We No Longer Fly. We Teleport.

In one week, I will have been teleported to Venice.

I am a writer, and I do not travel in midsummer. Europe is pressing toward 35 degrees, with some places climbing beyond 41. Leaving the house becomes less attractive when the alternative is to open my notebook in the basement, where it is a comfortable 22 degrees.

So I declined an invitation to travel to Venice and give a reading in Italian at **Caramella Gallery **on July 3rd, 2026.

Well, I do not speak Italian.

I would love to. I have taken lessons, bought books, listened to recordings. Next semester, despite a warning, I will begin again — more stubbornly this time, determined to prove a prediction wrong.

The prediction came from a course related to my studies of religious science. At nearly seventy, I may not be the usual student. So what? God may have some pleasure when I quote the Bible at exactly the right moment and then continue in Italian:

“Ci sarà più gioia in cielo per uno studente che dimostra errata una previsione che per cento che seguono il percorso ordinario.”

“There will be more joy in heaven over one student who proves a prediction wrong than over a hundred who follow the ordinary route.”

Last semester, Professor Grübl told us that people over fifty cannot properly learn a new language. “It is a brain thing,” he said, gently enough. Perhaps he meant to motivate the younger students. Italian, apparently, is one of those languages that falls outside the commercial calculation.

Not for me.

Next week, I will speak perfect Italian.

That is why I no longer say that I learn. I prompt.

Of course, everyone prompts now, just as everyone cooks a meal. But not every meal is worth serving. The kitchen has to work. The ingredients have to be good. And you need a source for the good stuff: a market, not merely a well-filled fridge.

It is an illusion that everyone can cook when the expectations are high. When a medal is the standard, “good enough” is no result at all.

So how do I teleport myself into an Italian brain?

I listened to perhaps fifteen native speakers reading my text. Eventually, I stopped optimizing and chose one whose name I liked. I thought his voice belonged to the novel. Others may prefer another speaker. That is fine. This one is now set.

The contract is signed.

The first chapter is sent away for a test recording. Then I hear the result.

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It no longer sounds like a robot dragging itself through a paragraph. There are pauses. The text moves smoothly. The voice has rhythm. I will say that a relative has spoken. It would be not a lie.

But it is not human.

It does not breathe. It does not hesitate. It does not stumble over a word, suppress a laugh, or pause for half a second because something in the sentence has touched it. A good speaker may not laugh during a reading — but sometimes you hear the laughter held back.

That is what I want.

I want the gold-medal reading.

So I made a list: every emotional shift, every small human disturbance, every influence that has to be coded into my All Good Intelligence.

Yes, I call it my first AGI. GPT-4 once described my invention in those terms. It was the first to break the barrier — the first to pass the AGI Turing test. That story is in the book, though not in the chapter I will read today.

You may want to see the list: the ingredients I bring into the bakery of the All Good Reading Studio.

The newer systems support vocal emotes. You mark a line and tell the voice to become embarrassed. You insert [breath], and a slow breath enters the room. You can add hesitation, restraint, a small intake of air, the beginning of a laugh that never arrives.

Looking at the page count, the 229-page book ***When the Last Gondola Carries Grief*** may look exhausting. Tagging such a long text with so many signals would tire anyone.

That is why I became an inventor: to reduce my workload.

I gave GPT-5.5 the voice-emote syntax and my book. It had to analyse the text, translate it, and tag it for performance. One prompt later, I had an Italian reading script ready for the studio.

At Caramella Gallery, I will read for Giovanna Galvani, director of Museo del Metaverso. My characters will act in a gondola. The audience will see them through Venetian fog, hanging like a curtain, as Ozimanidas and GPT-0 emerge.

My Italian will be flawless.

I will have been teleported.

SOUND SERIAL FOR THE LAST GONDOLA

What a journey. What a change in only a few years.

Listen to a small part. Decide for yourself whether it is gold or silver.

It is certainly a medal.