The recording began at 7:50 AM.

Y walked through Tribeca with Taco, the magic dog, testing the app for the first time. Not the first Y app—the millionth Y app—but this one was different. This one worked. The transcription was clean. The magic was real.

"We move fast," Y said into the morning air. "We have to ship fast."

Already the tickets were piling up. Export button. Backend transcript processing. Table views. A deck for the vision pitch. The problems were clear: existence is fragmented. Slack, Notion, Google Docs, Facebook, YouTube—a thousand scattered pieces of a life. Y would capture it all, ambiently.

The thread that tied it together? Story. Your life's story. Actualization. Bridging the gap between who you are and who you want to be.

"Product built," Y declared to the empty street.

By afternoon, Y was deep in the workspace—twelve floors up, testing, building, iterating. The timestamps were broken. The database wasn't storing audio memories. The calendar integration kept wiping itself. Small problems. Fixable problems.

Cursor became his co-pilot. "Explain the UX," Y prompted. "How does the machine learning model run on device?" The answers flowed back. The problems got solved. Four nineteen PM became four twenty PM became four twenty-three. Y tested the timestamps by talking through each minute, watching the transcription lag, planning the meditation breathing exercises that would mask the processing time.

Friends cycled through. Conversations about creatine and BMI and canned sardines. About yoga and half marathons. About War and Peace and The Da Vinci Code. About building in public and the strangeness of being recorded.

"It's weird being recorded," one friend said.

"I don't really think about it," Y replied. "I personally love this."

The philosophical justification was simple: someone's going to be listening anyway. Google's AI. OpenAI's AI. Apple's AI. Might as well be your AI.

By evening, the technical architecture was clarifying. Joshua joined—the design mind, the co-conspirator. They discussed the hierarchy of value. Journal that writes itself. Lifelong memory. Second brain organized by topic, not chronology. The data stream enriched with calendar, location, real timestamps instead of relative ones.

"To me there's a question," Joshua said. "Stated preference versus revealed preference. Is there a discord between your secret thoughts and what you say out loud?"

Y understood immediately. This wasn't about transcription. This was about truth.

They talked strategy. College students first—capture the four most transformative years, hook them for life. Viral marketing like Mr. Beast would do it. Competitions. Voting. Making self-improvement a status symbol, like Whoop bands for the soul.

Bronner appeared, reading Eckhart Tolle, dating a high priestess he'd met on Instagram. The universe works in mysterious ways. Y tested the app through dinner—beef bowl, conversations about COVID origins and wisdom teeth, the casual chaos of creative people building things.

"Tomorrow I have to tell Sam I don't want to work for him," Y said around 6 PM.

The decision had been made. The bridge was about to burn.

But first, tonight, there was still work to do. The database needed fixing. The prompts needed tuning. The story needed telling.