Two characters. Sixteen bits of intent. What follows is one of the most layered chains of physics and software ever engineered. The moment a key is pressed, a switch closes within a scanned matrix and the keyboard reports a USB HID scan code. The operating system maps it to a character, the browser captures it, and on send, “hi” is wrapped inside a JSON payload alongside a system prompt and model parameters. The journey from there: - DNS resolves the API hostname, frequently to an anycast address at the nearest network edge - TLS 1.3 (RFC 8446, 2018) encrypts the request after a single round-trip handshake - Packets travel as voltage transitions in copper, radio waves over Wi-Fi, then photons in optical fibre at roughly 200,000 km/s, about two-thirds the speed of light - An API gateway authenticates the key, enforces rate limits and routes the request through a load balancer to an available GPU cluster Inside the cluster, the text is tokenised using byte-pair encoding, a compressio...