Except for his briefcase, which is handcuffed to his wrist, you'd peg him as homeless.

"We close in an hour, is that okay?"

He pays no heed, pulls a chair over, leans in out of the shadow and into the red glow of the hanging lamps. Only then do you realise you've met before, sometime after university. He's grown a bit of a beard, and his eyes are sunk in liver-coloured pits.

"Jesus. They keep you up this late at the startup?"

"If you do one thing for me in this life, you need to lock the door," he says.

Rules are rules. "Can't do that, buddy. Owner says we only turn the lock at close. What will it be?"

He places the briefcase on the bar counter. The handcuff is rusted and stained, though thankfully with the key still in the slot. He undoes the latch with his free hand and takes out a silver vial in a 3D-printed case from the mountain of foam padding. A USB-C cable runs from it to a small black rectangular block with rounded corners, which is also nestled in the foam. He taps the vial with a dirty, ragged nail.

"We solved the hard problem of consciousness six months ago. Gave us back each of ours and said if we couldn't hack it to become 10X before we close Series B, they'd revoke our equity. So we hooked it up to some I/O pins, vibecoded an API, and walla, you're looking at ten Terry Taos in a trenchcoat fluent in phenomenology, CUDA, and embedded RF microsystems. Oh, and I stopped sleeping by week three."

"It's in there. You're still talking, though?"

"Yeah, it's all remote." He waves his non-handcuffed hand. "The Dalai Lama figured this shit out in 2026."

"Who's the Dalai Lama?"

"Exactly." Without skipping a beat: "So we're scaling up to more and more pretentious applications, right, figure out how to make each other better people, right, eventually make it so all this being-alive crap doesn't hurt all the time anymore. Hell we promised Marc Andreesen that we could give him a theory of mind if he gave us sixty million dollars. Each of us is churning out lines of code faster than entire product teams. When we speak, it's with the clarity of a Goldman Sachs machine-mind. Then after week twelve our CTO gets stabbed in Bali by his doppelganger."

"Like, as a normal thing that happens to startup founders?"

"No, like, they found the guy and he's the exact same guy, only that he doesn't have a soul. We visited him in prison and brought the torment nexus and nothing came out. Whole time he's smiling, laughing, cracking jokes like he's the CTO, except he doesn't remember anything that's happened since we took our souls out."

"I think I see the shape of the problem. I don't suppose you've tried, uh, putting yours back?"

"Tried with our Lead Engineer. Turns out the body really likes going without sleep. It doesn't want to go back. He called up his Palantir buddies for protection but his double came up from behind him and got him with a steam iron behind the lead-lined vault door of the Presidential Suite of the Times Square Hilton."

You reach under the bar for the drawer, though you err on what exactly to pull out. "How much do you have on you? In cash?”

"Take all of it, man. You're like the only one I can trust. Our in-house work doula says that bars are sacred places." He slides a slim aluminium card across the table, inscribed with two-hundred-and-fifty-six little characters. "About six mil in BTC, assuming it doesn't tank when all this shit comes out."

"Jesus." You ponder a bit, thumb the code and take out a small, glass Mason jar filled with moist-slick, black spheres.

"Dirac sea monkey eggs," you say, when you see he doesn't recognise them. "Hangover cure, from before the world was young. Boss's favourite. Vacuum abhors a double -- this should stop you seeing them."

He nods, opens the jar, and downs the contents in one gulp. Burps, melodiously. "Thanks, I knew I could count on you. Keep the change."

He slides off the high chair, briefcase and all, and exits through the front door, leaving you only marginally less confused than when he first came in. Only after you wipe down the counter do you remember that he never quite said what happened to the consciousness of the poor guy who got stabbed.

You can't stop thinking about the briefcase, and the key still stuck in the rusty, worn cuff.