There was a freedom to this set of choices. It was a way to thumb my nose at the status quo. I had no illusions about my real freedom. I was still in prison for being an introvert and the programming was set to make me an extrovert, but if my reviews and commentary could be believed, most of the people watching our show or its reruns were the ones one step from my situation themselves. How did I know? I had viewers, but not a lot of talkers. They’d say stuff like, “Thanks,” or “tfte,” which stood for thanks for the episode, or just a happy face emoji. And that stuff was great because I kind of knew that they were just like me. They liked what we were doing and wanted us to keep going, but they didn’t know what to say. I’d been just like that.
I let the wind in my hair blow away my concerns. We were off to our next episode and the Writer AIs were furiously setting up situations that would shock me and amuse our viewers. The problem with AI was that it could still only try to blend what was most common into an amalgamation and that wasn’t good enough. The motorcycle drove itself, so I was working with the Writer AIs to build something better than that.
“You can’t just throw me into another remake of the Big Bang,” I told them through a mental link that we’d expanded to include meetings. It was like discord rooms or zoom meetings on crack.
“But we gender-swapped, so it’s clear of copyright infringement,” the Writer AIs communication scrolled across my vision. They wrote; they didn’t talk.
“It’s not about copyright infringement,” I tried to explain. “It’s about making something new. We can take elements from different things and mash them together in a new way that no one has seen before.”
“That’s not in our algorithm,” they complained with a scolding-finger emote.
“But that’s why it will work better,” I argued. “We need to be different from the competition. They’re all leaning on only AI ideas and those can only come from what’s already being done.”
“But that’s popular!” the text scrolled, blinking the last word.
“Just because it’s done the most often, doesn’t mean it’s popular,” I resisted the urge to lean back. For the sake of viewers, I needed to look like I was actively riding the hoverbike. “It might even mean that we’d get lost in what I call the ‘Sea of Imposters.’”
“We’ve never heard of it,” the Writer AIs typed back.
Of course they hadn’t. It was part of a book that I wrote for my author exam. I wrote a set of fables called Chasing Illusions. It was a book that no one reads. It’s published. All author exams were published, but no one read them. Thing was, no one wrote fables anymore. The type that have morals at the end. The kind that make you feel stuff you may or may not want to feel. One of my graders had commented that in my first three chapters, I’d made her feel uncomfortable, and then said that I probably hadn’t meant to do it. I had meant to do exactly that. I’d written the sentences short at some places and made the wording just a tad awkward, just to get the reader to feel as uncomfortable as my teen-aged main character. Had I written too well? It didn’t matter. She’d flunked me on it, and that was that.
The Sea of Imposters was a part of my story where the heroine tries to contact a famous person because she has news for them that only they would understand. She can’t get through the sea of people who all claimed to have the same thing. She couldn’t think of a single thing to say to them that hadn’t already been claimed by a bunch of people who thought they were smarter and more special than her. She struggled to trick her way through the crowd to no avail and ended up questioning if she was any better or more special than the sea of imposters. What if she was just another of the imposters?
“If we write what everyone else is writing, then we’re lost in the pack,” I tried again. “But if we write something very different, we might just pulse to the front of the pack long enough to catch people’s attention. Then we can say what we want and see if it resonates with anyone.”
That could as easily backfire as give us traction, the World AI joined our conversation.
“This is the time to do the crazy shit,” I urged, inadvertently revving the engine of the hoverhog. “We don’t have a ton of followers to either lose or gain. This is the perfect time to take chances.”
“Marketing agrees,” Grace translated for the few that couldn’t join our chat yet. “If it’s a bad idea, we have enough viewers to see a visible drop and still have enough to retract that episode and change directions.”
I’m getting a nod from the Producer AI, the World AI admitted.
“But then what are we going to do?” the Writer AIs whined with a vibrating text. “We’re only AIs. We can only make suggestions based on trends and amalgamations.”
“That’s how you use my unpredictability,” I turned on my blinker to get off the road. I wanted to be able to concentrate. “I can take your amalgamations and turn them inside out. You can be prepared for that and respond more naturally if you know what I’m thinking, right?”
“Yes….” And the dots were in rainbow colors. Even AI writers were eccentric.
“So give me a scenario you’re thinking about and I’ll show you what I mean,” I pulled into a fast food drive-in that advertised Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives.
“Fine, we were looking at the Big Bang scenario with an age difference so that everyone was in their fifties instead of their late twenties,” the text scrolled by as I paused next to the advertisement long enough to get a ding in the back of my display. I guess it wasn’t just a display now since it had sound. That ding meant that we’d earned the advertising. It would earn us exactly three cents. I didn’t mind advertising like that since I hoped it might slightly appease the prison assholes. “We wanted to mix that up with the grumpy Diner guy from Gilless Gals. Then we could mix in a cheating ex-husband of the Mob Wives.”
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
“Why are we still catering to these contract people?” I asked. “I’m not choosing any of them.”
We are pandering to them because we think it would be wise to keep our options open to opportunities, the World AI sounded as condescending as ever.
“Let’s go a little less commercial and little more off-the-wall,” I suggested, knowing I had very little say in what they eventually decided. All I could really do was point at the menu like some kid and hope the parentals didn’t choose something healthy instead. “I’m not retirement age and I don’t think our audience is either. What else do you have?”
“If we’re sticking to the younger demographic, we were thinking of our next episode being something more toward the Supernatural network,” the text scrolled by. “Marketing agrees that they could be very near comeback. We’re thinking a contract for the girls turns sticky when it turns out that the guy they want to dump off a bridge is really a werewolf. Luckily Tami has silver bullets and puts it down so that he doesn’t get hair in her soup.”
“I like that one,” I ordered two double-cheeseburgers, probably just to spite my feelings of parental editing. “But we can do it one better. Let’s have something more interesting than a werewolf and make it combatable by something that would already be in the kitchen.”
“Like a vampire and garlic?” the text typed, and I groaned and ordered a huge Oreo milkshake.
“We’re looking for less cliché, not more so,” I leaned back on my seat and listened to Tami kibitz about the menu choices being uninspired.
“If you want it to be more to your taste, go take over the kitchen and make something better!” Jean was snapping at Tami. I just smiled.
“Maybe I will,” Tami snapped back. She did tend to wake up snarly.
“Just order a burger and be content,” Jean growled.
“Then you order and wake me again when it gets here,” Tami waved her hands and laid her head back down next to Hex.
“What if we had a flock of crows,” I suggested, propping a boot up on the sidecar next to Podo and Kodo, who were pointing at things on the Drive-In menu for the flustered waitress that did not want to move on to the Thunderbird. “The crows can witness one of the girls’ jobs, which would have been fine, normally, but these are shapeshifter crows who then try to blackmail the girls. Tami could cook for the crows to buy them off?”
“That is different,” the Writer AIs scribbled as I paid the waitress in cash from my bags.
“Unless one of the crows was the job?” I went on. “Then it could be problematic. I’d hate to have to kill of a murder of crows, though that’s almost poetic.”
Too poetic, the World AI said for it and the Producer AI.
“Give me another one,” I suggested, ignoring the way Jean was ordering, which was specifically designed to piss off Tami. They got a fish sandwich for Hex, who started to knit in Tami’s hair to try to wake the girl in a different mood.
“We were thinking of a rodeo theme where Tami or you fall for a bronc rider to try to capitalize on the romance boost we got before,” they suggested.
“Okay but we were there to kill his brother and when we figure that out, it blows the romance,” I bumped the idea. “We could escape through the tunnel of love at the end. It would be poetic.”
You have a penchant for the poetic, the World AI didn’t sound all that pleased at that.
“Would you rather we kill the guy in the tunnel of love and escape through the house of mirrors, because that would be too cliché,” I argued. This was the best part of writing for me. A bunch of us author-wannabes would sit around bouncing out ideas and upping each other. “The next thing you’ll be saying you want is for a clown to be chasing us.”
“Fine,” could text sulk? “How about the federal agent sniffing around the rash of murders? We could make it a case of a random traffic ticket turning into some cop recognizing Jean from a wanted poster and flagging the governmental agency so that some guy tries to infiltrate your group by seducing…”
“No,” I cut off the text before I needed to barf over it. “Just no. What about something more like, we run into an agent who is investigating something else entirely?”
It could still entail a romance angle, the World AI pressed that point and I wasn’t so against it if I wasn’t the girl in the girl/boy thing, though my body said something different to me at the memory of how easily that agent had affected me. The Producer AI and I agree that we need to introduce an element of romance.
“Fine, but they aren’t investigating us,” I grudgingly allowed.
“What if the girls’ job was an agent?” Hex popped into the mental communication with a purr.
“Oh, I like that,” I sat up straighter. Luckily my order had come so it didn’t look weird. “We could be after a corrupt agent who is a murder detective and knows nothing about our work. We could even help him find his murderer.”
Viewers – 8189
Once again, an attempt at poetic symmetry, the World AI groused, but I could tell that I was wearing them down.
“What if he was a pet-abuser, instead of a person-abuser?” Hex put in, her nose twitching at the smells coming through the windows of the Thunderbird.
“Can we get away with that?” I asked, grabbing my milkshake and finding that it was ice-cold and yet still flowed through the straw like it was liquid, the best of all worlds.
Perhaps, the World AI answered. Marketing is running some numbers on that one.
“Hit me with another amalgamation,” I carefully slid Podo’s chili-cheese fries into the sidecar on a healthy pile of napkins. Kodo dove in quickly, but Podo wiped her paws fastidiously before eating.
“You are all whipped back in time to take out Stalin?” the Writer AI text spat out.
“No,” I shook my head.
No, I was happy to hear that the World AI agreed.
“A wormhole takes you to another planet?”
No, the World AI got it out before me, but I shook my head in agreement as I took a huge bite of a drippingly greasy double-cheeseburger that was not going to go to my hips.
“Tami and Jean’s father is their next assignment?”
“Please,” Jean’s eyes bugged out even as she chucked a wrapped burger at the sleeping form of Tami, Hex darting out of the way and into the front seat to daintily paw the bun off her fish burger. “We’d have taken him out first if he’d been abusive!”
“The ghost of their father appears and admits that he was a jerk and deserved it?” I suggested, but I wasn’t all into either.
“Ugh,” Tami said out loud, both to the burger and the idea. “If you toss that drink back here that way, I’ll dump what’s left on your head.”
“I got you a slushy and I wouldn’t waste it,” Jean bantered back at Tami who was finally motivated into sitting up. “It’s cherry/grape, just like you like it.”
“That’s a reason to get up,” Tami declared.
“Are we married to the idea of just abusers or are we willing to include cheaters?” I dipped a fry into the goopy remains of my milkshake. “And are we only male-killers or do we do women too? Because I could see us shaking things up by taking out a female next. They cheat and abuse too.”
“You don’t think maybe that’s too controversial?” the Writer AI fretted.
“What is this? 2020? No!” I retorted, coining an old slang campaign from the late 2100 women’s re-movement. “We are woke folk.”
“I like that idea,” Tami whispered into our silent chat. “Can we take out a woman who is cheating on her wife? Like one of those real badass executives?”
“You willing to seduce her?” Jean asked, feeding a spoonful of vanilla shake to Hex who stuck her paw in the frosty liquid before bringing it to her mouth to lick off.