Mr. Stompy, or Steve as the rest of the world called him, was not an ogre. He also was not a convicted felon, the strong man from the circus, an escaped mental patient, a boxer, a wrestler, a longshoreman, or any of the other things that Sam had imagined him to be. Actually, Steve was a scientist, and quite a good one.

However, like most good scientists, he was a bit eccentric. He had this distracted way of looking at you, like he was only using a small part of his brain to listen to you, the rest of which was busy contemplating the grand unified theory of the universe, and wondering if he left the coffee maker on again.

Sam had been right about one thing, though. Steve really was self-employed. In fact, he ran his own research facility, which had some very illustrious customers. It was Steve’s company that designed much of the natural language subroutines for Watson, the IBM supercomputer that once competed on Jeopardy! against two former champions, and beat them both.

Steve’s current project was a top secret one for DARPA. The project involved the use of very high voltages, so Steve habitually wore his thick, super-insulated work boots at all times, just to be safe. He knew himself to be scatter-brained, so he worried that if he were not careful, he might one day run straight out of the apartment wearing slippers and get himself killed at work. So he always wore his boots. Always. This probably went a good way toward explaining the stomping that Sam always heard.

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Steve’s project was an exciting but demanding one. He had people working on it twenty-four hours a day. He only went home to have a quick bite to eat, to take a quick nap, or to feed his cat. And even then, he would sometimes work. He had his own equipment in a spare bedroom that he would twiddle with on occasion as new ideas came to him. He was really close to a breakthrough, so he cheered every advance, and cursed every setback.

Steve didn’t mean to be a bad neighbor. Heck, he didn’t even realize that he was a bad neighbor. No one ever complained to him, so how would he know?

Actually, he did have some clues that someone was angry with him, but he never paid any attention to them. For instance, he’d had four flat tires in the two and a half years since he had been in his new place, all of which happened overnight while parked in his spot. Also, he would frequently find that his mail had been crumpled into a ball and shoved back into his mailbox. And one time, he even found the words “GET OUT” written in red marker on his front door. He chalked it all up to mischievous youths. None of it mattered. Only his work mattered.