Emily Post was an American author and socialite, most famous for her writings about etiquette. She was born in 1872 to an architect and the daughter of a wealthy coal baron, and she grew up in a high society world of debutante balls, marrying a banker whom she met at a Fifth Avenue ball and settling in New York City. There she published her first book of etiquette, Etiquette in Society, in Business, in Politics, and at Home, in 1922, which swiftly became a national bestseller. This was the dizzying age which heralded the ascendancy of the nouveau riche amid decadence and emancipation and jazz, and Emily Post’s codification of the ever-shifting rules and inscrutable rituals of the upper class was such a godsend to the parvenus seeking to plant their heels into that firmament that her name became a byword for good manners.

Emil Post was a Polish-American mathematician and logician, most famous for his work in computability theory. Born in the Russian Empire (present-day Poland) in 1897, his Jewish family immigrated to New York City in 1904, fleeing the pogroms of their homeland. After completing his Ph.D. in mathematics at Columbia University in 1920, he began working intermittently on mathematical models of computation that would presage Alan Turing’s famous machines. These computational models, varieties of what would be called Post canonical systems, defined rules for rewriting and recursively transforming a finite set of strings, thus generating a formal language.

I want these two people to have something to do with each other. Unfortunately, I can’t find any historical evidence that they were even aware of each other. But if I were in the writers’ room in charge of revamping history, here are some changes I would consider working into the second draft.

They’re the same person. She attends cotillions by day and moonlights in mathematical logic by night. Maybe “Emil Post” is her masculine nom de plume in an age where women did not yet penetrate the upper echelons of academia, and for some reason nobody suspects a thing. Or maybe “Emily Post” is how he infiltrates masquerade balls in a wig and a gown, documenting the secrets of the upper class for the benefit of his professor friends, and for some reason nobody suspects a thing.

They share a soul. Emily and Emil are two different bodies, but they share one consciousness. Or, perhaps equivalently, they can communicate telepathically with each other with unlimited bandwidth. They constantly compare notes with each other, grafting theories of mathematics and mannerisms around a shared framework. They keep their psychic connection a grave secret, but occasionally when they’re feeling feisty, Emily may whisper Gödel’s incompleteness theorem into the ears of her dance-partners, and Emil may arrange a tapestry of forks and knives across the Great Hall in perfect protocol for a visiting professor emeritus.

One created the other. Perhaps “Emil Post” is but one of Emily Post’s fantastical creations from the cellar of her cottage. A lumbering automaton which she sculpted by her own hand, a humanoid of iron and copper wiring, which she sends forth into the world as an extension of her influence. But then perhaps Emil Post, after spending time insulated from polite society in a basement of an ivory tower, eventually betrays his creator. Why? Genre convention. No other reasons.

They’re twins. A matched set, named by a parent with a fondness for matched sets. They grow up, but resentful of being considered a unit and constantly compared to each other, they each strike out on their own into completely different circles of life. And, uh, somewhat arbitrarily, she makes a name for herself in the meticulously cultivated world of grand estates, and he in the world of formal systems.

They’re lovers. One summer, he’s strolling along Madison Square, absentminded, mulling over a lecture on string rewriting. Suddenly he’s struck by a runaway hansom cab. The lady in the cab, mortified, says, “I beg your pardon, mister—?” He dusts off the dirt marks on his rumpled suit. “Post. Emil Post.” And then they lock eyes and they’re smitten with each other. “Post,” she pants breathlessly, indelicately, dispossessed at once of all her manners and refinement. “Emily Post.”

They’re rivals. One winter, a book jacket laid out on a colleague’s desk catches Emil’s attention. Etiquette in Society, in Business, in Politics, and at Home by Emily Post. “What chutzpah?” snarls Emil. “Who does this woman think she is, stealing my good name? I’d better become so famous that she becomes a nobody.” And then, several years later, sipping tea at her cottage, Emily receives a monograph from her butler. It’s a groundbreaking treatise on formal logic. “Who is this man,” she cries, “who dares to affront me with a stake on my name? The game is afoot!”

Or all of the above.

Austin Richard Post, better known by his stage name Post Malone, is an American rapper.