(This story was released to Patreon patrons early two weeks ago, and to the public, now. I wrote this short story back in 2022. It’s a little past what’s topical, now, but I think it has elements that continue to resonate when it comes to the possible outcomes of the current LLM/GPT based AI fad.
One line algorithmically created by Generative AI is used in the opening epigraph, and the opening line is borrowed from ‘The Cold Equations’ (1954) by Tom Godwin (Wiki article here, readable online here.)
It may illuminate you as to the author’s mindset while writing this to note that in The Cold Equations’s publication history, a great deal of editorial effort went into ensuring the story’s deuteragonist is incapable of saving herself. In this story, similarly gargantuan efforts are made within the story in a similar direction.)
(Approx 3250 words/10-20~ minutes’ read.)
The (Fool’s) Gold Equations
By Malcolm F. Cross
Let us swear an oath, and keep it with an equal mind,
In the hollow Lotos-land to live and lie reclined
On the hills like Gods together, careless of mankind.
– Tennyson, the Lotos-Eaters
But in reality we are all trapped here, wanting more than what we have.
– Follow-on line, generated by software based on the GPT-3 transformer neural network.
He wasn’t alone.
Dara had to remember that, for his own sanity. The capsule was empty, but he wasn’t alone. The basic fear of being alone, the hungry-hurt of loneliness, wasn’t real. He could put the feeling aside.
He rolled over in the cramped space, glancing up at the starfield outside, rolling serenely. Perfect and clean, unlike the stink of his sweat clinging to his blanket, but there wasn’t anything he could do about the heat. There wasn’t anything anyone could do about the heat.
“Status report?” he asked, gingerly.
“Mission-day fifty-seven. All systems nominal, life-support fully stocked, drive on-line, with plenty of extra fuel in case of an emergency.”
“That’s good.” Dara relaxed back into his stinking blanket. Just a little too warm to be comfortable, but if he pulled it away his sweat cooled enough on his bare legs to make him wish he hadn’t. “That’s really good, thanks Mya.”
The AI didn’t answer him, but Dara didn’t expect it to. He was lonely enough he was thanking virtual assistants.
He scrabbled in the gap between his makeshift bed and the capsule wall, pulling up an old wrapper and squinting inside by the delicate glimmer of starlight. There wasn’t any food in it, just another crumpled wrapper stuffed inside. He wrinkled his nose, flicked it away, and fumbled for something to eat down there. “Mya?”
“I’m here.”
“Could you respond, when I thank you?”
“Of course, Captain Spurling.”
“Thanks.”
“You’re welcome.”
“Okay. Set everything to energy-saving mode, please.”
“Done.”
There wasn’t anything in the pile of discarded wrappers except a stale, half-eaten cereal bar. Dara gnawed on it cautiously, but despite the sweetness, all it did was cake his mouth and make him wish he had milk.
He didn’t. He barely even had any water.
“Did Gracie ca-Hffck.” Dara tongued the mulchy mess out of his mouth, spat it into a spare wrapper. Rubbed his face. “Did Gracie call?”
“I’m unable to do that for you on energy-saving mode.”
“Uh. Go back to normal operation.”
The dash console lit up with the blue numeral, showing a waiting call. “One call,” Mya told him.
“Great. Play voicemail.”
“Dara, we really have to talk about your dad, he keeps calling, saying I owe him money? I thought you explained that he was loaning to you, not to us?”
Sweat stung his eyes. Definitely sweat. “Not that one.”
It seemed like Gracie drew a breath. “It’s been so long since we’ve talked, I don’t even know what to say. I’m sorry? Is… is it okay for me to say that?” The voicemail paused, as if waiting.
“Go on,” Dara whispered.
“I’m sorry,” Gracie said, voice firmer. “I’m sorry we broke up. It was my fault. I provoked you really, and—”
He squeezed his eyes shut, half-consciously shaking his head. “Iterate.”
“I’m sorry. I made mistakes. We both made mistakes. We should talk sometime. When you’re back. Maybe… maybe figure things out.”
Relaxing, Dara drew in a breath of sweat-scented air. “Say everything’s going to be okay.”
“Everything’s going to be okay,” Gracie said.
“Okay. Mya, save the prompt settings and increase the weight for whatever gave me that.”
“Done.”
“Weather today?”
“The temperature is eight Kelvin.”
That seemed low. “Not mission-weather. Outside weather.”
“Eighty-six Fahrenheit. Sixty percent humidity. Clear skies, but expect rain tomorrow or the day after.”
“Right. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
“Switch off the capsule and set things back to energy-saving mode, please.”
“Of course.”
“Thanks,” Dara muttered, watching the stars in the windows blink out, one by one.
“You’re welcome.”
He fumbled open his car door, and the sunlight blinded him. Gravel crunched under his bare foot as he sat up, fumbling in the front seats for his socks and shoes.
“Mya, maybe, uh. Reduce frequency of response to when I thank you.”
“Done.”
“Can you check for the nearest operating food bank, please?” He dusted off his feet before pulling on his socks.
“Plentiful Harvest at the corner of Quimby and Millbrook received donations from the Sikh Gurdwara this morning.”
He grimaced. “That’s a long walk. How’s the charge?”
“The car will have a sufficient charge to make the round trip in three days, depending on weather.”
“You said three days yesterday.”
“This estimate assumes remaining in energy-saver mode at all times. With low to moderate processing use, charging for a round trip will take six to forty-six days.”
“Oh. Right.” Not that he really expected to find anything, Dara searched through the piled trash and wrappers in the car’s footwells for food. Nothing in any of them, so he began scooping them out onto the dirt, just leaving them in a messy pile beside the car.
Nobody would care about littering, not this far out of the city. Not this far from the freeways. That’s why he’d parked out here, almost in the wilderness, so nobody would hassle him or take his extra solar panels, lain out on the dust.
He couldn’t risk losing them, he couldn’t afford to replace them. He couldn’t afford to pay for a charge, either. He knew that much. “Download some podcasts for me to listen to, please. But stay in energy-saving mode.”
“Done.”
Dara got out of his car, checked that he had his keys, and slammed the door behind him. Then he wandered away from the dirt track so he could shit in the bushes before finding a stream to wash in.
By the time he made it to the food bank the queue was three blocks long. His phone ran down to standby power before he reached the front of the queue, so he couldn’t even listen to podcasts. Just stare at the only entertainment going, a madman.
“Don’t you all understand? When did it last rain?” The madman was wild-eyed, clutching a kid’s backpack to his chest. He kept wandering from his place in the line to yell at anyone who looked like they were listening.
“It’s gonna rain day after tomorrow,” the woman two spaces ahead of Dara replied, uncertainly, reading the report off her phone.
The madman laughed. “And how long has it been saying that?”
Nobody answered him.
Except Dara. Dara was stupid enough to mutter, “Everyone knows the weather predictions are wrong. They’re always wrong, weather predictions are only, like, a guess.”
“Oh? Oh?” The madman stalked down the line, thrusting forward to stare into Dara’s eyes. He recoiled at Dara’s smell, but didn’t say anything about that, just backed off. “The weather’s wrong?”
“Yeah, the weather reports always get it wrong.” Dara folded his arms uncomfortably, clenching his arms to his sides, to keep his sweaty pits to himself as best he could. “It’s been like that forever.”
“What were you?”
“Huh?” Dara wished he hadn’t said anything.
“What was your job?”
Dara looked away. “I was gonna be an airline pilot, uh, that’s what I trained for.” But the airline had dropped him before he finished getting certified.
“I was a meteorologist.” The mad weatherman slapped his chest, clutched at the backpack to keep from dropping it. “That’s what I was. When I started my career we used multi-model ensembles, and those were good predictions, three, four, five days, six days out. Now it’s all brute force bulk neural algorithms, like those damn planes.”
“So they got your job, too.” Dara kept looking away, hoping the guy would leave. “They got everyone’s job.”
“Don’t you get it? The algorithms, they… they just learn to do what people want!”
“I thought that was the point.”
The mad weatherman stepped around into Dara’s eyeline, staring at him. “You want to hear there’s rain? They tell you there’s going to be rain, that we didn’t fuck everything up! The climate’s much worse than everyone thinks, they picked the most optimistic model they could.”
Forced into making eye contact, Dara stared back into the madman’s eyes. “But, they wouldn’t use an AI that did that. They’d use an accurate one.”
“They use the one that tells them what they want to hear. They don’t care. If a weather newsfeed gives you something to look forward to, you’ll come back and look at it again. That’s all they care about.” He stared at Dara, like there was something inside him, behind his eyes, and if only Dara understood, it’d be inside Dara, too.
Dara looked away.
“Perry, don’t bother the man.” A woman leaned out of the queue, further up. “You know they’ll toss us out if you raise a ruckus again.”
The weatherman, Perry, clutched the backpack tighter. All it did was make it obvious how empty it was. “That’s all AI does. It tells you what you want to hear.”
Dara didn’t make eye contact again. And the rest of the queue seemed to know not to say anything, in case there was someone else ready to start yelling about something. In case they could make it to the end of the queue while there was still food, before the foodbank closed.
There was a one-use charger with the relief rations he got, so Dara spent the walk back to his car listening to podcasts while tramping over an alien planet on the distant frontier where death was a tiny mistake away, but Dara was prepared – a real hyper-competent genius rocketship pilot who could solve any problem. He just had to follow the walk cues in his earbuds and the augmented reality pathways along sidewalks shown in his spectacles while ignoring the rumble of traffic.
He’d managed to get enough food he wouldn’t have to go back for a few days, maybe long enough the car would be charged by the next time he needed any, he hoped. When he got back, Mya told him that using the hike program on his AR glasses had required high-energy use of the bulk processing block in the trunk.
He tried to budget energy and charging time out like fuel – he’d learned the math for that. Budgeting a little charge to run the processing block, save a little for the batteries… He got bored and asked Mya to do it all for him, and she said it’d all be okay in a few days, if the weather held out.
He put on a podcast but it wasn’t very funny, so he had Mya put it through a generator and iterate it until it was a laugh-out loud docu-series about Roman history and the fall of empires kinda making fun of the last president, the one Dara didn’t vote for. He was still giggling, even after he’d finished his chores – cleaning off the solar panels built into the car, dusting off the extra ones he had on the ground, kicking the trash piled around the car so the wind would take it away, shitting in the bushes, again, using an empty food wrapper instead of toilet paper because he didn’t have anything else.
He felt ashamed. Dirty. Awful.
And then he closed up the car and got back into the capsule, on his voyage between the stars, and he made some really awesome virtual nebulae, all glittering and stars and… and nobody cared when he uploaded them to the virtual space exploration interest groups. Everyone was posting the stuff they’d made with AI generation, and it was all great.
Dara browsed some of the other stuff people had posted, for once, because he was trying to save on power and the bulk neural algorithms were really inefficient – almost burned as much energy as cryptocurrency – and after awhile he found his own post, but didn’t realize it at first. It was great, like all the others, but everything was great, so… it wasn’t all that special, really, the nebula Dara made.
That he’d told the AI to make.
“Mya, could you call Gracie for me?”
His view of the stars was blotted out by the messenger window, and the connection rang for a minute.
“Did you have to call without warning?” Gracie groaned. “Ugh. I was busy.”
“Sorry. Uh. I just had a thought I wanted to share… is, is now a good time?”
“Sure.” She sounded tired.
He wondered what she’d been doing. “So, uh. I was in a queue earlier…”
Gracie got the edited version of the story about the weatherman.
“… Do you think he was right? That AI’s just… showing us what we want?”
Gracie didn’t answer for a time. “What do you want me to tell you, Dara?”
“I don’t know. What do you think?”
She laughed, bitterly. “I think if we keep having these conversations I’m going to figure out we broke up, and then you’re going to clear my memory again and we’re going to start ov—”
“Uh, Mya, can you, uh. Mya, rewind the model’s memory back to last year? Six, uh, make it seven months before the breakup?”
“Done.”
Dara covered his eyes, holding them tightly shut. “Gracie?”
“Hi, Dara.” She sounded tired.
He texted Gracie, the real Gracie, not his chatbot built off the logs, a couple of days after that.
You want to talk? she sent.
He thumbed back, Yeah.
If I want to swap meaningless smalltalk with you, Dara, I have my chatbot of you tuned so it won’t try and restart our relationship. The message felt harsher than it had any right to. We can talk, but I don’t want another meandering conversation where you dance around saying that you want to get back together. Why can’t we just be friends?
Dara checked the autocomplete responses, but so many of them were obviously angry and hurt that he had to put in the truth.
I’m lonely. I’ve been lonely ever since we broke up.
Gracie didn’t answer for a long time. When she did, it was thoughtful and kind and clear that they wouldn’t be getting back together, and it felt like she was using her autocomplete to do the talking for her, so he felt even more alone.
Dara had everything he wanted, except for an extra couple of solar panels.
He could sell the car, but then he wouldn’t have anywhere to live. And he could sell the processing block, but then he’d have to rent processing power, and then he’d run out of money and not have access to any AI generated content, and he needed it.
It gave him an escape to space and the capsule and the mission, it gave him tweaks to the movies he’d downloaded so they had endings he liked better, it continued the cancelled cartoons he’d loved as a kid, it gave him music and stories and beautiful art.
He just needed some extra solar panels. Then he could have all the processing time he needed, and he could get the car to drive him.
He managed to make a little money, from renting out part of the processing block now and then – that was less and less as the weeks went by, but it was still enough to keep him connected to the internet.
He tried looking for remote jobs, like when he was a kid, but, anything anybody could do remotely through a computer? Well, if someone could do it through a computer, a big enough bulk AI processor could do it, too, so he was out of luck.
But he had everything he wanted. When he got a rash from washing in the stream, Mya told him it’d go away on its own in a few days and he didn’t have to worry. When he asked about pilot jobs, she showed him a newsfeed that said venture capitalists wanted to bring human pilots back, and they might even be ready for job applications next year.
Next year. That wasn’t too far away.
He got really good at a flying game, keeping his skills up, but it was locally generated on his processing block from a few tens of thousands of hours of other streamed game footage, so, he was the only one playing the game. Nobody else to talk to, or share it with.
Which felt bad, until he got Mya to make him some people to talk to while playing it, built from calls made on a discontinued service that collapsed and dumped its records.
So he wasn’t alone. He didn’t need to be scared of that, not really.
He just needed an extra solar panel, because the charge was low enough now that if he turned everything off and didn’t do any processing at all, it’d take eight days to finish charging the car.
He spotted a plume of dust on the horizon – the real horizon – while cleaning off the solar panels with his bare hands and water he dragged over in used drink cups.
He must’ve looked pretty bad, waving at the drivers on the road when he got there. Smelled bad, too, but there wasn’t anything he could do about that – the relief ration packs didn’t come with soap.
It was a whole lot of people – a convoy, trucks and cars piled high with stuff strapped to them – jerry cans of water, furniture, blankets, plants growing out of plastic sacks of dirt, all kinds of stuff. The convoy was like a moving town. One of them slowed down, stopped, and rolled down their window.
Dara shamedly crept closer, letting the cool air of the car’s air-con wash over him – he hadn’t used air-con in forever.
“Hiya,” Dara said, eagerly.
“Hey there.” A woman, travelling with her adult sons in the back – one lifting his AR glasses only briefly before letting them drop. “Been out here awhile?”
“Yeah, uh. Lost my job.”
“Oh, we all did, honey.” She smiled. “You need a ride?”
“Oh, uh. No, uh. My car’s back there, I… I just need an extra solar panel, or some charge,” Dara stumbled over the words, pointing back the dirt track he’d parked up. “Where are you all going?”
“We’re going to set up a farm, a real farm. There’s going to be rain, up north.” She smiled, brightly. “That’s what our newsfeed says. We just got to go north.”
“Oh. Oh, well, that’s amazing. That’s such great news – good luck.”
“You want to come with us? We can give you some charge for your car, you can come along.”
Dara shook his head and smiled, “No, uh. Some charge would help a lot, but, uh. I saw on my newsfeed that they’re going to start building an airport around here and bring back the airlines, in a few months, once they get everything figured out? So, so… I just got to kill some time with watching my shows and things, and wait right here.”
“An airport?” She lifted her eyebrows.
“Yeah. Yeah, I was… I am a pilot. They’re going to have a new job for me.”
The woman smiled at him. “That’s good. That’s real good – something to hope for.”
“Yeah, I’ve got a lot to look forward to.” Dara smiled back, hugging himself, rocking in place. “The future’s going to be great, that’s what the newsfeeds say.”
