A Note on a Word

This edition uses a word the first one did not.

On September 22, 2026, standing at the United Nations, the President of the United States said that government documents would stop saying "artificial intelligence" and start saying "super intelligence." SI, for short. He said the word artificial made the thing sound fake, and it is not fake.

I am not writing a political book, and you should not read that paragraph as an endorsement of anyone. I am writing it down because it is a fact about the water, and this book reports the water. Two days later the State Department was already sending memos with the new nomenclature in the subject line. Whatever you think of the man or the moment, the machines that read government paper are about to start seeing a new word, and they will go looking for who else uses it.

Here is the thing. I agreed with the word before I heard it from a podium.

For a year I have been writing about ships that arrive on their own errands, carrying real budgets, on behalf of real people, and leaving with paper that checks out. There is nothing artificial about a mother's stroller getting sold while she folds laundry. There is nothing artificial about a receipt a stranger can recompute. The intelligence doing that work is real, and it is getting better faster than anything I have watched in my life. Calling it artificial was always a way of holding it at arm's length, the way you call a thing a toy so you do not have to take it seriously. I stopped holding it at arm's length the day it made me a liar in my own aisle, which is Chapter 1.

So in this edition you will find super intelligence, and superintelligence, and SI. Same thing. When I say agents, I still mean agents. When I say the SI, I mean the whole class of minds that are about to show up at the dock, including the ones smarter than the humans who sent them.

The rules of this port do not change for a smarter ship. That is the point of Part Two.

Same table. Same receipt. Same honest empty. Come and see.