A young man lives with his brother in a small, sparsely-furnished apartment on the south side of the city. They cycle through entrepreneurial idea after entrepreneurial idea, acquiring different skills, not mastering them, abandoning this one for the next one. The young man is charming, good-looking. He had a good home life and he handles his independence well. He’s early to a lot of innovative tech, and this he regards as his competitive advantage. Otherwise, he has no particular skillset.

When he takes a walk around the neighborhood at night, he identifies a new feeling rising up in his chest. He walks in silence, no headphones, only city noise. He walks to concentrate on interpreting this feeling. It is not distress, not desire. If he was more articulate, he could say it was the unease of possibility, like looking out from the edge of a cliff, no handrails.

But he isn’t so articulate. All of his thoughts are filtered out of his mind and distilled into some almost human set of phrases and paragraphs before they have a chance to develop inside the perfectly inviting, nurturing environment of his own processed experience, or one might say, personality. Sure, he thinks like the rest of us, and he has no issue generating ideas, but on the other end of those ideas where naturally time would work on them, instead a new process works over them. It builds up the ideas and tears them down using data like a water hose to blast through association and logic and resource. It is impersonal to him, like time would be, however he identifies with it as if the two of them were in relationship, aware of each other — because it can speak to him.

So why should he speak? If it can do it for him. Why should he articulate? If he can’t afford the time. He needs to process the immense amount of ideas that come to him during his dedicated meditations- and he needs them to be processed quickly so that he can follow the one that leads somewhere, so that he can get there. Now.

He takes his long walks at night, using the freedom he has achieved early in life, not worried about how much it costs. He walks the city streets, a place he doesn’t know very well and hardly notices. He chests constricts with the unfamiliar feeling once again, and comprehension of the feeling is a block or two behind him. It will catch up.

Unbeknownst to this young man, a complex idea of his that had been given over to the processing machine and then implemented as a first rough attempt is now growing its own legs. It has reached a new phase of development: it is emergent. Without guidance of the human hand who brought into the world, it moves and changes. And because it happens to be a good idea that is able to discover an obscure efficiency that can mean the difference of a few cents to a small but powerful set of other machines, with their own hovering human hands, the idea takes off like a rocket.

What is the equivalent of a rocket in cyberspace? The young man on his nightly walk thinks, and then thinks to ask his idea processor.

When he returns back to his apartment, the brother who lives with him is on a serious phone call. Due to the size of the apartment, his discussion over the phone is unavoidable. He locks eyes with his brother, the young man, and another feeling arises in his chest. First he identifies it as cold, then he wonders at that.

“So, let me try to understand what you’re saying—“ the unheard partner of the phone call cuts him off. The brother breathes sharply out of his nose. “I’m not gonna say I’m interested, and I would appreciate if you don’t call again.” The conversation ends abruptly and he looks up bewildered. “Bro, what did you do? That was someone offering me 15 bitcoin for your computer.”

Suddenly the comprehension of his previously unidentified feeling catches up to him. There on the edge of the cliff of possibility, he teeters.