"Then: I google "time-series visualization" and start work on a new version of my model, thinking that maybe I can impress her with a prototype. I am… - Robin Sloan

I am really into the type of girl you can impress with a prototype.

There is no immortality that is not built on friendship and work done with care. All the secrets of the world worth knowing are hiding in plain sight. It takes forty-one seconds to climb a ladder three stories tall. It's not easy to imagine the year 3012, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't try. We have new capabilities now — strange powers we're still getting used to. The mountains are a message from Aldrag the Wyrm-Father. Your life must be an open city with all sorts of ways to wander in.

After that, the book will fade, the way all books fade in your mind. But I hope you will remember this:

A man walking fast down a dark lonely street. Quick steps and hard breathing, all wonder and need. A bell above the door and the tinkle it makes. A clerk and a ladder and warm golden light, and then: the right book exactly, at exactly the right time.

There was more to upgrade. I went to a shop in downtown Oakland that sold salt of every kind and color, black and pink and blue. Each variety sat shimmering in a glass canister, priced by the ounce, with a handwritten card recounting its biography: here, salt from the beaches of Gujarat; there, salt from the pans of Brittany; behold, salt from the suburbs of Portland.

I backed slowly out the door. I would stick with Diamond Crystal.

There had to be a scale somewhere — the scale of stars, the scale of far-off cosmic super-beings — upon which we ourselves, we humans with our cities and bridges and subterranean markets, would look like the lactobacilli and the yeast.