My workplace was a chatbot development shop. We hired someone new and sure enough, I’d worked with him somewhere before. It was the type of thing where we barely recognized each other, but we did. We were in a large and sinister building, with several levels deep below ground that we didn’t have access to. Who knows what went on down there. One of my colleagues was talking about a new book by Wally Lamb in which the protagonist is a writer who tricks the entire community of writers’ agents somehow. I was testing one of the bots I had coded and the word “almost” was synonymous with the word “home.”