But Ryan didn’t mind. It’s like I said already: At that age, everyone had imaginary friends.

You pointed to the hole and explained, “Me and Ryan are digging a tunnel!”

“To the other side of the earth,” Ryan added.

When I glanced down at my hand, I was surprised to see that I was holding a shovel too.

We got started. You and me and Ryan. Dirt crunched under our shovels as we dug.

Deeper.

Deeper.

Deeper.

Before long, we’d gone far below the surface. The sky was nothing more than a tiny speck of light above us. We kept going. Our tunnel plunged farther into the earth.

Finally, the ground broke open.

We’d made it!

All the way to the other side of the earth!

And it had only taken twenty minutes!

We climbed out of the hole. Brushing away the dirt, I looked around. Grass, trees, a house. That’s what we saw. I scratched at my furry head. The other side of the earth looked a lot like your backyard.

“Hey, buddy. Watcha doin’?”

The voice caught me by surprise. I spun and saw a future version of you standing on the back deck. A man who shared your bright blue eyes and curly tangle of hair.

“Hi, Dad!” You waved a filthy hand. “We just dug a tunnel to the other side of the earth.”

“Really?”

For some reason, he sounded like he didn’t believe you. Following his gaze, I realized why. All of a sudden, our incredibly deep tunnel didn’t look so deep after all.

It was just a small hole in the grass.

So that’s why the other side of the earth looked so much like your backyard. Because it was your backyard.

The tunnel was never really there. It was a lot like me.

Imaginary.

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments. Plural Noun. 1. A section at the end of a book that most people never read. 2. A chance for the author to thank all those who helped. 3. Recognition that the author is just one of many humans who made a book possible.

This book began on a sidewalk in Maplewood, New Jersey. In each of my hands was a bag of groceries. In my ears were headphones. The headphones were piping in a podcast interview between Ezra Klein and Yuval Noah Harari. Klein asked, Do you think human beings will be the dominant life form on Earth in three hundred years? Harari’s answer came without hesitation. “Absolutely not!” He predicted that humans will either destroy the world or we’ll be surpassed by our own creation: technology.

Well, I nearly dropped my grocery bags. Partly because—yikes! But it wasn’t just fear I was feeling there on the sidewalk. It was inspiration. My imagination immediately began conjuring a future world. A world in which humans have been replaced by their own creation. A world ruled by robots.

That was the day I started writing The Last Human.