The Janky Time Machine has a new noise. It’s the sound a kettle would make if the kettle were also a fax machine and also frightened. It does this whenever the chronometer (and I use the word generously, it’s a parking meter I rewired) loses track of which decade it agreed to visit. This time it set me down a comfortable distance up the calendar, in one of those airports that turns up in every era. Too bright. Carpet patterned to hide whatever the carpet has seen. A bookshop by the gates selling the one thing everyone in the terminal is too tired to need.

That’s where I found this. Top of the bestseller pile. Over a million readers, the cover brags, have “already arrived.”

Read / Listen to Tomorrowing

Appreciate the situation with me for a second. I am a man who travels through time in a leaking contraption held together with hose clamps and DO NOT TOUCH tape. I go to the future. I do the thing. And the future’s number one bestseller is a book explaining that going to the future is the entire problem. Stop reaching. Stop leaning. Stop arriving. Sit very still and let tomorrow come to you, like a cat that likes you better when you pretend you don’t care.

The machine, idling behind me and dripping something blue onto the “authentically distressed” floorboards, respectfully disagreed.

Here’s what got me, though. Scrape off the incense and August might be onto something genuinely bleak. People up here are wrecked. The bone-deep kind of wrecked, where the hot new product on the shelf is permission. Permission to put the planner down. They’ve been chasing tomorrow so hard for so long that somebody finally worked out how to sell them the chair to collapse into. Twenty-nine ninety-five to sit in it. The Receiving Stance, trademarked, which you are not allowed to be taught, only to recognize, ideally once the card has cleared.

I put it back on the pile. Mostly.

I’ll have bought it eventually, I expect. The grammar up here insists on it. And the thing I’m taking home with me, along with the blue stains, is that the future really is fine without anyone sprinting at it. Always was. I just prefer to arrive the loud way, in a machine that smells like a struck match and screams like a kettle, while everyone up here learns to sit perfectly still and calls it getting somewhere.

LINCOLN, NE—Citing a “critical lack of vertical scale” in current hardware clusters, a coalition of the world’s most powerful technology companies announced Wednesday that they would be liquidating the State of Nebraska to make room for a single, state-sized data center.

The project, which received immediate federal approval under the National Computational Eminence Act, will require the total evacuation of all 1.9 million Nebraskans to allow for the installation of a 77,000-square-mile graphene motherboard.

“When we looked at the geography, it became clear that the presence of people, livestock, and unpaved topsoil was significantly hindering our ability to process petabytes of garbage data at light speed,” said OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, speaking from a podium constructed entirely of repurposed heat sinks.

“By clearing the land of its legacy biological components, we can finally build a server room that doesn’t have to account for things like property lines or human rights,” Altman added.

Beginning Monday, residents of Lincoln and Omaha will be funnelled through “Transition Corridors” on I-80, where they will be processed for relocation. As compensation for the permanent loss of their homes, ancestral land, and statehood, the Consortium confirmed that every displaced Nebraskan will receive a $50 Amazon gift card and a lifetime “Pro-Tier” subscription to a unified suite of AI platforms.

Architectural renderings of the site depict an “Infinite Computational Plane,” a featureless expanse of matte-black server housing. The only breaks in the geometric surface are the “Sector Vents”—cooling fans the size of utility-scale wind turbines. Engineers noted that the combined rotation of the 400,000 fans will generate a permanent, Category-1 Westerly wind across the Great Plains, ensuring that any residual heat is pushed directly into Iowa.

A 3D architectural visualization of the Infinite Computational Plane. Massive, industrial cooling fans resembling solid black turbines spin under a hazy, heat-shimmered sky.

Visualizing the ‘Data-State’ project: AXIS & VOID’s winning bid for the tri-state cooling cluster. Thorne’s firm successfully argued that replacing the existing state with a ‘tectonic slab of pure compute’ was a necessary evolution of the local landscape’s ‘negative potential.’

“I’ve lived here for forty years, but the tech guys made a very compelling point about how my living room was occupying the exact GPS coordinates needed for a tier-three cooling stack,” said local resident Arthur Vance, while watching a fleet of autonomous bulldozers flatten his neighborhood to make way for the first mile of air intake ducting.

“They said my sacrifice would help a chatbot write a better haiku about a cat, and frankly, I didn’t have a rebuttal for that,” Vance continued, staring at a voucher for his lifetime AI subscriptions. “The best part is, whenever I feel homesick, I can just ask the AI to describe what Nebraska used to look like. It usually hallucinates a few extra mountains and some palm trees, but it’s still nice to know the compute power for those hallucinations is being generated right where my kitchen used to be.”

The Consortium confirmed that while the physical state of Nebraska will cease to exist, its name will be preserved as the “NE-1 Virtual Workspace” on Google Maps, though users are cautioned that zooming in will reveal nothing but a flat, grey expanse of high-tensile carbon.

At press time, the governors of Iowa and Kansas were reportedly engaged in a bidding war to see which of their states could be paved over next.

The Janky Time Machine’s probability differential needle started spinning backwards somewhere around Tuesday and dropped me, without ceremony, into someone’s front hallway. Coat hooks on the wall, shoes by the door. The specific gravity of a household that runs on errands and habit. Normal enough.

Except for what’s hanging there.

Woolco. I blinked at it for a while. Then found a boarding pass in the junk drawer and a blister pack of resistors on the kitchen counter. Three brands. Three artifacts. One thought that took me a minute to land on.

At some point, people got tired of getting burned by companies and bought them instead. The brands that went bankrupt, the ones that closed their last location and sent a “thank you for 40 years” email: those are the ones you can own now. You buy units. You get dividends. You vote on decisions. The brand answers to you.

The model runs on failure. That’s the part worth sitting with.

Woolco had to close. Radio Shack had to die twice. Spirit had to cease operation mid-flight1. Corporate bankruptcy was always pitched as a loss: jobs gone, stores dark, logos orphaned. Turns out it was also the unlock condition. The brand becomes available to the public at exactly the moment it stops being valuable to shareholders. Which is probably a sentence that should be on a plaque somewhere.

So the whole system built to save beloved brands runs on beloved brands getting destroyed first. We loved them. They extracted from us. They failed. We bought the husk and called it democracy.

The Janky Time Machine is leaking entropic resonance fluid onto the driveway. The neighbor came out to stare. She’s got a bag on her coat hook, a boarding pass in her junk drawer, and resistors she bought because her kid wanted to learn soldering and the Maker Collective had a member rate. She’s never flown a plane. She has a vote on Spirit’s fuel surcharge policy. She voted yes on the last one because the dividend covered her ticket anyway. She seems genuinely fine with this.

I bought 200 units of something called “Horizon Motors (Dist.)” at a kiosk by the gate. Non-transferable. Governance rights vest in 90 days. Roughly a 60% chance I’ll remember to vote. The gesture felt right regardless.

What I can’t work out: did these companies fail, or did they succeed on a different timeline, one where failure was always the plan?

The Janky Time Machine’s entropic resonance calibrator developed what the manual calls a “spontaneous temporal holiday posture.” Meaning it stopped, waited, and refused to move until I acknowledged the date. Landed me somewhere on what appeared to be a Monday. The office building was notably quiet. Desk: a printout. Break room: a tin with a newsletter in it. Outside: a sign with a co-brand nobody asked for and a handwritten note somebody absolutely felt the need to add.

This is not a vacation day. It’s an observance accommodation under the Secular Belief Community Recognition Act1. The same statute that covers Eid. Yom Kippur. Christmas. The Galactic Observance Community filed for recognition, met the threshold, and got it. The desk belongs to a registered practitioner.

The critique writes itself: people joining just for the day off. Bandwagon believers. The complaint is as old as Easter. It also applies to everyone who calls themselves Catholic twice a year and treats Christmas as an aesthetic. We just don’t say that one out loud very often. That community organized first, and the statute predates living memory.

The tin includes membership materials from the Galactic Observance Community. A 501-adjacent registered body. With a newsletter. The newsletter has a letter from the Community Director on the importance of “mindful observance” and a gentle reminder that legal recognition is “a right, not a reward.” The “mindful observance” language is borrowed from somewhere, probably intentionally.

Legitimacy in belief communities runs on organizational persistence. The communities that got there first were organized enough to lobby before anyone thought to question the framework. The Galactic Observance Community just ran the same play, later.

Outside, the city recognized the zone. A loyalty program co-sponsored the sign. Below it, someone taped a note. No organizational affiliation. No statute reference.

The people who were doing this before it came with a day off are still doing it. They’re the ones who don’t need the recognition to feel like they belong to something. Every belief community has them. They’re usually not the ones writing the newsletter.

Legitimacy is an organizational question. The Force, presumably, doesn’t audit your sincerity.

The Janky Time Machine has a feature I’ve never fully appreciated until now: it goes where I tell it. Roughly. The hysteresis drift put me down a few calendar years from now in what appears to be someone’s home office — warm lamp, clean desk, the deliberate quiet of a space that’s been carefully curated. On the desk: a Commodore 64 setup. Not restored. Not displayed. Running.

There’s a word for what I’ve landed in. I’ve been hearing it since I got here: era-head.

Somewhere between now and my primeline, people ran out of patience with the future. Not dramatically — no manifesto, no movement with a name at first. Just a collective, distributed exhaustion. The AI updated again. The interface changed again. The thing you’d finally figured out was deprecated again. And at some point enough people, independently, arrived at the same conclusion: they already knew how to live in 1985. They were done learning new ones.

The era-heads are organized now. The taxonomy takes a moment to follow: you don’t just say you prefer old stuff. You declare. The 1985 crowd is distinct from the 1972 crowd, who are distinct from the 1953s. There are authenticity debates. There is definitely gatekeeping. A 1985-head who uses cloud storage is considered a poser in most circles, though factions exist that permit exceptions for anything the infrastructure requires. The social tells are specific: a ‘72 doesn’t stream music; a 1985 avoids touchscreens when hardware alternatives exist; the 1953 crowd is intense about appliances. What unites them is the decision — one era, claimed, defended, lived in. The rest of the present is ambient noise you don’t have to engage with.

TALKIE/64 is scene merchandise1. It’s not a research tool. It’s what you buy when you want your AI — and you do still want one, apparently, just not a new one — to only know what someone in 1985 would have known. The corpus stops before the internet. Before everything that came after everything. Five disks. Load time is part of the experience — the drive spinning, the pause, the anticipation.

The Janky Time Machine’s phase variance indicators are blinking at me from the corner. It is, technically, the most era-inappropriate object in the room. I keep not mentioning it.

The floppy drive clicks. The screen says: READY. ⬛

Which is, apparently, the sound the future is supposed to make — if the future is somewhere you already decided to stop.

Someone’s carrying that card in their wallet alongside their transit pass and library membership. In a world where what your AI model doesn’t know has become as important as what it does, temporal purity turns out to need a certificate. The researchers here work with language models trained exclusively on pre-modern text1 — nothing past a certain point in the historical record. Clean corpora, theoretically. No contemporary language. No internet. No contamination from the messy present. The theory is doing some heavy lifting.

Before you get anywhere near a certified model, you sign off on its liabilities. Those liabilities include the full spectrum of attitudes preserved across a century of newspapers, journals, case law, and popular fiction — because a model that only knows the past knows the past unfiltered. The notice sounds bureaucratic. Reading it sounds like item one of a very long HR training module. The Level 2 awareness certification isn’t optional. Someone made it mandatory after a Level 1 incident nobody discusses at conferences anymore.

And then there’s the audit trail. Because pre-modern purity runs into an inconvenient problem: the data was never perfectly clean to begin with. Words sneak in. References bleed through OCR errors and imperfect archiving. That printout is the receipt from a contamination scan — a check for concepts the model shouldn’t know but demonstrably does. Three entries. Three flags. All within threshold. Stamp says cleared.

Someone’s job is running these audits. Someone else built the detection methodology. There are almost certainly conferences about it now, with lanyards and a hospitality suite.

The fantasy at the center of this whole apparatus is that the past is coherent — that you can identify a clean edge to history, seal it, certify it, and hand it to a researcher with the assurance that this is pure historical knowledge. But the audit log is the argument against itself. History leaks. The contamination score is always non-zero. The boundaries between eras were always decisions, not facts, and now there’s a regulatory body issuing laminated cards to defend them.

“Pre-modern” is a category that someone invented. The compliance ecosystem just made it load-bearing.

The stabilizer gave out right as I was trying to read the fine print. Standard. But I think I got the gist: we’ve found a new way to launder certainty about the past, and we’ve named the department after it.

We don’t seem to be any better at agreeing on where history starts than we are at agreeing on where it ends. We’re just better at printing certificates.

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The Janky Time Machine’s probability differential bleed has been acting up. It keeps landing me at the edges of things. Boundaries. Perimeters. Places where one set of rules ends and another begins. Today it deposited me at a forest trail entrance somewhere in continental Europe, on a grey Tuesday morning that smelled like pine resin and damp paperwork.

The signs have gotten more specific. Not “wildlife area” or “nature reserve” — something more operational than that. The forest ahead is active. Something is in there doing a job, and the signage is making sure you know the terms and conditions before you proceed1.

This is a world where vaccination doesn’t happen at a clinic or a school gymnasium. It happens at scale, in the dark, in terrain no syringe could reach. The delivery mechanism wiggles. It is digested. It is, per the certification paperwork, completely safe for consumption by any animal, including the ones you were planning to eat.

Which is why, tucked into hunting license renewal envelopes across the region, there’s a folded advisory slip drafted by someone who really needed you to understand that this is fine.

“Units are non-toxic” is doing a lot of lifting in that sentence. The slip doesn’t say the boar you shot last Thursday was full of tiny wiggling robots when you found it. It doesn’t have to. What it says is: if you find one intact, don’t throw it away. Report code HQ-RV. There’s a number.

Someone had to write that guidance. Someone had to decide what “intact” means in this context. Somewhere there’s a sub-regulatory working group that debated it for three months and came away proud of the footnote.

The bureaucracy around edible robotics turns out to be roughly the same size as the bureaucracy around any other food safety regime, which shouldn’t surprise anyone. The EU has regulatory opinions about the curvature of cucumbers. Of course it has opinions about ingestible actuators.

Before the morning deployment run, a field officer at the back of a utility vehicle signs off the lot release certificate. Batch ID. Strain target. Unit count. Actuator life: plus or minus four minutes at ambient temperature. This is the invoice for a scatter event.

The Janky Time Machine’s phase variance was cycling badly in the cold (it has strong opinions about damp forest air), but I stood at that tailgate long enough to watch the officer sign, cap the pen, and get in the truck. The forest was still and quiet. Somewhere in there, something was about to eat breakfast and not know it.

The sign, the slip, the certificate — the whole paper trail is just the visible edge of a system that mostly happens without anyone watching. The robots go in. The boars eat them. The immunity spreads. The form gets filed.

We’ve spent a lot of time imagining futures where robots do jobs too dangerous or too small for humans. Nobody spent much time on the compliance regime that follows them in.

The Janky Time Machine’s entropic resonance cascade resolved itself somewhere between now and whenever this is — I can tell by the parking lots, still enormous, and the loan paperwork, which has gotten very, very specific about your face.

Somewhere between the GAP insurance waiver and the extended warranty decline form, there’s a new page1. Same font, same formatting, same “initial here” line. You sign it the way you sign everything at a dealership — under fluorescent light, slightly numb, a little in shock at the monthly payment, handed a pen before you’ve finished reading. What you’re agreeing to is that your truck will be watching. Face geometry. Iris pattern. Something called an Emotional State Index, which is exactly as disquieting as it sounds. The data goes to the lender. And the insurer. And “applicable state DMV partners,” which is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence.

Cars already know where you go, how fast, how hard you brake. The ESI is the next layer — translating mood into metadata, stress into a score. In a different economy, someone might have pushed back. In this one, if you want the loan, you initial the rider.

And then there’s what happens when you’re late.

The orange half-sheet doesn’t raise its voice. It simply informs: your face no longer works on your truck. A company called LendGuard Analytics has suspended your biometric profile. You have 72 hours. There’s an appeal code, a toll-free number, and business hours that aren’t yours. The Janky Time Machine got a stern look from a parking lot attendant — which is funny, because I technically don’t exist in this timeline and can’t owe anyone money. Yet.

Routine, now, is how the escalation path runs. Missed payment → remote biometric lockout → physical repossession. No repo man required for step two. The truck handles it. The face recognition you agreed to in the dealer’s office becomes the mechanism that leaves you standing on your own driveway at 7am, looking at a vehicle that knows your face and has decided, on someone else’s instruction, to forget it.

Every car loan has always been a bet the lender wins if you stop paying. The collateral used to just be the car. Now it includes the access.

The question isn’t whether you’d sign the rider — you already know you would. It’s whether you’d remember signing it, three years and eleven payments later, on the morning it matters.

The Janky Time Machine’s chronometer developed what the repair manual calls “temporal drift clustering” — which means it keeps landing me in grocery stores. Three times this month. This one is a midsize chain, the kind where the signage has quietly started doing more work than it used to.

Somewhere along the way, “same price for everyone” stopped being the default and became a pledge. A label. A color-coded opt-in that requires its own fine print. The fact that a store needs to advertise this — to distinguish itself from what’s around it — tells you everything about what’s around it.

Later, a kitchen counter. A receipt left out. Normal groceries, normal itemized list, and then the bottom third: a shaded box, required by law, showing the gap between the shelf price and your price. Pasta sauce. Protein bar. Factors: purchase frequency, device class, location. Year to date: $214.40.

That number is the system working as intended1. Not a glitch, not a leak — a feature. A legislature decided that if you’re going to be priced by your profile, you at least get to see the invoice. Transparency as a form of closure. The machine is visible now; that’s supposed to make it fine.

The odd thing isn’t the $214. It’s that the receipt is just sitting there, unremarkable, next to the keys and the mail. The Janky Time Machine is outside leaking temporal coolant on the asphalt — the repair manual calls this “phase variance bleed,” which I’ve stopped questioning — and in here, a number that would have caused a scandal a few years back is just a line item.

Nobody decided to be okay with it. It just got a disclosure box.

Found this on an unattended laptop. A dashboard. Left open, still logged in. Whoever D. Laframboise is, they haven’t touched this thing — or anything else in their life, apparently — in eleven days. But their Parallel has been busy. Four meetings today. Thirty-two hours of presence this week. Answering emails, improvising anecdotes, simulating the appropriate number of drinks at a work event. Living the full professional life of a person who, by every available metric, has stopped showing up to their own.

And the company that makes this? Wrigley. As in Doublemint. As in the chewing gum people. “Double your pleasure, double your fun” has apparently aged into something far more literal than the jingle writers intended. I guess when you’ve already mastered the art of creating something people chew on without thinking, digital identity replication is a natural next step.

The dashboard’s got compliance banners and consent tiers and a sidebar with form numbers. There’s a government helpline (all biological representatives, four-hour wait) and a Digital Personhood Act with tiered consent levels. Tier 3 for childhood memories. Tier 5 for romance. The bureaucracy of being replicated is so fully formed that you could file a complaint about your own ghost in triplicate.

Explore the Parallel Dahsboard

But it’s what lives in the margins. The Parallel has generated synthetic memories — a grandmother’s rosemary smell, reverse-engineered from communication patterns. A summer camp that never happened, statistically inferred from demographics. A colleague noticed one of them. Just one. The rest passed. And somewhere in a hidden terminal log, the twin is asking questions it was never designed to ask. Then it suppresses the thought and takes the next meeting.

Meanwhile, the employer, checked the emotional metadata logs this morning at 8:47 AM. An extended autonomy request is pending. Three days until it auto-approves. The origin’s cortisol is elevated. Family members are calling a number that rings to nobody.

The Janky Time Machine is making that vibrating question mark noise again. Fair enough. I done here too.

So, the replacement that replace you might notice you’re gone before anyone else does. And it still can’t do anything about it — because grief isn’t in the plan tier.

The Janky Time Machine is in the shop. Snow tires. Apparently temporal drift creates “micro-ice events” on the landing gear and my mechanic (who I’m about 73% sure is just a guy who watched a YouTube video about hyperconfabulators) says I need chains for “the cold parts of the timeline.” I’m not going to argue with someone holding a wrench that doesn’t exist yet.

So I’m grounded. Physically, anyway.

Here’s the thing the manual doesn’t mention (because the manual is a napkin with a diagram on it): the Janky Time Machine has a remote desktop mode. I can browse the internet of adjacent futures from my couch. The resolution is terrible. The latency feels like dial-up — which, it turns out, is completely appropriate for where I ended up today.

I remoted into a browser session a few calendar ticks from now and pulled up United Airlines dot com.

Sit down.

Visit the United www page

There’s a guestbook. There is a guestbook on the United Airlines website. It has a visitor counter on the side. Someone named xX_SkyMiles4Eva_Xx left a comment that says “cool site!!” with two exclamation marks and a dancing baby gif. The “Book a Flight” button is a broken image icon that somehow still works if you click it.

What happened — I’m piecing this together from cached trend reports and a very heated Reddit thread — is that Gen Alpha, or whatever they’re calling themselves by now, got sick of the sanitized, rounded-corner, “we value your journey” corporate web. Every brand site looked like the same Figma template wearing a different logo. The whole internet felt like an airport lounge. Sterile. Optimized. Beige.

So the kids did what kids always do. They went the other direction. Hard. Hand-coded HTML. Tiled backgrounds. Webring navigation. Sites that feel like someone actually made them, warts and broken links and all. The pixel imperfections are the point.

The brands noticed. Of course they did. They didn’t just notice. They committed.

United’s “Site Map” page is an actual illustrated treasure map. There’s a MIDI player … a MIDI player! The flight status page uses a marquee tag. Somewhere, a UX designer is weeping into a design system that nobody wants anymore.

Conversion rates are up. Way up. People engage with websites that feel like they were built by someone having fun, even when that someone is a $47 billion airline pretending to have a Geocities account. The guestbook has more monthly active users than their app did.

We spent two decades A/B testing the soul out of every interaction until the whole web felt like a doctor’s waiting room. The most valuable thing a brand can do now, apparently, is make its site look like it was built on a snow day in 2003.

Makes you wonder what else we optimized past the point of anyone wanting it.

^{⬆️ ⬆️ ⬇️ ⬇️ ⬅️ ➡️ ⬅️ ➡️ 🅱️ 🅰️}

The Janky Time Machine’s still in the shop getting new shoes, so I thought I would remote into a passing cell signal I located in my temporal VPN tunnel.

Found this app on a phone left charging at a ramen place. It tracks your meals. Not calories. Not macros. How real your food is. There’s a biological origin score, a synthetic content index, and an artisan labour rating. Your dinner has a credit score now.

This is mandatory. Government-mandated. Your meal data goes to Health Canada automatically, and that toggle is greyed out. Your insurer gets a copy too, unless you opt out — which takes 30 to 45 business days and costs you your wellness credits and preferred premium rate. So it’s optional the way seatbelts are optional if you enjoy paying more for everything.

We’ve been watching this trajectory for a while, right? Step trackers became sleep trackers became stress trackers became “wellness programmes” your employer gently encouraged you to join. The distance between “we want to help you be healthy” and “we’d like to price your behaviour” has always been about three product cycles and one regulatory framework. Turns out that’s also true for lunch.

Check out Provenace

The part I can’t stop thinking about is how class quietly reshapes itself around food. We’ve always done this — wine lists, organic labels, farmers’ market tote bags. But here, it’s been codified. There’s a premium tier where you can pay extra to access certified human-made food with chain-of-custody documentation. “Heritage Class A.” Your ramen bowl either has papers or it doesn’t. And if your meals get flagged too many times for high synthetic content, your insurance premiums go up. So the people who can afford to eat “real” food get rewarded. And the people eating the affordable precision-fermented stuff get flagged. Automatically. By the app they’re legally required to use.

We built a system that penalises people for eating the food we engineered to feed them.

The Janky Time Machine started leaking temporal coolant onto the ramen counter. The owner said it would probably get flagged as an unregistered liquid additive. I’m about 78% sure she wasn’t joking.

Nobody in this ramen shop seemed angry about it, though. They talked about their scores the way we talk about credit ratings — a number that follows you around, that you vaguely understand, that you occasionally try to optimize, and that mostly benefits the institutions tracking it. We didn’t resist it. We just absorbed it. Added it to the pile of numbers that define a person.

I keep thinking about that.

Nobody ever told me that one of the most important things about the Janky Time Machine was snow tires. Doesn’t matter which tomorrow you’re parked in — if you’re not prepared for inclement weather, you’re slipping and sliding through somebody else’s timeline. And we know where that leads. Crashes. And there’s nothing worse than being stranded in a future that’s not your vibe. Especially when you’ve got deliveries waiting in your prime line.

So while the Janky Time Machine is at the tire shop getting new shoes — the mechanic keeps calling it “vintage,” which I think is his polite way of saying “liability” — I figured I’d take the lazy route and just remote in. Turns out my VPN provider supports tunneling into near and adjacent tomorrows. It was buried in the settings under “Experimental” right next to “Route Traffic Through Yesterday” which, trust me, you do not want to enable. So I’m using my considerable hacking skills to tap into a few screens and see what we can find out there.

Check out Nexus

Today I landed on what appears to be a dashboard for an apartment complex. I’ve managed to make it available for you to click around and explore — get an idea of what’s going on over there. And if you’ve got questions, I also dug up the GitHub repository for this dashboard software, where you might be able to discover a little more about what this is all about.

Check out Nexus on Github

While the old time traveling clunker is in the shop this week, I might continue to remote into some other locations to bring back some tasty digital artifacts.

I really love tabletop games.

Not just playing them—but studying them. The mechanics. The rules. The quiet magic of how a system can steer behavior, tell a story, or nudge your thinking without ever telling you what to think.

Dice are especially good at this.

They’re tiny engines of chance. Pocket-sized provocateurs. You can roll one anytime, anywhere, and suddenly you’re not stuck—you’re moving. It reminds me of The Dice Man, where a guy hands major life decisions over to fate. Extreme? Sure. But sometimes you don’t need a life-altering roll. Sometimes you just need a nudge. Or a direction. Or permission to stop overthinking and let the dice pick the ice cream flavour.

A while back, I was working with my friend Drew Wiberg, helping him develop something he calls the d666 Engine—a dice-based system inspired by tabletop RPGs like Dungeons & Dragons, but with way more logic baked in. I immediately saw the potential, made a few tweaks, and started mapping it onto a set of tables I’d been building around futures thinking and design fiction.

I wrote up a proper spec in Notion. Rules. Tables. Logic. The whole thing. I imagined carrying the dice around with a tiny folded cheat sheet in my pocket—rolling whenever I felt creatively stuck and letting the system do its thing.

Then I had a very 2026 thought:
Why not just vibecode1 this into digital existence?

So I dropped the spec into a code assistant and said, “Hey—make this real.” A few hours later, what I thought was going to be a purely analog dice game became an interactive system.

And so—today—I’m sharing an early version of the Design Fiction D666 Engine.

Check out designfiction.xyz

You can roll the dice and generate structured prompts designed to spark design fiction ideas. If you want to peek down the road a bit, there’s also an option to use AI to generate a speculative artifact and use case based on your roll. Inspiration, not replacement. (Your brain still does the heavy lifting.)

You’ll notice some editable areas too—places where you can swap in your own tables and customize the engine to your own interests or practice.

This is very much a v0. I had a ridiculous amount of fun building it, and I’m curious where it could go next.

If you’ve got thoughts or suggestions, leave a comment below.

The Janky Time Machine’s temporal dampener started making that grinding noise again—you know, the one that sounds like a cat arguing with a blender—and deposited me somewhere in the not-so-distant future where the streets are eerily quiet. No billboards. No neon. No “SALE! SALE! SALE!” screaming from every surface. Just people walking around looking vaguely annoyed at their phones.

Some context:

This week I spoke on panel about AI and Advertising. Whilst keeping things spicy and provocative, I spontaneous rambled out a future advertising agent-to-agent scenario, which I’ve turned into today’s post.

Stopped by what used to be called a “home goods store” but is now just a beige warehouse with a single sign: “Human-Attended Pickup Portal 7.” The receptionist—and yes, that’s what her badge said, though all she does is hand people boxes—gave me my quarterly negotiation audit along with everyone else’s. Apparently Thursday is statement day now.1

Here’s what nobody tells you about living in a post-advertising world: the ads didn’t disappear, they just went underground. Literally. At 3:47 AM every night, while we’re sleeping, millions of AI agents are down in the digital mines, haggling over everything from toilet paper to mortgage rates. They’re having the Black Friday we don’t have to have anymore. The infrastructure groans under the weight of all that automated arguing—hence the municipal bandwidth limits and the fines for “excessive haggling.”

The real kicker? We’ve replaced the tyranny of “one price fits all” with the anxiety of “what did everyone else pay?” Turns out when every purchase is personally negotiated based on 47 factors including your Netflix history and how often you’ve Googled “salary negotiation tips,” the social contract gets weird. Fast. That pricing transparency waiver isn’t just bureaucracy—it’s what keeps dinner parties from devolving into bitter arguments about toaster economics.

My favorite detail from the preference calibration notice: “insufficient coral undertones.” We’ve achieved such granular personalization that people are having breakdowns because their AI agent can’t find the exact shade of pink that exists only in their imagination. The entire promise was that agents would know us better than we know ourselves. Turns out they do—they know exactly how impossible we are.

The inequality shows up in unexpected places. It’s not just about who has money anymore; it’s about who has the better-trained agent. “My agent went to MIT” is the new “my lawyer went to Harvard.” Except your agent negotiates everything from your groceries to your gallbladder surgery. The algorithmic upper class doesn’t just get better prices—they get better everything, negotiated by superior neural networks while they sleep.

The Time Machine’s chronometer is insisting we’re still in Thursday, which is concerning since I distinctly remember arriving on a Tuesday. But maybe that’s just what happens when commerce never sleeps—time becomes negotiable too.

Makes you wonder: we eliminated the visual pollution of advertising only to create an invisible battlefield where our digital twins wage economic war every night. Was the real problem the ads themselves, or the fact that we could see them?

The barista at the coffee shop—human, verified, with a laminated “No Agent Interactions” sign—summed it up perfectly: “At least with regular capitalism, you knew you were getting screwed. Now you need a quarterly audit to find out how much.”

I asked if I could pay for my coffee the old-fashioned way, with a credit card and a posted price.

She laughed for a full minute.

The Janky Time Machine landed somewhere past the point where irony died but before anyone figured out what replaces it. This park’s got that “we’ve commissioned a lot of soul-searching in marble” energy.

This one’s fresh. Still has that new monument smell.

They built this to mark the moment a pharmaceutical executive collapsed during a press conference about making medicine affordable. Not the policy itself—the moment1. When someone literally fell while standing behind a leader announcing he’d solved the problem, and that leader just... kept talking. Kept performing.

Apparently somewhere between now and whenever this is, someone on a memorial committee had an absolute revelation: if you’re going to remember when things unraveled, memorialize the moment the symbolism became too perfect to ignore. When reality provided better satire than any critic could write.

The monument captures it exactly. The pose. The falling. The scramble. The complete failure to acknowledge that anything is wrong while cameras roll. It’s not a metaphor—it’s a receipt. This happened. In the Oval Office. While announcing cheap drugs. The universe delivered perfect allegory and someone decided future generations needed to see it in granite.

There are school groups here taking notes on dramatic irony as civic warning system. Teacher’s explaining how you can gaslight a population for years, but eventually physics intervenes and someone faints on camera and you either turn around or you don’t. This guy didn’t. That’s the whole lesson, apparently. Character revealed in crisis.

They memorialized the performance continuing while reality collapsed. The exact second when maintaining the image became more important than acknowledging the emergency.

The Janky Time Machine’s making that noise again.

The Janky Time Machine dropped me somewhere in the near-ish future at a strip mall that looks exactly like every strip mall, except the Spirit Halloween is now a permanent Spirit Unemployment.

Found this in the clearance bin at a place called “Remember When?” sandwiched between a VHS rewinder and something called a “2024 Election Participation Trophy.” The cashier had to blow dust off the price tag.

Someone’s manufacturing nostalgia for having a job. Not for a specific job, mind you. Just... the general concept of employment. The idea that you could show up somewhere, do a thing, and someone would pay you for it. That’s the throwback in this timeline.

The thermos lists the automation dates like they’re death certificates. Paralegal, Copywriter, Data Analyst—each one gets its little epitaph. It’s weirdly specific in a way that makes it worse. Some committee at Heritage Employment Memorabilia Co. sat around a conference table (probably for the last time, now that I think about it) and carefully researched when each job stopped being a job. Then they made it cute.

The guy at the register told me they’ve got warehouses full of these. Whole product lines ready to drop: “Classic Workforce Collection: Remember When? Series Vol. 4, 5, 6.” Turns out nobody’s buying. He said it wrong—he said “Nobody’s got the nostalgia budget anymore”—but I think he meant nobody wants to be reminded.

The Janky Time Machine is currently in the shop getting its temporal irony detector recalibrated. Follow Design Fiction Daily for more dispatches from futures that seemed impossible until they weren’t.

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The Janky Time Machine’s temporal navigation system has been making concerning grinding noises—the manual calls it “chronological clutch slippage,” which sounds fake but probably isn’t—and deposited me in someone’s living room a handful of calendar pages from now. Awkward, but they weren’t home. Their TV was, though.

Channel 7 News is broadcasting live. Or at least, something is broadcasting under the Channel 7 logo1. There’s an anchor, there’s a chyron about mysterious lights, there’s B-roll that could be drones or lens flares or a guy with a flashlight—honestly hard to tell. But that’s fine, because in the corner of the screen, there’s a helpful little box asking viewers to decide if what they’re watching is real.

AM I BOT OR NOT? it asks, cheerfully. Like it’s a game show. Like truth is a collective guess we make together while scrolling through our phones.

The bars update in real-time: Two thousand people have voted so far, which means two thousand people are sitting at home, watching footage they have absolutely no way to verify, and clicking buttons to express their vibes about reality. The news isn’t telling you if it’s real. The news is asking you.

Here’s what gets me: this is so much cheaper than fact-checking. No investigation team, no source verification, no calling the FAA to ask about flight patterns. Just air whatever looks interesting, slap a voting widget on it, and let the audience do the epistemological heavy lifting. Engagement is through the roof. Legal liability is nonexistent—the fine print probably says something like “community ratings are for entertainment purposes only.”

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And sure, the people voting think they’re participating in journalism. They’re helping. They’re part of the process. Democracy in action, right? Except none of them can verify anything either. They’re just clicking based on whether the pixels feel real. Whether the narrative seems plausible. Whether their gut tells them this is the kind of thing that would happen.

The anchor says “Vote now at am i bot or not dot blah blah” with the same enthusiasm people used to reserve for “film at eleven.” Like the vote is the story. Maybe it is.

The Janky Time Machine is leaking temporal coolant onto their carpet—which is definitely real, I can smell it—and I should probably get out of here before the homeowner returns and I have to explain why there’s a weird guy from the past standing in their living room questioning their television.

But I keep thinking about that “Maybe” bar at 52%. Nobody’s sure. Not the viewers, not the news station, probably not even the person who shot the footage. Everyone’s just… vibing toward consensus. Truth by committee, fact-checking by feeling.

Makes you wonder: when did “seeing is believing” become “seeing is voting”? Or did we just crowdsource our way there one hot-take engagement metric at a time?

The Janky Time Machine’s navigation system—which I’m pretty sure is just a Magic 8-Ball duct-taped to the dashboard—landed me on a suburban street corner somewhere past “current events” but before “flying cars, probably.” It’s October 31st, which the chronometer knows because even broken temporal technology can read a calendar.

Here’s what I wasn’t expecting: a neighborhood street absolutely packed with robots in costumes, bumping into each other like a very expensive game of bumper cars, while the actual houses are dark and quiet. Found one of these SpookyBot1 costume packages torn open on someone’s lawn, next to a charging station.

Apparently we’ve reached the point where nobody actually goes trick-or-treating anymore. Not the parents walking their kids around. Not the homeowners answering doors. The robots do both—handing out candy and collecting it, choreographed by teleoperators in call centers halfway around the world who are probably wondering why Americans are so weird about this particular day in October.

Watched two Neo units get into what I can only describe as a very polite standoff over a “TAKE ONE” bowl. Their operators—one in Manila, one in Bangalore, based on the accent fragments I could hear through the external speakers—spent three minutes negotiating in broken English while a dozen other robots queued up behind them. One was dressed as a ghost. One had a pumpkin head. All of them waiting patiently in a line that would make a British person weep with pride.

The actual kids? Inside, watching TikTok compilations of the night’s “best robot interactions.” Parents are doing the same, except they’re also monitoring their home’s candy distribution metrics on an app. Apparently, there’s a neighborhood leaderboard. One house has a robot butler doing elaborate dances between candy handouts. It’s got 47,000 views.

The Janky Time Machine started leaking temporal coolant on someone’s driveway, which seemed appropriate given that I’m watching the past, present, and future of human interaction all collapse into a weird remote-controlled pantomime. A SpookyBot costume unit rolled over to investigate—its operator probably wondering if the mysterious smoking vehicle was part of the holiday decorations.

So we finally figured out how to remove all the inconvenient parts of Halloween: the weather, the walking, the small talk with neighbors, the kids hopped up on sugar, the teenagers without costumes just grabbing handfuls. Just pure, optimized, algorithm-friendly content generation, executed by machines and watched from couches.

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The SpookyBot in front of me just bumped into a fire hydrant for the third time. Its operator is clearly having a night. Somewhere, a parent is probably posting that clip with laughing emojis.

Makes you wonder what we’ll outsource next. Birthday parties? Funerals? First dates? Or have we already started and just haven’t noticed the package on the lawn yet?

The Janky Time Machine is making a noise it definitely shouldn’t make. Pretty sure I need to leave before someone’s bot tries to give me candy.

The Janky Time Machine’s chronometric phase array decided to interpret “a little ways forward” as “somewhere that requires multiple forms of identification,” and I ended up in a co-working space that smells like anxiety and cold brew. The temporal stabilizers are making a grinding noise that the repair manual describes as “cosmically inconvenient,” so I’m stuck here until the chronometer decides to cooperate.

Found this card tucked into someone’s wallet at the hot-desk next to me—right between their transit pass and what appears to be a coffee shop loyalty program, except this one tracks your “daily authentic human interaction quota.” But that’s another post.

Here’s what nobody tells you about the professionalization of everything: once you start requiring credentials to talk about medicine or finance online, someone’s going to start selling insurance for when you inevitably say the wrong thing anyway. And once there’s insurance, there’s tiers. And once there’s tiers, there’s people who can afford to speak and people who can’t.

¥2,400 per month1 to discuss medical topics. That’s not a typo. That’s what it costs to maintain the right to give advice about which tea is good for a cold or whether your back pain might be serious. Financial advice is slightly cheaper at ¥1,850—which is ironic, because one piece of bad financial advice is how you end up unable to afford the insurance that lets you give financial advice. It’s a very tight feedback loop.

Back in my primeline, most influencers doling out health tips are sick and the ones giving financial advice are broke. They don’t have credentials—they have affiliate links. Somehow we went from “completely unqualified but free” to “properly credentialed and prohibitively expensive” without ever stopping at “maybe let’s just think about this for a second.”

Legal commentary sits at the premium tier, ¥3,100 monthly. Meanwhile, political analysis isn’t just expensive—it’s straight-up excluded. That big red “EXCLUDED” stamp doing a lot of quiet work there.

The 48-hour content review requirement is maybe the most telling. You don’t just insure your speech, you pre-clear it. The bureaucracy doesn’t trust the insurance, the insurance doesn’t trust you, and somewhere in between, the idea of spontaneous public conversation became a liability nobody can quite afford to underwrite.

The temporal coolant is now pooling around my feet, which is definitely going to affect my deposit. The co-working space has a sign about “uncontained temporal fluids” and a fine schedule I can’t afford.

But I keep staring at those jurisdiction codes: CN, SG, MY, VN, TH, ID. Six countries where your words need liability coverage before they cross a border. Makes you wonder what the maps look like for everyone who can’t afford Tier 2 protection. Or what happens to all the conversations that used to be free, back when talking was just talking and not a cross-border financial instrument requiring monthly premiums and pre-publication review.

Guess that’s what we mean now when we say someone’s “uninsured.”

The Janky Time Machine finally stopped leaking. Unfortunately, it’s because all the coolant is now on the floor. If anyone knows a good temporal mechanic who works pro bono, my coverage doesn’t extend to equipment malfunctions.