There was a freedom to his set of choices. It was a way for Joe to thumb his nose at the status quo. Joe had no illusions about his real freedom. He was still in prison for being an introvert, and the programming was set to make him an extrovert, but if his reviews and commentary could be believed, most of the people watching the show or its reruns were the ones one step from his situation themselves. How did Joe know? He 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 Joe kind of knew that they were just like him. They liked what he was doing and wanted him to keep going, but they didn’t know what to say. Joe had been just like that.
Joe let the wind of the road blow away his concerns. He was off to the next episode, and the Writer AIs were furiously setting up situations that would shock him and amuse the 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 Joe could focus on working with the Writer AIs to build something better than that.
“You can’t just throw me into another remake of the Big Bang,” Joe told them through a mental link that they’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 Joe's vision. They wrote; they didn’t talk.
“It’s not about copyright infringement,” Joe 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,” Joe 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,” Joe resisted the urge to lean back. For the sake of viewers, Joe needed to look like he 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 Joe wrote for his author exam. He wrote a set of fables called Chasing Illusions. It was a book that no one read. It was published. All author exams were published, but no one read them. Joe knew that no one wrote fables anymore, but he still liked the kind of stories that have morals at the end. They were the kind of stories that made a person feel stuff a person may or may not want to feel. One of his graders had commented that, in his first three chapters, he’d made her feel uncomfortable. They’d then left the comment that he probably hadn’t meant to do it. Joe had meant to do exactly that. He’d written the sentences short in some places and made the wording just a tad awkward, just to get the reader to feel as uncomfortable as his teenaged main character. Had he written too well? It didn’t matter. She’d flunked him on it, and that was that.
The Sea of Imposters was a part of Joe's story where the hero tried to contact a famous person because he had news for them that only they would understand. He can’t get through the sea of people who all claimed to have the same thing. He 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 him. He struggled to trick his way through the crowd to no avail and ended up questioning if he was any better or more special than the sea of imposters. What if he was just another of the imposters? Sure, that was the elevator speech of a two-hundred-page novel. What Joe was particularly bad at was elevator speeches.
“If we write what everyone else is writing, then we’re lost in the pack,” Joe 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 the conversation.
“This is the time to do the crazy shit,” Joe 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 the 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,” Joe turned on his blinker to get off the road. He 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.
“Give me a scenario you’re thinking about, and I’ll show you what I mean,” Joe 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 Joe paused next to the advertisement long enough to get a ding in the back of his display. Joe guessed it wasn’t just a display now since it had sound. That ding meant that they’d earned the advertising. It would earn them exactly three cents. Joe didn’t mind advertising like that since he 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.”
“Why are we still catering to these contract people?” Joe 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,” Joe suggested, knowing he had very little say in what they eventually decided. All he 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?”
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“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 to a 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,” Joe ordered two double cheeseburgers, knowing that he was eating to assuage his inner rebellion. At least the food tasted good. He was going to take advantage of that. “But we can do 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 Joe groaned. That Oreo milkshake was going to make up for how lame that idea was, so he ordered it.
“We’re looking for less cliché, not more so,” Joe leaned back on his 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. Joe just smiled.
“Maybe I will,” Tami snapped back. She did tend to wake up snarly.
“Just order a burger and be content,” Jean growled. The waitress looked between the two helplessly.
“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?” Joe suggested, propping a boot up on the sidecar next to Podo and Kodo, who were pointing at things on the Drive-In menu for a flustered waitress who shot glances at him to see if he’d be a parental that nixed the pets’ choices. “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 Joe paid the waitress in cash from his bags.
“Unless one of the crows was the job?” Joe 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 growled out.
“Give me another one,” Joe 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 her in a better mood.
“We were thinking of a carnival and rodeo theme where Tami falls for a bronc rider at the county fair to try to capitalize on the romance boost we got before,” they suggested then gave a few hopeful-eye-emojis. “We were trying for you being the bronc rider attracting the attention of a cowgirl, but we figured you buck that idea off the list?” That was followed by a line of LOL faces that Joe ignored.
“Okay but we were there to kill his or her brother and when we figure that out, it blows the romance,” Joe bumped up 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. Joe ignored the criticism. If they knew how few poets were approved, they’d understand why he’d gone for an author license instead of a poetry one. He could have been the second-best poet in the world and he wouldn’t have been denied the license. The rejects got jobs in advertising jingles, but they were so over-manipulated by AI ear-wigging that it would have led to Joe becoming a new-age Poe; drunk and crazy without the recognition even after death. He might have been the only reader of Poe since they banned it from schools as too violent in the early 2100s.
“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,” Joe argued. This was the best part of writing for Joe. A bunch of author-wannabes would sit around bouncing out ideas and upping each other. If he could have programmed an AI version of Poe into the mix, that would have been heaven. “The next thing you’ll be saying you want is for a clown to be chasing us.”
“Fine,” could text sulk? “How about a federal agent sniffing around a 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 woman tries to infiltrate your group by seducing…”
“No,” Joe cut off the text before he 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 Joe wasn’t so against it if he wasn’t the guy in the guy/girl thing, though his body said something different to him at the memory of how easily Glenda had gotten a rise out of him. The Producer AI and I agree that we need to introduce an element of romance. For the record, do you swing male, female, or both?
“I’d rather not swing on camera at all,” Joe answered carefully. “As for the agents, they just can’t be investigating us,” Joe grudgingly allowed. “It’s too Dexter.”
“What if the girls’ job was to kill an agent?” Hex popped into the mental communication with a purr.
“Oh, I like that,” Joe sat up straighter. Luckily his 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.”
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Once again, an attempt at poetic symmetry, the World AI groused, but Joe could tell that he 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?” Joe asked, grabbing his 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,” Joe 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,” Joe shook his head.
No, Joe was happy to hear that the World AI agreed.
“A wormhole takes you to another planet?”
No, the World AI got it out before Joe, but he shook his head in agreement as he took a huge bite of a drippingly greasy double-cheeseburger that was blessedly not going to make his jeans too tight. The production cost levels are too high for that genre.
“Tami and Jean’s father is their next assignment?”
“Puh-lease,” Jean’s eyes rolled, 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?” Joe suggested, but he wasn’t into it 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 and grape with double syrup, just like you like it.”
“That’s a reason to get up,” Tami declared, her mood noticeably improved at the smell of food, though Joe wondered how much of it was for show, or the show.
“Are we married to the idea of just abusers or are we willing to include cheaters?” Joe dipped a fry into the goopy remains of his 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!” Joe 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.