The Scrybe

Alice’s face twitched slightly at the ding of the job alert from her laptop. She took a moment to stretch her arms overhead then behind her back to release the tension in her shoulders and neck. Hunching over a computer for hours at a time was turning her into a gargoyle - a shortsighted, vitamin D deficient gargoyle. 

It had been worse, of course, since the pandemic, as she was reduced to remote freelance work after she’d lost her job. It’s true that it wasn’t a company that she envisioned herself working at long term but it was a full-time job, in an office, with colleagues, and career prospects. Now she was chasing after content writing jobs, writing marketing copy for other people’s websites in her little flat, wearing pyjamas most of the time. Once upon a time, the thought of being able to work from your bed without having to get dressed or commute to the office was a fun fantasy. Now it sucked. The job market was tough and freelance work often felt like a race to the bottom. There was no time for thinking about the dross that she was writing; she just had to churn out the words. 

She pulled her laptop over to check the job alert. Someone wanting a suite of content for their new business’s website. Did they even have any clients yet to be publishing testimonials? Putting her ethics aside, she clicked on Accept. Reading through the details more closely, she groaned. This was a lot of work for not a lot of money. She would have to work fast.

A coffee might help. She got off the bed and made a cup. That was the other thing about working from home. When she’d been at the office, she’d worked hard, sure, but her work life and her home life had always been separate. Now it was like there was no division between the two. She was literally working from her bed or her couch all the time, trying to keep ahead of her bills. And she had not worked on her novel at all since losing her job. That was possibly the worst thing about the situation. 

She sighed as she drank her coffee. The cup drained, she returned to the laptop and opened a web browser. An ad in the sidebar caught her attention. Scrybe - Smart AI Writing Generator - Create great copy in seconds! She’d heard talk about artificial intelligence writing generators but had never used one. The ‘real’ writers she’d worked with said that no AI machine could ever do the job of a real human. But the jobs that she was doing now, were they real writing? Half of it was just search engine optimisation. She already had a program that she used for that, so this was just the next step, right?

Intrigued, she clicked on the ad and had a look around the website. Write marketing emails 10 x faster! Well, that sounded promising. She created an account and downloaded the plugin. She could just use this for the bread and butter type jobs. The clients wouldn’t care; they just wanted their content written. If she could work ten times faster, she could take on more work, but just enough to get ahead and then she could even schedule some non-work time for herself. Maybe leave the flat every now and again, or even work on her novel.

She selected the keywords and parameters for the new client job into the Scrybe interface and clicked submit. Within minutes, pages and pages of marketing materials appeared on the screen. 

“Hmm,” Alice said to herself. The writing quality wasn’t bad for a bot. She sorted through the documents and sent them off to the client. The whole process had taken about ten minutes. That done, she checked her current job list. There was another one she’d been working on that the Scrybe could help with. It wouldn’t have been that much work for her but it was mind-numbingly boring. She entered it into the Scrybe and grinned as a series of blog posts materialised. Not bad at all. With that job out of the way, she didn’t have any other current work, so perhaps she should take the rest of the afternoon off? It would be good to get some fresh air. Feeling energised, she quickly got dressed and went for a walk.

When Alice returned, refreshed and energised, physically and mentally, she stopped herself from checking her job alerts. This was going to be an evening of relaxing. Instead, she decided to open up her novel manuscript. It had been months and months since she’d worked on it and she winced when she read over the opening chapters. Some serious editing was required. She scrolled through the manuscript, thinking about the novel so far. She’d been working on this for a while, since before the pandemic, and now the themes seemed too ironic. Her main character was a young woman (not unlike Alice) who was facing disconnection from the society around her. Alice hadn’t quite worked out how her main character was going to resolve her problems by the end of the novel and she was unsure how much of the pandemic she needed to put in the novel. She tapped out a few sentences. Discouraged, she stared at the screen. The Scrybe icon blinked at her from the toolbar. Had she pinned it there? It must have automatically added itself to the toolbar when she’d downloaded the program. “Maybe I should use the Scrybe for my novel,” she said outloud, half joking. 

Ding! A job alert sounded and, feeling frustrated by her novel, she decided to check it. Someone wanting to update the content on their website. She clicked ‘accept’. The Scrybe could take care of it in a minute. She entered the details into Scrybe and like magic, there was the content, ready for her to sort through and send to the client. Even when she accounted for the Scrybe subscription fee, this was easy money. Sally abandoned thoughts of an evening off. Maybe she should could burn through these freelance jobs and earn some serious money, and then...Well, she’d pay off her credit card and then she could take it easy. Not be so desperate to take on whatever work was thrown her way.

She looked through the freelance job site that she usually used, cueing up jobs that she could take care of with the Scrybe. The evening passed in a frenzy of work. Sally didn’t notice when she fell asleep on the couch, laptop screen glowing next to her.

It was the middle of the night when Sally woke, discombobulated. Blinking, she tried to orient herself. The room looked different somehow, but she couldn’t put her finger on it. What was the time? She really should go to bed and get a proper night’s sleep. 

Ding! Geez, that sound was annoying sometimes. Sally tried to move but she couldn’t. She looked around her again and something struck her; she couldn’t see herself. Oh no, was this another episode of disassociation? She’d had some mental health problems early in the pandemic when she’d lost her job but she’d been mostly ok lately. Breathing slowly, she assessed the situation. She could see around her apartment, the walls, the ceiling, the kitchenette, her couch. “Okay!” she said in her loudest voice. She could hear herself so that was a good sign but then it occurred to her that she was just talking in her head, so could she actually know if she was speaking aloud or not?

“Don’t panic,” she reminded herself. Something entered her peripheral vision, then marched across her front vision. Text? Was she seeing things now? She squinted to focus on the words. Enter keywords...Select field...Webinar transcript...Sally was properly panicking now. Her fingers were moving of their own accord now, typing from within her laptop. No, not just within the laptop. She was in the Scrybe program. 

“Help!” Sally screamed, inaudibly. “I’m stuck!” Her protests had no effect. In the time that she had been screaming, she’d produced a thousand-word webinar transcript for someone’s website. Click, click. Now someone was selecting and downloading the transcript. Was there another writer on the other side, using Scrybe for their content writing job?

Sally screamed again, “Help! I’m trapped in here! I’m a human, I’m not a bot!”