It’s 2035, and my niece is interviewing me for a school project about the twenties. She’s twelve. She has a list of questions her teacher approved, a recording light on, and the merciless politeness of someone who wasn’t there.

Her first question is the one I knew was coming. You all knew it was dangerous, she says, reading carefully. There are speeches about it, from back then. So why didn’t you make rules?

I tell her the true thing first: we had the rules. Not passed, but written. Outside testing, liability, incident reports, an off switch for the biggest systems. The whole design fit on a napkin, and I remember the napkin being famous for fitting. She waits, because that wasn’t the question. The question was why.

So I try to explain what we argued about instead. We argued about whether the machines were conscious. For years, sweetheart. Whole conferences. We argued about whether worrying was science fiction, and then about whether not worrying was denial, and both sides mostly argued with cartoons of each other. We argued about the other country, constantly, both countries pointing across the water saying they won’t stop, in perfect symmetry, like a mirror arguing with itself. We argued about one watermarking law for most of a year. It passed. It required a small label on generated images. Everyone declared victory and went to lunch.

Meanwhile, I tell her, the actual thing kept happening, quietly, on weekdays. The systems went into the power grids and the hospitals and the banks, not by decree, just by being better and cheaper each quarter. Every year the pause everyone discussed would have cost a little more, broken a little more, angered more people who now depended on it. Nobody moved the window. The window moved itself, a few centimeters every earnings season.

Did nobody warn you, she asks. And I have to laugh, because everybody warned everybody. Warnings were a genre. The people building the systems gave the scariest warnings of all, in interviews, at dinners, then went back to work. Warnings had become content, and we rated them, like everything else, by how they made us feel.

Were people evil, she asks, because twelve-year-olds go straight at it. No, I say. Busy. Everyone had a reasonable excuse and a mortgage. The lab people said if we stop, worse people won’t. The politicians said the other party would call them backwards. The rest of us had jobs and kids and a genuinely excellent entertainment situation. Every single year had a locally sensible reason to wait, and the years compounded, the way money does, except in reverse.

She checks her list and finds the question her teacher must have written, because it’s too clean for twelve. When exactly did the window close, she asks. What day?

And this is where I have to tell her the worst part, which is that there was no day. Nothing slammed. No vote failed on live television, no siren, no headline you could frame. There was just a year, I couldn’t even tell you which, when the people who used to say soon started saying realistically. When the serious proposals quietly became symbolic ones and nobody issued a correction. A window doesn’t close like a door, it turns out. It closes like evening. You only know it happened because you’re suddenly reading by lamplight and can’t say when that started.

She thanks me and stops the recording, because that was the last question, and asks if we can get ice cream, because she’s twelve and the twenties are homework, the way distant wars were homework for me.

There is no niece, by the way. There’s just me, writing this in 2024, in the lamplight hours of an afternoon, hoping the interview never happens. The napkin is real. The window is real. The evening, so far, is optional.

So here’s tonight’s exercise, from the side of the window where exercises still matter. Picture your own 2035 interview. A kid you love asks what you argued about during the years the window was open. Answer honestly, out loud if you can bear it. If the answer embarrasses you, good news: the window is open right now, and you’re allowed to change it. Next up in this series: the blind spots, the things we couldn’t see coming, and the ones we chose not to.