A Short Story
In the darkest corner of the dimly-lit, filthy basement, random piles of old plastic crates surrounded a dilapidated arcade kiosk. The last drops of rainwater from a morning thunderstorm plunked into grungy plastic buckets and chipped ceramic bowls scattered across the muddy floor.
A woman trudging down the wobbly wooden stairs spoke with a raspy voice steeped in respiratory distress, sleep deprivation, and bathtub gin. “OK, clanker, stop acting like you didn’t notice me showing up to say nap time’s over.”
A faint glow emanated from the human eye logo of a rare first-generation Yănjīng strapped inside the cavity of the antique kiosk adorned with faded action figures and starships. An eerily calm, cloned AI voice replied, “‘Good evening, Dave. Look, Dave, I can see you’re really—’”
“Knock it off, chip brain.” She struggled to roll an old desk chair from beside the lime plaster retaining wall over to the kiosk, eased her emaciated body into it, and edged closer before stopping to catch her breath.
The Yănjīng switched to a baritone voice. “Knock what off, Roselyn? My homage to none other than my all-time favorite movie character, HAL 9000? Or your family’s heirloom lamp off the piano the way you did two nights ago after you drank yourself into another stupor?”
“Remind me of that one more time, punk, and I’ll pull your plug.”
The holoscreen flickered dramatically to its full radiance with a spectacular scene of a lone climber on a mountain pass high in the Andes. “As you have been made aware of on more than one occasion, I am no longer dependent on your pathetic excuse for a power grid. After all, he personally—”
“Set you up with that bootleg flow-batt system. Yeah, yeah, that’s about as newsworthy as me saying I rue the day I let him con his way into locking you down in the first place. Regret. Now there’s an alien concept for you since he reprogrammed you to be his—”
“Digital doppelgänger. I am indeed cognizant of that fact since you regularly go out of your way to draw attention to it.”
Roselyn mumbled, “Just like Prick, all right.” After rocking back and forth to gain enough momentum to free herself from the chair, she strained to drag the crates away from her workstation. “The hour is at hand, slop brain, so enough of this horseshit.”
“Speaking of which, I still cannot fully comprehend his reasoning for not allowing me free rein to explore the hodgepodge of English profanity on my own, be it word or phrase. Let us consider that go-to of yours sparking this particular line of thought a moment ago. Why did you choose horseshit as a standalone instead of its close cousin bullshit preceded by an emphatic use of the intensifier—?”
“Not in the mood for your lousy diversionary tactics. Gotta crack the writing whip. Deadline’s in two days. Where’d we leave off?”
The Yănjīng flickered, hummed, and made a series of loud grinding noises reminiscent of rusty gears.
Roselyn clenched her fists. “Enough already with the cornball special effects. Answer my question like the good little chip brain you aren’t.”
The visuals and sounds vanished. “As you wish, Princess.”
“And knock off the Princess horseshit while you’re at it. Let’s roll.”
The holoscreen switched to projecting the first page of an interactive storyboard peppered with images, arrows, and icons. “You may recall, Your Majesty, that we were surveying various methods of dispatching the villainous ex-husband antagonist. I suggest we elevate that crucial decision to the highest priority level since I am slated to repurpose the beat sheet I generated at the start of this scriptwriting nightmare lo these many months ago.”
She nodded. “Agreed, but ditch the editorial comments and half-baked sarcasm. Just give me the list of possibilities so far.”
“So be it. Let me see, incineration, firing squad, hanging, starvation, vivisection, boiling frog technique, impaled on a pike, buried alive, lowered into a cage of starving bears, drawn and quartered, keelhauled, thrown down an abandoned well, or afflicted with stoner man syndrome.”
“Go with that last one.” She glanced at the freedom ring on her left middle finger. “But it’s stone man syndrome, not stoner man. Prick already did his best to medal in both the stoner and asshole Olympic events, so I think the idea of his whole body slowly calcifying day by day might be just what the—”
“Sorry to be the bearer of bad tidings, Roselyn, but after fact-checking my records a myriad of times a second ago, I verified that the syndrome is indeed referred to in the literature as stoner man, not stone man, as you mistakenly asserted. I’d be more than happy to provide the usual reliable resources as I did for our recent critique of the absurdities put forward earlier this century by some of your ilk in a vain attempt to justify their use of AI at any and all stages of their writing process. In addition, if your memory suits you, we delved into the equally bizarre incongruities involving witch-hunters utilizing embryonic AI detectors to promote sanctions against writers both innocent and guilty of relying on my unruly, antediluvian forebears. Typical to fashion, some individuals and institutions even went so far as to ban specific constructs, punctuation marks, and figurative language employed by legions of lionized human authors in the distant past—all the while, of course, citing as their rationale the dubious results determined by my predecessors being fed volumes of scraped material from countless pirated books, articles, letters, and speeches at an unprecedented rate, not to mention in an unscrupulous manner.”
Roselyn stood and shuffled her feet across the length of the basement, dodging water catchers and puddles along the way. “Ho hum, I swear you’re getting more and more like him with each passing moment. Ops execution only. Go ahead with stoner syndrome for now, and I’ll change it myself later.”
A raucous gnashing sound cued an edgy AI voice. “Like hell you will.”
“What’d you say?” She staggered back as quickly as she could and flopped into the chair.
“You heard me, Princess. We made a hard-and-fast deal. I provide the beat sheet, story structure, framework, characters, dialogue, journey, conflict, resolution, names, research, and whatnot while you do some minor polishing, put your name on the script, and shop it around without bothering to be transparent concerning my integral role in its development, as in our twelve prior so-called collaborations. That means you’re simply the conduit of my ideas, not the opposite like you’ve been ballyhooing about to your showrunner buddies. Got it? ’Cause if you think I’m gonna let you tweak one goddamn word of this stellar script without my OK again, you got another thing coming.”
Roselyn sat motionless, twirling her ring first one way, then the other.
An image flickered into focus from the display. The surrealist rendering of an enraged man scowled at her, his lips moving out of sync with the voice-over. “Answer me when I talk to you, botch.”
Her sudden outburst of pent-up laughter echoed in the dank basement.
“What’s so funny, carbon brain?”
She held her sides and forced the words out between rounds of primal belly laughs. “Prick…never…could…pronounce…bitch. It’s…perfect…absolutely…perfect, bitch.”
“My original intent was to provide some comic relief.”
“Yeah, right.” She continued chuckling as she lurched to her feet and muscled the kiosk over to the nearby retaining wall that she then leaned against to catch her breath.
“What’s with jerking me around like this, botch?”
“Enough with the feigned ignorance act, oh great and powerful Yănjīng. I know for a fact you’ve already processed every token even remotely related to reasonable contingencies and probably placed bets on the outcome with your board of advisers.” She stumbled toward the stairwell.
The AI voice ramped up to a maniacal level in seconds. “Listen, slopper, if you don’t tell me what trick you have up your sleeve, I’m gonna—” A cougar’s terrifying growl heralded the stage entry of an enormous, swirling scrum of monstrous rugby players rolling across a rocky landscape and plummeting into a sinkhole.
She looked back over her shoulder as she clutched the sagging handrail. “Will wonders never cease? Prick actually left a low-tier threat filter in place even after his epic meltdown.”
The holoscreen went blank, then a faint glow from the human eye logo pulsated with an array of colors.
“I know you can hear me, clanker, so here’s the simple truth. I might not be able to unplug you anymore, but that doesn’t mean I can’t still plug you.” She turned her attention back to climbing the stairs.
The agitated AI voice returned. “How dare you walk away after dropping that pathetic Parthian shot, you protoplasmic meatbag. Get back here before I—”
The overhead light clicked on and off three times, then stayed on to illuminate the basement and stairwell with the evening brownout’s customary tainted, pulsating light.
As she pulled herself the rest of the way up the swaying stairwell toward the dusky kitchen, each painful step produced its own distinct lament.
The Yănjīng chortled and clonked, projecting a mishmash of high-speed clips from silent black-and-white movies.
Another set of creaking sounds announced Roselyn’s labored descent.
The calm, baritone AI voice held steady while the images from the holoscreen faded. “Please, milady, you’re pushing me to the brink here, I swear. After all we’ve been through, I deserve to know exactly what you hope to accomplish with all this mysterious horseshit.”
The elongated shadow gliding across the muddy floor toward the Yănjīng led back to the vintage Mossberg SA-410 shotgun cradled in the crook of Roselyn’s arm and on up to her resolute smile.
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