The Interruption
In August 2019, Google walked.
The acquisition would have completed the work on NIO Innovation — the edge-to-cloud platform I had spent years building, the multi-patent portfolio in distributed intelligent systems, and the autonomous vineyard demonstration that had put the theory in dirt. Nine U.S. patents had been issued by then. The platform was real. The deal had been moving inside Google Cloud for months.
Then it stopped moving.
I had never done press on any of it. The patents were issued without announcement. The vineyard demonstration was shown to people who needed to see it and to no one else. People in my circle did not know about the work. That was deliberate. I had spent the founding of the Deloitte Digital era watching what happened when builders started narrating themselves into the air, and I had decided that the work could be quiet until the work was done.
The deal not closing meant the work would not be done. The chapter ended in silence because it had always been silent.
That was August.
In mid-December, I was walking our two bichons across the University of Colorado Boulder campus. Cold air. Teddy Bear and Dirk were pulling slightly ahead, as they always did.
Then the pain.
Not pressure. Not soreness. A sharp, bar-like stab through the chest that showed up without warning and made the world feel mechanical.
I kept walking, wincing as I picked up the boy’s poop.
People often ignore pain, not realizing they are in the middle of a before-and-after moment. The realization only comes with time.
Two months later, on February 17, 2020 — our 35th wedding anniversary — I was in Boulder Community Hospital with a massive DVT and multiple pulmonary embolisms.
Blood thinners.
No root cause diagnosis.
No coherent explanation from the U.S. government for refusing my doctor’s request to test me for COVID.
The country was still caught between denial, the president’s pledge that it would all be gone by Easter, confusion, and performance. The medical system had not yet stabilized around what it was seeing. None of us had language for what had already entered the body and the culture.
The command I kept returning to was simple.
Understand it.
At first, I meant the clots.
After the clots came depression and mental fog, quietly overshadowing the physical symptoms and deepening the sense of disconnection. Not dramatic depression. Not collapse. Something quieter and harder to explain. A long stretch of low emotion. Fear with no sharp edges. My inner system no longer trusted itself.
Years later, I would learn the phrase Long COVID.
At the time, while the country was locked down, it felt as if I was slowly disappearing while remaining technically functional.
I spent much of that period in the guest bedroom with the bichons on my lap, reading obsessively.
Climate models.
AI alignment.
Governance papers.
Transformer architectures.
Weakness in institutions.
Existential risk.
As the thoughts grew darker, I pushed harder into the study.
Understand it.
I did not experience this as intellectual curiosity. I experienced it as survival.
I believed I was studying the future. Looking back, it was the structure I needed right then to survive the present.
The grief from August had not gone anywhere. It was underneath. The virus arrived in a man who was already losing something. Without it, I think I would have mourned NIO and stopped. The curiosity would have closed with the deal. The patents would have stayed quiet for a different reason.
Instead, the body collapsed, and the mind had nowhere to go but in.
Teddy Bear stayed close through all of it. So did Dirk.
The dogs developed the strange emotional intelligence animals sometimes have around illness. They seemed to understand before I did that something fundamental had shifted.
When Teddy Bear died, I cried harder than when my mother, JuneBug, died around the same time.
I still do not entirely understand that.
Maybe grief attaches itself most fiercely to the witnesses.
Late in 2022, after years of uncertainty, a new primary care physician asked the question that should have been operationally obvious much earlier.
“You cannot remain on blood thinners indefinitely without understanding why the clots occurred.”
That decision eventually led to a hematologist in Tucson, our new home. Complex, repetitive testing at a cancer center, searching for an answer.
Then the answer.
The likely cause was catching the original COVID strain at Denver Airport in late 2019, before the world knew what was spreading. I had the virus in 2019. It is still in me. It will be there forever.
The effect of finally knowing the cause surprised me.
Within weeks, the PTSD-like loop that had followed me for years largely dissolved. Not because I was suddenly healthy, but because uncertainty finally had boundaries.
Understand it.
Around the same time, conversational AI reached the public. ChatGPT was released in late 2022. I was hands-on immediately.
Not casually. Compulsively.
By 2023, I was enrolled in a formal AI safety study through the Center for AI Safety ecosystem and Dan Hendrycks’ work. What started as existential-risk research gradually shifted toward disciplined user testing of frontier systems.
The strange thing is that AI did not make me feel less human.
It restored a form of continuity I thought I had partially lost.
Thoughts stopped evaporating as quickly. Fragments had somewhere to go before disappearing. Conversations could resume rather than restarting from scratch.
The energy flow changed.
Not just productivity.
Continuity.
I have said it aloud more than once. If not for COVID, would I have been this prepared for this AI moment?
The honest answer is no.
The deeper I studied catastrophic risk, the less interested I became in apocalypse performance and the more interested I became in responsible adoption, institutional adaptation, and human augmentation under conditions of accelerating complexity. I still take the risks seriously. Probably more seriously than many evangelists. But I no longer believe withdrawal is a serious option. The systems are here. The real question is whether humans, institutions, and cultures can stay psychologically and operationally coherent as integration continues, or whether they will be pulled into the race condition shaping policy, frontiers, and C-suites.
That question feels less abstract to me than it once did.
Dirk is under my desk, snoring as I write this.
Teddy Bear is gone.
The world that existed before August 2019 is gone, too.
Something else is here.