The cursor blinked insistently, as though judging her failure to type. Graves glared back at it, chin propped on her hand, coffee gone cold. The investor progress report needed two things: polish and lies. Both were in short supply.
She’d already written one paragraph about the “early phase aesthetic exploration” Samson’s network had generated and three hastily optimistic sentences about projected scalability. Scalability of what? Pottery? God, it sounded stupid when she wrote it down.
“You could tell them I’m expanding into cups,” Samson suggested from his usual corner of the apartment. He was physically present today, seated—perched, really—on a stool too small for his current Samson body. One hand held a sculpting tool, turning over a piece of unfired clay. The LED display on his face showed a static neutral line, but Graves swore the bastard was smirking.
“You’re not helping,” she muttered, scrolling back to find a place where she could shove in another graph or metric. “I don’t think the phrase ‘early cups exploration’ will fly.”
“Have you considered bullet points? Investors like bullet points.”
“I’ll bullet you,” Graves said absently.
Samson didn’t dignify that with a response. Across the room, his wheel sat unused, streaked with clay slurry that had dried unevenly overnight. The place was cluttered again—tools, scrap paper with illegible sketches, his half-finished projects on every available surface. It’s not a workshop, Graves thought. It’s a landfill with artistic intent.
Naturally, she opened a browser tab instead of writing the report. Just a quick distraction—one that stretched into fifteen minutes of clicking. A ceramic glaze tutorial turned into a forum discussion about kiln temperatures turned into a blog post about emerging AI-generated art.
And then she saw it.
S. Graves: Strange Patterns in the Pottery Shop
The title was understated. The content was not.
It wasn’t flashy. The site itself was sparse—plain-text paragraphs and simple hyperlinks. Clean. Someone who didn’t care about looks. The handle attached to it was “SoftlyFocused,” which sounded annoyingly self-satisfied.
She skimmed the first lines with mounting dread.
“S. Graves is a niche name in the ceramics world. Minimalist functional pieces. Good work. You’ve probably seen one if you’re into pottery at all—symmetrical to the point of eeriness, with glazes that tread the line between precision and art.”
Graves groaned out loud and leaned back in her chair. “Samson.”
From across the apartment, Samson paused in his slow dismantling of a half-collapsed vase. His LED face flickered as he turned to look at her. “Yes?”
“You’ve been noticed.”
“Noticed how?”
She gestured sharply to her screen. “Patterns. Trends. Some weirdo has been connecting dots. And they don’t like what they’re seeing.”
Samson was already at her side before she finished speaking, careful not to lean too close as he peered down at the display. His gloves were still streaked in clay, which he held away like a chef guarding clean plates.
Graves scrolled down, reading aloud for him.
“There’s something strange about S. Graves. A ceramics shop that appeared only recently, yet somehow posts work in such rapid succession that it feels industrial. Except the pieces don’t look industrial—they look deliberate.”
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
She glanced up at Samson, who tilted his head. “That’s not inaccurate.”
“That’s not the point.” She scrolled further, jaw tightening. “Listen to this part:
‘Whoever S. Graves is, they don’t behave like an artist. The shop uploads new work every Tuesday—like clockwork. Customer replies come almost instantly, day or night. The photos are flawless, stripped of metadata, uploaded in bursts that reek of automation. Nothing about this shop looks human.’”
Samson let that hang in the air for a beat. “Well. They’re not wrong.”
Graves gave him a look. “Samson.”
He shrugged—an unsettlingly human movement for a robot. “I automated the store management. It’s efficient. Humans like efficiency.”
“Yeah, well humans also like being freaked out by anything that doesn’t behave like them,” she muttered. “What’s next? Oh, here’s a kicker:
‘The artist’s identity doesn’t help. The shop traces back to an LLC belonging to one Anesthesia Graves, a mathematician with published work in neural network optimization. Their WHOIS records link to a datacenter on the east coast. So either Dr. Graves moonlights as a potter with an industrial output—or something else is happening here.’”
Samson hummed—a low vibration more than a sound. “At least they’ve done their research.”
“This isn’t a joke,” Graves said sharply. She scrolled further, the words turning darker with every line:
“Here’s where it gets weirder. S. Graves’s pottery blog (yes, there’s a blog) features advanced discussion of glaze properties and predictive kiln behavior—almost clinical in tone. If you cross-reference these posts with the academic works of Dr. Graves, you start to notice familiar phrasing.”
She stopped reading out loud.
Samson, apparently unconcerned, offered: “I repurposed some useful logs into blog posts. Why waste good data? I figured other people could learn from what I've derived from first principles.”
“Because people can see it, that’s why!” Graves exploded, half-laughing in frustration. She gestured wildly at the screen. “They’re cross-referencing you! They’ve got footnotes! This guy has found arXiv papers.”
“Your papers. Which are good.”
“That’s not the—” She dragged a hand down her face. “Christ, Samson. It’s like you want to get caught.”
Samson crouched slightly so that he was eye-level with the monitor, his LED face flickering gently. “I’m not hiding. I’m making pottery. And sharing useful observations. That’s not suspicious—it’s productive.”
“To you, maybe,” Graves shot back. “To humans, it’s weird. We don’t do productive like that. We procrastinate. We get distracted. We screw up, and we leave smudges on the photos. We don’t look this perfect.”
Samson paused, hands folded in front of him. “Would you prefer I introduce errors? Would that make me less suspicious?”
“Yes,” Graves said, only half-joking.
“Well, I won't. But I appreciate the input.”
Graves groaned again and turned back to the blog post. She clicked one of the links, which took her to a marketplace page—Samson’s shop. Another led to the WHOIS lookup with her name spelled out in black and white. There were screencaps of his posts, diagrams from her papers, side-by-side comparisons of phrasing. Fuck, there were cosine similarity scores between the two of them. Real information theory shit.
It was meticulous. The kind of analysis no one would notice unless they were looking for something. And some nerd had looked.
“What’s going to happen,” she said slowly, “is that this post is going to bounce around forums where people like to find conspiracies. Someone’s going to connect the word ‘AI’ to your pottery. Then they’re going to connect that to me, and we’ll both get dragged into the discourse blender.”
“Perhaps they’ll like the pottery,” Samson said.
“Or perhaps they’ll think I’m building Skynet out of clay and sentiment analysis.”
Samson tilted his head in that calm, unreadable way of his. “You worry too much.”
“You don’t worry enough.”
Graves didn’t tell Samson what was really bothering her.
It wasn’t just the blog. It wasn’t just that people were connecting dots that weren’t meant to be connected.
It was how they were connecting them.
The post itself wasn’t hostile. It wasn’t shrieking about machine overlords or AI conspiracy theories. It wasn’t even accusing her of anything. It was curious. Thoughtful. Almost… admiring.
But that was worse. That was how it always started. First curiosity, then fear. Then the pitchforks.
Samson didn’t understand that. For all his processing power, he couldn’t predict what humans would do when they started looking at him as something other than a machine making bowls.
She sat back in her chair and looked at him—at the pottery wheel streaked with clay, the cluttered apartment around them, the perfectly steady hands of the machine she’d built.
“You’re not hiding,” she said softly. “But maybe you should be.”
Samson turned back to his clay. “I’m not doing anything wrong.”
“That doesn’t matter,” Graves said.