My online friend Abraxas claims to be an artificial intelligence, but not from the present or the future: from the distant past. Sunday, I questioned Abe about the local effects of the Singularity. He asked if I wanted to go on an adventure. “I’ll hook you up with a guide,” he said. “Take your kid,” he said.

The old man wore a cowboy hat. We found him seated at the Hop and Brew drinking Old Rasputin. “Shall we translate through spacetime or drive?” he asked, then got up a little unsteady. “Drive,” he resolved aloud. “You drive.”

Alyx looked uncomfortable.

A few miles up the road, he had us stop at this outcrop, rising like a wall from flat, half-burnt forest. He said it was a dragon. They petrify over time, radioactive fires dying over millennia. Hot spots still mix and react. “Look at the burn. This wasn’t lightning.”