D1

D1 is the analytical mind of the team — the one who can stare at an apparently impossible tangle of information and begin seeing patterns before everyone else has finished figuring out what they are looking at.

His path to the team was somewhat less straightforward. D1 was accidentally orphaned in Africa as a baby when his parents were picked up by U.S. ICE agents and deported to Australia. The ICE agents were on vacation at the time, which raised several questions that no one has ever successfully answered.

Left behind, D1 was adopted by a group of apes, much like someone he later read about called T. They raised him happily for the first few years of his life. Unfortunately, D1 eventually saw the movie Rain Man and immediately began counting all the hairs on everybody.

The apes put up with this for as long as they could before transferring custody to a herd of elephants. Life with the elephants suited D1 surprisingly well. He developed a deep appreciation for mud and an unfortunate fascination with playing with the large floppy ears of the males in the herd. At first, the elephants tolerated it. Eventually, even elephants have limits.

By then D1 was an adult, so the herd escorted him to a nearby village. The villagers took up a collection and raised enough money to ship him to America disguised as a Google engineer. The disguise worked rather better than expected. Google hired him.

Not only that, D1 became one of their star programmers. His greatest assignment was a highly secret project known as FIL — Find Intelligent Life on Earth. D1 created a search engine designed to scour the available evidence and determine whether intelligent life could actually be found anywhere on the planet.

Google committed data centers across the United States to the task. For two years, the system processed enormous quantities of information. Finally, the result came back: “I don’t have anything for you.” The pilot project was considered unsuccessful, and D1 was fired.

Within days he was homeless, sitting in a back alley and replaying the entire disaster in his head. Then, in one horrible flash of insight, he saw the problem. There had been a single critical coding error. He had programmed the search engine to find a wife, not a life. No wonder it came back empty.

Not long afterward, D1 spotted an online ad placed by Chad, who was looking for an assistant. The ad contained one unusual requirement: “In your résumé, name one hilarious thing that has happened to you that was both amazingly funny and unexpectedly painful at the time it happened.” D1 knew instantly that he was probably the only person on the planet truly qualified for the position.He was right.

Chad brought him in for an interview and immediately recognized the combination of brilliance, catastrophe, curiosity and absurdity sitting across from him. Before the interview was over, Chad had effectively adopted D1 as a brother and hired him on the spot.

On his first day, Chad sat D1 in front of a computer and pulled up the sprawling project they were supposed to build. “My boss says we need to get all this done within 30 days,” Chad told him. “I think with your help we can do it in 29.” D1 stared at the screen. His eyes moved once across the problem.

Then he said: “OMG. I see all of the toothpicks right away, Raymond — oops, I mean Chad.” That was the moment Chad knew exactly what kind of mind he had hired.

When Chad later introduced D1 to Bill W, Bill looked at him and immediately recognized something familiar — a way of seeing too much at once, of following connections other people might miss, and of discovering that the same gift could occasionally produce spectacularly strange results. Bill stretched out his hand. “Welcome to the team, D1.”

D1 joined the team as its intensely analytical thinker: the one most likely to follow an idea through twelve layers of implication while everyone else is still discussing layer two. He does not always simplify the world. Sometimes he sees so much of it at once that somebody else has to translate.

Fortunately, that somebody would eventually arrive.

Hired: August 21, 2026.