SAM ALTMAN AND THE COSMIC ROLLERBLADE

Here’s another 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.

Sam Altman was eight years old when he broke his leg roller skating. He had begged his mother for the Rollerblade Aeros with active brake technology in the heels.

Vitamin D oil, she thought. She would stock up on Vitamin D oil to prevent any scarring. She would buy the pads, the helmet, but what about the face? Might there be some kind of facial protection he could wear, a hockey mask or nose-glove or wrap-around cloth like those desert nomads in the Sahara? Safely swaddled. The way she first received him when he was born.

Sam was not wearing a helmet, or any safety gear, when the accident occurred. It was as if the asphalt absorbed, along with half a litre of blood, his recollection of the crash itself.

He remembers stepping out after dinner, his skates propelling him towards the Clermont loop, not far from Martin’s house. If he exerts his memory, which he never does, he might recall how the street lamps were snow-globes. Blizzards of moths. He might remember the way the Aeros rattled his teeth. Or how the spider silk drifted from the elms and sweet-gums to drape across his arms like strands of ghost hair.

What he usually remembers are the cubes of light above the surgeon’s table. Or that’s what he thinks he remembers. In fact the lights in Sam’s mind are the sealed-beam headlamps of the car that found him; and while he doesn’t remember, will never remember, the cracked tibia poking from his shin, it lives in his mind. Like the unearthed handle of an ancient tool. The memory itself a half-buried relic, forever embedded in his subconscious.

It changes his sense of self, just as the tiniest spec on a mirror, undetectable as we gaze upon our image, can still disturb the reflection and make us crave the purity of an unsullied glass. For Sam, the sight of his blood-smeared tibia dissolved his trust in the materiality of life. It’s why he understands a person can be broken but still be conscious. Shattered but sentient. Destroyed but alive.

For his mother, it had the inverse effect. She did not see the exposed bone herself. Rather she heard an account of the accident from the local Ackerman boy, a football star, who found Sam on his way home from getting high and handsy with Martha Scott (the car still smelling of skunk-weed and green apple perfume). His mother would change the bandage, massage the scar with her vitamin E oil every three hours; and although she watched it heal and fade and even disappear entirely behind the knee-high socks Sam took to wearing, she was never be able to look at her son again without seeing his fragility.

The cause of the accident was a bat, as in the night-flying mammal. Martin saw the whole thing from his window. He was practicing his flute arpeggios when the half-crouched skater, a miniature Sam Altman, swept through the sepia mist below. He would never tell Sam, not even after they became friends, but he noted it in his diary: “16 June, 6:58pm, boy struck by an Eastern Red bat, Lasiurus borealis;” and a week later, he would show his sister the bloodstains on the street.

“This smaller stain came from his leg. This bigger one over here, see how it fades into the dirt? It came from his head.”

“You saw him lying in the street?”

“Yes.”

“You came out and saw him lying here?”

“I was standing by the Dogwood over there. Not a trivial chance the bat had rabies. It was flailing around on the ground, then flew up into him. When they fly erratically like that, you know.”

“You should have told me sooner, Marty. I won’t tell mom and dad, but I need to call the hospital. Tell them what you saw. His family — and maybe the doctors.”

“Won’t the boy have told them?”

“You said he was lying there. For a long time. Maybe he was unconscious. Maybe he didn’t see the bat the way you saw it. Maybe he won’t remember what happened. You should have checked to see if he was okay.”

“Once he moved I was going to talk to him. Then the car came.”

“We can change the details of your story. But I’ll definitely call the hospital.”

Isabelle never called the hospital. Never told anyone. What were the chances of rabies? Besides, it had like, what, a 72-hour incubation period? Or maybe that was for tetanus. The doctors would have run tests, no doubt. They would have detected its presence. But if the boy were to start showing symptoms? Foam at the mouth? What if the boy’s mother learned Martin had seen the whole thing but hadn’t said anything until now? She would blame Martin for the boy’s condition.

Isabelle would have none of that. She was also just 17 years old. The gusts and thermals of her imagination kept her intentions unsteady. She would say the right things. She was good at that. Her parents loved her for it. Yes I’ll call the hospital, she told herself. Absolutely I will. The words could emanate from her mouth and she would believe what she was saying. But she was still a whirlwind of impulse and desperation, which meant that long before she could return indoors and start flipping through the phone book, her resolve had disintegrated.

So Isabelle is standing on her bedroom balcony now. The morning has goose-stepped into existence, a triumphant army of clouds, urgent, synchronised, finely uniformed. Too early, way too early. What with Martin’s morning crime scene and Isabelle having to muster up another excuse to skip the Saturday family therapy. Two weeks in a row now. Staying home, getting high, missing therapy. An English essay on Rilke’s ‘Archaic Torso of Apollo’ was the best excuse she could think of.

In truth, she worries that if she attends these therapy sessions, she won’t be able to protect Martin’s secrets — including his latest confession about the accident he witnessed. The one he neglected to tell anyone about. The family therapy is always about Martin. Isabelle’s own life is safely locked away, which is how she likes it. Enchant me all you want, doc, you’ll never crack the code. But Martin’s life. Martin’s life is a family project, priceless, delicately passed between them, breakable, vulnerable to the clumsy interpretations of Dr. Mukherjee, the therapist.

Dr. Mukherjee, thinks Isabelle. Her kohl-rimmed eyes, her dimpled, kissable cheeks.

Isabelle has swallowed one of the Vicadin she collects in the mahogany rolltop desk her father made for her. A columbarium of sorts, that’s how she thinks of it. Eighteen slide-out drawers and a dozen open pigeon holes. Earrings, bracelets, letters, filled-up diaries, magazine cutouts, favourite chewing gum, a collection of found photographs, the flirtatious notes Mr. Strawberry occasionally inserts in her workbook. They go into the desk and never come out again. Catalogued for eternity.

Only one drawer, upper level, second from the right, contains items of daily use. Her tobacco, her rolling papers, a glass pipe, her lighter, and now and then a small packet of contra-ban: Pills, vials, dried and powdered fungi, weed, those miniature bottles of liquor she occasionally pockets from Circle K.

Out on the balcony, she’s bundling the marijuana shake into its ZigZag shroud and talking to the nearest Dogwood blossom. The flower is an early bloomer, its piglet ears wide and attentive. If she stretches her arm out far enough out, she can touch it.

“You know what I mean? It’s not like he’s married. Wait, is he married?”

No, he’s not married.

“And to ‘admire’ is not ‘to love,’ right? To admire is to appreciate something special about someone.”

No, it’s not to love.

“Do you smell that? The pears?”

It’s the dead Catfish and Bluegills from Deer Creek. Hundreds along Brentwood.

“Like, a chemical spill? I think it’s the pear trees I’m getting. My God the meadowlarks are loud this morning. Musical sword fights, jousts, duels.”

She licks and twirls the joint, then stabs at the air with it, her little sabre, left arm raised backward in the en guard position. The dogwood blossom shivers with laughter. “Oh, you like this?” she says, exaggerating her stance, advancing and retreating, heel of her front foot landing first with each step, just like fencers do.

Someone is shouting from a distant car, which, as it approaches, shakes the Earth. Music is playing and the bass notes land like dropped boulders out the open window. The singer is calling out to her — “run, run, run…run!” Which is what she does, what anyone would do, she tries to reason later, were they to hear such an imperative. Run!

Yes, she knows it’s from that song by Radiohead, but how can you ignore that belted command?

Run!

In a moment she’s down the steps and out the front door, sock-less in sneakers and still wearing the snug velour shorts and laced white tank-top she woke up in.

In the yard below, a warm breeze makes the azaleas squirm. The bees hover nervously, recalibrate their landings. She runs down the driveway, past a scrawny shirtless figure, one of the Faber boys, who, arms above his head, steers a manual mower and pretends not to see her. She runs down Maryview, past the bloodstains belonging to a boy named Sam Altman. In just over four years, he will come to her house. Many years after that, he will become CEO of one of the world’s largest artificial intelligence companies.

She turns downs Conway. A rush of greenery from both sides presses up against cordons of brickwork, white picket fences, telephone wires, an invisible forcefield created by lawn trimmers and hedge cutters. Directly above, a meteor, one of the Delta Aquariids, burns a molten streak across the stratosphere. Isabelle can’t see it. In fact, given the time of day, it goes largely unnoticed in America. At least by humans.

But a cloud of dust particles from the meteor will mix with rain clouds and shower down across a large swathe of land near Seattle, Washington. There it will be analysed for decades by the mycorrhizal networks in the soil.

Isabelle is passing the little fire hydrant she so often adores, with its red helmet and stubby yellow arms. It guards the driveway of the widow, Mrs. Dickerson, whose police officer husband was shot to death six times in the back. Whenever Isabelle thinks of Mr. Dickerson, she imagines a spaghetti strainer, blood draining out, organs held in. Seems oddly painless, even cathartic.

Far down Conway she can see what appears to be a horse, and as she approaches, she confirms it: A young buckskin with charcoal shoulders and black mane. The horse has lifted its head, ears pivoting, detecting something. Maybe it’s the meteor, which has disintegrated at this point. Or maybe it’s Isabelle herself, who is really only half-jogging now, out of breath, more of a stumble really, the Vicadin having softened her stride.

Or maybe it’s something else. In fact, at that moment a helicopter is crashing in heavy rain in the forest near Snoqualmie Falls, outside Seattle. The pilot and a family of three will die instantly. In the moment before the crash, the pilot, sensing danger, was thinking about whether he should accept the re-marriage proposal from his ex-wife after five years of estrangement. The two other men, a gay couple from San Francisco, were celebrating news that their Vietnamese surrogate was pregnant at last. As the helicopter’s blades swipe into the Douglas firs, their daughter, six-year old Crystal, worries about her stuffed turtle named Fielding. She had left it alone in the family’s hotel room with the rain-slicked balcony and a view of Lake Washington.

It is precisely the sort of event, such a terrible tragedy, that Isabelle imagines a horse can detect somehow, even from so far away. That’s what horses do. They pick up these sorts of signals through their special horse’s sense. They will even tell you about these tragic events if you’re willing to listen really hard. Which she will do. She will listen for as long as it takes. But when she finally reaches the horse, it has started chewing on the grass again and seems uninterested in her.

She strokes its thick mane, which, to Isabelle, feels aqua-marine and glittery blue.

“You know something, don’t you?” she says. “A secret you want to share with me.”

Now and then the horse twitches its head violently, like someone with Tourettes. Isabelle is a smell. It flares and clears its nostrils, trying to comprehend the ghost figure standing before it.

“We’ve never met before, you beautiful thing. Not in person anyway. I remember you from my dreams.”

Is a smell, is a spell.

“Ah, so you recognise me now? You know who I am. What’s this?” she asks, noticing a scrap of paper protruding from the horse’s mouth. She grabs at it and part of it tears off. The rest vanishes with the grass mouthful beneath the flapping nostrils. She continues her questions: “Why are you here? Do you love me as much as I love you? More? You love me more?”

Is a spell, is a dream.

“That’s Camilla from Phil’s place,” says a man’s voice behind her.

She turns to see a yellow Ford Taurus that has somehow sneaked up on her. The speaker sits in the driver’s seat, grey furry hands on the steering wheel. He wears a floppy brown fedora and rectangular glasses perched on red-specked cheeks. His thick facial hair is surprisingly well-groomed and evenly salted, a feature Isabelle admires in older men.

“Shall we let him know?”

“Sorry, do I know you?” asks Isabelle.

“I mean Phil. Should we let Phil know his Camilla’s on the run?”

Isabelle can see a pair of legs in the passenger seat. A wife? In jeans and leather boots? She bends down for a better look, but the rear window douses her eyes with the molten sun.

“Not very safe wandering around like this.”

“I live just down the street.”

“The horse. The horse isn’t safe. I mean, it’s safe now. Now that we’ve found it. Baldwin will tie it up, keep an eye on it. Go on, son.”

The passenger door opens and a young man emerges — or he looks young, moves young. He wears a red Cardinals baseball cap from beneath which several spikes of hair are jutting. There’s perspiration on his narrow nose. His lips are chapped, his sneakers unlaced. He walks around the rear of the car, opens the trunk, takes out a figure eight loop of rope.

“Easy there, fella,” says Baldwin, making a clicking sound as he approaches Camilla, who is ignoring him.

“You’re Terry’s daughter, right?” asks the old man.

Isabelle strokes Camilla’s shoulder as Baldwin gently drapes the rope around the mare’s neck.

“You and the horse got something going, I can tell,” says the man in the car. “C’mon, get in. You’ll want to be there when we tell Phil we found his darling, right?”

She does. She wants to be there, telling Phil how the horse is not your ordinary horse. How Camilla is actually a messenger spirit. How when she had heard Thom Yorke of Radiohead belting out “run!” she had thought it was for her. But no, she realises now it was for the horse. She wants to tell Phil how his horse radiates wisdom and love, how it appears to her in her dreams, and about the scrap of paper she found in its mouth, the paper which reads — she looks at it now — “teach me music, teach me joy.”

In the car, the man casts a few glances toward Isabelle to better understand what he’s dealing with. Thick black-rimmed glasses, recessive chin, ponytail, and something clenched in her fist. She sits hugging her knees to her chest. When some girls hug their knees like that, the man thinks, the knees come almost level with the shoulders. Not this one. Her legs are short.

“I think you’re mistaking me for someone else, Mister. Neither of my parents is named Terry.”

“Okay, well, you’re going to like me once we get past the awkwardness.”

“Maybe I already like you. Who’s that Baldwin fella? Your son?”

“Grandson. Daughter’s boy. What’s your name?”

She ignores the question, opens her hand to see the horse’s message and, in doing so, reveals the tiny white baton of happiness. The perfect time for it. She leans forward and unplugs what seems a lewd pacifier from the dashboard’s underparts. It comes out hotter than she expects, a fuming red coil that coughs up a flame when touching the joint-tip.

“You ever seen a UFO?” she asks.

“I’m Benedict, but everyone calls me Benny. You gonna share that?”

He reaches over without looking, receives the joint, takes a hit, extends it back. Isabelle pulls at his wrist like it’s the boom-arm of a microphone, holding it tight as she presses her lips to the soggy nub between his alabaster fingers. A long, deep inhale. A distant starburst in her eyes. When she lets go of his arm, it remains close to her lips, searching, until she gently pushes it away.

“Put your seatbelt on, will ya?” he says.

“They’re only real if you believe in them,” says Isabelle, twisting the wrong way around while searching for the little steel flipper that, like helmets, can save your life in an accident. In doing so, she notices a bunch of gear in the backseat. Boots, sleeping rolls, a bundled up tent and large duffle bag. Beneath the rear window, stretched lizardlike on the sun-baked parcel shelf, are a pair of thin, beige, extra long gun-cases.

“Coming back from Castlewood? Those rifles you got?”

“They are.”

“I love hunting. I mean, not that I’ve hunted before. Just the idea of it. You ever seen Deer Hunter? All that killing in Vietnam and he can’t get himself to shoot a solitary deer in America.”

“Coming back from Taum Sauk. Baldwin’s a gun nut. Like his father. Spent the whole week out there.”

“Remington 700s. That’s what DeNiro was using. With a scope, of course. You use scopes? I love guns.”

“Saw that movie like five times. Painful but therapeutic.”

“I know. So good, right?”

He’s dragging at the joint more slowly now, more relaxed, like someone settling into a hot bath. His skin seems to have thawed, cracks forming around his temple. Vietnam, she thinks, and her mind is suddenly there. Those wide cone hats, rice fields, silk lanterns, island pagodas. She imagines a man from the future in tinted goggles, riding cap, a white cloak flapping in the wind behind him. A hunter of sorts, but also an artist, a salesman, a middle-aged man from the future zipping around lush limestone mountains on a hover cycle. Like in Star Wars. Pagoda punk. He is brimming with passion, this man, this traveller. Sad, deeply loved, deeply missed by someone.

She can feel this love and a shiver cuts through the hot wind. It scares her. She squeezes her knees even tighter to her chest.

“The best one by far is Apocalypse Now,” Benedict is saying.

“Oh, I want to see that movie so bad,” says Isabelle. “Were you in Nam?”

“That’s what I was telling you. Were you not listening? A Topo Engineer, map reader. Mostly Saigon.”

“Did you kill people?”

“Of course. You too, my lady. You, too. We all did. Just being alive is to kill. Survival depends on the death of others, says Schweitzer. You know Schweitzer? The philosopher? I’d put it a bit differently: To desire, I’d say, is to murder.”

“Wait, isn’t that Mercy hospital,” Isabelle exclaims as the pale megalithic structure rises into view above the freeway’s grassy shoulder. Cold-blooded, and sunning itself. Like the lizard guns. “Hold on, can we stop there for a sec?”

“Why? You unwell?”

“It’s a relative.”

“It’s relative? What do you mean?”

This makes Isabelle laugh. “No, a relative is in the hospital.”

“Oh, I thought you meant, you know, that health is relative. Like in some sense you’re perfectly healthy. In another, you’re about to die.”

“Ain’t that the truth,” she says. “I meant a relative. Although not really a relative, to be honest. Someone I know, or haven’t met yet.”

“A fake-lative, then? I’d say you’ve got a real fake-lative in the hospital, that’s what you’ve got.”

Isabelle laughs at this. “Right. Although his relativity is kind of unreal, you get what I mean?”

“No,” responds Benedict, coughing and struggling to get the words out as he laughs along with her. “No that’s just it, I have no idea what you mean.“

They decide not to stop at the hospital. Benedict doesn’t want his grandson waiting too long with the horse. Certainly not in this unforgiving heat. He tries to recall if there was at least some shade where they had left Baldwin to wait. There was, wasn’t there? Baldwin’s mother will be furious if she finds out. But yes, he remembers now, there were fruit trees. Pears if he’s not mistaken. So not just shade but food if necessary. That’s good, really good.

Benedict says he’ll drop Isabelle off at the hospital on the way back, and Isabelle agrees to this. Although she’s struggling to remember why she needed to visit the hospital in the first place. Something to do with Martin. Everything comes back to Martin. But why a hospital? It was something important, she recalls. Time sensitive, maybe something criminal? An accident, that’s right. Blood and disease. But it wasn’t a real-ative. Fake like a dream. Except for the horse. The horse is a real-ative. The horse is all that matters to Isabelle now. The horse and the message she needs to pass on to its owner.

Isabelle has found a Stevie Ray Vaughan cassette in the Taurus’s glove compartment and now the few remaining cars around them are swaying along with his taffy-smooth guitar riffs. Benedict had said it would take less than 15 minutes to get to Phil’s place. But it feels like they’ve been driving for hours. How could that buckskin mare have travelled so far from home on its own?

When they finally stop, time has slipped away entirely. They’re not at Phil’s place, either. They’ve pulled into the leather and iron hues of Castlewood State Park, where Isabelle wants to fire one of the guns and Benedict is expostulating on the final scene of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

“The alien thing, the monolith is watching over him. Like he’s living in — what are those things called? Those shoeboxes with a scene in them?”

“Like a diorama?”

“Yeah, something like that.”

“Oh no,” says Isabelle, suddenly alarmed.

“What?”

“It just came to me.”

“What’s that?”

“That man in the future. The man with the goggles, the visor, the beautiful white embroidered robes.”

“Are we talking about Blade Runner now?”

“No. I had a vision. This man in the future. While you were talking about your time in Vietnam. This man is there, in Vietnam. I mean he’s there now, right now, but he’s living in the future.”

“What about him?”

“Something very bad just happened to him. His blood is smeared across a road. It drips into a bright green paddy field. Blindingly green, with limestone mountains punching up through the mist.”

Many years later, after her debut novel, Feverish Earth, is published, Isabelle will recall the day she and Benny first met. This day now, hot and dusty, sitting in the car smoking weed, talking about movies. Talking about the work of fiction she wanted to write and listening to music. But this is where her memory stalls. Over the years she would go on many such drives with Benny, visit many national parks, talk about many works of art. Which might explain why her memory of this particular encounter is so muddied.

She has some recollection of her and Benny driving around while searching for Camilla and Baldwin later that evening, that warm, midge-infested night. But she also remembers arriving home before her parents and Martin. “Finish your essay?” they would ask her. “Yes, changed my life. What did Dr. Mukherjee say?”

“Oh your brother’s gonna be fine, don’t you worry about that.”

So the timing is wrong. It doesn’t make sense.

One day, while sitting on a bench in New York’s Central Park, Isabelle will concentrate very hard and try to piece together the exact timeline of that first day with Benny. The early details come easy: The blood on the street. Radiohead. The scrawny Faber boy. The dust and shadows and warm pine-scent of Castlewood.

Did they kiss, she will wonder? Did they do more than kiss?

She will remember how comfortable she always felt around Benny, right from the start. Although she never fully loved him. Or did she? No, probably not. In fact, she might have even loathed him. But she always felt pleasure in touching him. She would explore his body one part at a time, an ornate ear, a piece of his torso, a single foot, like the remains of an ancient statue. One of the Greek gods, or those middle aged generals raging against the world with blind eyes.

She felt the rich sensuality of a life fully experienced. His life. The Vietnam war, the shame of so much death. All those movies and books. The butterflies he had collected during his travels across America. The hours and hours practicing the banjo, or spent writing poetry and philosophy, or raising two children into adulthood. The first time he met his grandson. So much beauty, yet with an equal amount of futility. The power of just surviving so many experiences. He was fearsome and full of anguish, yet always so gentle, so receptive.

He also loved her, she knew, more than he’d loved anything before.

But on that first day? In the car at Castlewood?

She knew only this: It was both the moment their affair had begun and the moment the old lovestruck bard, Greylaw, in Feverish Earth, began to take shape in her mind.

There on the bench in Central Park, she will open her wallet and take out Camilla’s note. The note she had kept in the roll-top desk her father had made for her. A special pigeon hole dedicated entirely to that note. Kept it for many years.

Teach me music, teach me joy.

— — — — -

“Ronny, I want you to meet Sam,” says Paul Madera. Paul was the man who had called Sam that night at the sculpture garden, just moments after the earthquake. He recently turned 50 and his eyebrows are little steamboats tossing about on the wrinkles of his forehead. He speaks in a deep, empathetic voice. “We’re entering a new age of interconnectivity, and Sam is the guy who’s gonna take us there.”

“In the future,” says Sam, “we won’t think of our position in time and space as we think of it now.”

“That’s right,” says Paul.

“Tempo,” says Ron Conway. “Tempus, temper. Balance. Koyaanisqatsi — ever see it? Crazy time, yeah? Life out of balance. Philip Glass, fucking brilliant. Pitch me what you got, Sam.”

“Ok, well, in the future we can be anywhere in the world,” says Sam, repeating the same pitch points he’s used throughout the day. “Havana. Honolulu. Hanoi. It won’t matter. We’ll still be in touch with friends and family through our mobile phones. Location-based networking. This is the future I’m excited about. This is the future we’re helping create with my company, Loopt.”

Ron is a man with money. Not the Paul kind of money. Paul is older, a roll of fat around the midriff. Paul will lure you into lengthy transactions, multiple meetings, countless pages of documentation. Ron on the other hand is tight-shirted, tight-skinned, short black hair, some East Asian ancestry settled over his face. Ron is just a couple beers and a hot tub before the cash is wired to your account the following morning.

“I’m not like you, Sam. I’m not interested in creating the future. But I can create your future.”

“As in your fortune,” resonates Paul. “Ron tells your fortune, then makes it for you.”

“How many monthly actives you got?” asks Ron.

“Nine thousand.”

“Growth?”

“Thirty percent.”

“Revenue?”

“Each Looptser is bringing in two friends. We get paid by the Telcos for growing their user-base.“

“Listen to me, Sam. I don’t come to these events just to see the pretty booth-boys and their swag hags, right? All these Gen-X journos, tech bloggers, that gang of code crunchers over there hoping to tickle some life into their lap-dance machines. God no, put one of them sicky-sticks down my deep throat please.”

Sam surveys the vast exhibit hall of Moscone Center West. Techcrunch50. Young, bright-eyed founders. Jovial, hoary old-timers. Corporate men on contracts. Upstart fund managers with business cards.

It’s 2009 and the recent tech bubble burst is, to Sam, just a hot splash of magma starting to crust over. New ground to terraform. To frolic upon. A place to set up a rope swing with “SA” carved into the seat. Caves to explore, fruit trees to grow. Sweltering, sure, but only for a little while. The cold magnificent night sky. Do they know that’s what they are, these convention goers? Elements of molten rock? Heating, inflating, splattering, then cooling down like corpses?

He can feel his foot-sweat. His pulse is in the high 80s. His hand is clenching his water bottle.

“Here’s what’s going to happen, Sam,” says Ron. “Your sticky dream is gonna dry up in your pyjama bottoms. Be sure of it. Ka-shits-kabab-kaboomy. All those red lobsters — “

“Loopsters,” bassifies Paul.

“ — you’re going to sell them as fast as you can. The whole deep-sea haul. Drop it on a bigger boat.”

It’s an image that will appear in Sam’s dream that night, as he sleeps beside his lover. Pale, freckled, unsheathed Nick. A flying ship, a sky-trawler, dragging its net across the earth. An enormous cache of people lifted off the ground, screaming out their talking points, slowly being lowered into a spewing caldera, larger and hotter than anything known in the dark and shrieking cosmos.

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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.