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don’t want to hurt anyone with the explosion. Plus, I know Torino—I know all the tech companies here, so I can make my way around. But once I saw a Torino with no electronics.”
    I wiped clammy sweat from my hands with the café’s rough cloth napkin. “Tell me, Massimo, how did you feel about that?”
    “It’s incredible. There’s no electricity there. There’s no wires for the electrical trolleys. There are plenty of people there, very well-dressed, and bright colored lights, and some things are flying in the sky… big aircraft, big as ocean-liners. So they’ve got some kind of power there—but it’s not electricity. They stopped using electricity, somehow. Since the 1980s.”
    “A Turin with no electricity,” I repeated, to convince him that I was listening.
    “Yeah, that’s fascinating, isn’t it? How could Italy abandon electricity and replace it with another power source? I think that they use cold-fusion! Because cold fusion was another world-changing event from the 1980s. I can’t explore that Torino—because where would I plug in my laptop? But you could find out how they do all that! Because you’re just a journalist, right? All you need is a pencil!”
    “I’m not a big expert on physics,” I said.
    “My God, I keep forgetting I’m talking to somebody from the hopeless George Bush World,” he said. “Listen, stupid: physics isn’t complicated. Physics is very simple and elegant, because it’s structured . I knew that from the age of three.”
    “I’m just a writer, I’m not a scientist.”
    “Well, surely you’ve heard of ‘consilience.’”
    “No. Never.”
    “Yes you have! Even people in your stupid world know about ‘consilience.’ Consilience means that all forms of human knowledge have an underlying unity!”
    The gleam in his eyes was tiring me. “Why does that matter?”
    “It makes all the difference between your world and my world! In your world there was a great physicist once… Dr. Italo Calvino.”
    “Famous literary writer,” I said, “he died in the 1980s.”
    “Calvino didn’t die in my Italy,” he said. “Because in my Italy, Italo Calvino completed his ‘Six Core Principles.’”
    “Calvino wrote ‘Six Memos,’” I said. “He wrote ‘Six Memos for the Next Millennium.’ And he only finished five of those before he had a stroke and died.”
    “In my world Calvino did not have a stroke. He had a stroke of genius, instead. When Calvino completed his work, those six lectures weren’t just ‘memos’. He delivered six major public addresses at Princeton. When Calvino gave that sixth, great, final speech, on ‘Consistency,’ the halls were crammed with physicists. Mathematicians, too. My father was there.”
    I took refuge in my notebook. “Six Core Principles,” I scribbled hastily, “Calvino, Princeton, consilience.”
    “Calvino’s parents were both scientists,” Massimo insisted. “Calvino’s brother was also a scientist. His Oulipo literary group was obsessed with mathematics. When Calvino delivered lectures worthy of a genius, nobody was surprised.”
    “I knew Calvino was a genius,” I said. I’d been young, but you can’t write in Italian and not know Calvino. I’d seen him trudging the porticoes in Turin, hunch-shouldered, slapping his feet, always looking sly and preoccupied. You only had see the man to know that he had an agenda like no other writer in the world.
    “When Calvino finished his six lectures,” mused Massimo, “they carried him off to CERN in Geneva and they made him work on the ‘Semantic Web.’ The Semantic Web works beautifully, by the way. It’s not like your foul little Inter-net—so full of spam and crime.” He wiped the sausage knife on an oil-stained napkin. “I should qualify that remark. The Semantic Web works beautifully— in the Italian language . Because the Semantic Web was built by Italians. They had a little bit of help from a few French Oulipo writers.”
    “Can we leave this