We eat in silence for a few minutes. I keep stealing glances at her, trying to reconcile what I’m seeing with what I know about Logan’s girlfriends.
They’re usually vapid. Decorative. Interested only in his money and the lifestyle it provides. Samantha is none of those things.
I pull up the news on my tablet, scrolling through headlines while I finish my eggs. A particular story catches my eye.
“Did you see this?” I turn the tablet toward the table. “Augmented reality glasses that overlay navigation directly onto your vision. Walking directions, restaurant reviews, and real-time translations. All on lenses that look like regular eyewear.”
Kai glances over. “That’s either brilliant or the beginning of a dystopian nightmare.”
“Both, probably,” I say.
“It’s incredible when you think about it,” Samantha’s voice cuts in, and I look up. She’s leaning forward slightly, her eyes bright with interest. “Two hundred years ago, we were sharing communal sponges to clean ourselves. Now we’re creating technology that can translate languages in real time and overlay digital information onto our physical reality.”
I blink. That’s not the response I expected.
“Communal sponges?” Kai makes a face.
“Romans used them in public bathhouses,” she explains. “Shared sponges on sticks. For…well, you know. Personal hygiene.” She wrinkles her nose. “The same sponge. Multiple people. No soap.”
“That’s disgusting,” Kai says.
“Yes.” She takes a sip of coffee. “We went from that to indoor plumbing, then to smartphones, and now to augmented reality. The rate of technological advancement is exponential. It took us millennia to figure out basic sanitation, and now we’re developing new world-changing technology every few years.”
I set down my fork. “You think the acceleration is sustainable?”
“I think it’s inevitable.” She shrugs. “Once you hit a certain threshold of knowledge and resources, progress compounds. Each innovation makes the next one easier. Faster. We’re not just building on what came before anymore. We’re building on the systems that helped us build what came before.”
“Meta-innovation,” I say, nodding. “People usually find this stuff boring,” I tell her.
“Well, they aren’t paying attention.” She picks up a piece of toast. “The world is changing faster than it ever has in human history, and everyone’s too busy scrolling social media to notice.”
“You notice.”
“I try to.” She meets my eyes. “Don’t you?”
I do. I’ve always been fascinated by the intersection of technology and human behavior.
I’ve never met anyone who could articulate it the way she just did.
“There was a marketing campaign last month,” I say, pulling up another article. “For a new AI assistant. They staged a public debate between the AI and a philosophy professor about consciousness. The whole thing went viral. Brilliant strategy.”
Samantha’s expression shifts. “That was my campaign.”
I stare at her. “You worked on that?”
“I pitched it, actually.” She leans back in her chair. “The client wanted traditional advertising. You know, the boring stuff. I convinced them to stage the debate instead and frame it as a genuine philosophical question rather than a product launch.”
“It was genius,” I say, and I mean it. “You positioned the AI as intellectually legitimate. It made people curious instead of skeptical.”
“And it quadrupled their projected sales in the first week.” She’s trying to sound modest, but I can hear the satisfaction underneath. “The video hit ten million views in forty-eight hours.”
“How did you get a philosophy professor to agree to it?”
“I didn’t.” She grins. “I found an actor with a philosophy degree. Someone who could actually hold their own in a debate but understood we were selling a story.”
I laugh. “That’s borderline unethical.”
“It’s marketing.” She takes another sip of coffee. “We disclosed it afterward. The whole point was getting people to engagewith the question. Whether the professor was real or not didn’t matter once they were already thinking about it.”
