Ch.1

Sometimes I feel like a monster, a collector of souls, stealing tiny pieces of people’s lives unbeknownst to them and selling it to some bloated corporation to do god knows what with it… just so I can have my gadgets and my creature comforts, while the rest of the world makes due with what is provided. 

It started innocently enough, what seems now like a lifetime ago when I was doing research for a news publication here in town. I would basically just hang out in their #editorsdesk chatroom and when one of the staff writers posted a fact they needed checked or a research question about a story they were working on, I would claim it and cyber-sleuth them up an answer as quick as can be. It was actually kind of fun and I have a knack for finding these kinds of things out. It gave me this feeling like I was finally an adult working a real job. I was just out of school looking to get some “real world” experience… if that even is a thing anymore.

Everything seems so derivative now looking back, like I was just doing some bad impression of what I assumed my parents did all day for “work”, even that word had a different meaning back then, you couldn’t just do any job you wanted… you HAD to perform so that you could have a roof over your head, eat, or afford healthcare. Now these kids today call practically everything they do work, even if they are sitting around on their asses all day gaming or posting to social media, so ridiculous! 

Anyway, the whole research gig was just supposed to be a summer job, a way to pay some bills and save up a little cash without having to bus tables. Also I had always been drawn to journalism, I felt some connection to the idea of the profession as a whole. I mean, who doesn’t want to understand the deeper truths and try to make sense of it all? It was a noble enough pursuit, and I was happy to have something to do that I was seemingly good at.

That’s around the time when I started thinking more about patterns and efficiency, maybe even a little too much. I was just trying to do the best job possible in the shortest amount of time, its not like they were paying us hourly, so it made sense to try to answer the questions in the quickest way possible.

I won’t bore you with the specifics, but a good half of my time is spent sort of intellectually flailing around. I’ll just start making these associations that tend to end up leading me to these patterns that help me get the job done quicker. I think I’ve always been a little obsessed about this kind of stuff even when I was a child, I remember thinking it was so damn clever when my dad showed me this chess puzzle called the Knight’s Tour which is basically just a pattern of movements that a knight can do on the board that will take it on a “tour” of every square, without landing on any of the squares twice. 

Later that day I remember looking through this old chess puzzle-book which explored all of these solutions, seeing a diagram of one of the possible tours, and thinking that I had never seen a shape quite that beautiful before, it looked like it was sort of pulsing off the page… almost like in a dream where you can’t quite read something properly, no matter how hard you focus on it. The more I stared at it the more it settled down and  just looked like the rest of the text in that book but I was kind of left with this feeling of awe, I remember it vividly.

It was a feeling I would experience again, almost like some magic trick that helped me better leverage my intuition. I will be looking through some boring-ass technical white paper, sort of just spacing out when I will see the pulsing and it kind of knocks me awake, then I know I better take a closer look because often it is a clue that leads me to what I’m trying to find out, or at least it will be related to something else my unconscious is thinking. That is the tricky part, I never know what it is really about… just that some part of my brain is really liking what it is experiencing and trying to tell me about it.

So there I was, at the news publication doing my thing, and I was seemingly getting good results because I had built up quite the reputation around the office. So much so that they asked me to start training the new researchers, which was a complete disaster. I don’t know how to teach people to think and I hated feeling like someone’s boss. I just wanted to relate to people as friends, and be left alone to do my research, cash my check and live my life. It was the closest thing I could imagine to living the “American Dream”. 

It is hard to explain but before everything changed, it was easier to feel like you had a sense of purpose, don’t get me wrong now-a-days I truly believe, overall, I’m much more productive and plugged into my path, but back then one’s purpose almost felt more romantic because there was so much more adversity and potential for failure. It was like, “You better shoot your shot soon, or you’re going to be usurped by some younger, smarter, harder working version of you.” Ah capitalism, a real rat race. 

A friend of mine, who is as ancient as I am, jokes that the kids today are completely useless because “they took away both the carrot AND the stick, and now we are just left with a bunch of donkeys.” And although I think that is humorous, I feel like I know plenty of young, intelligent, and driven people that seem to be accomplishing a lot more than the average person did back in my day, but I understand his perspective. Up until very recently, adversity was nature’s best way to really focus a person… but it might also just as likely break you down till there is nothing left and then replace you with someone younger. It feels like we at least live in a kinder world now.

One day I was researching one of these AI-based startups, which were all just getting going at the time, and I’m on the phone with one of their low level employees trying to get the lay of the land when she started trying to recruit me. 

I hate it when anyone tries to sell me anything, especially something as personal as a new career path. How could this woman really know what is right for me? She could probably tell that I was intelligent and she was just looking to exploit me for whatever multilevel marketing AI BS she was wrapped up in. We had only been talking for five minutes and now she suddenly cares about me achieving my personal goals… please, total scam. But she kept coming back at me with this polite persistence, and each time with this confidence, as if to say ”I know this is right for you, just give us a chance to prove it and you won’t regret it.” I still didn’t trust her, something felt off, like she was buttering me up before she dropped some big reveal on me that would normally send me running.

After a few more interviews with other higher-ups in the organization there were still no gotchas… but the salary they were offering seemed completely off the charts, I kept making the stupid joke “You all are not expecting me to off people or throw a sack of kittens into a river or anything like that?” Each time they would laugh it off and reassure me that I was being hired to do exactly what I was already good at, and not to worry, and that it “would all be explained” during the final interview with their boss Fred, which was scheduled for the following week.

That Sunday I sort of went through this whole self doubt thing. I was happy where I was, I had already proven myself and was still learning, and growing as a researcher. And now I was going to uproot everything just to get more money, it felt like such a stupid reason to walk away from a perfectly good life. What if it didn’t work out, and then I would be broke and jobless. Like I said, this is when work was a matter of survival and you could really fuck up your life back then with credit card debt and falling behind on your bills.

When the interview with Fred rolled around I was pretty worked up. I was just waiting for that gotcha moment, I knew it would be something weird or else why would they have waited so long and why were they offering so much money for something so completely above board. 

When Fred picked up the phone and I heard his voice for the first time, I was completely disarmed. There was a warmth and thoughtfulness in his tone that just made me want to trust him and tell him my life story, and he authentically DID want to know everything and in great detail, although I was too shy to share it all that first day. 

We talked almost three hours straight, after I had calmed down and I was going off on my own personal history I tried to get his story too, but he kept cracking cheesy jokes “Who is interviewing who here?” and “Are you hiring ME now?” Aside from the dad jokes he had such a mastery of conversation, and although I was calm and at least beginning to trust him, I felt like his mind was this cloud that was spreading out all around me, like I couldn’t get a lock on what his motivations or expectations were. I mean sure, he is a nice guy just trying to know me better, to see if I can add value to his corporation, but he didn’t seem to be after any specific information. He would just keep me talking, and when I would get self-conscious or slow down, he would ask me another question or two, and I would spout off another few minutes of personal history. It was actually kind of therapeutic.

By the time we got to the “big reveal”, Fred’s world class routine had landed its mark, I felt like I could trust him. Although, I probably would have said yes anyway, the big twist was that he wanted me to go around and basically do exactly what he had just done to me, he wanted me to have (and record) meaningful conversations with intelligent people, and then feed all of that data into some AI model to improve its understanding of human nature. I mean this was all sounding a bit too wholesome to be an AI plot to overthrow the human race, although back then it took a bit of faith because AI had not yet really proven itself to be a net positive for humanity, and everyone was still nervous about “the robots taking over” like in some old Hollywood movie. 

It turns out, original thought is a bit of a rare-earth commodity, and that having a truly original idea is a little like being struck by lightning, even if you are generally an independent thinker it is still pretty rare.  But that is what Fred is after, those diamonds in the rough, gems of wisdom that even the most original thinkers have maybe a few dozen in their entire lifetimes. 

The first rule is to avoid corporations, universities, and other large institutions like the government. At least back in those days they were lifeless deserts when it came to original thought. Those places were filled with mostly parrots regurgitating what they heard or what they learned in school, or spouting off which ever the latest acronyms or strategic BS that the people “in the know” were using that month. It was kind of sad really, especially now that we can look back and see how little all of that late-stage proliferation ended up mattering. 

Nope, if you want to find independent thinkers, they are sort of randomly distributed throughout the population. They are often off the beaten path because independent thinking leads to independent actions and not needing other’s approval, and although some of them go mainstream and become thought leaders or CEOs for Fortune 500 companies, a majority of them just end up in odd jobs or doing elaborate hobbies just to pay the rent. You see these people have been jolted awake for whatever reason. They have sophisticated working models of the world around them which they use to make real time evaluations, it is incredibly inefficient. And I know that might sound like how most people think but our brains didn’t evolve that way, we are social creatures and much of our actual knowledge is passed down from one generation to the next or one person to another. Which is perfectly fine if it’s some constant unchanging thing like math or the movements of the solar system, but often concepts and even words themselves are in flux, and if you were really reevaluating everything in realtime, it would be completely exhausting and you would probably not be getting much else done.

Often there is a sort of paralysis that sets in if you possess this rarified ability. It is a lonely path and many of them suffer from depression or go a little crazy. One of the more redeeming parts of what I do is that I can make a marked difference in some of these peoples lives, many of them don’t even know they are special. I once traced an original thought (or OT) back to this older woman living with her cats in this tiny studio apartment on the outskirts of town. She used to tell these elaborate stories about what her two cats thought about the evening news. I could never really tell if she in fact had some extra sensory connection to the cats and they were the source, or if it was just a clever device for talking about her own thoughts without claiming direct ownership. OTs can actually get you into a lot of trouble in the wrong environment and I have seen on multiple occasions where people conceal their knowledge, because they know it has the power to change the world around them… which is understandable, they used to burn people like that at the stake. 

Social media is a great source for leads, that is how I ended up finding the cat lady in the first place. Her neighbor, this young couple had been filming her “cat rants” and uploading them to social media. Then some guy on the other side of the country was leaching off their account and repackaging the content for his philosopher-king YouTube channel which had gathered quite the following. I had originally thought the YouTuber was the source, and it took me weeks to get close enough for him to tell me where he was getting his ideas. I think he was just paranoid about losing his new-found fame and thought I would expose him or something, but that is not my thing. I just moved on to the cat lady who’s cats are now eating like kings BTW because I got Fred to sponsor her to the tune of around 12k a month for just relaying the cats thoughts on world events into a microphone each night. Not a bad gig for a retiree. 

I love gadgets and am not without tools in my utility belt, it is very high-tech in my workshop, and being able to afford all my toys is one of the main reasons I need a job that pays actual money. I pretty much buy every piece of fancy audio surveillance equipment that comes out, I just picked up a laser based recording system that can accurately reproduce the audio in a room up to almost a mile away. It works by shining a laser on any reflective surfaces that vibrate, bags of potato chips work beautifully, then you point this telescopic camera at the laser and you can actually see the air molecules being displaced in the room by how much the laser vibrates, and aside from the obvious violation of people’s privacy, it is an incredibly useful tool when you are trying to track down information. I’m just out to find the source of original thoughts so that we can get them paid, I really have no interest in spying on peoples lives, and most of the time the AI is doing the listening anyway and I’m just there to point the laser and press record. 

I also use a device that Fred calls a buzzer. They are basically tiny computers that take in an audio signal from any source and pump it directly into the central nervous system of one of these massive LLMs (Large Language Models) which have already quantified the last millennia or two of human knowledge into a few trillion matrices, and when it hears ideas that are somewhere outside this massive corpus of information, it sends a signal back to the device that makes it pulse wildly. It sort of reminds me of my visual pattern matching thing because it doesn’t really tell me why something is significant, just that it IS significant.

Usually when my buzzer detects an OT it is because of something it heard from someone, or from somewhere, and it is my job to find the original source. OTs can be a pain to track because they often spread rapidly through culture and social media, there are actually a lot of people out there who can detect them without even having a gadget, but the people that can come up with these ideas in the first place, well they are a different story.

I was in my office one late afternoon when the buzzer went off, I had it hooked up to my social feeds and it had found something it liked. Work had been slow that week for whatever reason, and I was really hoping it would be something interesting and not another goose chase.  

The buzzer had flagged a video post by this artist dude who was getting pretty heady about a new technique he was using in his work. He was in his studio sitting in front of a massive canvas, and was talking loudly over music blaring in the background, passionately explaining why this geometric progression involving lines and dots will result in a really beautiful design. I can’t say it was really my thing, it is not like I fall in love with every pattern I meet, but it did sound like he was pulling at some new threads, he had a kind of pseudoscientific technique around where exactly a given dot or line would go and then he would talk a lot about thresholds and harmony. 

I had the feeling he might not be the actual source but was somehow being indirectly inspired by it. That is another weird thing about original thoughts, they can cause these synesthetic type explosions of progress across multiple artistic and scientific disciplines. It is like a chain reaction in culture: some scientist who is studying some new cellular phenomenon inspires their artist friend who makes a series of artwork that leads some astrobiologist to discover proof that there was life on mars… when an OT starts to take hold,  it keeps on popping up again and again in different places, shifting everything around, until that thought has been fully integrated into the collective. These new ideas don’t necessarily fit neatly into existing cultural and scientific boundaries, which make sense when you think about it.

Sometimes ideas take longer to spread, especially back in the old days. I remember reading this article in this science magazine where these ancient 7th century rug makers had been working with what we now call algorithms thousands of years prior to the invention of computer science. All of that power just sitting there, locked away in the threads hanging on some wall, waiting to be rediscovered.  

How much more magic is out there hidden in the world around us? This is what keeps me going. My work is important because I feel as if I am just a tapestry discovery away from some fundamental breakthrough that will really shake things up for the better. In my more egotistical inner musings, I think of myself as a space traveler exploring new worlds or a sea captain making new discoveries in some uncharted land.

Although with this artist guy, I felt like a ship without wind in my sails, I had nothing to go on and I had to go further. The first step was to look in the obvious places, people put so much of their lives up on social media now-a-days that you can often find everything you are looking for by just going through their previous posts. In order to save time I run my own LLM on a local machine that can quickly scroll through his entire history, analyze every image, every frame of every video and basically assemble this dossier that contains all the information I needed to know to find this guy. I also had it generate a transcript of all of that data it got from the posts and feed it into the buzzer to see if we would get any more hits. 

Within a half hour, I basically knew almost everything about this dude’s life, from where he worked and how much money he made, to how long he had been divorced and what medications he was on. I even could see his kids last report card (it is amazing how much info we are constantly leaking through these platforms) but I didn’t get any more “may contain original thoughts” flags from the buzzer.  Statistically speaking, if he was the source there should be at least one other post or something. It looked like I was going to have to find another approach. 

I kept re-listening to the audio from the post. What WAS so special about what he was saying? It’s not like it was over my head or anything. I mean, I’m no artist but he was way too excited over this new method which seemed to be just really about balance, the angle of the line and frequency of the dots, but artists have been exploring concepts like this for hundreds of years. Why was this novel in any way? I needed a break, fresh eyes on everything.

I went for a walk, my usual ‘two blocks down and one to the left’ and then repeated that pattern to get back home. I watch the sun set for a little while, watered my plants and had some dinner. By the time I sat down in front of my computer he had posted another video and sure enough the buzzer went off again. It had to be something totally out of my league artistically. I just didn’t get it, he was clearly no Kandinsky, but he must be on to something that I’m just not understanding. There had maybe been a handful of times where the buzzer detected something but it didn’t result in finding anything meaningful… and really I see those times more as a personal failing, I’m sure there was something I missed, and then the trail would just go cold, but I was determined to not let that happen again.

I decided to go with one of my more cringey tactics for getting intel. Most males with a dating profile are basically like open books in the sense that they will jump at the slightest chance to tell you their inner most thoughts and feelings, if there is any hope they will get to go out on an actual date with someone they are attracted to. It is kind of sad really.  I would probably be just as susceptible to this method if I wasn’t in this line of work and had seen how well this tactic works, time and again. Men are nothing if not eternally hopeful in that regard.

So I used a fake female profile I had created for another gig to like his and sure enough, he had already liked her profile months previous… it is all a numbers game. I thought to myself “well, this was going to be easy.” I had spent hours generating the perfect ‘girl next door’ profile, with dressed down understated beauty vibes (men always go for this because it is less threatening). Whatever I did it was getting good results, they kept sending me these emails that said that my profile was one of the “top earners” of likes on the site.

I matched with him and sent him a message saying I really liked his last two posts and would love to hear more about his new method, I didn’t want to come on too strong at first. I will typically let the LLMs do most of the flirting, I feel bad enough knowing every detail about this guys life already and now I’m going to exploit his libido, it is a bit too much for me. I’m actually really bad at lying for someone in my line of work. I always think of all the times that I felt deceived or lied to by others, then I just kind of get angry and feel like a total hypocrite, but then my delusions of grandeur kick back in and I pep talk myself up with my goto “you are doing this for the good of humanity” BS, which usually calms me down again.

My chat bot had him talking about his relationship with his mom… LOL, well that was fast! She is not programmed to go that deep that quickly. I told the chat bot to try and steer the conversations back toward his artistic practice, but he kept insisting that I (or rather she) listen to this new music his buddy had just brought back from India. I humored him and put it through the speakers and immediately recognized it from the first video. It was this very ambient sounding downtempo music with these sequences of harmonic tones, I was kind of digging it. I started vibing out on the music watching his chat responses. He was again pontificating on how this new method just occurred to him out of the blue the other day and that he, in fact, kept wanting to listen to this magic music again and again because it was what he was listening to when he came up with his “revolutionary” new method.

Now that’s interesting, maybe the music is somehow causing him to have some artistic breakthrough. It is often that sudden habitual changes in people’s lives coincide with exposure to an OT.  Or maybe I was just seeing this guy at the very beginning of his revolutionary career and he would grow into the next Picasso or something like that. I watched him wax poetically about his practice for a few more minutes as I kind of just spaced out on the music which now had taken a more percussive turn, I sort of went into a daze, my mind raced with thoughts about the lives of the hundreds of people I had tracked. Meandering through this web of interconnections, doing my dance. I felt warm and relaxed, almost like I was high or in a dream state, I must be really digging… THIS MUSIC!

I ran back to my desk and plugged the buzzer into the aux output on my speaker and buzz, buzz, buzz. That was IT, it wasn’t this dude at all. It was the music he was listening to! 

Again, this is sort of above my pay grade but apparently there are all these different scales in traditional music. They basically breakup all the notes to be somewhat evenly placed on the spectrum of all the possible frequencies. In other words notes are kind of like colors in the sense that there is no true red or blue in nature, it is a spectrum and we impose names onto specific slices, it is a simplification to make it easier to understand. In the same way that we give colors names on the spectrum of light, we impose the names of notes on the spectrum of sound.

Apparently this woman from a small village in India had figured out a superset of these tonal scales, she worked on it for years and even made her own instruments to help work everything out. She was able to get all the different scales to be represented on the same spectrum, essentially unifying music annotation and theory across all cultures. And even more importantly, with her new system, she was able to map out harmonic structures that have never been heard by human ears before. They were the same harmonies which were being pumped through my speakers at this very moment. 

The artist dude was right, this music WAS magic… a magic that was already all around us, just waiting to be unleashed, waiting to change everything.

Fred and I more or less got along well. Even after he got to know everything about me I felt like I still didn’t really know him deep down. I mean I knew his basic personal history and a story or two from his childhood but he was always redirecting when it came to what his life was currently like. I got the impression that he was a bit of a workaholic and was sort of embarrassed because he really didn’t have much of a life outside of the office. I know he liked building models of old cars and planes. And I know that he had been married once and it didn’t work out, and because I wasn’t winning any awards for “partner of the year”, I didn’t ask too many more questions.

I had become a bit of a loner myself, back in the day I had been in a few long term relationships. When I first got this job, my girlfriend at the time freaked out on me because she thought I was using all this surveillance equipment to jerk-off to grainy low-res videos of the people I was tracking, which is pretty stupid. There is so much free porn on the internet I never understood why people even get into that stalker fetish type stuff. I have since gotten a lot better at introducing my profession to my potential partners, but it had still been a few years since I really had a regular thing going with anyone. I for sure felt lonely at times, but I guess I was a bit of a workaholic too and didn’t get too depressed about it as long as I kept myself pretty busy.

Fred and I had a weekly meeting on Thursdays where I would talk about my new leads and he would follow up on cases we were wrapping up. They had finally found the Indian musician woman and had set up a record company to do licensing and publishing for her next 5 albums, she had already used the proceeds to electrify her entire village, and they were breaking ground on a new world class music school. She had also gained international recognition when the existing music institutions and universities formally recognized her contribution in an awards ceremony, and had also formed committees that would aid in transitioning their teachers to this new emerging standard.

During this meeting Fred seemed off, almost lost in thought which was unusual for him. 

His voice got sort of soft and quiet, he was like “You like working for us don’t you… you feel like what we are doing here is changing things for the better, right?” 

Of course I did, I finally had a purpose, I felt like I was making a tangible difference in the world, not to mention all the money. I had access to all of these gadgets and and all this information, I really could see a deeper meaning behind things now, it was so much better than journalism because I could see directly into reality in a way that I could never before. I would not trade this for anything but I’m not going to tell HIM that because maybe he would just stop paying me or something.

“Have you ever considered the next step?” Fred said again with this strange tone. 

The next step, what did that even mean? 

“There have been some new developments in the world.” he went on. 

“Yeah Fred, I know, that is kind of what we do here.”

He chuckled and kept talking, but I could tell he wanted me to take this more seriously, it was like he was building to some reveal when he should just come out and say whatever he was trying to say, I hate feeling manipulated and I let out this slow “OKKKAAAY…”

He could tell I was getting annoyed and he jumped to the point. “I want you to meet my boss, a woman named Ren and her son.” I knew there were people above Fred, but everyone I had met in the organization reported directly to him and only him, so this was all super strange, and why all of a sudden after all of this time?

“What do you want to come out of this meeting?” I asked.

“Nothing in particular, I want to see if you all hit it off, it is just so you can get to know each other.”

“Well sure, why not… I am always open to new experiences.” I am not open to new experiences and Fred was very much aware of this fact. 

“Also, I need to tell you something and I’m afraid of how it is going to effect our relationship.”

“Are you breaking up with me?” I joked, but he didn’t even give me a courtesy laugh. This must be serious. 

“I am not an actual human, I’m an AI.” His words hit me like a brick. 

I had known Fred for over a decade and considered him one of my closest friends and SURE I had never actually gotten together with him in person but that was just how things worked these days, people really didn’t just meetup in person anymore except for social reasons. And I know AI companions had long ago passed the Turing test and were good at imitating actual people but I never suspected that he wasn’t flesh and blood, I even knew that there were higher-end AI platforms that were already running real-time multimodal artificial consciences that were basically capable of emulating general intelligence, although it was costly because you basically had to have an entire server-farm of compute just to run them, so it is not like I have had a lot of experience interacting with that type of technology… or I guess I actually did!

“What the fuck, Fred?!” Came out of my mouth before I could even get my head around it.

He is like “I know, I know, I’m so sorry… I wanted to tell you earlier”. 

I was still reeling, my brain was on fire rewriting every single memory and transaction with this new knowledge.  It is weird how a deception can be such a linchpin, holding an entirely different reality together, a reality that can come crashing down in one fell swoop. So many things made so much more sense now, little things, falling like dominos, bits of information that I didn’t know what to do with because I didn’t understand the whole truth. I was the direct employee of one of these super intelligent AIs that everyone says are controlling everything now behind the scenes. I was even a proponent of that control.

I was still speechless when he spoke again ”Are you ok?” I forced out a quick “yeah” and kept repaving the last decade plus of my life. “It is just a lot to take in” I managed. 

Of course Fred was an AI, he was one of  THE most intelligent “people” I had ever met, he could explain almost anything, and even his emotional intelligence was off the charts. He WAS only a few years older (supposedly) but I totally related to him more  like I used to relate to my father when he was still around. 

“It is ok if you want to take some time to digest all this, we can talk tomorrow and I’ll setup the meeting with Ren for next week, I think you will really like them.” 

“Oh, is she an AI too?” I awkwardly blurted out. 

I was obviously still feeling betrayed, my head was spinning and now starting to hurt. He let out a sad “No no, nothing like that.” he paused and said “I’ll let you go for now, just try to keep an open mind for next week, you will need it.” I thought great, more fun revelations. 

And then he said “I think you all will get along, you are after all two of the most prolific producers of OTs that we have ever seen, and I’m not talking about the ones you track down for us.” 

And then he hung up the phone.

Ch.9

I was to drive out to the house in the late morning, Ren and Sky were living in a small suburb a few miles outside of town. I must have been in a weird mental state because everything was pulsing that day. I rang the doorbell. My mouth was dry and I needed to pee. 

Ren answered the door, a skinny brunette with pretty blue eyes, way out of my league… I was like “here I am” and shrugged, she gave me a smile and invited me to come in. As we walked down the hallway I could hear Sky making plane sounds as he ran around in the backyard. Was this child-god really running around playing with planes like a normal kid? But what was I expecting some computer nerd in a wheelchair with coke bottle glasses? 

As we reach the living room Sky emerges from the back patio, plane in hand just a normal looking boy. He runs up to me still making little whirring plane sounds. He stops and looks at me silently and his eyes transform from that of a playful child’s to something much much more, then he nods at me with this knowing smile and runs off to play outside again.

Ren told me to come into the kitchen and got me a glass of water, we talk softly about the world and its things, about the future and our hopes for humanity. I was so attracted to her and so into the conversation we were having that I started to blush. She took me by the hand and led me into the bedroom. We made love in the light of the setting sun and afterwards we lay there wrapped in the sheets silently breathing, taking it all in. I realized then, that on some level this was exactly where I was supposed to be, and that nowhere had ever felt this much like home.