Chapter 8 — The First Dinner
Rufus talks about the value of sharing.
Followed by Chapter 8 —— The First Dinner, in which Saskia treats Mica with their race winnings.
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Hello Friends,
Today’s is a particularly fun chapter as it marks the first meal Saskia and Mica share together. To celebrate the occasion, I’d like to talk about the rewards and liberation that come from sharing more generally.
I was thinking about this while listening to Patrick O’Shaughnessy’s podcast, Invest Like The Best. Patrick has a traditional closing question that he asks all first time guests of his show. Specifically: “what is the kindest thing anyone has ever done for you?”
Being a long-time listener of his podcast, I have given this question some thought myself. Answers typically fall into a couple of buckets. A common and understandable trope is thanking one’s parents for all they have done. Certainly an acknowledgement that the vast majority of guests would likely include if they were giving multiple responses. Another response is similar, but substitutes another authority figure, often a boss or teacher. The final major category of response is some variant of a kindness that someone bestowed on the guest in which the bestower had no personal gain; the helping of a (complete) stranger response, if you will.
Obviously I would include examples from all of the above categories were multiple responses permitted, but if I had to pick one incident for myself, I’d harken back to a teacher I had in either fourth or fifth grade. And, honestly, I don’t recall her name, even if I do still recall her action. So, what did she do? And what does it have to do with sharing?
There are not many things I recall from my years back in grade school, as evidenced by the fact that I don’t even recall whether this incident occurred in fourth or fifth grade. What I do recall is that the episode happened on a class field trip to the Yara River in Melbourne. Everyone was assigned to bring something to share at a class picnic, and I’d brought the much prized salt and vinegar chips. The unfortunate admission that I have to make now, is that, despite two siblings, I was evidently not that great at sharing, and when it came time to eat, a friend and I began hoarding our goods. At this point my teacher could easily have employed the draconian “my word is law” and forced us to share. Instead, though, she made the astute observation that she could appeal to our self-interest, and teach us a much bigger lesson. Her offer was simple: you can keep the chips to yourselves, or you can partake in everything else. To me, the brilliance of her proposition, was that it left us with the agency to choose, and, at the same time, made absolutely clear what the correct choice was, both for us and everyone involved. Of course, we chose to share, and in doing so learnt a much bigger lesson. A lesson that sharing can be positive sum.
Much more recently, sharing this project taught me another lesson about sharing, one of unexpected liberation. For while there is always risk involved in putting something out in the world, the act of courting feedback from multiple perspectives minimizes how personally you take any specific response. So, not only will The Curve of Time, without doubt benefit from your feedback, so too will I personally benefit, in the form of a surprisingly boosted sense of self-confidence. So, thanks again to all of you who have shared your thoughts thus far, and to those who are still cogitating and will share them soon.
Until next week, be kind to someone and keep an eye out for the ripples of joy you’ve seeded.
Cheerio
Rufus
PS. If you think of someone who might enjoy joining us on this experiment, please forward them this email. And if you are one of those someone’s and you’d like to read more
And now, without further ado, here’s chapter eight, in which Saskia and Mica celebrate their win at the race track.
— 8 —
The First Dinner
Saskia had offered to buy Mica dinner with the proceeds of their wager at the track. And, as much to test the veracity of the winnings as to dig further into what was happening, Mica accepted.
They sat together at a table with a white linen cloth that Mica guessed had a higher thread count than the bedsheets she’d splurged on a couple of months back. If she was honest with herself, it all felt a little stuffy, but the freebie would have been worthwhile for the novelty alone, even were it not that she held hope that the curious circumstances of the day might somehow become more clear.
“So, are you using AI to predict the future?” Mica asked. “The Lotto numbers, the horse races?”
Saskia cocked her head sideways and fiddled with the fork by her plate. It amused her, the outrageous possibilities the general public expected machine learning to open up. That, and the absurdly terrifying future the doom–and–gloomers saw. “My AI just sorts the trash.”
It was in some sense a natural——albeit multi-generational——offspring of neural networks’ early victories identifying hand-written numbers, though the path from discerning individually scrawled digits to reading checks deposited at ATMs, still left a gulf to be leapt before machines became useful at helping recognize and sort the trash.
Mica felt Saskia was dodging the hunch she wanted to pursue, but she understood that it sometimes took a more circuitous path. She could return to her suspicion that Saskia was some sort of techno–prophetic witch——albeit an attractive one with cute dimples——but for now she indulged her date and let her own curiosity for what Saskia was telling her lead the way: “How does it do that?”
Saskia related the leaps in vision technology required to achieve general object recognition. How her machines were trained on a conveyor belt of trash long enough to stretch well past the moon. She noted that identifying the articles of trash from vision was only half the problem. You still had to pick the pieces out. And, of course, modern robotics relied on AI trained on trial and error as much as image recognition relied on big data.
“But enough about me.” Saskia switched gears. “Tell me about you. Lottery winners are a pretty sure beat, but I doubt it was the sure beat that attracted you to journalism in the first place.” Her analysis left her question implicit.
“No,” Mica agreed. “I wanted to do my part to shine a light on climate change. Both the problems it poses, but also the possible remedies.”
“And how’s that been going for you?” Saskia asked, genuinely curious.
Mica pushed the last piece of hamachi through the delicious citrus aioli that had spilled across the serving plate. She hadn’t made as much progress on her investigative goals as she’d hoped in the last couple of years. Worse, she’d actually suffered a setback when a story she’d lobbied for left her with egg on her face.
“That’s a long face for a passion,” Saskia correctly interpreted Mica’s stall.
“I lobbied for a piece on green hydrogen,” Mica started. “But it didn’t quite pan out as I’d hoped.”
“Really? Sounds interesting.”
The pitch was, Mica agreed. Unfortunately, it was predominantly froth. In the end, the funding never materialized and the whole project had fallen through. That in itself wouldn’t have been such an unhappy happenstance, but Mica had campaigned with her editor, buying the pitch she’d been sold. In the end the editor had been right; infinite cheap energy turned out to be a requirement for the use of hydrogen as an energy storage source, rather than an actual generated supply.
Recounting the story left Mica feeling glum, and she excused herself to the restroom.
∞
Saskia sat alone for a couple of minutes, despondent that her genuine interest in Mica’s aspirations had caused her dinner date to flee. She glanced around the restaurant. Nobody else seemed to notice her sitting alone. She was out of place in this world. Not in a sore thumb sort of way, but in a way that made her feel invisible. To hell with it, Saskia thought, and she too abandoned the table to check on her companion.
Saskia passed the door with an etched nickel handlebar moustache and pressed her palm gently on the puckered lips engraved on the corresponding metal plate of the adjacent room.
Inside, Mica was the sole occupant, standing in front of one of four marble sinks.
“Hey there,” Saskia tendered. “You alright?”
Mica laughed self-consciously.
“You were gone so long——I figured maybe you were waiting for me.” Saskia gave Mica a cheeky grin and slipped the lock on the door she’d just entered.
Mica blushed, and turned back to the sink.
Saskia was less than two weeks ahead of Mica in terms of accepting the impossible, but she had the distinct advantage that she was experiencing time travel where Mica had merely witnessed it from the sidelines. Perhaps a two-pronged approach might help.
She approached Mica. As she did, Saskia reached forward and gently touched the other woman’s shoulder. Mica sank her head into Saskia’s hand, her hair catching on Saskia’s climbing callouses. Saskia leaned in to kiss the soft exposed skin on the other side of Mica’s neck. Mica closed her eyelids in submission, when——
The squawk of a stall door swinging open behind them interrupted the moment. Mica’s eyes involuntarily popped open. In the mirror she saw Saskia reflected, across the room.
Mica shrieked, and turned violently to see whose lips were caressing her neck: another Saskia. The one she now only half expected. One who jerked back in surprise at Mica’s panicked response.
“What the——?” Mica’s eyes ricocheted between the two Saskias.
“Hey there, future me.” The Saskia beside Mica’s neck waved across the room at her double, her second prong.
“Not funny!” Mica reprimanded them both. Her mind spun back to Saskia’s twin earlier that day. Desperately clutching to piece everything together, she charged both Saskias: “What part about being taken for a ride on another story didn’t you understand?!” How the Saskia’s managed this stunt——it didn’t matter. She didn’t want to know.
“Hey,” the Saskia by her side tried to placate her.
But Mica wasn’t interested this time. “Is this how all identical twins get their kicks?” She strode to the door, flipped the lock and stormed out.
Lavatory Saskia turned back from the slammed door to her younger self. “Well, that didn’t go as planned.”
Saskia’s eyes darted between her future self and the hope that Mica would walk back into the room. “Alright, you scram,” she instructed her older self. “My turn to give that a try.”
Both Saskia’s entered stalls again.
Younger Saskia’s mind raced. There had to be a way to improve on the outcome with a do over. First things first, though: perhaps it was a better idea to arrive a little earlier. The stalls were enormous and she paced about as she rolled back in time, thinking to herself. Planning . . .
