from butter, so why shouldn’t she complete the picture?

Thus, on a fine afternoon, she was on the way to deliver the day’s yield. She strode along purposefully, a brimming aluminum milk-can of Grade A Whole perched with practiced ease atop her pretty, fair-haired noggin. In addition to the pail, she had a lot else on her mind . . .

I’ve got enough silage for the cattle for awhile, so with the money from today’s sale, I’ll buy some egg-keeping equipment. Hmmm, I should be able to afford a few warmers to begin. Next week, if I can again carve out one day’s earnings to buy a stock of fertilized eggs, I’ll be able to start them incubating. The week after that, let’s see, while the eggs are coming along I’ll need to hammer together a hen coop, so that’ll be milk money down on lumber and hardware. Then, in the succeeding weeks, I’ll repeat the process . . . more incubating equipment, then more eggs, then finish off the coop. Of course, I’ll need to factor in some sort of attrition rate... Suppose only 80% of the eggs hatch? And a few of the hatchlings are likely to die.--Wow, I wonder if there’s an algorithm for tracking this?--Okay, so, then I’ve got a brood of chicks; I’ll need feed for them as well as for the cattle. And what’s the maturation time? Gotta look that up. I’ll want to have the first group ready at a time when the price of poultry is expected to cycle high. And I’ll need to keep some hens as layers . . . so I may have another outlay for a dependable cock. Which puts us several months down the road . . . should be just about time for the senior prom. Well, there ought to be enough profit for a gown, surely? A satin affair, I should think, in a viridian shade to set off my coloring. And if I can get that dreamy, sleepy-eyed shepherd boy, Pictian Blue, to squire me to the affair, I ought to be able to turn the heads of all the other girls, although, naturally, I shan’t deign to notice, except maybe for a queenly toss of the head . . .

. . . as the thought was mother to the deed, Pollyanna unconsciously gave a regal little bob of her head, at which the sloshing can precariously tipped and fell, splashing its steaming contents in an eerily curving lamina across the width of the country lane.

Pandora’s Poxes! thought the milkmaid to herself, stamping a clog-shod foot. But then, never one for crying over spilt milk or anything else, she simply said a quick prayer. Chalk it up to a sacrifice to Pan or such other little god of mischief as may profit from it! I guess one should not go counting one’s chickens before they hatch . . . Or should one? Is it theoretically possible?

As it happens, Dear Reader, there is a Sentient Will behind the affairs of the world. Or, rather, there are many such Sentient Wills, and they are behind some of the affairs of the world. One of these then spoke directly into the cerebrum of the curious girl. It did not do this in words, however, for all such primordial ontogenetic sprites long predate the relatively recent human invention of language.

Something in the arc of the splattered dairy extract, in the shape it had made as the dusty cinders of the path absorbed it, in the flash of viscous white fading to boggy brown . . . something in all that chaos tugged at a sympathetic group of neurons firing in Pollyanna’s busy brain. It suggested a parabola . . . a plotted curve, the nature of which kept tickling some hitherto unguessed-at faculty, some unflexed aptitude.

Verily, the unflappable lass had unwittingly said just the right thing and so the genius loci of that bowered byway, in gratitude for an unexpected but welcome offering, imprinted on Pollyanna’s mind’s eye a lengthy complicated string, a sizeable fragment of theory, a substantial portion of a code in binary drips and drops of nacreous fluid: there was mojo in the moo juice and a nascent symbolic formula in the would-be infant formula!

Tranced and somnambulant, her pail and her missed sale forgotten, the epiphanant rushed home to her bedroom and turned on her personal computer. Akin to the possessed, preternaturally alert Samuel Taylor Coleridge, when jarred wakeful from his opium torpor, Pollyanna strained to set down the intricacies of her vision before they faded. Like him, she on honey-dew had fed and drunk the very milk of Paradise. Only once the manifestation was encoded on her screen did some semblance of normal thought return.

What have I got here? wondered the maid. It seemed to address itself to the question she had asked herself during her sauntering daydream: Is there a method for following the actuarial vagaries of poultry-farming, from fertilized egg to advertised pullet? And, to address the issue in a larger context, is there a program which can track market economics, calculating the optimum times to buy and sell chickens? When to breed them and when to slaughter? Why, mightn’t there be a unified field theory of poultry?

Surely some overarching eggsistential concept could at last encompass and answer all those nagging questions, the marginalia of the age-old philosophers: Why did the chicken cross the road? When will the chickens come home to roost? Why does "chicken feed" mean "small potatoes" when small potatoes are not chicken feed? Why isn’t there a chicken in every pot? Which did come first, the chicken or the egg? How rare are hens’ teeth? And why does panic cause one to "run around like a chicken with its head cut off"?

There looked to be an "X" constant to these and other unsettling and apparently unanswerable chicken-related questions; a common factor which was "variable" only to the uninitiated. Call it the "pullet surprise." Pollyanna had stumbled onto a new predictive science. To function, though, it was going to need tons of stored factual data, information requirements that the program itself could and would identify as it became more complex.

In short order, she liquidated her hard-earned stocks for ready money and put it into bigger and more powerful computational gear. To her buddies on the Web and to her mentors at Juno Achievement, the poised young lady pitched her new undertaking and soon angled for an appreciable amount of venture capital. Outsiders jumped onto the bandwagon as news of her discovery spread.

Pollyanna met with one lawyer, then several. Papers were drawn up; articles of incorporation. She had an idea. She had a company. There was no product—yet--but it was one hell of a hot intellectual property. Programmers were hired to keep up with the burgeoning data input. She took a partner on board, a brilliant young Indian mathematician named Vashki Rhee, to help chase the numbers as the formulas evolved. PR guys were brought in to spin straw into promises of gold for more investors.

Accountants. Support staff. A physical plant had to be built to house it all. The money was bleeding away faster than spilled milk. PollySci, Inc. was so deep in the red inside the first year that even the bean counters couldn’t tell her just where the chimera of profitability might ever be found. But, of course, "the Program" (ApparatChick, as it was known by then) would even solve for that.

So, all they needed was more money! Taking the company public was the obvious next step. By close of business on the day of the IPO, Pollyanna’s stock had increased sixfold in value. In a few more weeks, she was a multimillionaire.

This was when the same little tutelary spirit from the country lane again visited the maid’s receptive mind . . . now perhaps less genius loci and more spiritus Loki . . . whispering a warning we might loosely translate as: "Stop milking it, girl, and jump!"

Two days later, getting more milk money than they could spend on a billion school lunches, Pollyanna and Vashki sold out to an avid Silicon Valley Think Tank and left the finalization and debugging of ApparatChick to other heads. Whether it would ever actually be viable, let alone pay for itself, was no longer their concern.

At the ripe old age of twenty, Pollyanna Vermeilens, with a fawning entourage that even included the aforementioned Pictian Blue as well as "Ornery J." Eichhorner, Georgius P. Puddlingham-Pye, and several other hunks from her high school graduating class, set up housekeeping on Maui. Money couldn’t buy happiness, of course, but it sure made a reasonable downpayment. Miss Elga was brought along to provide fresh milk, but few other artifacts from childhood survived her metamorphosis from farm girl to jet set aristocrat. Pollyanna’s three-legged wooden milking stool and her battered old milk-can sat out on the huge lanai of her mansion and weathered away over the years, curiosities from another life.

AND THE MORAL OF THIS STORY?

To everything, churn, churn, churn!

A fitting editor's extra in more ways than one--convoluted, punny, and clever. Pollyanna reminds us all of the truism: the best revenge is living well. Now, drink your milk and write your comments to our BBS.