AUGUST 7, 2025

In some corner of the multiverse, I’m not here typing this.

In one life, I’m a retired tech magnate—silicon-rich and leisure-poor. I built a software company during the networking boom of the late ’90s, sold it for obscene money before the crash, and stayed ahead of the curve just long enough to retire before the AIs I helped fund started writing their own IPOs.

These days, I live in a glass-and-stone mansion overlooking the Pacific. The yacht is moored below. Silicon Dreams, I call her—a nod to my code days. My morning ritual includes coffee roasted by a drone and brewed by a service robot named Jules. I watch the sunrise through polarized smart-glass while considering which of my passive income streams to ignore today. I should be happy. Maybe I am. But there’s a part of me that misses solder smoke and the thrill of debugging something broken at 2 a.m. Sometimes, money buys everything but meaning.

In another thread of time, the Cold War turned hot in October 1962. The missiles never launched—but everything else did. Proxy wars lit up like dry kindling. I joined the U.S. Air Force and flew over contested zones from Europe to Southeast Asia. The twelve-year war that followed—WWIII, if you’re keeping count—burned deep and long but never went nuclear. Somehow, we kept our atomic egos in check.

We “won,” apparently. At least, that’s what the speeches said.

Now I live in a quiet suburb outside Austin, a silver-haired vet with a shelf of medals and a synthetic leg that works better than my real one ever did. The robots that clean my home are Japanese-built, Chinese-funded, and wear little U.N. blue collars. There’s peace, technically. But sometimes when I close my eyes, I’m flying recon over the Yalu River, and peace feels like something we bought on clearance.

Then there’s the version of me that never saw the inside of a startup office or the cockpit of a warbird. That version captains a rust-patched freight barge weaving between the islands of the West Philippine Sea. My boat, The Low Tide’s Blessing, smells like diesel, salt, and dried fish—and she runs like a dream on borrowed time.

We move cargo—fish, rice, electronics, sometimes bootleg media—to Hanoi, Manila, Seoul. And we run fast when the Chinese Coast Guard starts sniffing. Beijing’s shadow stretches far these days. They say they own the sea, and sometimes even the sky. Hell, I think they’ve started mapping cultural memory like territory.

But out there, freedom lives in the gaps. It lives between patrol routes, behind false manifests, beneath tarps of counterfeit squid concealing smuggled chips. It’s not lawful. It’s not safe. But it’s mine. And there’s nothing like splitting the sea at dawn, outrunning bureaucracy on a creaking hull powered by sweat, tech, and nerves.

Three versions of me. Three lives.

One has wealth. One has medals. One has scars and sunburn and salt on the tongue.

And here I am in this world, remembering them all—or maybe just imagining. Who knows? Maybe those aren’t alternate universes. Maybe they’re alternate truths. Realities that peeled away at key moments and carried different pieces of me with them. Maybe we all scatter that way, across timelines.

Or maybe it’s just a long-form daydream from a man who reads too much quantum theory and doesn’t trust a single one of his browser tabs.

Either way, I raise a glass tonight:

To the mogul who made billions and still hungers for meaning.
To the veteran who held the line when the world teetered.
To the outlaw captain dodging satellites and sailing into the wind.

And to the me who writes this down—who remembers, or imagines, or both.

See you in the next life. Or the last one. Or the one in between.