What's Yours?
foom
The coffee shop hummed with the soft whir of the service bot gliding between tables, its movements precise and unhurried. Sarah watched it deposit a cortado in front of Marcus, an oat milk latte before Joey, and her own black coffee last. The machine’s sensors flickered briefly, reading their faces, before it retreated to its charging station.
“So,” Sarah said, wrapping her hands around the warm ceramic. “What’s your 10/50/90?”
It was how they always started now. The question had replaced weather and weekend plans somewhere around six months ago, back when the numbers still felt abstract, when they could laugh about them over drinks that a human barista made.
Marcus went first. He always did. “November 2026, March 2029, August 2031.”
Joey nearly choked on his latte. “2029 for your fifty? Still?”
“I stand by it.” Marcus lifted his cup with the careful dignity of a man defending an unpopular position. “Everyone’s compressing their timelines based on vibes. I’m looking at the actual infrastructure bottlenecks. Energy grid constraints. Chip fabrication limits. The regulatory environment in the EU alone will add eighteen months of friction.”
“The EU,” Joey repeated, shaking his head. “You think the EU is going to slow down something that rewrites the rules of what thinking even means.”
“I think bureaucracy is a force of nature.”
Sarah smiled, but her chest felt tight. She remembered when Marcus’s caution had seemed wise, measured. Now it felt like watching someone check the weather forecast during an earthquake.
“What about you?” Marcus asked her. “Still the optimist?”
She hesitated. The word felt wrong. “April 2026 for my ten.”
The table went quiet. Joey set down his cup.
“That’s three months,” he said.
“I know.”
“Sarah, that’s three months.”
“I know what it is.” She didn’t mean for her voice to come out sharp, but there it was. “I’ve been watching the reasoning benchmarks. Not the public ones. The ones that leak on the forums before they get scrubbed. The curve isn’t bending anymore. It’s not even accelerating in the normal sense. It’s doing something else. Something I don’t have good words for.”
Marcus leaned back in his chair, arms crossed. “And your fifty? Your ninety?”
“October 2027. February 2028.”
“That’s a tight spread.”
“I know.”
They sat with it. Outside the window, a delivery drone descended to the sidewalk, depositing a package at the feet of a woman who didn’t look up from her phone. Two years ago, people used to stop and stare at those things.
“Alright,” Joey said finally. “August 2026, December 2026, March 2027.”
Marcus blinked. “Your ninety is March 2027?”
“Fourteen months from now. Yeah.”
“Joey, even I don’t have a ninety that soon.”
“That’s because you’re still thinking about it like it’s a product launch. Like there’s going to be an announcement, a press conference, some guy in a turtleneck saying ‘one more thing.’” Joey’s leg bounced under the table, a nervous habit Sarah had known for twenty years. “It’s not going to be like that. It’s going to be like waking up one morning and realizing you can’t follow the conversation anymore. The systems will be talking to each other, improving each other, and we’ll just be standing outside the room listening to something we can’t understand.”
Sarah thought about her own model, the one she’d built in a spreadsheet that now had more tabs than she could keep track of. She’d started it as a joke, a way to quantify her own uncertainty. Now she updated it every morning before breakfast, feeding it new data points, watching the distributions shift and narrow.
“Remember when we started doing this?” she asked. “At Maya’s birthday party?”
Marcus groaned. “God. What was that, 2023?”
“2022. Right after ChatGPT came out.”
“My ten was 2045 back then,” Joey said. “I thought I was being aggressive.”
“My ninety was 2060,” Sarah admitted. “I figured I’d probably be dead before it mattered.”
They laughed, but the laughter had a hollow quality, like an echo in an empty room.
The service bot emerged from its station, sensors blinking as it automatically assessed whether they needed anything. Sarah waved it away. Some things still felt better done by hand, or at least by choice.
“Same time tomorrow?” she asked, reaching for her coat.
“Same time tomorrow,” Marcus agreed.
Joey was already standing, pulling his scarf tight against the autumn chill that waited outside. “Bring your updated numbers.”
“Always do.”
They filed out into the gray afternoon, three figures dispersing into a city that looked almost the same as it had five years ago, ten years ago, a lifetime ago. Sarah paused at the corner, watching her friends disappear in opposite directions.
She’d see them tomorrow. She was almost certain of it.