(16, 2016) I will pass my exams, only a few days from now, with colours flying. Aces, aces, aces, through calculus, biology a breeze, and chemistry done fast. This, then, will be a stark indicator that I always had been one attuned to great things. Why, would people ask, did I feel destined for such achievement? Here I will provide the words my mother or father will speak to me the month before I would pack to leave home. There words will be the kind that glues to the brain. They might be:

Keep your feet high as you walk, and you’ll never stumble.

Always count the minutes one stares at the moon.

Under no circumstances should you trust anything but your own hindbrain.

(26) Ten years from now as a guest on The Late Leopard Show, Leop will clap his hands and lean forward and look at me straight, say: tell me about your childhood. And I will mention one of the above quotes, whichever it ends up being. He’ll smirk then tell me to elaborate: who were my parents? How was school for you? These questions, trivial, but crucial for the layperson to relate to me. Every answer I will end with my catchphrase, which I will adopt from a travelling partner I meet in Costa Rica in my twentieth year: And that’s just how it is.

There will be a man in the audience, white t-shirt, jeans he’s worn everyday of his adult life yet still they are as unworn the day they were bought. This man will yell out to me one of two things:

Softie!

Job thief!

He would be referring, in jest, to Pete’s Plumage Parlour, the mattress company I was to found. It was the first of its kind – a mattress company with a research department. (22) It will be founded with my friend Pete during our last four months at the University of Brighton. By way of computer, we would developed simulations of mattress-human interfacing – or interlacing – with highly-accurate representations of the human and mattress morphology. Our secret would be to adopt the work of Geralst et al. published three years prior, The State of Soft Body For Sleeping Denizens: An Incomplete Study.

Leop’s desk has nothing on it except a pen in a cup. I will try my best to sit up straight in the brown leather armchair but I’m forced to accept a minor slouch. I won’t ask him why he has a desk for the purpose other than to hide his legs. But he will ask me about my mattresses, of which one will then be wheeled into the centre of the stage on a hospital bed. This is when the white-shirted heckler will chime in. Some will laugh, as they do, to release an awkward tension. Here are the words I have prepared to say back:

Hardie!

Lazy!

The audience will cheer. Yet still, this brief quip will effect my deeper than I will comprehend at the time. That evening and for months after I would be unable to sleep, riddled with waves of guilt. In the evening I’d wake up drenched in sweat and stand at the window of my New York penthouse flat – the one with an entire wall made of windows and looks over the west side of Hyde Park – and I would stare into the headlights of the cars until it numbed me.

Guilt for what? For when? For which? With Pete’s Plumage Parlour’s intercontinental takeover, there will no longer a need to sell a mattress to a customer. Customers will only ever want one mattress, so much in fact, that houses now will come with a Pete Bed installed right from the build. Mattress salespeople soon find themselves in a listless world: stores shut, turned into wharehouses for Pete’s mattresses, and that was that. The total job loss? Employment would plummet by five-percent in the United States alone.

(27) Now using heavy doses of drugs to sedate me at night, I will be sprawling, not know where to move forward in my life. I will find solace in the local library, among the more eclectic and dusty people of the city. There I go to use the computers and escape the loneliness of the high life, bathe in a false atmosphere that I am equal to the ones around me. Feverishly, I will be dissecting the internet in search of a man, one in a white t-shirt with new-looking old jeans.

It’s important for the reader to put in perspective what the state of technology will be at this time. A decade from now, the interweb is a very different sort of graph – a reeling mess, or, it was until three corporations, each instructed by the government to sort this all out or else, would build a bot army full of autocurators. They worked like cranes in a shipyard, these little minds, but ten-thousandfold. Suddenly, the sky was clear, we would be able to see a webpage for its words, the images made us laugh again. But this was with a cost. Such a use of immature automation would weave a bias into the digital world and we would not see it until it was too late.

My white-shirted target was, to my convenience, white himself. He would be a breeze to find all the world about him.

(27, 2023) We would meet at either Martiz’s or Gustiv Gardon. Both Italian restaurants, which I now love, but would hate for a few years prior after a road accident with a pizza truck when I will be nineteen. But Italian food, as Pete would always say, was the food of the deal.

I choose calzone. Pepperoni on the side, I will like to stack them all atop each other at the end, eat them all at once. The white-shirted white man, he will order a salad, green. I will ask him how it is, and he will reply, delicious but suspicious. This will spark a discussion at length, about a newfound shared interest: our suspicion of food served at restaurants. Our opinions, to my delight, would be the same about calzones and how much we disliked their secrecy.

Our meeting will be the root cause of both the second and third of the five most important, pivotal points in my life. The first, my mattress business. As is the nature of these points that pivot, I won’t know of the value of my meeting with the white-shirted man almost one year later. But, the third event will happen on my walk back from our dinner that evening. I will walk from Martiz’s or Gustiv Gardon either down third street (if coming from Martiz’s) or through the park on elm road (if leaving Gustiv Gardon by the side door, which I always will do), and I will be struck by the scene of either a man kneeling on the road scratching something, or a piece of litter caught by the wind and hitting me in the face. My curiosity will lead me to peer over the man’s shoulder or inspect my windswept interloper and both will be this: a piece of paper, no larger than my palm, bright blue, and with the words, Lucky’s Loony Lotto. And then just below the writing, in green or red letters, Win big! Sixty-Gajillionatinine Million Dollars. Frozen on the spot I will read it four, five – ten times at the least – and my eyes will grow wide.

I will race to the library.

The library used to lock its doors after ten in the evening. Now it will be open twenty-four hours after a redirection of funding from the government based on nostalgia alone. After I had moved from Bristol to New York, it would allow me all the resources to expand Pete’s Plumage Parlor from to international customers without ever turning on my lights (I would be cashless by the end of university from student debt). It will be either the computer on the third row, second from the left, or the one right at the entrance embedded in the wall like a cash machine that would become my spot. Wonderful how the mind scalds those crucial events into itself to keep for old age.

Here I will be, third row or right be the door, clacking away on a Xperion-A12 mechanical keyboard with double-blue reflex springs and PBC dampers, the clock twenty minutes to midnight. My stomach reeling only a little bit from having all the parts of a calzone rolling inside while I ran.

Gajillionatinine, I will say to myself under my breath. I am baffled that it is a real number, but when did I miss this? Further searching leads me to discover that it was a number coined by the science fiction author Klem M. Meldine. Mr. Meldine had written a short story in twenty-twenty, four years from now, about a woman named Ki, born with such thick skin she could light herself on fire and not feel a thing. For show, she drenched herself in gasoline and lit a match, with crowds oohing, aahing, and turning away with one eye still curious. She becomes so famous that another lady, so rich, sought to fund the most elaborate show ever, Ki as its centrepiece. What show? It is called The Sun of Ki. In it, Ki is launched into space, along with ten-thousand tons of oxygen and a ton of gasoline, and lit aflame in orbit of the Earth. How could such a show be funded, asks Ki? The rich lady says, I have a bajillionatinine dollars. The show is beyond a success, it is the most watched event of humankind. But during it, Ki accidentally makes contact with her parents, who turn out to be aliens that communicate by way of the licks of flame. Ki did not know this, for she was brought up by humans since she was a baby. Now the world turns about, hates her for her origin because that is disgusting. The rich lady hates her for it too. Ki’s parents say, yes, they are aliens, but they are gajillionatinine aliens. When the rich lady asks what this is and the aliens explain by way of writing out the number of zeros on twelve reams of paper, the rich lady is now happy. The world then finds this out too. They are happy. The story ends with Ki renouncing her parents for the humankind. Her parents leave with their gajillionatinine dollar amount and all the economists and politicians become innumerably sad.

This story, to be written fourteen years from now, will profoundly effect me. As I would read it like a madman at an ice cream buffet, my eyes running across the text like a-hundred different flavours, I would forget where I was and yet out a curse at the end of the story. The librarian, their name will be Ms. Kaline, Mr. Jer, or some machine on wheels with a grating voice, will ask me to leave. First politely but then in would be security who has to force me out as I protest. They will be rough and I will be thrown to the curb outside. With Mr. Meldine’s story running through my head like a memory of my own, I will perch there on the ground, in piles of cigarettes, or coffee, or receipts, or puddles, but certainly with lots of lichen and gum to keep me company. The sun will rise, people buzzing past me, someone will toss me a penny, and it is then that I will look up at the sky – the day will be a little overcast, the clouds with those swills of cold air bends, like ghostly ethanol in water.

This is the first time in my life that a fool will be made of my intellect. That someone will have bested me at my own game. To write such a book, Mr. Meldine would have to be a riveting genius, or a nutcase at best. But how to find him, I will wonder? Without access to the computer I think for a moment and then will remember the Theory of Seven. It is a common, but misquoted, idea that every one person in the world is seven steps from any other person, by way of friends or acquaintances or family. Countless studies disproved this claim unanimously. What is true, is the results of the psychologist Emerald Bluh, who proved with ninety-nine percent certainty, that any group of seven people know something you did not. When I first read about this a year from now, it would strike me to the floor and I put it to work at school, learning so many things that I was clueless of. Here, again, sprawled on the side walk, it would be the tenth time I would used the Theory of Seven. To every person that came by I would ask if they knew of Mr. Meldine, of his book, The Run of Ki. Most would brush me off or walk faster, but without a doubt, every seventh person I talked to, it was always something that I had learned. Of course, as I am now, such a tactic would be useless, but so much I will have learned over the years, honing my logical and analytical skills. Therefore as I am jumping from person to person it will be this I know then: more information – no matter what it is – is always, by induction, more instructive than less when one is trying to learn about something. I would feel myself gaining pace on Mr Meldine.

But what of the white-shirted man and our Italian food affair?