It is early December, and I have just watched what will be my favorite episode of television. I like it because of the love story. I like it because it reminds me of my own love story.

It is five years ago, and you and I meet for the first time. We are in graduate school together. We fall in love very quickly. Two months later, we move in together and we will never live apart. Ten years from now, I will tell our children that I predicted their names before they are born (Hello, Nolan Preston and Maya Carter). Exactly sixty-one days ago, we are on the couch together and we watch a TV show, ‘A God Walks Into Abar.’ I do not know this at time, but it will inspire me to build something beautiful.

Today, my wife encourages me to write something that means something to me. So I do.

I want to write a story, within a story. I want it to be a play, told episodically and non-linearly.

You may find this particularly infuriating to read. I hope you do not.

But this will be one of the many stories I write. They are both personal to me and, hopefully, meaningful to you.

Now.

It is late January, and I am on a vacation with my family. This is the second time that I have been here. Four months before you and I will meet, I am on vacation with my parents, brother, and his girlfriend. And we are staying at this same exact hotel. Now, six years later, I am here with you, and you are now my wife. This is the first time we are here together.

This time, we get a chance to explore this place together. We get to spend our mornings and nights together in bliss while we [[Tachyons obscure my vision of this moment]]. The afternoons we spend exploring the Island. I suggest that we try something called Forest Bathing. A week before, I am reading an article in the New York Times and I learn that Forest Bathing exists. A week later, my family and I try it for the first time. It is an excellent and a therapeutic experience. I would recommend it.

It is on this drive back from the forest bath, while giving my father driving directions in a minivan, that our innermost story begins.

Google Maps has now informed me that our route will have an additional 25 minutes of traffic. I am navigating using my Google phone. I try and find another route. However, Google does not suggest any other options. I do not have any other ways to find directions. I do not know this at the time, but while writing this it will remind me of something.

It is somewhere between 2000 and 2005. My memory is not complete from this time. I am either a pre-teen or early teenager. In either middle or high school. I am sitting in the front seat of a different minivan. And I am giving my father driving directions with a paper map. I feel a sense of accomplishment and joy for helping him get where we need to go. This is the last time I ever do this. But it is not the last time I will have this feeling of joyful accomplishment.

In the year 2020, my father and I are sitting in traffic. We do not get a chance to spend much time together anymore as we both live in different cities in different states. We have Skype and phone calls, but those are more like status updates than conversations. During this drive, we are able to speak at length and for fun. We talk about whatever comes to mind, but mostly about Technology or science. As that is what we both do.

My father, who appears as frustrated as I am with the traffic, tells me he has an idea for a new App.

He asks, what if you could pay Google Maps a fee to reduce the traffic on your route? We talk about how that might technically work. For $10/month you could take 10 other drivers off your road and navigate them on a different, and likely slower, route. You can scale it up or down from here. You can make it more, or less mean, to the non-FastPass Google Maps users. The idea is quite simple, but not yet complete.

At first the idea appears to be clever to me, and also bad to others it may affect. But it does not have to only be bad. Perhaps a driver may want a more scenic route rather than the fastest route, and you could send them on a new adventure if they so choose.

Unfortunately algorithms have difficulty predicting human curiosity as a variable in their calculations of driving routes. So all routes are time efficient.

While sitting in traffic, my father and I can not determine how to implement this idea without being in control of the data. Google could certainly do it; however, the idea of traffic manipulation may not be compatible with their slogan: Don’t Be Evil. So we do as all innovators do, we pivoted to other ideas to get around traffic. They are unfortunately not related to this story, but may be to another in the future.

A week later, I am back home and back at work. On my commute I read through over 100 headlines in my RSS app of choice, Feedly. I read a handful of the ones that seem relevant or of interest to me. I find one of these on The Verge. The article is about a performance artist in Berlin who has used 99 smartphones and a wagon to fool Google Maps into believing an empty road was full of traffic.

The concept of the video seems so clear and clever. I do not even feel the need to watch it. I know that this will work this way. I know that the traffic algorithm does not currently anticipate human curiosity or acts by performance artists when calculating traffic. I find this quite funny at the time.

Now, while I write this. My wife comes home, sits on my lap, and we kiss for a time. I will spare all of us (her, me, and you) from making it more awkward than that. As this is the first time you and I have met.