An AI Collaboration
This evening he ducked into The Power Café, a narrow place on the corner that had once been a tailor’s shop. It now boasted a slogan in chalk script on the sandwich board outside: The Magic of Northern Italy. Inside, the reality was day-old biscotti and an espresso machine that hissed like an asthmatic.
Above the counter, a sun-faded poster drooped: Waisted Minds. A waist is a terrible thing to mind. Beneath it, graffiti scrawled by some anonymous wit demanded: Why are Texans so Austintatious?
He smiled grimly at the joke. It was just the sort of thing she would have laughed at.
He slid into a booth. Around him, voices hummed with the same desperate cadence. A sharp-suited man at the counter asked, too loudly, “If I’m so successful, why am I so lonely?” A pair of students argued over credit cards, one insisting, “I’m gonna max out my Monkey card,” as if that were rebellion. At another table a trio quoted advertising gurus like preachers citing scripture: The greatest sin in advertising is to be boring. “And the second greatest sin,” one added, “is not agreeing with Ogilvie.”
He pulled out his notebook. The pages were cluttered with fragments: The Four Atomic Sons of Madame Fauvre. Freestyle Frost Flicker--for cleaning ice off windows. A single word: Opinionitis.
He paused to reflect on that one. Yes, that was the sickness of the age. The inability to hear without judging. He remembered the P.I.N. Formula from de Bono—Positive, Interesting, Negative. But no one waited for the interesting anymore. Everyone lunged straight for the negative. To be effective, he thought, one must tame the value judgments, suspend the reflex to condemn. A mature mind listens first.
But who was listening?
He closed the notebook and left. Outside, the streetlamps flickered, frost spreading across their glass like silver lace. He whispered the only benediction he trusted: How to get blessed—be a blessing.
A voice startled him. “Talking to yourself, or to the universe?”
A young woman leaned against the lamppost, smoking. Her coat was too thin for the cold, her hair cut short in uneven lengths, as if she’d done it herself. She smiled wryly.
“Maybe both,” he said.
“Lucky universe,” she replied. “Most people don’t bother.”
They fell into step as he walked. She didn’t ask where he was going, and he didn’t offer. After a few blocks she said, “You look like a man who keeps notebooks. Am I right?”
He hesitated, then showed her the one in his pocket. She flipped it open, skimming the fragments. “‘A man who needs nothing can afford to risk everything.’ I like that.” She tapped the page. “But do you believe it?”
“Some days,” he said. “Other days I need everything and can risk nothing.”
Her candor knocked the air from his lungs. He thought of her, the one he’d lost—a woman bound by rules like chains. He said nothing.
The girl must have noticed. “Sorry. I say things too bluntly. It’s a flaw.”
“No,” he murmured. “It’s… familiar.”
They walked in silence until they reached the river. The water was black, its surface rimmed with ice.
“You know,” she said, tossing her cigarette into the current, “the footprints we leave—half the time they’re not even ours. They’re for whoever comes next.”
He looked at her sharply. The echo of Buzz Aldrin’s words startled him, as if the universe had been listening after all.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
She grinned. “Depends on the day. Tonight it’s Clara. Tomorrow it might be something else.”
“Clara,” he repeated, testing it. “Do you ever feel like you’re living inside a song? One you can’t quite hear but that keeps pulling you forward?”
She tilted her head. “All the time.”
He smiled for the first time in weeks. The Song of the Matrix was no longer a solitary hum. Someone else could hear it too.
And for the first time in months, he wasn’t just listening. He was accompanied.
# # # #
"The Song of the Matrix" is a collaborative work of fiction. The process I used to create this story was as follows. I was sifting through old folders on my Mac and came across a document where I had copied a batch of fragments and ideas from a writer's journal, circa the mid-90s. After feeding several of my short stories into ChatGPT and instructing it to "learn my style," I then fed a page from that Word doc into ChatGPT and instructed it to write a story using all these disparate elements. That was version one. I then re-fed an edited version of that into the AI. At the end of my third version, ChatGPT asked me if I'd like to add a second character to the story. I said yes, which resulted in version four. After tweaking and fine-tuning, I ended up with this which you read here. What do you think?
