The View from the Roof

I have lost count of how many times I have rewritten this chapter. Not because the words would not come. Because they kept expiring. A capability I had labeled speculative became a product before the paragraph cooled. A distinction I was leaning on dissolved over a weekend. The future no longer waits at the end of the road. It walks toward us while we are still describing it.

I told you in the Foreword that there was no elevator to this roof, and you climbed anyway. I owe you something for that. Not predictions. Prediction is a game the river always wins. What I can offer is one last cut, in Raanan's sense: the facts you already hold, set in a new relationship, until the meaning hiding between them shows itself.

Here it is. You met half of it on the fourth floor, in the boardrooms running the seductive math: if five can do the work of a hundred,