This is a story about software, but bear with me. At the moment, we're hanging sideways in a rented Cessna 172, slipping from 7,000 feet toward the patchwork fields and forest of central South Carolina. A lanky 32-year-old aeronautical engineer named Austin Meyer holds the controls. "Ready?" he says. "Three, two, one-now!" He whips the yoke around, and we lurch into a belly-twisting bank to the right. I click my stopwatch as the attitude indicator swings past 0 degrees, then 30.