Josh is thirty-eight and has not slept in two days, which is normal, but is also wearing the same shirt he wore yesterday, which is not. Kristen is asleep at the cabin. The kids are asleep at the cabin — Matthew fifteen, Gracie ten, Barrett five, although the four-year-old version of him keeps appearing in the back of Josh’s head for reasons Josh has not given himself the room to think about. Josiah does not exist yet.
The colo is a Cogent-leased cage in an Arley, Alabama data center that the platform’s investors agreed to use because Josh’s father had once spec’d the building’s HVAC for a TVA-region industrial retooling in 1997 and the old union electrician who stayed on knew Josh’s father by face, which was the kind of thing that mattered, in the part of the country Josh had not lived in for seventeen years and had moved back to in March because his wife had said I want our boys to grow up where their grandfather is. The cage smells like new fiberboard and old coffee. Josh has been refilling the same paper cup for fourteen hours. The terraform plan is on the third large monitor. The fourth large monitor is open to the platform’s pre-launch dashboard. The fifth large monitor — Josh’s personal one, which his ops director believes is closed but is not — is open to a marked-up PDF of A Pattern Language, which Josh has been re-reading, in twenty-page increments between deployment windows, since the night his co-founder pitched him the architecture in March.
The architecture is sound. Josh wrote most of it. The architecture is not what is keeping him up.
What is keeping him up, in the part of the night Josh has not let himself put words to, is a thing his father used to say at the kitchen table in Arley when Josh and Jay were boys: the federal government does not have an authority of its own. It has the authority the states gave it, and only that. Justin had not said this as politics; he had said it as a structural observation, the way a robotics engineer says the tool head does not have an angle of its own; it has the angle the wrist gave it. The inference Josh had drawn from this, between thirteen and twenty-five, was that the federal government had drifted very far from the angle the wrist had given it. The further inference, between twenty-five and forty-five, was that any institution that had been delegated authority — federal agencies, large NGOs, any organization that performs the public interest as its product — was, in a hundred-year time horizon, a kind of failure-mode-of-delegation. Josh had written this down in a journal at twenty-five, recopied it at forty-one, and was about to recopy it again the week he sold his stake — though Josh, on this October morning, did not yet know that.
What is keeping him up is the name on the pre-launch dashboard, which he typed into a TLS cert request six hours ago and which will appear on a forty-million-user homepage at six in the morning Eastern, and which is the name of an Earth-side president whose worldview Josh’s pastor has, in three separate Sundays this calendar year, called the most powerful witness against the wisdom of crowds the American church has been given since the founding generation. Josh has not asked his pastor whether he was joking. Josh’s pastor was not joking.
$ git log --oneline --since='3 months ago' | head -3
e8a1c4f TLS: cert pinning for primary domain
4f9b211 feat: timeline ranking (v1, behavior-only, no graph signals)
1c08e9d ops: standby pool for launch day (3x baseline)Josh closes the git pane. He opens the pre-launch dashboard. He opens his Bible app, which is on his phone, because Kristen is asleep with his real Bible on the nightstand at the cabin. He reads the same chapter he read at three this morning, in the King James because the King James is what his mother had read to him when he was Barrett’s age, and reading anything else feels, to Josh, like walking into his own house through a side door.
Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding. In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy paths.
The verse does not, this morning, direct him very far. He puts the phone face-down on the desk. He picks up the paper cup. He looks at the dashboard.
His brother Jay called him at midnight from his school’s faculty parking lot, four hours after parent-teacher conferences ran long. Jay had said, in the same voice he used to use to read Beowulf aloud at family Christmases: brother. you don’t have to do this thing. Josh had said: I know. Jay had said: I’m not asking you whether you can. I’m asking you whether you should. Josh had said: I know. Jay had said okay and hung up.
Jay had not called back.
Josh’s father had not called. Josh’s father did not call about work. Josh’s father had once spent eight hours showing Josh, at thirteen, how to lay out a six-axis robot’s tool-change matrix on graph paper in pencil before letting him touch a keyboard, and then, when Josh had finished the matrix correctly on the first try, had said: good. now go home and read your Bible. The lesson had been about robotics and the lesson had not been about robotics. Josh’s father did not call about work, and so Josh’s father had not called, and so Josh’s father — whom Josh loved more than any man Josh had ever met — was on Josh’s mind the way a closed Bible on a nightstand is on a sleeping man’s mind.
Josh deploys the pre-launch dashboard’s last green button at 03:47 Central, which the platform’s playbook insists on calling 04:47 Eastern, which Josh has stopped translating. The platform goes live at 06:00. By 06:09 the front-page module he architected three months ago is serving twenty-eight thousand requests per second, which is below the standby capacity but above the mean projection, which is what Josh had asked for. By 06:11 the President’s first post is the most- liked piece of content the platform has ever served. By 06:14 the second-most-liked is from an account that was created in the seventeen seconds since launch, and which is impersonating the President, and which the platform’s anti-fraud system catches in forty-one milliseconds, removes, and silently logs. The system works. Josh built the system.
He does not feel proud of building the system.
He drives back to the cabin. Kristen is awake when he gets in, which she knew he would be home around six and had set the coffee maker the night before. Their second-oldest daughter, who is ten and would later be Gracie at fifteen and Gracie at twenty-five, is sitting at the kitchen table eating cereal in silence, in the patient way ten-year-olds whose fathers have just shipped a thing eat cereal. Barrett, five, comes around the corner holding a stuffed bear.
Barrett says: Daddy.
Josh picks him up.
Three years and two months later, Josh will sell his stake in the
platform during what the press will call a corporate
reorganization and what the family will only ever call Josh’s
career change, will use the proceeds to apply for the colonial-
expansion lottery at the Mars Programs Office because his wife
will say, on the same couch in the same Arley house in 2024,
I think we should leave, and they will, and the satellite that
in 2026 will receive a 1.4-gigabyte zip of academic PDFs — the
same ~/papers folder Josh is, on this October morning in 2021,
already eleven years deep into curating — will not yet have been
launched.
Josh holds Barrett. Barrett, five, holds Josh’s collar in the small competent fist of a child who has not yet learned that adults cannot always be helped.
Outside the kitchen window, an Alabama dawn is failing to illuminate a strip-mall parking lot in any way that anybody, that morning, finds remarkable.
Inside, on the kitchen counter, Kristen has poured Josh his coffee. She has set it next to his Bible. She does not ask him how it went.
Josh kisses the top of his son’s head and reaches for the cup.
He has not yet decided.
He has, in fact, not yet decided for the next thirty-eight months.
Then he decides.