DANIEL:
Nice to meet you. I’m Daniel Reed.
Thank you for taking the time today.

V:
Likewise. It’s a pleasure to meet you.

DANIEL:
I read Cole’s piece.

V:
You know him?

DANIEL:
He’s a veteran reporter at a rival magazine.
...I hate to admit it, but that was a good piece.

DANIEL:
Today, I’d like to come at this from a slightly different angle than Cole—

G:
Hey, Daniel. That’s a NotePin, right?

—G hadn’t missed the small device I’d set down on the table.

DANIEL:
Yeah. Good eye, G.
I’ve got it on loan right now for a review with a major electronics retail chain.

D:
What’s that?
What do you use it for?

DANIEL:
Basically, it’s like a notebook you use with your voice.
You record something, and the AI organizes it for you afterward.

G:
Can I see it?

DANIEL:
Sure.
What do you usually use, G?
When you’re making music, don’t you get melodies that just pop into your head?
Things you want to get down right then?

G:
Nothing.

—That wasn’t the answer I’d expected.

DANIEL:
You don’t use anything?

V:
G seems to remember almost anything he hears once.

DANIEL:
Wow. Really?

G:
The things I need.
I try to forget the rest.

—I couldn’t help a wry smile. I’d heard the stories, but G was something else.

DANIEL:
Then I’d recommend it.
It picks up voices really well, and the AI does a pretty good job organizing things.

G:
Not for me. I’d give it to D. [laughs]

D:
Why me?

G:
You know why.

G:
D talks forever and never gets to the point.
And what he says today isn’t what he said yesterday.

—Apparently, he wasn’t talking about casual conversation.

DANIEL:
Like when you’re working out an album concept or the visuals?

G:
Yeah. Obviously.
What else?

—Then he turned to D.

G:
Let AI sort it out for you.
That’s it. Definitely.

D:
Wouldn’t it be boring talking to this thing?

D picked up the device and studied it closely.

—The two of them were talking slightly past each other.

G:
Who makes the cell?

DANIEL:
Uh... they haven’t said officially.
They didn’t name the cell supplier for the previous model either, but if I had to guess, probably ATL or Sunwoda.

G:
Just leave it somewhere in your room. Don’t worry.
It’ll catch everything while you’re awake.

—D shrugged and looked at G, as if to say that wasn’t what he meant.
There were still a few things I wanted to ask G, but I left them for later.

DANIEL:
By the way, V.
When you’re making a song, do the four of you have fairly set roles?

V:
I’d say so.
B and I usually write the music, and G does sometimes too.
D and I write most of the lyrics.
We leave the online side to G.

DANIEL:
G:B doesn’t really put individual writing credits front and center, does it?
Can you usually tell who wrote a song from the finished track?

V:
Probably.
The faster stuff tends to be G.
B’s usually sits lower, with a stronger groove.
D’s lyrics... you know. [laughs]

DANIEL:
I see. Then let me try one.
“My Precious One” was yours, V.

V:
Interesting. What made you think so?

DANIEL:
It says “save me,” but then you circle a date on the calendar and swear you’re going to turn it all around.
That’s not how someone who just prays would write it.
I felt like I saw a side of you there.

D:
I circle dates on calendars too, you know.

—Maybe it was the “just prays” part that got to him. D gave a small shrug, looking unconvinced.

G:
Your calendar’s full of circles.

D:
How do you know?

—D looked at G suspiciously.

G:
Every time something comes up,
you send me your Google Calendar.
See? That’s why I’m telling you—use the NotePin.

—The NotePin conversation, which I thought we’d finished with, had somehow found its way back.

DANIEL:
[laughs] And the thumbnail is you too, right?
That song feels like you to me.

V:
Yeah. You got it.
I wrote that one.
But D might’ve been where the image came from.

B:
No way. That’s you.

—B spoke up unexpectedly.

DANIEL:
When you say “that,” what part do you mean?

B:
If he looks unsure, he usually already knows what he’s going to do.

V:
Do I ever look unsure?

—V looked mildly surprised.

B:
Sometimes.

—Interesting. For a moment, I caught a glimpse of how the two of them saw each other.

DANIEL:
Earlier, V, you said you leave the online side to G.
But as far as I can tell, G hasn’t released any music videos, right?
Is that a deliberate choice?
Or are you planning to put some out?

V:
Honestly, I think we just haven’t fully figured out what direction we want to take yet.

G:
We’ve got someone who’s picky.
“I don’t like my expression in that one...”
“I liked yesterday’s outfit better...”

—G laughed, mimicking D as he spoke. Then, after a brief pause, he added:

G:
But that’s not all.
Still not enough compute.

DANIEL:
Interesting.
If you could get everything you wanted, would you go with something like a Mac Studio with the M3 Ultra?

G:
No.
RTX PRO 6000, for now.

DANIEL:
Ah, Blackwell.
Handling 600 watts in a dual-slot card is huge.

G:
Right?
That double flow-through setup’s the one to get next.

DANIEL:
What is it now, around twelve grand?

G:
It was $13,250 when I checked yesterday.

DANIEL:
Wow. It’s gone that high?
It does have 96GB, though.
Price just keeps climbing.

G:
And the bandwidth’s huge.
With 1.8 TB/s, I could get through things a lot faster.

DANIEL:
But Rubin Ultra’s coming in 2027, right?
Aren’t you curious what that’ll bring?

G:
Yeah.
But if I keep waiting for the next thing, I’ll never buy anything.

DANIEL:
Fair point. [laughs]

V:
...Sorry to interrupt, G, but I don’t think we can go that high.

—That was when V, who had been listening to the two of us, quietly stepped in.

G didn’t argue. He just gave a mischievous grin.

There was something in his eyes the other three didn’t quite have—a deep, defiant glint. I had a feeling he was already rebuilding the configuration in his head.

And maybe one reason G:B’s music videos still haven’t surfaced is G’s own exacting standards.

G reacts fast. Extremely fast.

And I do not just mean that he answers quickly. He speaks quickly too, and by the time you put one piece of information in front of him, he already seems to be three or four steps ahead, mapping the whole problem in something close to four dimensions.

That is why some of the things he says can sound abrupt.

Right after D picked up the NotePin and asked, “Wouldn’t it be boring, talking to this thing?” G’s next question was:

“Who makes the cell?”

Read as dialogue, it might look as though he suddenly jumped to a completely different subject.

Sitting across from him, it did not feel that way.

The cell, simply put, is the rechargeable battery inside the device.

Most people would probably ask, “How many hours does the battery last?”

G did not.

My guess is that he already knew the capacity and the manufacturer’s claimed runtime.

What he wanted to know was what sat underneath those numbers.

Who made the cell?

Once you know that, you have one more piece of information with which to judge how much confidence to place in the numbers printed on the spec sheet.

And by then, I suspect G had already gone several steps further in his head:

Give it to D.

Leave it somewhere in his room.

Let it sit there for hours and pick things up on its own.

That is how he arrives at, “Who makes the cell?”

You cannot see the calculations in between.

Only the last piece he still needs suddenly comes out as a question.

The same thing happened later, when we started talking about his production setup.

When G said,

“I don’t have enough power right now,”

I knew immediately what he meant.

He was not talking about ideas for a music video.

He was talking about the compute needed to keep the process moving fast enough—to try what he has in his head, revise it, and try again.

That was why I brought up the M3 Ultra Mac Studio.

G came back with the RTX PRO 6000.

From that point on, I imagine some of the conversation became difficult for a lot of readers to follow.

The 96GB refers to the large pool of memory available directly to the GPU.

The 1.8TB/s figure is memory bandwidth—how quickly that enormous amount of data can be moved.

And the “double flow-through” design G seemed oddly fond of is about cooling.

It is a question of how you keep a card drawing around 600 watts cool inside a relatively tight physical envelope.

So what we were talking about was not simply, “I want an incredibly expensive graphics card.”

It was about how much data you can keep in play, and how quickly you can keep the whole thing moving.

That was what G was looking at.

I brought up Rubin Ultra in 2027 partly to give him a hard time.

In this business, whenever you are about to buy the fastest machine available, you can already see the next generation coming over the horizon.

Wait a little longer and something better may arrive.

G answered immediately:

“If you keep waiting, you’ll never buy anything.”

He is right.

And I suspect that answer was not only about computers.

G thinks fast.

He looks ahead fast.

But he does not seem like the kind of person who waits until every possible future option has resolved itself into the perfect answer.

He chooses the next move from the conditions in front of him—and by then, he is already thinking about what comes after it.

At the end, when V heard the price and put a stop to the idea, G did not argue.

He just smiled, almost mischievously.

There was something in his eyes then—a defiant, deeper glint that felt a little different from the other three.

Maybe the fact that I could follow him at all is exactly why he interested me more.

Up to a point, I can track what G is thinking.

Then, suddenly, I cannot see where he has gone.

I would like to talk to him again.