Three sheets of slightly mildewed paper. All he had. And two ball points that seemed to work.
The first thing he'd done was to devise a desalinator, using the screen of his laptop as a condenser. It didn't work. There was no fresh water on the island, that seemed certain. So far it had rained every afternoon, but the weather could change.
It was all very odd. There he was, happily married to Clarissa, riding high on a dotcom fortune then riding it down and selling the house in Mountain View and buying the yacht.
Out in the middle of the Pacific Clarissa and the crewman had started an affair right under his nose and they had dumped him on this island.
``So long Loser!'' Clarissa had called. She was referring to the unfortunate fact that he had been voted most likely to fail in his high school class. She hurled his laptop after him.
There were palm trees with some sort of fruit which appeared to be edible, so he wouldn't starve, at least for a while.
The trouble was his mind. He needed to exercise it. He began thinking of the Preposterous Hypothesis of Appollonius. So long the enigma of the world of radical mathematics. He started tracing symbols on the sand. Escaping the cage of equations and wondering free in pure theory. What amazed him was how easily it all came. His brain had transcended the everyday and now functioned on a new plane - a new dimension? He longed to communicate his analysis - his old professor at MIT, his friend Cory would surely appreciate his new interpretation. But all he had was three mildewed sheets of printer paper he must have once folded into his wallet to take notes on.
He packed the precious symbols onto each page, leaving out crucial side-bars and digressions, sacrificing clarity in his zeal to complete the postulate. He filled every page. Then he remembered his grandmother showing him a letter written by some long gone relative when he was a soldier in the civil war. The soldier had filled every page and then turned the page sideways and written at ninety degrees across each page again.
He rotated the pages and wrote again of how he had arrived on this island, and hazarded a guess at his location. He addressed it to his old professor.
He was fading. Gradual dehydration and the effects of the unknown fruit he ate were shutting down his kidneys, his liver. He wanted to find a water proof container to send out his final great work, to plea for help, but he knew he could not let go of these three sheets, consign them to the empty ocean where surely they would drift until they dissolved.
He lay down on the hot sand and let the sun bake him to oblivion, the three pages still in his hand.