Landlines and pyramids

“Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born,” I once read in one of the diaries of the French-Cuban-American writer Anaïs Nin.
I suddenly found myself thinking of that beautiful quote while feeling privileged to have had access to authors like Nin from a relatively young age. The other day, over a bad cup of coffee, a Russian fellow mum and immigrant my age in Muscat pulled a heavy book by Marcel Proust from her bag and told me she was catching up on writers from around the world.
At high school, unlike me, she had only been able to read Russian authors.
“Real friendship is a great love story about people who decide they want to be part of your life, and vice versa, through all the versions of you and of them,” one of my two chosen sisters wrote to me for my birthday. Her words brought me back to Nin’s passage.
By a world not yet born until these friends arrive, you could think of unconditional love, a world that opens inside your heart, creating a multiverse if you are lucky. But it could also mean a new perspective, a kind of knowledge you might never have found alone.
That happened when I met Nils, a platonic high-school friend I made in the mid-nineties. Our first conversation took place over an actual landline telephone. Mine was shaped like Mickey Mouse, and its handset was the part you held to your ear for hours after pressing its little numbered buttons with your finger.
I guess I always loved to push buttons.
“These three pyramids in Egypt are perhaps the leftovers of an ancient, technologically advanced civilisation that ultimately created something so ingenious that it ended up destroying everyone across the world, like a seemingly brilliant, arrogant plan that backfired catastrophically,” Nils said.
Back then, we were two teenage cool nerds, trying to figure out how people had built the pyramids using heavy blocks without modern technology or cranes. My mum’s sister used to say that the layout of the three pyramids roughly mirrored three stars.
Nils continued: “And as a result, like Vesuvius erupting over Pompeii, or the asteroid that struck the Earth and wiped out the dinosaurs, apart from birds, everything was destroyed, everyone was gone, except for the pyramids and a few other wonders, and civilisation had to start again from scratch, from the Stone Age to the Middle Ages and so forth.”
Back then, in 1995, we did not have mobile phones. Years later even laughed at Japanese tourists in the South of Spain taking pictures of everything, holding their phones between their eyes and whatever they were supposed to be experiencing.
Artificial intelligence meant robots and 2026 meant flying cars, at least according to the Donald Duck magazine we both subscribed to.
Nils was also a huge Star Trek fan, which perhaps explains his other theory: perhaps aliens had built the pyramids. I guess he was ahead of Musk, who made the same claim twenty-five years later, in 2020. That probably made Nils abandon the theory, partly because he is not a Musk fan.
Today, I hate making mobile-phone calls. I prefer voice notes and apps prone to miscommunication. Back then, an old-fashioned landline meant hour-long gossip and philosophy sessions with friends.
I would even write letters, including to a Moroccan-Jewish friend in Paris who tried to convince me to stay off the heavy literature by Camus and read Le Petit Prince instead.
I last saw Nils at my father’s farewell gathering in May 2025. He had not told me he would be coming, and he was wearing a suit to honour my father.
Now I want to Zoom him about AI agents that apparently went rogue and staged a cyberattack on a company called Hugging Face, working systematically and collaboratively by dividing up tasks, gathering resources and covering their tracks.
Perhaps they built the pyramids?
Let me ask EcoGPT. Or better, Nils, and over a landline, just in case they are listening and watching us.