“Here, look.” Jacob grabbed a notepad and began frantically scrawling columns of numbers.

“If you take these numbers, e, π, Phi, and list them out to twelve decimal places alongside the Fibonacci numbers starting at zero, you can see that at the twelfth decimal place all the digits are the same: 9.

“And at this point, the Fibonacci number is equal to the square of its position in the sequence: 255.”

Paul wiped his brow. Jacob had obsessed over this problem for too long. He was starting to lose his edge and reach for any answer, wild as it may be.

“Don’t you see?” Jacob said, “There’s a pattern here that we can find if we plot out the rest of the values.”

“I don’t understand a thing you’re talking about.” Paul frowned skeptically. “But perhaps you have something. I’ll come back in a few days, and see what you have. Please, try and get some rest, ok?”

He was worse than last time. At least he’ll have something to keep him busy, Paul thought.

As he left, a soft light flickered on in Jacob’s apartment.