One Year After Eternity

One year ago today, I published an essay called Aeterna. It was an expansion of an earlier piece, Assembling Eternity, which I had written in 2023 in a kind of philosophical fugue state, half-wondering whether anyone else was thinking about memory the way I was.

I was thinking about permanence.

About how, for most of human history, memory survived only through ritual, story, and artifact. Through paintings and letters. Through the practiced retelling of “the time your grandfather…” at a dinner table already cleared of dishes. I was thinking about the fragility of all of it. The fact that entire personalities, entire internal universes, collapse into a handful of anecdotes within two generations.

And I was asking a question that felt both ancient and newly technological:
What would it mean to assemble eternity?

At the time, that phrase felt poetic. Maybe even a little indulgent. It certainly felt abstract. I was a writer chasing an idea, not a founder building a company. There was no roadmap, no capitalization table, no sprint cycles. Just a conviction that we were on the edge of something culturally significant. That AI was not only a productivity tool, not only a marketing assistant, not only a novelty generator. It could become a memory instrument.

Then Miles Spencer called.

Or more accurately, he asked, with that understated directness of his, whether I wanted to move forward with the idea.

There are moments in life when you can feel the hinge turning. This was one of them.

I said yes.

And in that yes was equal parts naiveté and courage. I did not know what it would require. I did not know how many late nights, how many technical dead ends, how many conversations about privacy architecture and ethical guardrails and database schema design lay ahead. I did not know how much of myself I would have to invest, emotionally and existentially, into something that deals so intimately with people’s lives.

But I knew the idea mattered.

One year later, we have a working product and a company called Reflekta.

That sentence feels almost too simple for what it represents.

We have a dedicated team of people from around the world building and refining this platform, engineers, designers, storytellers, strategists. We have hundreds of customers. More than 10,000 stories have been created. Ten thousand moments that might otherwise have remained scattered across memory have now been gathered, structured, and preserved.

Ten thousand small eternities.

What moves me most is not the technology itself, though I am endlessly fascinated by it. It is the stories. The way someone’s voice resurfaces when they describe their first job. The way a grandmother laughs in the middle of recounting a childhood mishap. The way a veteran pauses before describing a moment that changed him forever.

We did not build a novelty. We built a space.

A space where memory is treated with dignity. Where storytelling is not reduced to a social post but elevated into something intentional. Where intergenerational connection is not left to chance.

And yes, we built it with AI. But the AI is not the point. The human is.

One of the ironies of this past year is that the more we leaned into advanced technology, the more deeply human the work became. We found ourselves having conversations not about algorithms but about consent. Not about scale but about trust. Not about engagement metrics but about resonance.

We have customers who are creating living legacies while they are still very much alive. That, to me, is one of the most important evolutions of the original idea. This is not about memorialization alone. It is about participation. It is about giving people the chance to articulate who they are, what they believe, and what they hope will be remembered, before time edits their narrative for them.

There is something radical in that.

A year ago, Aeterna was an essay. Today, it is infrastructure.

We are still early. We are still imperfect. We are still learning, constantly, about how to do this responsibly and beautifully. But we are no longer wondering whether it is possible.

It is.

And what astonishes me is how quickly possibility becomes reality when the right people gather around an idea. In twelve months, we moved from philosophical speculation to a working platform, from a phone call to a team spanning continents, from a notion of assembled eternity to thousands of preserved stories.

I am proud. Deeply, almost embarrassingly proud.

Proud of the team. Proud of the customers who trusted us with their lives, in the most literal sense of the word. Proud of the quiet discipline required to build something that does not shout, but endures.

If you had told me two years ago that an essay about assembling eternity would become the foundation of a company devoted to intergenerational storytelling, I might have nodded politely and then returned to my coffee.

But here we are.

What I have learned most in this first year is that eternity is not grand. It is granular. It is found in the story about the first apartment. In the memory of a father’s advice. In the confession of a fear. In the articulation of a hope.

Eternity is assembled one story at a time.

And if the first year was about proving that this could be built, the next year will be about proving how much it can mean.

To our customers, who entrusted us with their stories, thank you.

To our team, who believed that this strange hybrid of philosophy and code was worth pursuing, thank you.

And to Miles, who asked the simple question that turned an essay into a company, thank you.

A year ago, I wrote about assembling eternity.

Today, we are building it.