The Minneapolis airport was strangely quiet on New Year’s Day, as if the whole city was still asleep while Sofie and I slipped away toward another life.

She was only a year and a half old, bundled into a puffy winter coat that made her wobble when she walked. Every few feet she stopped to stare at something completely ordinary with total fascination: blinking runway lights, a sleeping businessman, the luggage conveyor disappearing through rubber curtains.

Children live in permanent astonishment.

I remember kneeling beside her near the gate while she pressed both hands against the giant airport window, watching planes move slowly through drifting snow.

“Big airplane,” she whispered.

“Very big airplane. It will take us to New York City,” I said. “The greatest city in the world.”

She looked up at me seriously.

“Why?”

That was her favorite word then. Why to everything.

At that moment I was becoming one of the young rising artists in Minneapolis. Grants were arriving. Shows were getting attention. My installations were growing more ambitious — systems involving animals, electronics, water, behavior, fragile balances between chaos and control. But Minneapolis suddenly felt too small for where my mind was starting to go.

New York still existed then as a mythological place for artists. Dirty, dangerous, magnetic. A place where you either expanded or disappeared.

I was terrified.

Of course later I would romanticize it, but at the time I was traveling with a toddler, a few bags, and wildly unstable confidence. One moment I felt destined for something extraordinary; the next I felt like a complete fraud dragging a child into uncertainty because of artistic ambition.

Near the gate I wandered into one of those airport bookstores and found a strange glossy magazine with psychedelic typography exploding across the cover:

MONDO 2000.

I picked it up and instantly felt something electric moving through me. Cyberpunk. Virtual reality. Wetware. Artificial life. Designer consciousness. Digital tribes. Techno-erotic futures. The language itself seemed to come from another century.

A few years earlier I had read Neuromancer and already sensed that the world was beginning to tilt toward something new. But this felt different. This wasn’t fiction. These people genuinely believed the future was already arriving.

Standing there in the airport, I had the strange feeling that some hidden door was opening just ahead of me.

When we boarded the plane, Sofie claimed the window seat immediately, pressing her face against the glass while snow drifted across the runway. I sat beside her flipping through MONDO 2000 while the engines slowly rose beneath us.

Somewhere over the Midwest she fell asleep against my side while I kept reading about networks, virtual worlds, artificial intelligence, hackers, digital identity, and strange new forms of human connection that barely existed yet.

The magazine felt ridiculous and prophetic at the same time.

I couldn’t know then how deeply those ideas would shape my life in the years ahead. I only knew that something about it felt true.

Hours later we landed in New York after dark.

The city hit me immediately — the scale of it, the noise, the speed. Steam rising from grates. Horns echoing through wet streets. Light everywhere. Even exhausted, the city felt awake in a way Minneapolis never had.

We climbed into a yellow cab at the airport. Sofie curled sleepily against me while the driver pulled into traffic with absolute aggression, accelerating toward Manhattan like a man late for something important.

At one point I looked up at the cab medallion mounted behind the seat and then studied his face more carefully. He looked exactly like my artist friend Bill Wormley.  It wasn’t Bill, but it was so uncanny that I kept glancing at him during the ride.

A month later, after the first World Trade Center bombing, I saw his face again on television.

I remember sitting there stunned.

Not because we had spoken about anything meaningful. We hadn’t. He was just another cab driver in New York on another cold night. But suddenly the ordinary memory became charged with history. The future I had sensed in that airport bookstore — all the technological exhilaration and strange possibility — now seemed tangled with something darker already moving beneath the surface of the world.

Looking back now, that day feels less like a move and more like a crossing.

I arrived in New York carrying my daughter in one arm and a strange magazine about the future in the other.

I had no idea how much both of them were about to change my life.