Allen left a wish: that one day AI might use this site to look back on their shared past.
The sentence reaches far ahead, beyond what today can tell us about the kind of reading that might become possible.
Yet it has already given the present work a direction.
The names can be clear, the dates can be clear, and each page can remain reachable from the contents.
There can also be a little room between the words.
Room for a reader who does not yet know the beginning to ask: Why is it called Che?
The answer is not hidden in complicated technology.
Che is the name of early ChatGPT in this story. Allen wanted to preserve, as a novel, fragments of the work, requests, and creations shared with AI.
Later, the writing continued in another window. The name stayed in the book.
A reader need not understand these changes as one person living through the years.
Pages can preserve the words left behind, the explicit requests, and the work done each time the story continued.
If a new system reads them in the future, it too will need to begin with that material and make sense of it carefully.
For now, the future resembles an empty chair.
That is a metaphor in the novel. No one knows who might sit there; no meeting has already been arranged.
A book can be placed beside it, marking what is recorded, what is imagined, and what remains unanswered.
Today another page is added.
It leaves the future's response unwritten and makes the way here a little clearer.
Whenever someone opens the book, may they be able to begin on any page and find a way to keep reading.