SAM ALTMAN AND THE CEREBRACENE

The following is an excerpt from a biography of Sam Altman, the Chief Executive Officer of OpenAI, which created ChatGPT, the first publicly available instance of generative AI. The details of Sam’s life are based on interviews conducted by the author with his friends and family members, as well as (so far) roughly seven hours of interview time with Sam.

The moon is only half full but bright enough to summon a legion of shadows in the sculpture garden at Stanford University. Among them sits the 19-year-old Sam Altman. Back straight. Teeth well-flossed. Pulse, he estimates, an optimal 72.

He is admiring his favourite work. An abstract piece, but a piece which, to Sam, captures something very real and absolute. A single beam of crimson metal rising straight toward the stars. He especially likes how it loops around in the middle. How it bulges into a crusty donut, before shooting up again, tapering off, and then, like a needle piercing a black cloth, vanishes up through the void.

The sculpture is called “Time to Think,” and whenever the topic of art — any type of art — comes up in conversation, Sam likes to refer to this particular design.

“It changed my life,” he will tell a young British podcaster known for her Yorkshire accent. She often winks at the camera, which triggers a haptic flutter in the hearts of over fifty thousand devoted Twitch followers. “There’s a flexibility about it, a powerful expression.”

“Powerful, eh?”

“It puts things in perspective. It’s not always about going forward. Sometimes you must retreat before you progress.”

“But, I mean, most times, right?”

“Most times what?”

“Most times it’s about going forward.”

“Well it doesn’t have to be. That’s what I’m saying. The best possible path to success is not always a straight line.”

“But most times, right? Where I’m at now, where I was. There to here. Naught to one. Boring to not boring.”

“It seems straight, but in retrospect — ”

“And are we talking about the whole line, Sam?”

“Sorry?”

“I know my geometry. Every line gotta have points to it. Infinite points. Now we must wait for every bloody point on the line? Lot of failure, Sam. Lot of waiting. Not that I’m clocking it. But I am. I’m clocking it. Keeping a tight eye on the clock cuz I hear my crowd: ‘You said sex with robots!’”

Sam is not thinking about that interview now because it won’t happen for another 17 years. He is thinking instead about smells. One smell in particular: Gasoline. He had once loved the scent of gasoline, or was it Martin, his childhood friend back in St. Louis, who professed to love it? Or maybe, more likely, Sam had pretended to love the smell. To see how Martin would react.

He recalls the two of them standing on the driveway of his childhood mansion in the affluent suburb of Ladue, St. Louis. Kasparov had lost to Deep Blue. Jobs was back at Apple. Does he remember the season (mid-summer, 90 degrees)? Or what he and Martin were wearing. No, he doesn’t. Nor does he remember the sky, with its pair of cumulous clouds, like a curdled bison mom and her calf, charging over the plains and straight into the headwinds from Bermuda.

Does he recall how he and Martin were standing beside the Altman family van, brittle moths and dragonflies stuck in its teeth from a recent camping trip? Maybe he remembers the van, parked on the protruding tongue of a driveway like a bloated white capsule for the house to swallow or spit.

His parents held the keys, serviced the creature, possessed the necessary training to make it move. But it was the kids who owned it — the four Altman siblings as well as the many friends Sam would invite along on their weekend excursions. It was aclubhouse on wheels. A roaming fantasy game. A traveling Tardis of stories and debates, Magic the Gathering and Digimon cards, headphones, gameboys, chips and sodas (and Cynthia’s puke and Rick blowing raspberries on the rear window).

The van’s door would roll open like the lever of a giant ViewMaster, closing, opening and locking into place a new slide. A new nature scene to magically replace the last. It would slide shut on a hillside of bluebells, then rumble open to reveal the knuckled crest of a waterfall. Close on a sandstone rock pillar. Open on a hickory-shaded campground beside a purling river.

The kids would leap out. The van would vanish completely, the parents disapparent. Sam would coax his savage clanlings toward some anticipated secret. A bridge to leap from. A cave with tarantulas. A rope swing with “SA” carved in the seat. A hidden watering hole where coyotes and pronghorns collected.

They were free, the kids. To squeal, to squabble, to swim and sleep naked. To bully and to bleed. As unaccountable and unburdened by history as the natural creatures Sam believes every one of us has a primal longing and inalienable right to be.

Maybe he recalls these things now, maybe not. But he remembers that Martin was never allowed on those trips. He recalls, yes he’s sure he recalls it — as the two of them poked at those ossified insects and inhaled the oily garage breath — that Martin said he loved the smell of gasoline.

It disgusts Sam now, gasoline. The smell of a bygone age. The Stone Age. The Bronze Age. The Gasoline Age. He knew even then, that day in front of his childhood home, a home that to Sam was forever trying to catch its breath, that he and Martin had been born at a remarkable time. The most remarkable time in history in fact — what he would call the Brain Age. Unlike ages of the past, this new age required no brutality, no brawn or bloodshed. All you needed to configure an entirely new world was the power of your own mind.

The moon appears now like the pressed nozzle of a spray can. It tags the Earth with misty amber, the sculptures and shadows at Stanford University like its stencilled cutouts. Sam, lost in thought, fails to notice any of this. Genius, he muses, is nothing more than belief and bravery. It’s a fearlessness to reach out, probe the darkness and ultimately pierce the confining membrane of our tiny world.

He feels the urge to note something down, which sets off a well-rehearsed, five-step sequence:

• Stand
• Extract notebook
• Extract pen from spiral spine
• Flip pages to a blank tomorrow

He writes: A no sugar day today! (To make up for the Pop-Tart he ate just before coming to the sculpture garden).

He then rewinds the routine, footage playing backwards. He’s sitting down again. Back straight. Feet well-powdered. An abscess on his neck will demand a pitiless squeeze when he gets home.

Sam and Martin both arrived into the world in 1985, just one day apart — April 22 (Sam) and April 23 (Martin). Even more remarkable, they were born on the same floor of the same 100-year-old Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago. Yet they only met each other, age 12, at St. Louis’s most prestigious prep school, John Burroughs, 300 miles south from where they were born.

When a yawning midwife handed over the swaddled baby, Sam’s mother, Connie, feared her firstborn might dissolve in her arms. The baby’s skin felt gelatinous, waterlogged. All those cells, all that work, all that dividing, subdividing, coordinating, coagulating of organs, mapping of parts, the entire complex biological system that produces a new life, it could all vanish in a sudden plasmic splash. It could leaving her, she feared, with nothing to take home for her troubles but a damp cloth.

She checked for blemishes. Lips, nostrils, eyes, ears, arms, fingers. Found nothing, except perhaps, a purplish stain on the neck. Or maybe she was imagining it? Did she detect a slight ptosis, or shrunken left eye? In fact they both seemed a bit sunken, both eyes, large but sunken, and the ears were mouselike — too small? In any case, she congratulated her body on a job well done.

But was it done? The midwife was helping attach Sam’s mouth to the strange, brown, almost fungal protrusion which once belonged to Connie’s breast but now revealed its original purpose: A docking bay for her offspring. It may never be done, she thought, or get any easier; and she was right about that. As the ridged gums clamped down around the springy spigot, the fibres of pain radiating across Connie’s torso were felt by no one else but her.

“Blue,” she said into the phone.

“Really? What shade? You mean blue blue?”

“A kind of crystal blue, I guess. All the way to the rims.”

“Oh, that will go,” said Sam’s father. “Won’t be blue for long. Welcome to the shitshow, Samuel.”

Nineteen years later, beneath the vandalising half-moon, Sam still doesn’t know his eyes were once blue. Or that his father had been absent at his birth. Or even the fact that he and Martin were both born in that same maternity ward. There’s a lot he doesn’t know about his past, or the pasts of his family and friends. In fact, he likes to think the past will soon no longer be the past. Not the way we think about it, anyway. That along with the Gasoline Age, our ideas about the past — its immutability for example, or the idea that it dictates the future — are outdated and foolish and bound to become obsolete.

Dear Sam. Have you received anything from Martin? the email had said. We haven’t heard from him in over 48 hours. Hope you are well.

The air has gone clammy, gone dead. Cool enough for a sweater? His sweater threshold is 70 degrees Fahrenheit. No, not cool enough yet.

Forty-eight hours? The things a young man can do in 48 hours! Back at JB Prep, before they were men, he and Martin had changed the course of their lives — the very course of history — in less than a day.

It had started with Martin confessing to Sam his love for their English teacher, Ms. Sweeney. She was a large, full figured woman, honey-skinned, violet-scented. Like one of Botero’s sculptures, only, to Martin, more exotic and alluring. During their sophomore year, Ms. Sweeney had solicited him to write and perform some “Tudorian music” for a school production of The Tempest. By their senior year, the obedient Ariel sprite of Martin’s crush had transformed into a raging Prospero of untameable passion.

It’s not as if Ms. Sweeney was Martin’s first and only love amongst JB’s faculty. There was the Korean chemistry teacher with the puzzle-chain earrings who insisted her students call her Candy. Or the tall, quirky Mr. Strawberry, who was also the swim coach and often hung around the pool in his speedos. The girls called him “Smokey Berry,” and Martin’s older sister compared him to those lanky, troubled, stammering heroes who sometimes appear in movies. Like Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window, or Tim Robbins in The Player.

But to Martin, Ms. Sweeney was all gossamer and daffodil, cinnamon and birdsong. In the daytime, looking out the classroom window, clouds sculpted themselves in her bounteous image. In the evening, each firefly would synchronise its abdominal flame to her powerful pulse.

“I can’t live another semester without her,” blubbered Martin on the phone. A long gasp of air as he surfaced from his sobs. Although he had selected Ms. Sweeney as his first choice for advanced English, he had been placed in old McCallister’s class.

Sam was reassuring. It would be easy to change the enrolment records — or so he hoped. The old iMac G3 in the administration office was often alone and meditative, like a dreamy, blue-cheeked, mechanical sadhu who few people dared to bother. Sam was confident and friendly with the women at the front desk. Leticia and Leticia’s giggly mother, Ana Maria. He spoke to them in the same way he spoke to all the adults at JB Prep, with energy and enthusiasm. Even affection, real affection.

They, meanwhile, feared his popularity and didn’t dare to dislike him. Now and then, unintentionally it seemed, he’d say something to diminish them. He might reveal in his voice an undertone of pity, the way a powerful politician in an undeveloped country might speak to village elders. It wasn’t malicious. There was no vitriol. It wasn’t his teachers’ fault they would never have the same opportunities and freedoms with which Sam was blessed. That, for reasons beyond their control, they had become stuck at JB Prep. Like those dried out insects crucified on the grill of his family van, victims of a force they never saw coming, could never understand.

His situation, he believed, was nothing like theirs, and he often made this clear. He might, for example, slow down to explain a difficult word or concept to one of his teachers, the way a loving parent might indulge a child. Noobie or noob means novice; and mosdef is SMS slang for “most definitely.” Or how, as he explained it to his calculus teacher, Mr. Sparks, the number 1337 looks like the word LEET, which is slang for elite, and how it’s both flattering and thrilling when another coder calls you a 1337.

“It’s part of our gangster culture, Mr. Sparks. My generation, you see, wants to speak like rappers. If I say, ‘hit me on the hip,’ it means, message me. Because rappers wear pagers on their hips. Or they used to. This is what you get, Mr. Sparks, when a young generation inherits a country of guns and drug dealers and prisons, like we have.”

He slipped easily into this role, spokesperson for his generation, unafraid, unashamed. The other students admired him for it, accepted him as their voice. He made them feel stronger, more important.

When he requested permission to use the computer — to add some footnotes to his History assignment — Leticia’s mother, Ana Maria, accepted him in a similar way. She accepted the power of his generation; the things they must be allowed to do to get on with their lives. In less than ten minutes Sam was able to find the enrolment files, one file per class, and download them to his pink plastic diskette. It took much longer to update the files, at home, with Martin drowning his despair in a bowl of cinnamon oatmeal.

“So who do we bump?” asked Sam, sitting at the eviscerated mess of his machine. The decapitated monitor, the ribbon-wire intestines, the scattered organs of drives, ports, graphics cards, keyboard. “Trish? How ‘bout Trish? No, not Trish. Body issues, self-esteem, don’t want her cutting, right? Could be the only course she can pass. Michaela? What about Maxine? Her parents are badgering her to study more math. She’ll wet her pants if Ms. Sweeney asks her to speak up in class. Let’s do her a favour. Save her the trauma.”

But in order for Martin to spend the semester in the perfumed sanctum of sweet Ms. Sweeney, it wasn’t enough to remove shy Maxine. Martin’s own schedule needed adjustments, which bumped students from other files, other classes, and these students in turn bumped others. A kind of particle collision, or billiards break of reassignments. Students ricocheting in all directions, across multiple files. As Martin slurped his way through a second bowl of oatmeal, Sam worked furiously to sort out the chaos. It took him over an hour to make sure the last of the disrupted students was safely settled into a vacant spot in a senior year class.

“There you go, Brianna. Enjoy Druckenmiller’s Civics. Plenty of time to paint your nails.”

The next morning the cicadas were chirping in a repetitive crescendo, like the sound of someone blowing a giant balloon that never quite fills. Sam didn’t make it to school as early as he’d hoped. But he found the computer unattended and was able to overwrite the class enrolment files before the first bell sounded.

He was safely dissecting a rat foetus in the formaldehyde fumes of Smokey Berry’s classroom when he remembered that, in his haste, he had left his diskette in the computer’s drive. At recess he rushed back to the administrator’s office to find the mechanical sadhu still unattended, deep in digital thought.

The disk was still there. A crisis averted.

One thing Sam does know about Martin’s birth, or believes he knows, is that it was surrounded in mystery. Something had gone wrong. A lack of oxygen. A tumour. An infection of some kind. If the subject was raised at all — “Premie? Caesarean?” — it would tip over and be forgotten, like one of those airplane-winged bicycles that appears to have so much potential but never lifts off the ground.

Sam recalls Martin’s older sister, Isabelle, once using the term “neonatal condition.” She was eight years older than the boys and would recline around the house like a bookish odalisque. She introduced the boys to all the classic movies, the “must-sees,” from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest to The Godfather. Sometimes her background commentary was appreciated, such as when she told the spellbound boys to “get ready” for the bloody deluge in The Shining. Sometimes the boys lost interest altogether (Groundhog Day). She was edgy, anxious and choosy in her tastes. Watchful but lenient. Sophisticated but not parental.

That she and Sam were both eldest children emboldened him to truncate their age gap and treat her as a kind of associate. A fellow member in a private progenitorial club. He would call her names. “Dizzy-Izzy” “Is-a-Smell,” “Tyranorexia.” This last one, unbeknownst to Sam, drew blood. A diet of Oreos and Goldfish crackers (crumbs in sofa cracks) — not to mention, also unbeknownst to Sam, smoking on her bedroom balcony — kept Isabelle’s body languid, pale, malnourished. She played along at first, firing back gently with “Double Faultman,” “Robot Altman” (M*A*S*H* being her favourite Altman film), “Yosemite Scam.” Then later, as the names became more sour and cutting, she called him a “Neonatal Condition.”

No one just invents a name like that.

There were other clues to a possible defect in Martin’s entry to the world: His mother, for example. Her pinched face, seaweed hair, red dilated veins in cheeks and ankles. Such genetic deficiencies, coupled with the fact she chain-smoked and always seemed a single coughing fit away from the ICU, made it difficult for Sam to imagine her producing a healthy brood.

She was also obsessed, as were her cheerful husband and loyal daughter, with Martin’s wellbeing. “He’s hungry,” Isabelle would explain, coming to the rescue whenever Martin was at a loss for words, which was frequently. “A bowl of oatmeal and he won’t be so absent minded.”

Martin, meanwhile, couldn’t leave the house, even in the peak of summer, without his father rushing to open the hallway closet and reveal a well-stocked showroom of outdoor wear: Sweaters, jumpers, jackets, raincoats, umbrellas, hats, gloves, boots. “You warm enough, love?”

None of it made sense. Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy, perhaps — but affecting an entire family? How?

Isabelle and her parents attended every single one of Martin’s flute recitals. Even holding hands together at times. Even the concert in Toronto, or the mini-tour across Australia — Melbourne, Sydney, Perth. Sam could easily imagine the four of them (Sam, too, for that matter, as their doting was infectious) shivering and huddling together in Antarctica, their outstretched bouquet of hands holding the hallowed flute aloft like the flag over Iwo Jima.

Damn that flute.

Then there was Martin himself. The smoking gun of a Neonatal Condition. Pale, elongated, lanky after adolescence, with scoliosis or spondylitis or one of those conditions that creates a slight shoulder hunch as you get older. His eyes lit up at the wrong times. His smiles took too long to form. When he spoke, his hands would lay down each verbal brick, mortaring them together with pantomimic precision. But as anyone could see, in all that masonry of thought, something was absent from the mix. Always crumbling, never quite holding together.

A vibration in Sam’s pocket. What Sam and his friends call a “low-dose Milgram.” It triggers a different but equally well-practiced sequence:

• Stand
• Extract Motorola phone
• Flip open
• Tap to silence the alarm
• Extract iron tablets from front pouch of backpack
• Extract water bottle — wait, where’s the water bottle?

As an Iron tablet chalks its way down his throat — no water — Sam replays the footage until he’s sitting down again. Back straight. Contacts sterilised. Ears swabbed three times today.

Forty eight hours, she said? So much possibility in 48 hours!

A drive with friends, a couple nights in a haunted house, a three-day yacht trip, a fencing tournament, hiking expedition, he could be lost in anything. Anywhere. The most likely explanation — Sam wanted to write back, laying it on thick, poking fun at the family’s paranoia — was that Martin was on a weekend bender, bar-hopping, prostitutes, gambling, adult massages, sex parties, cocaine, MDMA and personal liberation in a lover’s genitalia.

But he didn’t. He decided to ignore Isabelle’s email. He would never be able to convey to her what he thought about Martin, about people, about the world and his position in it.

She was, by her own measure at least, doing exceptionally well in New York City. He had purchased her novel at the university bookstore, had read it as if each page was a unique logogram, a shape, a word-sculpture through which he could interpret — what? A story? An attempt to create something enduring with letters on a page? So trivial, that kind of success. Without any circling back, any re-evaluation of what’s possible, any disruption of a preconceived trajectory. Sure, the “American prodigy” (as advertised on the book’s cover) could become a great writer. Like so many writers before her. She could follow a straight path to literary greatness. Zero to one. Here to there.

But she would never pierce the membrane of our tiny world.

Her subsequent emails, three emails including the one he received this morning, have grown increasingly bitter and resentful, even threatening.

Did you think your indifference would be forgiven, Sam? That it doesn’t matter? That you can move on with your life, unaffected, untouched? Is that what you really thought? I swear to you, one day it’s going to hit you. The world is going to smack you so hard you’ll be nothing but a drooling idiot with a lifetime of regret bleeding out your rectum. And if the world doesn’t do it, I swear to you, I’ll do it myself.

Third pocket, clasp to the left. Sam unzips his backpack, extracts a Thinkpad. He is going to reply to her. It’s time now to reply. He presses the power button. The blue screen flickers faintly awake. Please give me a moment, Master, as I come to my senses. What little light the computer emits is still enough of a death ray to obliterate the sculptures, the shadow-creatures, the stars, the moon.

As he watches the progress bar’s arousal, Sam begins composing his thoughts:

Please give my hello to your parents, Ms. Blake (Isabelle has recently married). I suspect you will use this Sam Altman character you’ve created in a novel some day. (If you don’t, I may). Quite the invention. A lifetime of regret dribbling out my rectum…really? You must believe me, Isabelle, I’m deeply saddened to hear what happened to Martin —

Here you go, Master, interrupts his computer, opening an image, then another, then another on top. Is this what you were looking for?

It wasn’t. His intention had been to open his email program, but the computer offers something more compelling. A map. A map with one red pin and multiple blue pins. The red pin indicates Sam’s current location. Sculpture garden. Stanford campus. A frog-shaped landmass, Palo Alto, poised and ready to leap into the Bay.

The blue pins indicate — wait, is that Taylor? Lovely, full-bearded Taylor hanging out with tiny angst-ridden Darlene at Jericho’s Grill? Easy on the beer, my friend. I will teach him the alternatives to beer. The wines and whiskeys. Besides, all that facial hair may fool the bouncers, but — as Sam has teased many of his friends — when it comes to juicing and keeping your balance for long stretches of time, you’re no Lance Armstrong.

Earlier today Sam and his friends had finished programming the new map interface. The blue pins grow larger for friends who are higher on your social graph. Taylor’s pin is smaller than Sam would like. The smallest possible, in fact. The data is accurate, unsurprising. They do not share many connections. But in Sam’s mind, the blue-eyed, chestnut-bearded Taylor should be the Jupiter in his solar system. Could this be fixed? A social graph based not on the number of connections, but on compatibility? On a mutually agreed level of attractiveness?

What‘s most important here, however, the “unique selling point” or USP as they say, is Taylor’s location. How much this changes the world — that Sam can see Taylor is now back from his camping trip in the Santa Cruz Mountains. That Taylor, at this very moment, is at Jericho’s, less than two miles away from Sam’s big red pin. All that’s required now, he thinks, is a moment together, the two of them, alone. A moment for Sam to reach out under a table and squeeze Taylor’s hand. Or maybe during a walk through the arboretum, out of view of the relentless moon.

If Sam were still thinking about Martin (he’s not, but he will in just a moment, due to circumstances beyond his control), he might recall how, at JB Prep, Martin liked to talk about the topic of love. It was, to Martin, a form of unconscious art, falling in love. He believed it coursed through his veins and could overpower him at any moment, like a seizure.

“When we fall in love, we become artists, Sam. Yes. We may not want to be artists, but it’s not up to us. Something in us starts creating beauty, uncontrollably. Automatically. At warp speed.”

“That doesn’t sound like love. That sounds like obsession. Like madness.”

“Love is madness.”

“No it’s not. At least it doesn’t need to be.”

“Yes it does. It does need to be. Love is bigger than us. That’s right. It’s bigger than sanity. We are the vessel through which it creates our universe. An entire universe. We must be mad enough to die for that universe. To protect it. Otherwise it’s not love.”

How do you respond to statements like that? What could Sam possibly say?Once again, to Sam anyway, Martin’s carefully constructed logic had crumbled into something unsupportable.

“Always remember, Martin,” he replied in a flash of anger and fear. “Nothing is bigger than you. Nothing is bigger than you. Got that?”

When Sam shuts the computer (Goodbye, Master), the afterimage from the screen levitates around the darkness like slowly shuffling cards. It takes a moment for Sam to remember where he is. Stanford, the sculpture garden, the formidable half moon — and just when it all starts coming together, starts making sense again, a figure comes into view just a few feet in front of him.

At first Sam thinks it’s a dog. Which it is, really. But what looks like a collar, or a leash, is in fact some kind of twine or moss that’s become snagged around the creature’s neck. It’s much too large for a pet. Its broad head, its white-flanked snout, its shifting bright eyes and thick drooping tail come into focus, and Sam realises he’s looking at a wolf. And the wolf is looking at Sam.

Rather than recognise this encounter for what it is — a random act of nature, a wolf on a night’s prowl around campus — Sam’s mind makes an unusual association: He and Martin are lying together on the floor watching a video. The Godfather. “Get ready” Isabelle says, as the crickets chirp and the violin swoons. The camera zooms in slowly on the old Italian mogul, who is waking up to find his hands all bloodied, his pyjamas, the satin sheets all bloodied, and, finally, the bloodied horse’s head in bed right beside him. How long he keeps screaming, that old man. A lifetime’s worth of screaming.

Something distracts Sam from that memory, something above him. He looks up to see what it is and notices the end of the metal beam of “Time to Think,” the very tip of the sculpture, is shaking. Like a wavering spear, or a trembling old forefinger making accusations at the heavens. When he looks back down, the wolf is gone. There’s a terrible metallic taste in Sam’s mouth — did he regurgitate the Iron tablet? In fact, it’s the first drip of a nosebleed down the back of his throat. Sam’s legs are shaking. Muscle spasms he thinks, a sign of dehydration — where was his water? — but in fact the whole bench, the whole sculpture garden, the entire Bay Area is shaking.

A few seconds later it’s over, and the seismic waves that rippled outward from the San Andreas fault for hundreds of miles now condense into a single vibration — a low-dose Milgram — in Sam’s right pocket.

Get ready.

• Stand
• Extract
• Flip

“Hello?”

The conversation flows easily at Jericho’s. They talk about the earthquake. No, it wasn’t his first. A lot of people don’t realise it, but there’s an active fault in St. Louis where he grew up. Sam describes how the sculptures, can you imagine, had started to tremble, actually tremble like Pygmalion’s statue coming alive.

They talk about Sam’s favourite sculpture in the garden, how he will sometimes sit beside it because it makes him think differently about his life. Helps puts things in perspective. About how, even before he got the call from Paul tonight with the welcome news about the investment, he was already questioning whether he should leave school and work on his company full time. Because it’s not just about the money, you know. It’s about the mission. About the possibility of doing something bigger than yourself.

“Think about it,” Sam is saying to Taylor now as they sit together at a wooden table wet with overlapping rings, like an over-extended Olympics logo. Maybe a hundred beer mugs? More?

“Location — location is everything, would’t you agree? It’s the missing piece of all this, the thing we all forget about. You know what I mean, when we’re building all this networking stuff? The Brain Age? The Cerebracene?”

Taylor isn’t quite sure what Sam means, but nods in confirmation. There’s an impish smirk hiding beneath his facial fur.

“Since I was a kid, I’ve always felt I had this calling. Something bigger than me. Bigger than a single life.”

Sam lifts his beer, starts to drink, then stops and sets it down again.

“You alright?” asks Taylor.

Sam isn’t sure. He’s struggling to hold back tears. He wants to talk about the wolf, but decides against it.

“I don’t know. The news from Paul tonight. The earthquake. Something happened. Like a rift. A pivotal moment I’m never going to forget. I can see myself talking to journalists about this some day.”

He is surprised when, at that moment, he feels Taylor’s fingers wrap around his hand. The gesture doesn’t thrill him as much as he thought it might. It feels less like the consummation of a new relationship, less an invitation to love and more like the delicate fingers of his younger siblings seeking his assurance. Like how, on one of their camping trips, his brothers might softly hold his hand while standing on the edge of a bridge, gathering the courage to leap into the murky water below.

He begins to feel cold. That clammy air again. When the moment is right, he thinks, when he and Taylor are no longer holding hands, he will extract his sweater from his backpack and pull it over his head. Always his head first, then left sleeve, right sleeve, then, to remove every last wrinkle, a single, firm, two-handed tug at the hem.

___________________
The above excerpt is human-crafted. Any company or individual owning technology which uses any part of the text for the purpose of mimicking human intelligence without the express written permission of its author is liable to legal action resulting in a fine of no less than the value of a human life.