Richard walked in the door to the Observation Lounge. He had never really had the honor of being here. It was for upper senior officer meetings and occasionally it could be used for leisure. But he had never been in here for either. The place reminded him too much about people in power and applying himself. He didn't like the thought of applying himself and then losing all the people he had connected with. It was a downright scary thought to him. But right now he had no time to dwell on his rather paradoxical problem. He had a duty and he had to apply himself to that duty.<br/><br/>He saw Commander MacReady talking to the Captain. It was probably something he could not interrupt so he moved out of the path out of the Observation Lounge and waited off to the side till he was done. He saw that most of the people with authority were here. There was Captian Mitchell, Commander MacReady, Second Officer Makari Osiel, Chief of Security Vergil Tosh, Chief Medical Officer Sahara Tir, and now him as the interim Chief of Intelligence. He wondered what separated him from them. And he already knew the answer, he was not as ready to apply himself as they were. There went that fact in his thought process again. He needed a distraction. Something that would keep him from thinking about why he craved people being his friends rather than advance himself.<br/><br/>He leaned against the wall as he tried to think of a distraction. For some reason he could not think about anything. But he used the thought he was trying to block out as a starting point. He wondered where his intelligence had come from in the first place. It could have been tied into his genetics somehow. And that led to a question that would be a good mathematical distraction.<br/><br/>He started his distraction with a simple question: How many different people's genetics had gone into him?<br/><br/>If he had 2 parents and they had 2 sets of 2 parents then that was six people. But he could go farther and farther he went. Math was always a good distraction. And when he was young he used to calculate his age down in seconds. He could have done that now but he felt that it was not going to be correct since he was technically getting younger as each second passed. So he stuck with his current problem and was currently on the tenth stage of the genetic pyramid forming in his head. 2+4+8+16+32+64+128+256+512+1024=2046, was where he was so far. But he was going to keep going till Commander MacReady was done with Captain Mitchell.<br/><br/>Richard made it a point to keep an eye on the two men as he did his distraction. It would be good to know when to stop and when Richard was immersed in his distractions it was hard to stop unless he had a reason to. And that would be bad if Commander MacReady stopped talking with the Captain and he was too distracted to pay attention.