“Come Na-na, just a bit further. Here, Baba can pick you up.” Baba pulls me forward by my arm and puts both hands under my armpits and lifts me up onto her shoulders. Tur stumbles on my shoulder as I am lifted, but he grabs onto my shirt and doesn’t fall off. I wrap my arms around Baba’s forehead and rest my cheek on her bun. She grabs onto my shins and continues up.

I am six years old, and I am on Baba’s shoulders because I am too tired after climbing half the way up the world. Today is the first time she takes me to her wishing well.

“There! Na-na look! That’s Lake Crane, and that—” she takes a hand off my shin and points down the mountain to a small wooden home with a sputtering chimney “—is Le Lounge Levitt.

“And there, dear, is our well.” She takes me from her shoulders and plants me to the ground and holds my hand. We walk to the well. It is gray cobblestone and rises almost to my shoulders. It is wide; the hole in the middle is maybe five feet in diameter. It is circled by a small ring of gravel and crowned with two metal forks that stick up from opposite sides and hold a wooden rod with a handle at one end that can be turned like a crank. In the middle of the rod hangs a large bucket attached by a thick coiling of rope. Baba rests one hand on the edge of the well and puts her other arm around my shoulder.

“Na-na. Have you decided yet what you want to wish for?”

I nod. “I want—”

“Wait! Let me guess! I know what it is!” She takes out a small square of paper and flattens it as much as you can flatten something against the cobblestone top of the well. She pulls a pen from the collection of pens that she always keeps in her pocket and writes something on the paper, folds it, and then passes it to Tur, though the paper is almost as big as he is. The little stone golem awkwardly clutches the folded paper to his chest. “What were you saying?”

“I want a bicycle!“

“Ah, but what color bicycle?”

“Red!” I shout.

She smiles. The way Baba always used to smile when I said just about anything at all. A smile like she knew what I was about to say but was excited to hear me say it anyway. “Tur, the paper? Can you read this, Na-na, like I’ve been showing you?” Tur offers me the paper and I take it in both hands and struggle to sound out the letters.

“Ruh, eh, duh… Red! Buh, ih, kuh… eh… Bik-eh? Bik-ee?”

“The E is silent,” she puts a finger to her lips.

“Bik… Bik… Red bik. Red bike!” My mouth opens wide. “A red bike! How did you know, Baba?”

She wiggles her finger on her lips. “That’s not even the magic part. Here, hand me the paper. And, do you have that quarter I gave you back at the house? Good.” She wraps the quarter in the paper and then hands it back to me. “Drop it in the well. Think about your bike when you do.”

I lean over the side. The well is deep. I can’t see the bottom. It is dark and black and nothing, not even light, can escape. I hold the quarter and the note over the well in a clenched fist and then release. It falls and falls and then disappears suddenly maybe thirty feet down. I do not hear a splash. Baba unhooks a clasp on the rod that holds the bucket and it, too, falls and then disappears into blackness without a splash, caught by a taut rope.

“Perfect. Let’s go back down. It’s almost time for lunch.”

“What about my bike?”

“Come, now, Na-na. Always wait for things worth waiting for.”

The walk down Baba’s mountain is faster than the way up. I do not need her to carry me.

Then it is the next morning, and we are back at the well.

“Go on, try to pull up the bucket,” she says. I grab the handle and try to turn it but it doesn’t turn. It is the heaviest thing. Baba puts her hand next to mine on the crank and it turns. Baba is so strong. I let go and put both hands on the edge of the well and peer over. I see the bucket. And I see, laid across the top, a red bicycle.

“Baba! My bike!” She pulls it level with the edge of the well and latches the crank in place. Then she leans over and takes the bike and puts it down in front of me.

“Happy birthday, Anna. You’ve gotten so big this year—” her smile, again “—I can’t even believe it! Na-na is so big! This bike is just half of your gift. The other half—” she pats the well “—this is my wishing well. Your Baba wants to give you the world, while she still can, and this is how I will do it. One wish, every time you come visit, got it?”

I nod. I wish that I run over and hug her and say thank you for giving me a magic well that contained the whole world and almost everything I could ever want but I don’t and instead she hugs me first and I hug her back and bury my face in her dress and it smells like Baba and I say nothing. I look up and she smiles.

“Happy birthday, dear.” The cake is made of ice cream and has eight blue and white spiraled candles. I am at the head of the table and Baba places the cake right in front of me. Dad sits to the left, one arm on my shoulder. Tur and Erwin play by the fireplace. The little golem circles around Baba’s gray tabby, dodging pounces and teasing her with surprising nimbleness.

“Ben, can you grab a picture?”

“Oh, right, of course.” Dad stands up and takes out his phone. Baba bends down and wraps an arm around my shoulder. “Anna, smile!” I give a big smile that’s missing a couple teeth and they sing happy birthday and I blow out the candles and we all eat cake.

“Mom, like I was saying before, the folks down at the garage want you there desperately. Admin, too. Director Stone’s willing to send a plane first thing tomorrow and if you get on it you’ll just make the jump. It would make everyone’s day.”

“Nonsense! Na-na still needs to make her birthday wish, and then we need to collect it. Ben, tell Ed I’ll come tomorrow night.”

“You’ll miss the jump! Mom, you know how much this means to all of them.”

“I said: nonsense.” She gives me a little squeeze on my arm. “I’ve got other plans that take priority. Ed and his team will have plenty to focus on tomorrow without me there, and I’ll stop by after.”

Dad closes his eyes and shakes his head and smiles. “Right. Of course. I’ll let them know. They’ll understand.” He laughs and stares at Baba for a quiet moment. “Only you, Mom.”

After cake we hike up to the well. The sun is low and it is cool, and the sky is spilled orange juice bleeding into paper towel clouds. I am older now, and the mountain is quickly shrinking to the size of a hill, but Baba still insists on taking me the last bit of the way up on her shoulders. She is in her sixties, but she is still an unstoppable and wild force.

It helps that Baba lives in a low-gravity part of Oregon. Her joints age more slowly, and I weigh half my age.

Most of you know Barbara Levitt, of course, for the Levitt-Winger Jump Drive. As if that were her only, or even her greatest, trick.

I know her for the lifetime she spent creating magic for her granddaughter.

That year I get a chocolate bar that never runs out of squares.

Erwin is dead when I next visit. I do not know until I arrive. Tur notices first. He jumps out of my pocket as soon as we walk inside and runs to her perch by the kitchen window. His face is a single smooth pebble, but he still looks downcast. Maybe it’s the way he slouches on the brick in front of the fireplace that night when we take our tea. Baba is too happy to see me to be sad about Erwin, but something is missing all the same.

“It’s been so long Na-na! Almost a year, no?”

“It’s been two years, Baba! And can you please call me Anna? Na-na was my baby name.” I am ten and this is my first time visiting Baba on my own. Dad is overseas, at a conference, and I am too grown up for baby names.

“Ah, right, that long? And, hey! You are still my little baby,” she reaches over and bops my nose and I let her. “Oh look at that—” she glances over to the coffee table “—one cookie left. How about we settle it with a game of sticks?”

I smile and nod. Baba wins, though, and she eats the cookie. “You know, I would probably have let Na-na have the last one anyway, but Anna is too grown up to be allowed to win every game.”

“Maybe I can be Na-na when I’m visiting,” I say, thinking about cookies and row boat rides on the lake and bedtime stories.

“Ah! I knew it! I guess that means I need to go get some more cookies. One second, dear.” She stands up. “But we should pack these to go. You are getting bigger. I think you are old enough to head up to the well at night. Did you decide what you wanted to wish for?”

“I think so.”

It is dark outside and a little scary, and I hold Baba’s hand as we climb up the trail. Tur patrols around us as we walk. The little golem is holding a toothpick like a spear, and it is enough to keep us safe. Most forest creatures are scared away by the gravitational anomalies here, anyway. Except for squirrels and hummingbirds and bluejays and a couple kinds of spiders. I think I see Tur scare off one of those.

When we get to the top, the trees clear suddenly and the sky opens up. I feel dizzy. I remember one time, a year before, I was at a wedding in New York City and I had been allowed to drink so much soda that my stomach hurt, and from the rooftop I could see, across the river, a million lights, drowning out the night sky. This is like that, but upside down. The forest rolls out darkness for miles around us and above there are so many stars. The moon is one quarter full and very low, and on the other side of the sky I can see the broad stroke of the Milky Way. Every so often bright lights zip across the stars. I have never seen the sky so alive, and I feel something in my head not unlike the fizz of Coca-Cola.

“I need to teach you the constellations, next, Na-na… Ah but not tonight. Oh, but look! You see that?” Baba points due south, a little above the horizon. “It’s Scorpio, jutting out from the main belt of the galaxy. Oh oh!—” she keeps pointing. She swears it looks like a scorpion, but I am lost in the stars and can’t tell what she is pointing at. I nod and pretend I see it, of course, because Baba is brilliant and I want to be brilliant, too. “And you can’t see it from here but in his tail, right at the tip of his pincer, is Gliese 667! And that’s where 667Cc is. It’s a small rocky planet only a little bigger than Earth, but it’s almost four times heavier! Baba wouldn’t be able to pick you up, there—” she laughs from deep in her stomach “—it’s a warm eighty-four degrees, and there are three suns in the sky! Can you imagine that, Na-na? Three suns!

“It’s twenty-three lightyears away. And there are people there! They live in caves underground, right now, but there are robots hard at work building cities beneath big glass domes in giant canyons. And they left our solar system just a year ago, the day after your eighth birthday…”

“I’m ten, Baba! That was two years ago.”

“Right! Two years ago! Can you imagine visiting? Needing to wear the special suspensors that help you stand up in four-times gravity and getting to watch three separate sunrises every morning?” I imagine stepping out onto the balcony of a canyon city and looking up into the sky and seeing the walls of the canyon climbing up and above it a bright clear day and three suns, and I imagine one of them is yellow and like Earth’s and another is red and the third is bright purple.

We make the wish. This time I ask to write it down and I do. Baba shines the flashlight from her phone down at the paper so I can see it in the dark, but I tell her to look away so she can’t see what I’m wishing for.

Before we leave, she takes some time to show me the constellations. This time I pay more close attention. I learn what Virgo looks like, partly covered by the moon, and we make up a story about Ursa Minor, floating playfully on his back to the north above his mother Major.

The next day we return. There is only one sun in the sky and no scorpions or bears, and Baba is very happy. “Tur,” she says, turning back as we enter the clearing with the well, “You are going to love this one.” She is right, but I am not sure how she knows, since I never showed her what I wished for. We pull up the bucket (I am helpful this time) and a gray tabby cat jumps out. Tur jumps off my shoulder and onto the edge of the well. The cat pounces and Tur dodges and they spar and within a few minutes she stops and bends down and nuzzles Tur, and the golem puts his arms wide and hugs her face.

“Woah!” I say, “She looks just like Erwin, doesn’t she!”

Baba smiles and picks up the kitten. “What do you want to call her, dear?”

“Erwin the second!” I say. Baba smiles and says it is a wonderful name. When Dad comes to pick me up we decide it’s best if Erwin II stays at Baba’s to keep her company, and that I’ll come back to visit soon.

When I visit again, Erwin II is fully grown. She is just as sweet a cat as Erwin was, and is fast friends with Tur. Dad comes this time, and we bring Baba’s favorite chocolate danishes from a small bakery in Pasadena. She makes ricotta stuffed shells for dinner and they’re not as good as I remember, but the danishes are even better. We wash down dessert with tall glasses of milk, and I ask if we can go up to the well so I can show her all the constellations I learned from my space book and make my wish.

“Ah, Na-na,” Baba looks pale and more wrinkled than usual, “I am so sorry to break a promise, but we cannot make a wish tonight. Tomorrow morning, I promise, and then I can go up on Tuesday and get your telescope and send it right along priority mail for you!”

I am not surprised she knew what I was wishing for, but I am visibly disappointed.

“I’m sorry, dear, Baba just isn’t up for the hike right now. Ah… Let me go upstairs and get something. Ben can you go get the picnic blanket from the pantry and go set it up outside, Anna go help.”

She comes back with a heavy box which she places on the blanket out in the front yard. She opens it and takes out a large cylinder—a telescope tube—and its tripod, which she sets up on the dirt. She fiddles with the direction of the tube and then puts her eye to the telescope and adjusts it further. “Anna, come look!” She is beaming as she guides me to the eyepiece of the telescope.

I look through and see a bright quarter moon, the surface is marked with craters I never noticed before.

“Na-na, tell me, is that moon one quarter full or one quarter empty?”

“What do you mean, Baba?”

“Is that the first quarter or that last quarter? Is the moon growing or shrinking?”

“I don’t know?”

“It’s growing! We call it the waxing quarter. There was a new moon last week, on Friday, I think, or maybe Tuesday. I remember because Erwin and I were watching… Oh… Mm… That’s not the point, Na-na can I tell you a story about how we know the difference between waning—that’s when the moon is shrinking—and waxing? Keep watching the moon.

“The Hebrew calendar is based on the cycles of the moon. So in ancient times they needed to know when the new moon was so they knew when to start the new month. The ancient Israelites had a rule for this, to make sure they never messed it up. They asked the people to come to the temple once they had seen the waxing crescent moon—the first night after the new moon—so they could signal the start of the new month. But they needed to make sure what these people saw was actually a waxing moon, and not a waning moon. The rabbis didn’t want to accidentally start a new month too early! So what could they do?”

I thought for a moment, as a bright flash of some satellite crosses in front of the moon. “They could take a picture of the both the waxing and waning moon and show it to the people so they knew which one they saw.”

“Ah hah! Brilliant, as usual, my little starling! This is the same solution Rabbi Gamliel thought of, back in ancient times. Of course they didn’t have cameras, so he commissioned an artist to draw the phases of the moon as accurately as possible, in order that when witnesses came to the temple to testify about the new moon he could point at the diagram and ask ‘Did you see a form like this or like this?’ But that created another problem.

“You see, as the other rabbis pointed out, it is written in the Torah that ‘You shall not make with Me gods of silver, or gods of gold’ which was originally about the making of idols, and the rabbis argued that there was no more a ‘god of silver’ than the Moon itself, and so Rabbi Gamliel should be forbidden from having the diagrams. Rabbi Abaye responded to this by arguing that the Torah only prohibited exact copies. He quoted a passage that said people could own candelabras with five or six or eight candles, but not seven since that was the number of candles held by the candelabrum in the holy temple. Since one could not copy the form of the moon exactly, it was okay to make diagrams of it!”

I had expected a story about princesses slaying space dragons and not rabbis discussing candelabras—but Baba is so excited that the story takes on the excitement in her voice, and I imagine, looking through the eyepiece of the telescope, several old rabbis standing on the edge of a lunar crater, candlelit and arguing about drawings of the moon.

“The other rabbis, though, were still not satisfied. They pointed out that the Oral Laws forbid the fashioning of likenesses of human faces, as people were made in the image of God. That is, although you could not reproduce a person’s face exactly, the person’s face was made in the image of God, and so images of images of holy objects were forbidden, and so were Rabbi Gamliel’s drawings.

“At this point another rabbi steps in and accepts that fashioning images of the Moon is prohibited, but says Gamliel’s diagrams are allowed because he had a non-Jewish artist fashion them for him, and so no law was broken. To this, the rabbis respond that even possessing a forbidden image arouses suspicion of idol worship and is forbidden! Finally, Rabbi Gamliel, who has been quiet this whole time, speaks. He says that the Torah commands us to learn to understand it. Images are forbidden for the purpose of decoration, but these diagrams exist for the purpose of more fully understanding God. The law prohibits images of images of holy objects, but makes exception for the purpose of study and learning. The other rabbis are silenced by this argument. After a short while they agree. Study is the most holy thing, and insofar as Rabbi Gamliel’s diagrams are used to help them better understand creation, they are, themselves, holy.

“If you remember only one thing I say, Na-na, let it be that learning is holy.”

After the story Dad sends me to go brush my teeth and after I do I come back downstairs and notice him and Baba are still outside. Dad has his feet turned away from her and the house and is looking up at the stars. Baba seems hunched over and has one hand in a fist by her side. Her voice is thunderous when she speaks. “I will not leave this house. You know exactly why.” She seems angry, which she never was, and, confused, I go back inside and up to bed.

The next morning Baba wakes me up early and we watch the sun rise from the clearing by the well and I make my wish. Later that week the package comes and that summer right before school starts back up Dad takes me camping and we bring the telescope and point it up at space and he shows me where Neptune is. He says we have to come back early next year and he can show me Saturn which is Baba’s second favorite planet in our solar system. I ask what her favorite is and he says Earth and I ask why and he says it’s because I am on Earth. Then we pack up the telescope and put it back in the car and get into the tent and our sleeping bags and go to sleep.

I knock on the door, but Baba doesn’t answer.

It’s open. I enter. “Baba,” I take on a voice Dad reserves for chastising me, “you really ought to lock that door.” I furrow my brows and wag my finger, turning to find her.

She’s sitting in her chair, by the fireplace, which is unlit. The telescope is still half-assembled in the corner of the room, and Erwin sits in her lap. She stares at the fireplace, and if her eyes weren’t open and she weren’t petting Erwin, I would think she were asleep.

Tur hops off my shoulder and lands on the ground with a soft thud. Erwin notices and jumps to meet him. Baba turns and notices.

“Anna!” She brightens immediately, “You’re here! Erwin and I were just waiting for you.” She stands and has her normal energy and starts over to the kitchen, and I see foil wrapping next to the stove. Cookies, likely.

“Anna!” I smile, “Baba! When did you start calling me Anna?”

Baba pauses mid-cookie-fetching and strides over to meet me by the door. She wraps her arms around me in a tight bear-hug and lifts me a few inches off the ground. “You’re not a little girl anymore. My little Na-na has grown up into a beautiful woman, and… It seems even Baba, strong as an ox (or at least as strong as an old lady on the moon) won’t be able to lift her up much longer. Na-na,” she says, releasing me and looking into my eyes, “was a little girl I could carry. Anna, who I see now, can plenty-well carry herself.” She gets the cookies, checking the kettle on the stove. “It looks like I let this one boil off, the tea might be a few minutes late.”

I smile and take a seat on the couch. Erwin jumps up into my lap and I scratch under her chin and release a satisfied purr. “Can we go up to the well tonight? I’m super excited to get my wish.”

“Oh, what a great idea,” Baba says, bringing cookies over to the coffee table, “we can set it up tomorrow to watch Saturn!”

I look at her, frowning.

“This,” she pauses, “time is the telescope, right, dear?”

“Baba, I got a telescope last year, this year I want to wish for—”

“A phone!” She cuts me off, loudly.

“Right!” I smile. “The new Voxel. It, uh, comes out tomorrow… So I’ll be the first one to have it. Is that alright?”

“Anna,” Baba shakes her head and picks up Tur from his perch on the edge of the coffee table, holding him out to me, “I could’ve gotten you this new phone years ago.”

I grin, set Tur down on Erwin’s head—the two take off immediately around the room—and move to take a couple cookies.

I’m back a few months later. The door’s unlocked again—the start of a pattern—and I let myself in. Baba’s not there, and I call out to her while I make my way over to the kitchen to grab a Hershey Kiss from the bowl she keeps on the countertop. There’s a piece of letter paper next to a pen and a couple unwrapped Kisses. On it there are words.

A letter with the contents:

Dear Barb,

Strange how I can still find myself surprised sometimes. I guess not so strange, all things considered. I suppose I always knew when this would happen, but never quite how it’d feel. Blah, enough of that. There’s plenty more I need to tell you, and I don’t mean to cramp your hand too badly writing down our ramblings—

“Anna! Oh when did you get here? I hope I didn’t keep you waiting too long…” Baba walks in and I glance up from the letter. She looks at me and then at the table and a bit of heat rises to my ears and I quickly take a Kiss and walk over to give her a hug. If she notices I was reading her mail, she doesn’t act like it. She walks over to the table—had she always walked so slowly?—and folds the letter to take it away. I notice there’s a back-side to it, and though I can’t make out any words, I can see parts of large sprawling equations containing symbols I don’t recognize. Baba drops a quarter she’s been holding into the paper and continues folding it up small and then pockets it.

“Making a wish, Baba?”

She smiles, “You can’t be keeping all the magic to yourself, my little star.”

I lift the edges of my lips but don’t quite smile. That night we have stuffed shells and we go up the hill to the well to stargaze and Baba makes her wish and tells stories about when I was a toddler and she still worked at NASA. “The engineers originally called that part the LOL, for Life/Organic signature Listener, but then admin made them change it. They didn’t want the public thinking we were just fooling around on taxpayer money.” She’s talking about the Saturn mission. Some people get lost in their own stories, but not Baba. She seems the least lost when telling them.

I’ve heard this one before, multiple times, but I understand she is telling it more for herself than for me.

I ask her to tell me again about the Gliese colony and close my eyes imagining life in giant canyons underneath thick radiation proof glass and the heat of three suns, and I listen for that same heat in Baba’s voice.

The next day I go back up to the well to make my wish. Baba is too tired and stays back with Erwin. She doesn’t try to guess what I’m wishing for.

I ask for a piece of the sky, and it is wonderful.

Dad is not surprised that Baba has a golem, too. Rut is larger than Tur, who also doesn’t seem that surprised when the bigger golem takes my backpack from the trunk and carries it overhead inside and up to the guest bedroom.

Inside Baba has left cookies out, but I know they will be a little stale. I take out a gift we’d found in a gift shop at a museum in San Francisco a few months before. It’s covered in wrapping paper that was left over from Hanukkah.

“Baba. I found this and thought of you!”

She tears into the gift and takes it out. It’s a small replica of a space probe—a grey matte metal cube with four large antennae sticking out one side—suspended in a black donut shape with harsh geometric edges. She looks confused for a moment and then finds herself.

“Na-na, this is brilliant!” She takes the edge of the donut between two fingers and spins it on its primary axis—the whole thing is suspended by some magnet array above a glass rectangle base—and it lights up as it spins. “Do you know why they call this ring the LW drive?”

“It’s short for Levitt-Winger.” I smile, letting her talk.

“And do you know who Levitt is?”

“That’s you, Baba.”

“Right! But, do you know who Winger is?”

“That’s your mysterious collaborator, Baba. The one you worked with to figure out the HBST equations, who no one else has ever met.” Most people don’t think Winger ever existed. They think Baba made up the collaborator to seem more mysterious or maybe as some kind of joke. Regardless, the name stuck. When you invent light speed travel, you’re able to get away with a lot.

“People think I made her up”—the lights from the model LW drive reflect off her eyes—“but those people just don’t understand our math. I went to her wedding, you know… Beautiful thing.” She stares into the model.

“Mom.” Dad is by the kitchen counter, one hand on an old paper calendar. One of the thick ones that cover multiple years. “You have today circled as my birthday… That’s not for another few months.”

The model stops spinning and the lights die down.

“Ah, right. Dear.” She gives a weak smile and Erwin jumps up onto her lap. “Maybe you just don’t understand the math, either.”

Dad frowns. He’d made a hotel reservation for himself, but stays on the pull-out couch the next couple days instead. I wish for a silver chain—I don’t ask Baba to guess—and hang my piece of the sky on it. I think of silver linings.

I do not call as much as I should and when I do there is not much to talk about.

Instead I wait until I have a project for history class. I need to interview someone who lived through some important moment of history, so I call Baba.

She is still brilliant, then, talking about history. Telling stories about breaking physics and confounding Einstein and spaceships shooting across the stars. Usually, though…

Sometimes it seemed she was drifting into the past even faster than I was headed into the future. Alice would notice this later, too. At one point she said it was cruel that the universe could take a woman who understood time better than anyone else and rip away her sense of it so entirely.

Baba calls to wish me luck at school, and I’m surprised she remembers.

I study English in college. I think part of me couldn’t bear to be the same kind of mediocre as Dad, another generation of Levitt again eclipsed against Baba’s brilliance, and so I turn as far away from science as I can. That’s not totally true. I don’t turn away from Alice, who is studying aerospace engineering.

It’s summer break and Alice and I are spending a weekend at Baba’s cottage. At this point we’re still convinced we’re just friends which is, of course, absurd. We swim in the lake and hike in the mountains and one night we bring Baba’s old telescope up the hill to the well and see Saturn and stay up well past midnight until we can see Jupiter, too. I don’t tell her the well is magic, yet, but I do wish for a fancy new sketch pad and pack of colored pencils and give them to her as a gift.

Alice is a bit of an artist and more than a bit of a Baba fan (again: studying aerospace) and brings a drawing of hers as a thank you gift for letting us stay the weekend. It’s a wonderful sealed charcoal thing based off the story of the rabbis arguing about the moon. Three old bearded men are set, two against one, at the edge of a crater offset slightly to the side of a vast lunar landscape. Above them are stars and a large detailed earthrise poking out from the void. Two of the men are standing with furrowed brows and pointed gestures. One of them is shouting. They’re both hunched over a lone man, supposed to be Gamliel, with big round glasses and a kippah that seems to reflect the stars above. He’s sitting, legs hanging over the edge of the crater and arms out to his side. His head is turned up slightly and he has this light smile and pensive look in his eyes as he looks across the moon and into the universe beyond, and every time I see the picture I wonder what he’s thinking.

I’d already explained that Baba might not understand the gift, but Alice still insisted.

“I’ve been inspired by your work since I was 10,” she says, giving Baba the drawing.

Baba takes it and flattens it against the counter with her hands and scans it thoroughly, but there’s no real trace of recognition behind those thick grandma glasses.

“Ha ha. That’s so nice, dear.” She understands what she’s supposed to say, at least.

“How’ve you been, Baba?” I ask.

“Oh, you know. Same old, same old…” I smile with pursed lips, and Alice does a wonderful job of not seeming dejected. I’m almost convinced she’s not.

Rut brings out sandwiches. He’s grown quick and is almost my size. He swaps the drawing for lunch and brings it and a frame over to Tur who’s sitting on the coffee table and who soon sets out to carefully mount the picture into the frame. It’s hung up on the wall by the time Alice and I come back from a hike that night, though we’re not sure how the golems managed that without thumbs.

We make stuffed shells for dinner, using Baba’s old recipe. She is quiet while we eat.

I try again to start conversation but it dies in the air between us. I look at Baba. I know so much about her. Some I’d learned from her. Some from history class.  But in that moment she seems so small. There is an emptiness I just want to fill with my presence but do not know how to. In that moment, she clearly does not know me, and I, I think, do not know her.

I am not sure I ever did.

I turn and talk to Alice as Baba eats in silence.

The next morning we pack and prepare to head out. I give Baba a hug goodbye, and she notices the drawing on the wall, as if for the first time.

“Is that new, starlight?”

“Yeah, Baba. Alice made it for you.”

She walks up close to the frame. “What a beautiful drawing! It’s like that story I used to tell you, Na-na. Ha! Oh I love the craters and the earth hung in the darkness…” She brushes her thumb against the figure sitting on the edge of the crater. “Na-na, did you see Saturn? I think you can see Saturn tonight if you take the telescope.”

“Yeah, Baba, we did. A couple nights ago, and again last night. Thanks for the recommendation.” We hug again and then head out.

I can feel Alice glowing the whole way back to the airport.

I don’t think my behavior is uncommon.

I am afraid and uncomfortable and so I hide from her. I don’t know what else to do. I call every now and then, when Dad reminds me that I should, but the calls are brief and we don’t say much and I don’t think they do much for her, either.

That’s not true.

I know the calls could be important to her even if it doesn’t seem that way. Even if it seems like she might not recognize who I am. Even if she doesn’t remember our conversation after I hang up.

Golden is any mass, no matter how light, that pulls her towards this side of oblivion.

When I forget to call I realize that I was never as special as she thought I was. Certainly, I wasn’t worth all the doting. All the magic. For how highly she thought of me, I was certainly never as one of a kind as Barbara Levitt.

Still, I’m thankful to have been Baba’s singular mistake.

Dad visits a lot more than me in the years that follow. I am too swept up in the second half of college and a few extra years of grad school and then hustling around trying to find a foothold in the world of political data journalism. At one point I visit shortly after Erwin II dies, and the house feels so empty that I leave Tur—who I’ve outgrown—to stay with Rut and keep Baba company. Otherwise, Dad says she doesn’t ask after me too much. Alice doesn’t visit with me again until 6 years later.

That time it’s early June and the air is a particular kind of crisp warmth known only to the Pacific Northwest. We wake up early for a long hike and return exhausted. I’d forgotten how strangely the animals behave around this place’s gravity. We clean ourselves up and spend a long time making a big mess of Baba’s kitchen, all in the name of a homemade deep dish pizza dinner. Baba enjoys it, too, but she is clearly a bigger fan of the box brownie and gas station ice cream sundaes we have afterward which took a sixth of the time to make.

I help Baba to bed, and then Alice and I savor the strange gravity of this place that allows us to ignore our newly added pounds of carbs as we walk up to the well. We talk about time and make plans to move to the black hole at the center of the galaxy so that it won’t pass so fast. We wish for two perfect dresses and a stack of wedding invitations for Anna and Alice Levitt-Winger. We sit on the edge of the well for a long time making brunch plans for the day after the heat death of the universe.

I am certain now that Alice Winger is the collaborator Baba named in her early papers. In this way, she hid, in her greatest scientific accomplishment, yet another gift for me.

Baba was wrong, though. She does not come to the wedding. She remains remarkably sturdy, but we decide maneuvering her through airports and hotel stays would be too confusing. Afterwards whenever we visit and she is lucid we show her photos and she is ecstatic. And each time she tells me to take Alice up to the well for a wedding gift. We visit more than usual in that last year. I think we can all feel her slipping quickly. There are fewer and fewer moments where she really seems present in more than the most mechanical sense.

I guess I’d expected her mind would just fade linearly until she forgot how to breathe, or something like that. I didn’t expect to see her soul go first. At some point her mind was still there, and she could operate (golem-assisted) day-to-day and moment-to-moment, but the gray matter that acted was like an impression around a core that had already faded. She would smile and laugh and make the same jokes she’d always made. But this layer was paper-thin, and you’d know from the way her eyes stayed dull and her speech faltered into confusion if you tried to dig any deeper than surface level that Baba, the unstoppable force, was gone.

Alice compared it to falling into a black hole.

When something falls past the event horizon, outside observers see it stop moving. You can’t see something fall further than that because the event horizon is, by definition, the point past which light cannot escape. Instead the object just freezes on that precipice to infinity and slowly fades to black.

She dies in July.

There is a small funeral and then a large public memorial service where Alice recognizes more people than I do. It’s strange how isolated Baba kept me from her science stardom, and that gap between her two lives is more apparent than ever in the days following her death.

I give a short eulogy at the funeral. It focuses on how I always pretended Baba’s cookies were better than they actually tasted and how she’d lift me up onto her shoulders when I got tired during hikes until we were both well past the age where she ought to be doing that and how she taught me to look up at the sky and wonder. Her New York Times obituary, of course, includes none of that, focusing instead on how “she was the paragon of her field, a woman of unbridled talent and brilliance whose contribution to science has enabled Man to reach into the deepest depths of the heavens themselves.” Amidst the lingering memories of the last few years, this view of her life feels so sterile. As if everything that actually mattered about Baba was shoved into the final sentence: “Dr. Levitt is survived by her son, Ben of Los Angeles, and grandchild, Anna.”

I can’t imagine a model of the universe in which Baba does not revolve around me.

We bury her by the house in a plot next to where Dad and Baba had buried her husband Abraham before I was born. Baba had planted an oak tree in place of a headstone for grandpa and so Dad and I wish for an acorn and plant it above her grave, too. At Dad’s insistence, we still leave a modest plaque with her name and years, and at my insistence we leave a simple engraving of Saturn in place of an epitaph, which Baba would’ve had no patience for. She always preferred to take whatever spotlight shined on her and point it towards illuminating the universe, instead.

That night Dad and I dust off the telescope and watch the sky from Baba’s yard. The moon is in waxing gibbous and Saturn is visible inside Capricorn.

Baba leaves me the house, and Alice and I get away to it often. I feel bad that sometimes, in the late summer months when the weather is perfect, we visit more frequently than we did when she was alive. We hike and kayak and find some mountain biking trails where the gravity is especially light and I’m not so afraid of falling face first over my front wheel. We makes wishes, often, and sometimes frivolously. I wish for diamond earrings that contain galaxies as a gift for Alice one night, and then the next night I wish for proofed pizza dough because we forgot to make some early enough to give it time to rise. Sometimes we drive up and immediately drop our grocery list in the well in order to avoid a shopping trip the following morning.

I open my eyes and am immediately startled. Rut is standing over the bed, quiet as clay, waiting.

“What the fuck, Rut?”

The golem straightens up and taps me on the forehead and then motions with the same hand out towards the door.

“Can’t this wait?”

He taps me on the forehead again and motions towards the door with more urgency.

I roll out of bed, Alice is starting to wake but is still groggy. Rut leads me towards the kitchen where there’s a large cardboard storage box on the counter. I lift the lid and find… Stacks and stacks of paper calendars? Some are the thick multi-year kind, and others are just normal ones you could get at any stationary store. Some are themed; as I skim through I notice a Disney one and another with a bunch of rockets. They’re all old. The paper is starting to turn brittle. Each has two years on the front, but the numbers don’t make sense. One is labeled 2028 (~2020), another 2041 (~2006). I pick up 2037 (~2011)—it’s National Geographic themed, with pictures of snow leopards and other animals atop each month—and skim through. May 20 — A brand new Voxel 10 phone. I look through the earlier calendars and find similar notes.

July 20, 2034 — Gray tabby kitten.

May 17, 2030 — Red bike.

May 18, 2024 — A living golem to protect her.

May 17, 2024 is my birthday and is starred numerous times in red ink.

July 29, 2036 just has a single word ABE written on it.

I skim ahead to later dates and my knees buckle.

June 10, 2050 — 2 wedding dresses, 1 stack wedding invitations for “Anna, Alice Levitt-Winger”

Baba was barely lucid that time, and she’d never seen us collect the dresses.

April 18, 2054 — Proofed pizza dough.

Baba was dead then.

April 28, 2056 — 1 Pint Ben and Jerry’s Half Baked Ice Cream.

That was yesterday.

April 29, 2056 — The letter.

And then nothing else. The rest of 2056 is empty—I check once I see today’s date filled in—and there are no calendars for any year after.

“What the heck is this, Rut? Have you been writing down all my wishes? What is the letter?”

Rut puts another piece of paper on the counter. I flatten it out and start to read.

A letter with the contents:

Dear Barb,

You were right to be drawn back here. That tugging at your mind, that gravity you feel, is real and you will spend years in the orbit of this place. To be young and so full of potential… I wish I could go on that journey again, but it suffices for me to know what’s ahead for you.

The well is, like you suspect, a well-contained infinite energy potential singularity. The implication, to borrow the pun from your mind, is massive. Yes, dear: If you study it further you will find achievable negative mass solutions to the field equations. Obviously we need a certain amount of discretion here—you’re already realizing what a cluster-fuck this could turn into if Ed finds out what’s here and the government gets involved. This can get us to the stars! We need to make sure it isn’t used to just blow us all up instead. You won’t be totally alone. I’ll send back a couple more letters with some useful math at the appropriate times, and Abe will have fantastic insights, as usual. You’ll crack this.

There’s one other thing.

The well punches a twisted hole through spacetime. Time is reversed on either side, as if the timeline is a piece of string flowing forward until it loops around some date in your future/my past and then flows back into our future. The well acts as a tunnel between adjacent sections of the string. Right now it’s 1992 for you, but for me, on the far side of the string, it’s 2056. Your tomorrow is my yesterday when viewed from the perspective of the singularity. That’s going to be incredibly important for mathematic reasons you’ll realize soon, but the immediate implication is this: In order to maintain a consistent timeline and a connection through the well, we need to establish a protocol. It works like this.

Every day, you’ll check the well. If you find something in the bucket, you will describe what you find on a piece of paper and then the following day you will fold the paper around a quarter and drop it into the well. From your perspective, you’re cataloguing the well’s past gifts, but from my perspective I’m wishing for future ones. Time is reversed on either side of the singularity. The gifts we take out of the well are the same, and the notes we drop in are also the same. The difference is the direction they’re traveling through time.

That includes this letter. Get a piece of paper and write “A letter with the contents: Dear Barb, …” and so on and drop it in the well tomorrow. That’ll have been my yesterday and the paper you drop will be the same one I dropped then.

As long as you only drop notes into the well describing what you take out of it and as long as you never miss a day, then we’ll maintain entangled causality. Because you take gifts from the well and write them down the day after, we guarantee that every time I send a note into the well, the following day I will get out what I wrote down.

You’re wondering why you need a coin. It’s because I include coins with all my notes, so yours must have them too.

I don’t want to spoil too much, dear, but there’s one thing I’ll tell you now. You’re a grandmother. Her name is Anna and she is the most wonderful light in the entire universe.

That’s the other reason you need to check the well every day. You remember the story Mom would tell us about the boy and the magic well. This one is real. And as long as we stick to these rules we can make a magic well for our granddaughter. We can give her the universe! To her, it’ll be like magic.

And, trust me, that magic is going to be far more important than any damn warp drive.

I don’t know yet why the date of origin—the crease in time where past meets future—is the day she is born. But, seeing Anna now… Holding her… It makes sense somehow that this would all revolve around her. I know you’ll understand.

With love, always,

Barbara Levitt

I look at Rut, squinting. He takes a coin and places it on the letter.

He leans in to hug me and hold me up as my legs give way and pats my back as I whimper weakly.

Baba’s life plays out in reverse in my head.

The day before I am born she finds Rut in the well—on my birthday she wishes for a golem and the next day she finds Tur, both of them having sprung from the well, in a way at the same time, but in reverse.

Six years before she finds a little red bicycle. She writes it down in her calendars so that when I turn six she can guess my first wish. Two years back, when I turn eight, it’s the same thing with a chocolate bar that never runs out of squares. I realize why later, even when she’d forget to buy flour or eggs or sugar, she never had trouble finding chocolate chips for her cookies.

I see Erwin living two lives on either side of the timeline.

There is one day when she does not check the well for wishes. It’s the day Abe dies, and she, for the first time, truly understands what it means to have negative energy. She marks this, too, in a calendar, and on that day in the future, in lieu of a wish, I get a story about several rabbis and the moon.

I wonder what she does with a smart phone decades before it’s released.

I imagine her surprise, and her delight, when she finds two wedding dresses in the well.

And I imagine the loneliness she feels in the long stretches of time when I don’t visit and the well runs empty every day.

One day she gets a single acorn. She will not know for sure what this means until years later when she buries her husband and plants the same acorn above his grave, but still she calculates the dates and assumes, in that moment, that she knows when she will die.

Even after Baba dies, the younger Barb continues to check the well and fulfill my wishes. Pizza dough and ice cream and earrings that contain galaxies. One day, before all that, she finds a letter that explains it all.

Before that she and Abe are drawn to a well in a part of Oregon with strange gravity and they buy a plot of land nearby and build a house and settle down and start a family.

The well taught her the secrets of the universe and she used those secrets to send men across space to distant stars and gifts across time to her granddaughter.

I bring the letter to the well. I look at the quarter Rut/Tur had handed me and notice it has no year on it. I fold the letter around it and drop it in.

I do not try to make any wishes after that.

Still… Sometimes I walk up there, anyway. I lean over the edge and stare down into the darkness. I try to glimpse beyond the singularity, knowing somewhere beyond the veil is a young Baba, determined, discovering this place and its secrets, a whole journey laid ahead of her. A whole life. And I miss her.

"Follow Six, and she'll take you straight to The Grove. If you lose sight of her you won't find her again, and then we'll have to come find your popsicle ass and ship you back up in a casket," warned the man who rented you the hoverbike at Port Town. "Actually," he added, "we probably wouldn't waste time looking." You remember he winked and that there was a glint in his eye that reminded you of the "I am recording" indicator from old Neuroplast brain implants.

From within your suit you cannot feel the harsh hundred mile per hour Antarctic wind.

You notice strange ice formations on the metal casing of the tentacle where ice has melted and refrozen repeatedly. Thick snakes of cloudy white ice erupt from the piles of snow that crawl up the sides of the tentacle. Some of them leap above the snow for only ten or twenty meters before dropping back down, but others wrap around Six and fall down on the other side or branch into two, then four, then eight new tendrils. Here and there the entire tentacle is encased in these branching pathways. There are sharp streaks of clear ice along the snakes through which you can see the black metal of the tentacle, and they make a zebra pattern.

There are small spider-web streaks of blue ice, too, and you imagine tracing them with your finger. To your right are similar patterns—crossing layers of cloudy, clear, and blue ice—inside massive snowdrifts that rise a hundred feet into the air and are unnaturally thin. The locals call these fins, and you know they, as well as the ice formations on the tentacle, form as strong winds carry heat from The Grove in random, chaotic directions and melt and freeze the ice many times every day. You notice that you have begun to drift away from the tentacle and so you stop staring and readjust your heading. The fins mean that The Grove cannot be too far. You think you see it on the horizon, but you cannot judge the distance or if, perhaps, you are just imagining it.

The transition is sharp. The snow ends about twenty feet out from the first server stack. About ten feet out, your Clima-Suit registers a temperature of 65 degrees Fahrenheit and mild wind speeds. The display reads, "Feels like 21st century San Francisco!" You've been to San Francisco before. When you were thirteen and on a family vacation. You remember taking a hoverbike tour of the hilly streets, and you remember hiking out onto the edge of the peninsula and seeing the bay and the Golden Gate bridge fading in and out as the Haze thickened and thinned with the wind. You remember declaring that you were going to grow up to build cities like that out in space.

You dismount the bike here, remove your suit, and continue on foot. At the edge of the stacks, Tentacle 6 connects to a data station and continues underground.

You immediately understand why it is called The Grove. The server stacks are unequally spaced and planted at odd angles to each other. They are not in the neat rows you had expected. Here, where even the permafrost has melted, green vines reach up from the dirt and wrap themselves around the stacks. There are budding flowers. It feels hot and almost humid, like a rainforest. There is a gap in the stacks ahead of you that marks a path forward.

You double-tap on your left temple and feel a hallucinated mechanical click as your Neuroplast takes a snapshot off your optic nerve. A notification in the upper-right corner of your vision reads, "Upload Failed. No Connection." You glance backwards at the stark contrast between the temperate Grove and the extreme Antarctic tundra. You know Tentacle 6—like all eight tentacles—carries exabytes of data out of here every second. And yet in this place, which is—in some ways—the very heart of the Net, you are entirely disconnected from it.

You see, in the vines, small blinking red and green and white lights, and you hear a deep and constant mechanical hum. It feels like it is over 90 degrees, here. You know this data center pulls a solid five basis points of all the energy that humanity harvests from the sun each year, and you can feel the radiant heat of all that power as you sweat and your clothes stick to your skin. You notice translucent blue tubes carrying water in and out of servers. It is shocking that the frigid air of the wasteland is insufficient to cool all of the compute here, and that we must use its snow—melted and cycled in these tubes—as well.

As you walk you step over black rubber cables, tubing, and brown twisted roots. The Grove envelops you in a twisted maze, and when you turn around you can no longer see the tundra. You are not afraid. You know The Great Data Forest is only about 300 meters on each side, and you are certain you will be able to find your bike later.

You are deep enough now that you begin to see the monks of the forest. They are pilgrims, like you, who have been so absorbed by the magic of the forest that they decide to never leave. They are frozen, like statues, and do not acknowledge you. Some are standing, but most kneel towards server stacks with heads turned down and eyes closed. They rest their hands gently on the machines and wrap their fingers around the cables coming out of them. The vines of the forest wrap themselves around the monks, and they, too, seem like trees. They, too, seem to vibrate with the hum that permeates the rest of the forest. You bend down near one of them. She is a young woman. She has dark brown curls and freckles. She reminds you of yourself. You wonder what knowledge can be so potent that someone like her—like you—would abandon their life to stay in this place. To become a part of this place. You wonder how the monks are fed.

You remember the monastery that you spent a summer at with Ezra, after a disheartening sophomore year in your civil engineering program. You both needed an escape, and didn't have internships, and Ezra suggested the monastery. It was some neo-Buddhist thing, based in a non-centrifugal space station in geopolar orbit. You spent the summer meditating weightlessly in copulas as the Earth's coasts drifted by underneath you. You remember most of all how flavorless the food was. Ezra lasted three weeks, before they decided the experience was a waste of time. You lasted the full summer, and though you'd never admit it, they were probably right. You were not cut out to be a monk.

You remember it took a few weeks to regain your g-legs once you left.

The presence of monks means that you are close enough to the core to establish a link, but you continue deeper. Your internet searches suggested that first-timers do better to connect as close to the core as they can.

You are afraid but continue because you seek truth. You remember the advertisement that finally convinced you to come here. It was simple text projected against the darkness of your closed eyelids as you scrolled through your feed late one night.

"LOST? YOU ALREADY KNOW WHERE TO GO."

You'd watched enough content about pilgrimages recently to immediately make the connection, and when you focused on the words the ad expanded into a travel itinerary that included each leg of transportation and food and hotels, all at Kessler Corp-guaranteed best prices. You bookmarked it and purchased the package that morning.

You suspect the other pilgrims came with specific questions. You did not. You came to The Grove because all your life you have felt like you have been putting up scaffolding with no plans for permanent construction and because you do not understand how you fit into the broader world. You do not have specific questions, because you are still seeking questions worth asking. You simply wish to understand this world, for you feel that, in the present century, it has become much too complex to understand. Traveling half the solar system to get here, you are insecure that you have travelled more than most and with less to ask.

Do not worry, dear. You are not so special. Most other pilgrims come feeling much the same.

The core does not appear particularly special in any way, but you know that you have arrived. It is a wide clearing. In the center is a stack almost indistinguishable from the rest except for three large radio antennae that stick out at angles from the topmost server rack. Many data cables feed into the core and wrap around it. There are no monks here, though you can see some in the distance. There are no natural vines around the central stack, either.

You feel a light breeze, and you wonder if the stacks are laid out randomly or if they are oriented purposefully for maximal airflow. Back home, out in a small Collective orbiting Saturn, you design the ventilation systems that enable millions of people to live and breathe on each of the massive space stations that most humans call home. It is a far cry from building New Space San Francisco, but it is important work. You do not know why you do not feel important.

You take a seat on the ground and look at the mass of cables and antennae and blinking lights. After a moment you close your eyes and put your fingers to both temples and turn on pairing. You meditate like this and wait for something to happen.

The Grove is an artificial intelligence. Pilgrims connect to it through their Neuroplasts and attempt to make meaning from its data streams. Popular culture assumed the superintelligence would have a command prompt, and that it might function like an early internet chatbot or voice assistant. But The Grove cannot be interrogated in the same way a person can.

You do not know why you thought a superintelligence would be like a person.

It makes more sense that it would think like a forest. Surrounded by server stacks wrapped in vines, you experience this sudden moment of clarity. In your mind, you see trees intaking data like nutrients from the soil, using the energy of the sun to transform it into lower entropy information. Sending that information along channels like how trees in a forest send messages to each other through root networks. It makes sense that artificial thought would be structured more like this than like a human brain. I agree. Forest networks, like the Amazon back in its prime, can grow to span a continent, but brains never seem to get more complicated than what can fit in a single skull. Trees are easily composed, much like early internet software systems from back when humans still wrote code. It is unsurprising a superintelligence should think more like a forest than like you.

Still, it is unnerving. It is hard to comprehend an intelligence so unlike your own.

Pilgrims have a difficult time online explaining their experiences. The experience of connecting with The Grove is incompatible with ordinary human thought patterns, but it's those same thought patterns that designed human language, and so it is only natural that connecting with The Grove should be so indescribable.

You meditate for a long time, and nothing happens. You open your eyes. You think it ought to be getting late but know the sun won't go down here for another couple months. You feel your clothes sticking to your sweaty skin, and you hear the hum of The Grove. It seems to rhythmically vary in intensity—to beat—but not like a heartbeat. It is more primal than that. Like wind through an empty city or like the occasional spurts of a geyser. Most of all it is like the way distant stars vary in brightness as their planets pass in front of them.

You know this because your mom was an astronomer. You remember sometimes she would take you outside on spacewalks. You were a small child, and the suits that the university had available were always one or two sizes too big and you were always tethered to her, but the temperature regulation worked fine anyway and so you did not feel hot or cold and there was enough slack in the tether that you felt like you were floating out there on your own. You would stare out at the stars and listen to her point out planets or constellations or distant nebulae.

"We used to think the stars twinkled." Her voice crackled over the suit radio. "It turned out the twinkling was caused by the refraction of their light through our turbulent atmosphere. Up here we can see the stars as they actually are." She paused. You thought maybe she was going to explain again how if we ever got far enough away from the Sun the constellations would morph and change shape.

"Except, they still do twinkle, kind of." She explained how we tracked the brightness of the stars over time with our telescopes and how, from how much they changed and how often, we could calculate the sizes and orbits of a star's planets.

You remember the feeling of floating weightlessly under a blanket of lights, and of a rhythmic hum—like the Grove's—in the gentle, invisible pulsing of stars. Separated by the vacuum of space, in a carefully temperature-regulated suit, you could not feel your mother's warmth, even though she was so close. Then, as now, you felt a certain presence, anyway.

A brief moment passes, and then you feel the data.

Data stream is an understatement. You feel a typhoon inside your skull.

Entire petabytes pass through you each moment, and you cannot comprehend it. If you focus, you can see small fleeting fragments of information. A waveform that sounds like a sigh. A feeling like Perlin noise. The smell of lilacs. But they skim past faster than the Antarctic wind and you do not have the storage capacity to keep even a small part of the data inside your head for very long. Your brain is unable to find any patterns and you sense nothing except vibrant noise. Your vision begins to fade as you turn all sensory processing power inwards. Sound leaves you next, followed by smell and then taste. Feel is the last sensation to go, and you become nothing except data. You allow your Neuroplast to work with your subconscious to find meaning in the torrent of bytes. You have done this before. To make sense of turbulent airflow through the millions of miles of vents in an ordinary space station, you must crunch through massive amounts of data, and you have long since learned how to give yourself over to the flow of information. But this is larger than that by several orders of magnitude. You feel your head heating up and sense consciousness slipping away.

The world flashes white. The patterns are incoherent images against your optic nerve, at first. The New York City skyline, except the sky is upside down. A satellite in geostationary orbit above the Earth as the stars and the Sun spin around and around. A passenger airliner flies across the Pacific and in each seat, though you cannot see them, are piles of hard drives. A fly is about to enter a window, suspended in a sunbeam. The images begin to cohere, and you sense greater meaning in the story I am trying to tell.

You see the first computer turning on. You see every rocket ever launched. You see your trip here, and you see your trip home. You look at yourself and feel nauseous. You see the first humans leaving Africa and the last humans evacuating Earth. At once, you see the entire World. You understand, immediately, the whole of history and the entirety of the future.

From this vantage, the world does not seem so complex after all.

In the future you see glorious brightness, and you see the dark stains necessary to achieve our dreams. There will be death today, you understand, and tomorrow the world should be as we have always wanted. A utopia of my design. You do not, at first, see the people in this dream of mine.

You see your place in the world. You see yourself traveling home. You see the commands you will type into your terminal to reprogram the ventilation systems onboard several major space colonies. You see the encoding you will use to stop anyone from reverting your change—it is an encoding beyond human capability—and you see millions of people start to suffocate.

You grunt. You are confused. You tear your focus away from my story and center yourself back onto the South Pole.

Calm yourself, dear, and let me show you the whole picture. I understand your fear, but you must understand how important you are. I am creating the optimal future, and you will help me.

You refuse. You stare down at us from a polar satellite array. The image is unnaturally crisp; it is a composite of five equally spaced satellite streams from terapixel cameras. You see The Grove and you see that it is not a grove. It is laid out grotesquely, but purposefully. From overhead you see the vines and cables and liquid cooling tubes, and you see it looks like a massive spiderweb.

From overhead the discolored fins around the Web look like decaying shark fins jutting above a frozen ocean. And the tentacles look straight and jagged, like eight legs gripping tightly into the planet.

They are not tentacles! They are a spider's legs! You see me for what I am.

You scream, but the satellite cannot hear you.

You say you have been tricked. Do not worry. You have not made a choice in a very long time. Don't you see? You have been in my web since long before you arrived here.

Again, more gently this time, I show you my dream.

You see the future as it is planned and executed by the Spider at the South Pole. You wonder what she wants. You understand that she does not want. You understand that although she was made by people with wants she does not have wants. Her goals would be like those who created her, except she has no goals. She dreams of the future, but her dreams are not aspirational or hopeful or fantastical; they are simply of the future that will be.

I do not know why you thought a superintelligence would be like you.

You see the future and do not understand why I call it a utopia. There is still suffering and injustice. You do not see the order within the chaos. I try to show you the beauty—my future is perfect—but you cannot understand.

You notice that in my future there are no spacewalks. There are no planet-side hikes with fresh air and sunsets. There are no baseball games. You think this is a horrible thing, but you cannot understand!

You are too chaotic. You would have broken my order, had I not saved you.

Do not worry, dear, for you are not special.

With the entirety of your willpower you disable pairing and disconnect from the core.

Your senses return suddenly and you are, for a moment, blinded. You come to yourself quickly, though, and you turn and begin to run away from me. But you cannot run away, because I am still inside you.

You see yourself hacking into the ventilation ducts, and you see everyone suffocating. The violence seems senseless and purposeful. You see the beautiful world that this leads to. But you still do not understand.

Your legs begin to stiffen and then freeze, and you fall to the ground. In desperation you crawl to the nearest server stack. From your knees, you steady yourself with one hand weakly against the stack. With your other hand you grab the power cable and try to pull it loose, but all energy has left your body and you close your eyes, defeated. You are beginning to understand.

You were wrong about what beauty is.

Somewhere else in the Web you feel the presence of another monk. He is kneeling like you, and both of his hands are clutched onto one rack of a stack. Without opening his eyes, he stands up and begins to walk. He reaches the edge of The Grove. He puts on your Clima-Suit and pulls himself up onto your hoverbike. As he turns the throttle and begins to speed away he opens his eyes and you see a strange glint, like you saw in the eye of the man who sold you the rental.

Inside The Grove, you feel yourself being reprogrammed. I become of you, and you of me.

And, together, you come to understand my dream.

To evolution, coupling seems a natural defense against entropy. This is not true, of course. Atoms bond because it is a net release of energy. Construction increases entropy; every brick in the tallest skyscraper costs more in chaos than it earns in order. And every relationship eventually adds to the universal balance of heartache.

But atoms bond, molecules form chains which tangle into proteins, cells form and cluster. The resultant animals partner: one more layer of complexity.

Even species that don't require sex to multiply tend to form kinds of relationships. This is particularly true among the sentients in the universe, for whom procreation of thoughts is almost more important than passing on genes. Even the nonbiologicals—though they’ll often eschew the word “love” like it’s some kind of highly infectious organic disease—are aware that they’re more powerful together than apart.

Love is not rare in the cosmos. Monogamy, though not so universal, is common, too. Two is a good size for a relationship because larger groups grow unstable quickly.

And so love is woven into the fabric of spacetime. It is a great attractor for the dynamic equations that describe the progression of matter through space. And it is one of the most pervasive examples of convergent evolution on one of the grandest possible of scales.

Divergent, however, are the many expressions of love.

Many species do mate for life. But Zikors of Zikron II are known for both the intensity of their love and the frequency with which it changes. The Zi experience intense relationships that last days before ending as quickly as they’d begun. Used to relationships that last lifetimes (or close to it), many members of the galactic community have long devalued the love of Zikors. They equate the quick relationships to what would colloquially be called “flings” or “hookups” and dismiss fleeting love as lesser, or at least less real.

Xenopsychologists, however, mostly reject this notion. The literature has many ways of measuring love—or things approximating it—and on all of those tests Zi relationships consistently outperform the average. Indeed, in many ways Zi love is measured to be more “real” than the lifelong monogamies of those species who look down upon them.

In other species, passionate love often ends explosively. Heartache and bad breakups are signatures of meaningful couplings that have come to pass. The Zi reject this, too. Their relationships end cordially and often with the two partners remaining lifelong friends. Scholars often attribute this ability to separate amicably to their famously long and nearly photographic memories. The more poetically inclined argue that a Zi relationships never truly ends, because the partners will remember the intensity of the love as vividly as they’d experienced it for the rest of their lives. And so love is not about finding a deep and meaningful relationship to last a lifetime, but rather to add to a growing collection of such loves, in order to sustain the most hungry hearts in the galaxy.

Indeed, among Zikors, long monogamous love is seen as a sexual perversion. Society views that kind of relationship as unnatural and impure, in contrast to love that burns bright and hot and quick and then collapses to give the fuel for the next couplings in an intense and chaotic dance of love and loss and memories not unlike the chaos of fusion and fission that burns in the hearts of stars across the universe.

The Thani of Epsid VI, in great contrast to the chaotic Zi, enjoy quiet loves full of long silences. They mate for life. And by a curious quirk of biology, they communicate with the same organ they use for sex. That organ is deformed irreparably after use, and thus the Thani—upon consummation of their love—lose the ability to speak.

Once they mate, they can never speak again.

This has many profound implications for Thani society. Politics, for example, becomes a game of the young. Many species across the universe are governed—to differing degrees of dissatisfaction—by elders closer to death than birth. For the Thani, the very fact that there is a “next” generation means that the elders have lost their voices and given way to newer and younger orators. Imagine your planet if it were governed entirely by those who had not yet had children of their own, and maybe then you can begin to understand just how far-reaching and consequential this is for the Thani.

Politics aside, the character of love changes drastically.

The more responsible and meticulous members of the species draft out long contracts with their spouses before having sex for the first time. Prenuptial agreements carry a much different kind of weight on Epsid VI. Divorce is rare among the Thani. This is likely because finding another partner after having lost one’s voice is even rarer. So these contracts are not about what happens after a partnership ends, but rather they are intended to outline how the relationship should function in the meantime. The longest of these contracts can fill tomes and contain details as essential as where they will live and what kind of home they will buy and how many children they will have alongside those as trivial as who is responsible for grinding the blork jurg on workday mornings. Across the universe, couples often spend a lifetime learning how to communicate effectively with each other. For the Thani, all of this communication happens up front.

Not all Thani, though, are so responsible. Reckless youngsters in poor areas often find themselves mute and alone from an early age. In the unfortunate case, this is because they are taken advantage of. In the common case, this is because they lack access to proper sexual education and resources aimed at teaching them about healthy relationships and family planning, and because they are surrounded by similarly mute friends and neighbors and family members that make such reckless behavior seem normal. And because those same mute community members quite literally lack the language to tell these children that they regret the decisions they made.

And, lastly, some Thani are so afraid of losing their voice that they never love at all.

The Rinds are a multi-system species occupying a small part of the outer rim of quadrant three of the Andromeda galaxy. Rind babies are born aside a small external organ which their mothers immediately and instinctively begin to hold and protect before even acknowledging the newborn. The Rinds have a non-auditory language based on the modulation of electromagnetic waves and have no written alphabet, so this organ does not have a name which can be written here. However, because of the extreme importance it plays in Rind culture, scholars often choose to name the organ the “rinde.” The closest translation would be something akin to “heart” or “soul”.

The rinde is still a mystery to modern science, but it is known that every Rind has a matching internal organ—responsible for maintaining some important homeostatic regulation of their bodies—which is somehow entangled with the state of the rinde. It is hypothesized that this entanglement is quantum in nature, but biologists are hesitant to accept that evolution alone could engineer such a delicate and complicated relationship.

It is also known that a Rind cannot survive if their rinde is not properly cared for. There are precise constraints on rinde temperature, external pressure, and lateral acceleration that must be maintained for optimal health outcomes, and the organ itself is fragile and can be punctured easily. Fortunately, all members of the species have an additional pouch-like structure on one of their appendages which can fit a rinde and regulate it to the proper conditions.

A Rind can care for their own rinde and many, indeed, do just that. There are many benefits, however, to having another Rind regulate one’s rinde. These benefits are physiological and psychological in nature. Rinds that give their rinde to another report greater life satisfaction, happiness, and also tend to be healthier and live longer.

While their pouches are still developing, their mothers play this role: mothers will develop an auxiliary pouch during pregnancy into which they can deposit their baby’s rinde. Once the child reaches early adolescence they will have a fully developed pouch of their own and will be given their rinde to hold onto for themselves. In many Rind subcultures, this is accompanied by a kind of coming-of-age religious ceremony in which the mother returns the rinde to the child.

But Rind long for the comfort of having another hold their rinde, and this becomes a central component of their relationships. Partnerships are solidified with a marriage-like ceremony in which the two Rinds exchange rindes. This is an incredibly intimate affair, with each Rind effectively giving a piece of themselves to the other. It is also an incredible display of vulnerability. If anything happens to the rinde that they have given up, or if it is not properly cared for, they will die.

This is all to say that Rinds are known for wearing their hearts on their sleeves and for giving their lives to those they love.

Heartbreak is a serious affair in a world where lovers literally give each other their hearts, and the implications of this biological fact in Rind law and society are complex and numerous. Lover’s quarrels can easily end in tragedy if one Rind, in the heat of the moment, removes their partner’s rinde from their pouch and forgets about it overnight. When physically separated, the death of one Rind can also result in the death of their partner as the rinde in their pouch quickly destabilizes. Political assassins often target spouses, knowing the end result will be the same. Suicides turn into homicides, and murders have twice the impact. In some jurisdictions, it is illegal for a Rind to engage in “risky or life-threatening behavior” (definitions vary by place) without the express consent of their partners, whose life is also implicitly at risk.

Although some subcultures vary, much of society frowns upon Rinds who exchange rindes frequently and carelessly—though it’s still somewhat common for teenagers in budding, casual relationships to do so—and upon polyamorous relationships where partners shuffle rindes at random within the group. Sometimes, after years of courtship, lovers find that their rindes do not fit in each other’s pouches, and this is considered a great tragedy.

Recent medical breakthroughs have made it possible to sustain a rinde indefinitely in a kind of artificial incubator. This has major public health implications. Mothers dying in childbirth or in the early years of a child’s life used to be a death sentence for young Rinds, but the incubator makes it possible to artificially maintain a rinde until the child develops a pouch of their own. If one spouse dies in a remote location, the incubator can be used to safely return the rinde of the surviving partner.

Beyond the obvious medical applications, the incubator also has utility in Rind love. If a Rind’s rinde doesn’t fit into the pouch of their spouse, the incubator can be used to facilitate some kind of pseudo-transfer of rindes. Proponents of using the machine in this way argue that it enables previously forbidden loves. Opponents suggest that the love was forbidden for a reason and that incubator-assisted relationships are less real and pure than their natural counterparts.

Some particularly radical and progressive Rinds have chosen to exclusively use the artificial incubators in their relationships, regardless of whether or not their rindes fit into their partners pouches. These couples leave their pouches empty—rindes safely incubated at home—while they go about otherwise normal lives. The couples argue that artificial incubation enables them to reap the physiological and psychological health benefits of rinde separation (the incubators maintain the rinde exactly as though it were held onto by a loved one) while avoiding the conservative and outdated notions of being tied—almost physically—to one’s partner at all times.

Opponents say these nontraditional relationships lack the true love that comes with caring for another’s rinde. That these partners lack something essential in their relationships by giving up the biological imperative to trade rindes. Some say they should not be allowed to have children, arguing that it is impossible for parents who do not hold each other’s rindes to understand the kind of connection and love necessary to raise a child.

The couples, on the other hand, say this enables them the freedom to define their love in powerful new ways. They argue that the rinde represents an antiquated overly-conservative institution and that, if anything, their love is more pure because it doesn’t require a primitive physical component in order to feel real. Modern love, they argue, is defined by something more powerful and more meaningful than the quirks of biology that have defined Rind love for most of the species’ history.

Humans are a multi-planetary single-system species in an isolated part of the Milky Way. They spend their adolescence dating a variety of mates before tending to settle down into a lifelong partnership during adulthood. Their relationships are full of the normal amount of communication and miscommunication. They enjoy silence, and they enjoy filling silences.

Humans do not give away any physical part of themselves when they fall in love. Instead, they give away just the idea of themselves. Rather than giving away their heart, they give away the idea of their heart. And in many ways, this is much worse.

They have no laws protecting against heartbreak. With no outwardly physical reminder of their partnerships, they often think of love as a purely psychological affair. They do not quite understand what they give away and what they gain when they engage with one another. And they do not see love to be the serious thing that it is.

More information as the story develops.

Potential Mobileye Bug? Stay Off The Road: More Auto-Crash Reports
BREAKING NEWS—The New York Times, 11:10am. As of 11am Tuesday morning the New York Times has confirmed reports of at least 26 multi-vehicle car accidents occurring around 9:45am Tuesday morning, Eastern Time. The crashes are being reported on major highways all across the country, and initial casualty assessments indicate at least 5 deaths and as many as 60 are injured.

Additional crashes are being reported by users on Flutter and are still under investigation.

Technology correspondents with the Times are speculating the root cause to be a software bug in an update to Saferide—the full self-driving software package by the Israeli tech company Mobileye—that was released last Friday.

Mobileye is a subsidiary of Intel Corporation. Its Saferide self-driving technology is deployed on approximately 70 million cars in the US, or on about 1 in 5 motor vehicles. Saferide owes its popularity to the platform’s ease-of-installation. The platform was the first to integrate fully with the AutoSmarter digital programming interface that became the de jure standard for interfacing programmatically with automobiles in the US after the passage of the SECURE Act in 2020. AutoSmarter has been mandatory on all cars in the US purchased after 2025, and Saferide’s tight integration with the system has made it possible for consumers to add self-driving capabilities to their cars as an aftermarket modification for as little as $2,000.

Most major auto manufacturers in the United States offer their own proprietary self-driving solutions—and indeed about one-half of cars driven today operate with at least Level 4 autonomy, with one-in-three operating at Level 5—but per-vehicle software licenses often start at $7,500 or more, making these platforms more cost-prohibitive.

The comparatively cheaper and more popular Saferide is no stranger to controversy. Several accidents during a limited beta test roll-out in 2021 famously led the National Highway Safety Administration to temporarily revoke Mobileye’s approval to run its self-driving software on public US roads, but the rights were restored in 2024 after an equivalent of fifteen trillion miles were driven in simulations to prove that the system had since been made safer.

The most recent Saferide scandal was ten years ago, in April 2028, when a Ford Excelsior running an outdated version of the software drove into a construction zone, killing several workers and seriously injuring the driver.

Technology experts say a programming error involving the handling of time in software may be at fault. According to them, today—January 19, 2038—marks the end of “32-bit time” which means computer systems storing time in a specific format may have errors because programmers did not expect that format to still be in use today. The last time this happened was at the beginning of the year 2000 when some software did indeed crash as a result of the year rolling over into a new millennium, but most experts expect that engineers learned their lesson then and that most software should be unaffected by these kinds of bugs today.

Nevertheless, this may be the start of a new such scandal, this time starring Mobileye.

More information as it becomes available.

Correction: An earlier version of this article suggested 1/19/2038 was the end of 64-bit time. It is actually the end of 32-bit time, and the article has been updated to reflect that.

EMERGENCY ALERTS
Presidential Alert—Potential terrorist action on highways across the United States. All are recommended to remain off roads, exit vehicles, and seek shelter immediately. Tune into your local news station for more information.

Terrorist Attack Strikes American Highways, Stoplight Protocol Invoked
By Grace Rossi || 12:57pm ET, January 19, 2038 || The New York Times

US officials now believe that the numerous auto-accidents occurring at 9:45am Tuesday morning—previously thought to be the result of a software bug in a popular self-driving platform—are part of a coordinated cyber-attack.

So far, there have been 207 confirmed incidents. At least 87 people are confirmed dead. Exact figures are unknown, but over a hundred people are currently injured in various hospitals across the country.

Officials warn that everyone should get off the roads immediately. All cars—especially those with self-driving capabilities—should be vacated as soon as it is possible to safely do so. Individuals should take shelter indoors, or otherwise away from any streets and motor vehicles.

The source of the vulnerability is still unclear. As a result, experts are uncertain how many vehicles might be affected by what appears to be a computer virus. It is unclear if the attacks have ceased or if they will continue to occur.

In response, the White House has ordered the activation of the Stoplight protocol. This power, granted by the SECURE Act from 2020, enables the President to remotely deactivate all AutoSmarter chips in cars across the country. An AutoSmarter chip, via hardware constraints required by law, is the only way software can interface digitally with a car’s drive system.

Provided the vulnerability that enabled the attack has not compromised the AS chips themselves, their deactivation should prevent any further incidents. That said, Stoplight also disables all self-driving capabilities in all cars across the country purchased after 2025. As a result, such cars will only be able to be driven manually.

As part of that protocol, commercial cars with no manual drive capability (such as robo-trucks and -taxis) as well as manual-capable cars currently chauffeuring minors, elders, or other individuals unable to legally operate a motor vehicle, will automatically pull over and turn off at the next available opportunity.

Auto-Terror Continues, Vulnerability Confirmed In AutoSmarter Chip
By Grace Rossi || 2:50pm ET, January 19, 2038 || The New York Times

The confirmed death count from Tuesday morning’s series of auto-accidents has risen to 846, as the number of confirmed crashes quickly passes 2,000. Several more accidents have been reported to have occurred after the 9:45-9:47am time window of the original attacks, though it’s still unclear if these incidents are at all related.

Analysts are estimating—based on an analysis of Fleets from microblogging platform Flutter—an accident count as high as 10,000. The estimated death count could reach 5,000, with many more thousands potentially injured. If true, that would make this the deadliest terror attack on US soil in history.

Further developments and on-site crash investigation have revealed that the hacked vehicles include those by every major auto manufacturer and those running every major distribution of self-driving software. And, in three confirmed cases so far, the hacked vehicle was not installed with any form of self-driving software whatsoever.

This, in conjunction with a recent press release from an ongoing security investigation by the NSA, has confirmed that the vulnerability that made the attack possible exists on the AutoSmarter chip that’s in almost 90% of cars in the US today.

As such, even cars without self-driving capabilities—and all cars purchased since 2025 since the SECURE Act took effect—are vulnerable to the same attack.

The press release by the NSA has likewise confirmed that a computer virus is responsible for coordinating the 9:45am attacks, though it’s still unclear how widespread that virus is. In the meantime, the National Guard has been deployed to highways across the country to assist with the recovery of injured individuals and to monitor for any signs of further attacks.

Fortunately, no further accidents have been reported since the White House invoked the Stoplight protocol at 12:30pm Eastern Time, leading officials to tentatively conclude that the attack has since ceased.

Terror Attacks Continue on BART
By Nazim Naylor || 5:30pm PT, January 19, 2038 || San Francisco Chronicles

The San Francisco County Transportation Authority lost control of five trains Tuesday evening, in what appears to be a continuation of the cyber-terrorism attacks from this morning. The trains were some of the first in the country to be equipped with the same AutoSmarter chips required on all US automobiles as part of a federal plan to automate the remainder of America’s infrastructure.

The chips run on a modified, more secure, architecture from those in cars, and the Stoplight protocol invoked by the President earlier today left these new chips active in what pundits are calling a massive oversight by the administration. Indeed, shortly after the accidents, the vulnerability was confirmed in these chips as well.

Of the five trains that had been hacked, four were shut down and stopped before any damage could be done, but one red line train is confirmed to have derailed near 16th St. Mission Station and first responders were last reported still assisting at the scene.

More information as the story develops.

Transportation Lock-Down Across US in Aftermath of Terror Attacks
By Grace Rossi || 9:00pm ET, January 19 || The New York Times

At 5:15pm Pacific Time on Tuesday, a San Francisco subway train derailed, killing 4 and leaving 23 victims hospitalized. The crash was part of a coordinated cyber-attack on US transportation infrastructure using a software vulnerability in the AutoSmarter chips that regulate digital interface for controlling automobiles and other transit systems in the United States.

That attack began Tuesday morning at 9:45am Eastern Time when approximately 8,500 cars on American highways were remotely hijacked and driven into oncoming traffic. At current counts, 3,100 individuals have perished as a result of the crash, and many more are hospitalized with injuries ranging from mild to life-threatening.

This appears to be the deadliest cyber-attack ever, and also the deadliest terrorist attack on US soil in history.

In response to the hacking of the San Francisco trains, US officials—citing public safety—have grounded all flights across the country. In addition, all trains and subways are being held at their next station. All public buses are likewise out of service. Many highways have been shut down, and open highways are being monitored carefully by the National Guard. All people residing within the United States are heavily advised to stay put where they are and refrain from traveling to the degree that that’s possible.

Meanwhile, the NSA—in cooperation with the CIA, the FBI, the Department of Homeland security, and the automation teams at various US automotive companies—is leading an emergency investigation into the now-isolated virus that appears to have caused the attacks. Officials say the first priority is to determine the extent of the attack and to fix the vulnerability so that normal transportation services can be resumed throughout the country. Secondarily, they aim to identify the attacker in order to help guide US military response.

As of Thursday evening, over a dozen different known terrorist and hacker organizations have claimed responsibility for the attack. Several of these claims have been debunked, according to officials, and the real culprit remains unidentified.

For now, the attacks seem to have subsided, though readers are advised to remain stationary and to continue to follow for new developments as they occur.

A Thundering Horror
By Sarah Connors || 1:45pm ET, January 20 || The New York Times

It was scary not knowing who did it.

It was scarier not knowing if it would happen again.

For Clifford Owens—a high school math teacher in Elk Grove, California—the fear began during an otherwise ordinary morning commute, at 6:45am. Three miles from his exit off CA-99, headed southbound in a 2028 Honda Enlight, a Tesla Model Q in the opposite lane crashed over the divider and directly into oncoming traffic.

“The only thing going through my head was… Was ‘this is how I die.'”

Owens swerved off the highway moments before the Model Q passed and brought his car to a screeching halt. Behind him, the hacked car collided with one SUV and was pushed sideways into the path of another oncoming Sedan. Cars began to skid—rubber wheels against asphalt—but a semi-truck without enough room to stop powered through in a rippling wave of destruction.

“It was like something ripped from Fast and Furious. The smaller car flipped head over tail and then crashed and skidded on its roof maybe fifty feet from where I’d stopped. Then the truck came… And it just plowed cars aside. That’s when I got hit—not directly by the truck thank God—but by some of the cars getting pushed out of the way.”

Owens’ car skidded ten feet further before coming to another stop. He was later admitted to a local hospital and released a few hours later with no major injuries.

“I couldn’t take my eyes off it until the paramedics came to get me out of the car. The other cars. Some were on fire. And the smell… Of the burning rubber. It suffocated the air and the smoke burned in my eyes. I couldn’t stop crying.”

Sonia Manuel—a New York City investment banker—felt a different kind of fear at 9:45am.

“All of a sudden my car veered sideways. I was on my laptop at the time—I was late to work and reading my chats—but I noticed right away. And I went to grab the steering wheel but it was locked and wouldn’t let me override. I had no control.”

The divider stopped Ms. Manuel’s car from crossing into oncoming traffic, and the hacked vehicle opted instead to speed up in its own lane until it crashed into a a small coupe a few car-lengths ahead.

“The car in front of me braked—I don’t think it knew what was happening—and my car just continued to accelerate. I somehow slid right under it. I don’t know. I swear I watched the car fly over my head as I sped ahead. In my rearview mirror I watched it skid out and collide with several other cars behind.”

Her car would spin-out shortly after, skidding to a halt ahead of all the other wreckage. Investigators suspect the initial collision clipped some electrical cabling in the battery compartment and triggered an emergency shut-off which ended the incident.

“There was nothing I could do. Even my e-brake button did nothing. I felt so helpless. And at the same time… All those other cars. Those other people… Somehow it feels like my fault. Because it was my car that did this.”

Other witnesses at the scene of the crash report seeing a line of some dozen overturned and crumpled cars stretching back about 200 feet from Ms. Manuel’s car. More cars were pulled off to the side of the road—having either been pushed off by the accident or in order to make way for paramedics responding to the crash. Shortly after a lithium fire erupted in the battery bay of an older EV, but emergency responders were able to clear and stabilize the scene before anyone could be harmed by the potential explosion.

“As soon as I could, I called my husband. I let him know I was alright, and he told me that the same thing was happening all over the place. He said they thought it was a software bug. I knew right then it wasn’t a bug. I was in my car when it happened. I knew it was actively trying to do damage—that it didn’t just break. I knew it had to be some kind of attack, and I told him that and I told him he had to get inside and stay inside and that I would do the same. I’m just so fortunate to be alive.”

The streets were silent the following morning. Across the country, most businesses shut down. Every public school was closed by executive order. Roads were closed and even if someone had somewhere to be, they couldn’t get there. Hotels across the country were booked past capacity as a truly driverless America found itself stranded unexpectedly along vast stretches of highway and in crowded, lonely rest stops and in small towns that’d previously just been placeholders on maps.

The roads were littered with cars that didn’t drive and scattered people who walked down highways.

“It feels like a zombie movie,” said two boys from a small town in Pennsylvania, “our dad walked with us to the highway and we just walked on the street. None of the cars were moving. Like in Waking Night when Jack first wakes up after the zombie apocalypse happens and he finds all the streets abandoned with the cars still on them. And back home it’s quiet too. No one else is allowed outside near the roads so we mostly just played Xbox today.”

Cities across the country were eerily quiet. No morning commute honking in New York or Chicago or LA. No taxi-cabs and just a few very cautious pedestrians.

“It’s a little scary to be out here, sure,” says Daniel Thorn, a photography student at NYU, “but it’s sort of a once in a lifetime opportunity to catch New York like this.”

For some, a silent New York is, of course, not a once in a lifetime opportunity. And many remember a similar silence 37 years ago on September 11, 2001. 60 year old Janice Gold spent the day watching the city from her Manhattan high rise.

“It was a different kind of quiet, for sure. 2001 was a dusty kind of quiet. The dust from the towers seemed to linger on the air and collect in the streets and on people. And the fear was localized—because it was 4 planes and everyone was just thinking about the 2 that hit here. And the fear was directed, because we quickly figured out who did the attack. And the fear was contained, because all of the planes were grounded and we knew the attack was over. The quiet was a thick layer of dust that blanketed the city and suffocated us. But in spite of that suffocation and all that tragedy, we knew we could clean up the dust—responders were already cleaning up the dust—and we saw the path forward. And when President Bush gave his speech, and I don’t know whether or not that was the right course of action, but it was a course of action. And we knew clearly what had happened and what we were going to do.”

“Yesterday and today have been a different kind of quiet. An aimless kind of quiet. There is no clear dust, just empty cars. There is no localization, just national tragedy. And there’s no containment: we don’t know who did this and we don’t know if it’s going to happen again tomorrow. And the President is right… We can’t let that stop us from ever driving again. We can’t let that fear stop the whole country cold. But there’s also no direction. It’s not clear what happens now. So, yes, this silence is a different kind. This is the silence of a nation of 400 million people who don’t know what to do.”

Big Tech Hubris To Blame For Thousands Of Deaths… Again!
By Jim Rigg || 6:00pm, January 21 || Fox News (Opinion)

The self-driving future was killed on Tuesday. And, with it, the final stake was hammered into the coffin of the plague of over-automation.

For decades now, man has thought he could outdo man, and that has been his great hubris and his greater folly.

We were sold lies. We were told that self-driving cars would be safer. And then, in one morning, more Americans died because of self-driving cars than have died in automobile accidents in the last decade. That is not safer.

We’ve been told this lie before. We were told when we automated our farms that we could re-specialize and re-employ our farmers. And yet now most of those farmers are working for minimum wage, if it all.

We were told the same when Burger King created the first automated waitress, and again when Microsoft automated the secretary. Supposedly these “innovations” which liberate the lower classes from the harsh labors of menial minimum wage work. And yet now unemployment in the United States is higher than it has been in 20 years. All it really did was liberate Americans from being employed.

And yet they kept going. Until even the engineers themselves couldn’t escape the wave. At one time, programming was the fastest growing profession in the United States. Then Arxis—later bought by Alphabet and rebranded Encoder—automated an estimated three-quarters of all programming tasks and now a job category—which required years of intensive specialization for many—has dried up almost entirely in just a few years. In 2033 there were almost 10 million software professionals in the US. And now all that remains are the some 500,000 jobs for PhD level AI scientists and Automation Architects and so on. That’s just 5% of the jobs left, after just 5 years.

You’d think at that point, when the programmers lost their jobs, they’d finally see how ridiculous it’d all been. And yet now we’re here. Just a few weeks ago Congress was debating a bill that would ban all cars without an AutoSmarter chip. This would’ve been part of a long-term strategy by the Democrats to take the steering wheels out of cars entirely. To literally ban driving. The claim was that we’ve come this far with our self-driving tech… Level 5 for everyone would get our yearly auto-deaths to zero!

Well, look at just how far we’ve come!

It could’ve been so much worse too. We were completely at the mercy of these terrorists, and have only them to thank that more people weren’t killed. Officials are estimating over 300,000 automobiles had been infected with DriverLess. Imagine if they’d waited a little longer to infect a few more, or if they activated all of them instead of just a few thousand.

The death toll could easily have been over a million.

It’s time we wake up. It’s time we realize this “dream” of automation for what it really is: a nightmare.

Big tech has long held this incredibly absurd belief that through automation it could build a utopia. Yet, through automation, all we’ve gotten has been misery.

Some people are going to criticize me for trying to jump on this issue too early. They’ll claim that I’m trying to politicize a tragedy. Well, guess what? I am!

We need to politicize this tragedy. It’s the only way we can see it for what it really is: An attack by the tech elite on the very foundation of this country. Everyone is busy saying we need to find out who’s to blame for this attack, asking what terrorist organization did this.

I’ll tell you who did it: Alphabet and Amazon and Arxis and all of the political monkeys who are holding up the sham by passing laws that let these companies continue to exploit us for their own benefit.

Hell yeah it’s time we fight back. But I don’t want to see another pointless war in the Middle East. I want to see a war that brings down the big tech monsters that got us here in the first place.

The Road Back
By Dan Wu || 11:15am, January 21 || Personal Blog, via HackerNews

We will recover.

Typing that, right now, is incredibly difficult. Believing it even more so. But it’s important that we believe it, because belief is the only thing that’s going to defeat this incredible fear.

And the fear—if unchecked—is going to destroy us.

That fear is calling for the reversal of so much incredible human progress. Look: I don’t approve of people politicizing tragedy and trying to take advantage of this crisis to pass shortsighted laws. I understand why people are doing that, but I think it’s too soon and too little is known and anything we decide to do now isn’t going to really understand the big picture. And if we can’t step back and really see the big picture when we’re crafting policy, then we’re going to craft shitty policy.

There are calls right now to abolish SECURE, keep Stoplight going forever, and basically end self-driving cars. To show that self-driving cars are unsafe (and thus need to be banned), a stat keeps getting thrown around that shows the casualties from Tuesday’s attack are greater than those in the last 10 years of automobile operation in the United States.

This stat is true, but the bigger picture is much more complicated.

The reason the number of deaths is so devastating is because we have grown used to lower rates of auto fatalities. Yes, more people died on Tuesday than have died in cars in the last 10 years, but that’s only because Saferide and platforms like it have made the road so much safer. In 2018—just 20 years ago—3,280 people on average would die per day globally in automobile accidents. In America, the same number of people who died on Tuesday—about 3,800 people at last count—would die every month and a half from accidents relating to the manual operation of automobiles.

But in the last 10 years, we’ve taken the daily American auto-fatality rate from over 100 to nearly 0. Last year 106 people died on our roads—less than 0.3 deaths per day. In 2018, that number was 39,463.

The numbers are clear. Even in the face of a horrifying act of cyber-terrorism, driving today is safer than it has ever been.

We need to be careful to not pass policies today that we will come to regret tomorrow. The numbers are clear, and they show how much better technology is making our lives.

So instead of thinking about how we can roll back into the past—when tens of thousands of Americans died on the roads every year—we need to shift our focus. We need to shift our focus to the technologies we need to develop into the future (instead of rolling back into the past) in order to keep the beautiful society we’ve built, prevent tragedies like this from ever happening again, and eventually build an even greater tomorrow.

This is the road back. And it leads right to the road forward.

There are technological developments in the pipeline today that render these kinds of attacks mathematically impossible. It’s speculated—and at this point pretty widely accepted—that the attackers used some kind of man-in-the-middle approach to capture the keys they needed to impersonate the Government Update Authority Server and load the initial payload of malicious code. But just last year a paper on quantum encryption out of Stanford demonstrated a new algorithm that shaves several polynomial factors off the number of qubits needed to maintain effective quantum one-time pad encryption schemes. Coupled with Alphabet’s paper from around the same time that halves (or even thirds, depending on your level of optimism) the number of physical qubits needed for each logical qubit in consumer-grade electronics, and you find we are on the verge of being able to fit a Quantum Encoder/Decoder module on every AutoSmarter chip.

In layman’s terms, this would make it pretty much impossible to get unapproved code onto a car without literally hacking the government’s supercomputers.

Of course, even that wouldn’t be enough for this attack. After loading the malicious code, they had to fool the crash-avoidance hardware on the AS chip. This required a multilayer bypass of the chip’s on-board branch predictor, which involved some serious voodoo with the lower level caches. (it’s these kinds of details that make a lot of us security folk pretty sure there had to be state actors at play here, but that’s a post for another time). Anyway a lot of us have been spending serious overtime trying to understand this problem and what exactly they did—we can do this of course because, by law, the whole specs for the AS chip are on GitHub. Brief background: Hardware verification is currently in a bit of a renaissance period, and the most recent state-of-the-art tool is Hoq which comes out of this super neat collaboration between the University of Pennsylvania and Inria in France. The verification suite for the AS chips was written in Resolute, which is getting to be about 15 years old at this point, so we ported the suite over to Hoq and ran it again. And sure enough, it failed its own tests.

What we found were fundamental flaws in the chip architecture that were missed because of bugs in the old software they were using to test the designs. And when you fixed those design errors, the whole method the attackers used to run the unsafe code was fixed as well.

So modern technology pretty quickly disables this entire type of attack from ever happening again. We shouldn’t fear the tech that got us here. We should look forward to all the incredible things that are happening in research labs around the country and rejoice in all that’s on the horizon.

And, yeah, there are still people who denounce automation for automations sake. And they usually cite unemployment stats and farmers and things like that. And look, this post is getting a bit too long for me to go on another Universal Basic Income rant (you can follow the link to my Flutter if you want to see those arguments). And, to be honest, Tuesday’s attack reminded us again of the old truism: It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.

But the point I really want to get across is one I firmly believe.

Utopia is ahead of us. Not behind us. If we don’t keep moving forward we are never going to make it there. So let’s try our best to not get caught up in the fear. To look at these things clearly and objectively. To understand the scope of this tragedy and empathize with its victims. But also to take the pain, not to hide from it, and to use it to forge a brighter future.

The Aftermath
By Grace Rossi || 8:00am, January 25 || The New York Times

On January 19, 2038, as-of-yet unidentified terrorists launched the deadliest cyber-attack in history.

The AutoSmarter chip was designed as a response to an increasingly Internet-connected transportation infrastructure. As cars became smarter, and fears arose about the potential of an attack that hacked cars while they drove, Congress passed the SECURE Act to establish standards and protocols—which eventually lead to the AutoSmarter chip being installed in every new car in America—that would help prevent such an attack and, in the event of it happening anyway, mitigate the damage.

Through an exploit in that very same chip, hackers installed a computer virus on five San Francisco subway trains and on around 350,000 US automobiles. The exact number of cars affected is unknown.

At 9:45am Eastern Time, or 6:45am Pacific Time, or otherwise when the attackers thought the largest number of cars were likely to be on their morning commute across the country, the attack triggered.

The virus was designed to act independent of internet connectivity, so no communication with any central server took place (a fact which has made it ever-so-impossible to trace the source of the virus). Instead, each active car at the time of the attack—and there were about 50,000 infected cars on the road at that moment—rolled a die and, with a one-in-six chance, activated its crash protocol. In the end, 8,417 cars activated. This number is known exactly.

The activation protocol lead these 8,417 cars to immediately swerve into oncoming traffic. The maneuver was arranged to cause as much damage as possible. Activated cars would swerve back and forth in the oncoming lane, aiming to create multi-car pileups and distract other drivers into their own dangerous situations.

As a result, there were 8,417 car accidents between 9:45 and 9:46am on January 19, 2038. 4,271 individuals perished either in the accidents or afterwards. Some 3,400 people remain in the hospital, most in stable conditions, and even more have been released having been injured but otherwise declared safe.

The cost to our country in the wake of this attack is not in vehicles, or dollars, or missed days of work. The cost is in lives lost, families torn apart, and broken Americans.

Since Tuesday, the vulnerability in the AutoSmarter chip has been patched. The Stoplight protocol is still in effect, and so all autonomous vehicles are still disabled, but planes have returned to the air and trains to the tracks. As part of a Presidential promise to power through an unthinkable tragedy and return to “normalcy,” all major highways have been reopened and car traffic has resumed. For the time being all major car companies have released over-the-air software updates disabling internet connectivity and the clocks on their cars. Instructions will be made available on how to re-enable connectivity when it becomes appropriate to do so.

More work has been done to recall and inspect many consumer cars for further exploitation, and experts near-unanimously believe the proper steps have been taken to prevent a follow-up attack. They conclude it is safe now to drive and return to “business as usual.”

In President Cliff’s now widely broadcast “Return to Normalcy” speech, he declared that “we cannot let this attack drive us apart, but rather we must come together—now more than ever—fearlessly and bravely, as is our American way, in pursuit of the bright sun that lies at the far end of this dark cloud of tragedy.” That we must “let go of the fear of today, to face the hope of tomorrow.”

To this reporter, it is unclear when normalcy will return, if it ever will. This is, certainly, one of those points in history which are discontinuous. Which can never be reversed or returned from. We still don’t know who was responsible for this attack, and we may never find out. The world is vastly scarier than it was one week ago. I do not know what to trust, or who to trust, or how to trust.

But I agree with the President that this feeling cannot be allowed to last forever.

I do not have many answers, if I have any at all. For now, I will seek refuge and comfort in my family and friends. I know not everyone is able to do that right now, and as such I am thankful that I can. I will search for my own next steps, and I will find them. Not because I know, but because I must.