04:25 AM. Today is the day.
Not tomorrow, not next week, not "soon." Today. January 29th, 2026. The day I get the keys. The day I move from Oslo to Kongsberg. The day that 16.5 years of being an Oslo resident comes to an end.
I woke up this morning in my old apartment for the last time. By tonight, I'll be sleeping in a different place — a house, not an apartment. A city of 30K people, not Norway's capital. A new chapter that I've been talking about, planning for, anticipating. And now it's here. The abstract has become concrete.
Last summer, I co-organized a drone swarm workshop in Kongsberg, together with NITO's Professional Network for Drone Technology, for which I serve as secretary. We brought in experts from Above Media and Pyroteknikk AS — some of Norway's first companies licensed to operate civilian drone swarms. Attendees got to see the process from start to finish — how the UI is used to plan the flight, to steer the swarm, to set the x, y, z coordinates for each drone.
That was physical swarms. Hardware. GPS coordinates and RTK precision.
But I've also seen videos of 50,000 drones filling the sky over Chinese cities. A coordinated swarm drawing dragons and phoenixes in the darkness, each tiny light knowing exactly where to be, when to move, how to contribute to a shape far larger than itself. Some drones fail. Fall. Burn out mid-flight. But the swarm adapts. The pattern holds.
And I think: what if we had a sky filled with AI instances?
Not drones carrying lights, but minds carrying perspectives. A swarm of AI personas, each approaching the same problem from a different angle, with a different "frequency seed" — a set of weighted words that tune their attention, their emphasis, their way of seeing. Not copies. Variations. Like musicians in an orchestra, all playing the same piece, each bringing their own interpretation.
Earlier this week, I ran a test. Twenty orchestrator agents, each spawning 25 sub-agents. Five hundred AI personas, all working on the same problem simultaneously. In another test, I had a synthetic database with 500 cases — an inbox of unsolved problems — and each AI instance claimed one case, solved it in its own way, returned its findings. All of this on my local machine — I don't have a public version yet. Maybe later this year I'll open it up on str.is, free to try, with a premium tier for those who want more.
Yes, some instances failed. Crashed. Timed out. Fell to the ground like drones losing signal. But most made it. Solved their case. Offered suggestions I wouldn't have thought of on my own. Parallelization. The swarm found patterns that no single mind — human or artificial — could have found alone.
I spent 2009-2021 working in the IT industry. Solution Architect at a SaaS company, designing systems, thinking in abstractions. Twelve years. Long enough to know hundreds of customers — call centers across Scandinavia and beyond, each with their own inboxes, their own bottlenecks, their own ways of routing calls and emails and tickets and chats, handling escalations and exceptions and the cases that don't fit any category. Strategic, tactical, operational. I sat in countless workshops with them, mapping workflows on whiteboards, asking "what happens when this queue overflows?" and "who handles the edge cases?"
I miss those workshops. The collaborative problem-solving. The moment when someone sees their own system from a new angle.
Now I want to run workshops again. But this time, the subject isn't call center workflows. It's AI swarms. Because I genuinely believe this is where we're heading — not single oracles, but orchestrated collectives. And someone needs to show people how to conduct them. I know what it feels like to orchestrate complexity, to build pipelines that process thousands of requests per second. But this is different. This isn't data flowing through predefined channels. This is cognition at scale. Distributed thinking. Collaborative intelligence between species.
And now, in Kongsberg, I'm planning the next iteration. From drones to minds. From hardware swarms to cognitive swarms.
│ │ ┌────┴────┐ │░░░░░░░░░│ │ FREE AI │ │ SWARM │ │ WORKSHOP │ │ │ │ Spring │ │ 2026 │ │ │ │ Location:│ │ TBD │ │░░░░░░░░░│ └─────────┘ │ │ ─────┴─────
I'm still looking for the right space. A library meeting room, perhaps. A community center. Somewhere in this new city that's about to become my home. The workshop will be free — no charge, just curiosity required. I want to show people what's possible when you stop thinking of AI as a single oracle and start thinking of it as a swarm. When you learn to orchestrate rather than query. When you become the conductor, not the audience.
The drones in China don't know they're making a dragon. Each one just follows its instructions, trusts the choreography, plays its part. But together, they create something that takes your breath away.
Maybe that's the point. Maybe the meaning isn't in any single light, but in the pattern they create together.
There's something strange about significant days. You expect them to feel different — heavier, more ceremonial. But mostly they just feel like days. You still make coffee. You still check your phone. The sun still rises at the same angle. The universe doesn't pause to acknowledge your transition.
And yet. Everything is different.
I moved to Oslo in the summer of 2009. I was 31 years old, freshly arrived from Copenhagen, looking for work. By October I'd found it — a workplace I would stay at for nearly twelve years, moving through different positions, until August 2021. I remember the feeling of possibility — how the city seemed to stretch out in front of me, full of paths I hadn't walked yet. That was 16.5 years ago. Half my adult life.
What happened in those years? Everything. Nothing. The usual human inventory: jobs gained and lost, relationships formed and dissolved, apartments rented and vacated. I became someone different — multiple someones, really, layered on top of each other like geological strata. The 31-year-old who arrived is still in here somewhere, but he's buried under fifteen years of accumulated experience.
Now I'm 47. And today I'm thinking about the next 16.5 years.
If I stay in Kongsberg for 16.5 years — which is entirely possible, maybe even likely — I'll be 64 when that chapter closes. Sixty-four. Deep into my sixties. Someone whose body has been declining for decades. Someone who has, statistically speaking, fewer years ahead than behind.
It's terrifying to write that. To see it rendered in plain text on a screen.
But here's the thing I keep coming back to: the alternative to getting older is worse. The only way to avoid turning 64 is to not make it that far. And I'd rather be 64 and alive — creaky, slower, greyer — than forever frozen at some earlier age.
Aging is a privilege. It doesn't always feel like one, especially on days when my back hurts or I can't remember why I walked into a room. But it is. Every year I get is a year that wasn't guaranteed.
And speaking of numbers and years: 42.
Douglas Adams died at 49. He never got to be 64. He barely got past the answer to life, the universe, and everything — the number he invented as a joke that became a symbol. Fans still leave pens at his grave in Highgate Cemetery. Writers' tools for a writer who left too soon.
___________ | | | Douglas | | Adams | | | | Writer | | | | 1952-2001 | |___________| ┌────┐ │ 42 │ └─┬──┘ │ ┌─────┐ │ │|||||│ │ │|||||│──────────┘ └─────┘ pens
I've loved that number since I first read The Hitchhiker's Guide as a teenager. It's absurd and profound at the same time — the ultimate answer that doesn't answer anything, that forces you to realize maybe you were asking the wrong question all along.
I'll turn 64 in Kongsberg. But first, I'll turn 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63. Sixteen more birthdays, if I'm lucky. Sixteen more years of asking questions and occasionally finding answers that don't quite fit. And at the end of 2025, I moved on from DLTQ — Don't Lose The Question — to str.is. Same question, different syntax. In programming, str_is functions check what a string is: str.isalpha(), str.isdigit(), str.isvalid(). They interrogate identity. They return true or false. They ask: what are you, really?
To go deeper, ask precisely. Sometimes it's terrifying to face that kind of question. Often it's liberating. What am I really doing here? Why am I really working where I do, thinking the thoughts I think, spawning these AI swarms, building muscle memory for a future I can't yet see? The precise question cuts through the noise. The precise question doesn't accept "fine" as an answer.
I don't know yet what kind of string my Kongsberg years will be. str.isbuilding()? str.isbecoming()? str.ishome()? The function hasn't finished running. The return value is still pending.
Don't panic.
So today, on The Day, I'm trying to hold two things at once: Remembrance for what's ending, and anticipation for what's beginning. The Oslo chapter is closing, and I'm allowed to mourn it even as I celebrate what comes next. The future is rushing toward me at one second per second, and I'm allowed to be scared even as I step into it.
Kongsberg is waiting. The house is waiting. The train rides are waiting. The next version of myself is waiting to be assembled from new experiences and new routines and new contacts, new friendships, new neighbours and library sessions and streets walked and moments reflected.
All I have to do is pick up the keys and walk through the door.
Today.