The Prompt Generator

Ever since his first book's modest success a year ago—though it already felt immensely remote—Marcus had been chasing another win, if not something bigger.

He was currently sitting across his agent, Melanie, who was unconsciously indulging in her most noticeable personal tic—placing the tips of all her fingers together and idly contorting them in every possible shape—as she contemplated her thoughts on his latest draft. Marcus found the habit irritating, verging on loathsome—not so much for what it was, but because it was a tell that she hated the draft.

She finally stilled her fingers and looked at him with a narrowed gaze. He knew the look too well.

“The writing is good,” she began, then exhaled heavily, “but the plot? It’s practically nonexistent,” she said, with a disappointed shake of her head. “I honestly can’t tell what the book is even about.”

For Marcus, plots belonged in cemeteries.

He hated it when people asked him what his book was about. He didn’t write to reveal some grand lesson wrapped in plot twists. For him, it was all about the striking beauty of the form—the delicate interplay of syllables, the rush of emotions that each line invoked, the suggestiveness of every well-placed word—haphazardly luring him on fresh trails of love, pain and death. To him, people who read books for what the writer had to say had nothing to say themselves.

“And there’s a…lot of blood,” Melanie added, scrunching her nose.

Marcus couldn’t help visualise all the scenes where his characters were either getting butchered, blown to pieces, or metamorphosing into a bloody, pus-oozing pulp—making him wonder: what was too much blood? But he was saved the trouble.

“There are at most ten pages—ten—between all the gore. Trust me, I counted.”

Marcus looked at the manuscript she’d placed on the table, now swollen to twice its size with yellow post-its jutting out like warning flags—barely recognizable as his.

His first book, an accident in every sense—a middle-of-the-night epiphany that appeared out of nowhere, leading to wisps of words seeping through the cracks of a world that assembled itself—had no dearth of blood and death. Yet, he had sat in this exact chair just over a year ago, and was told that his prose was ‘visceral’ and ‘grotesque’ yet ‘divine’ and ‘incomparable’. But three failed manuscripts later, he could only contemptuously classify his agent—even if a tad unfairly—as a basic bitch who couldn’t wrap her head around mind-twisting and punishingly intricate writing.

“I think the best thing for you—”

What did she—who’d not written a damn thing in her life—know what was best for him?

“—would be to rewrite this.”

When he didn’t reply, she lightly patted his hand. “This is salvageable,” she said, oozing practiced compassion, “but only if you can weave the horror more naturally into the exposition,” failing miserably at reassuring him. “And can you please dial back the sadomasochistic themes?”

Not really, he thought, gritting his teeth. He didn’t want to change a thing in this book, because he believed he didn’t need to. Swallowing the retort, he instead asked point-blank, “Can you sell it as is?”

Her eyes widened. “I’m your agent, Marcus. Not a magician.”

He rose from the chair, “Maybe that’s the problem,” he said, already halfway to the door. “Maybe what I need is a spell.”

***

That night, Marcus sat staring at the blank Word document open on his laptop screen with half-shut eyes, now and then taking a sip from the glass of whiskey that he had now topped up twice. The television droned on in the background, but his mind was squarely on the blinking cursor, taunting him. Putting the first words of a new story on paper felt monumental, as if something defining was at stake—the words needed to be just right to set the tone for what was to come next. But tonight the only word Marcus could think of was doom—not the right word, but the precise word to sum up his ruin.

His stupor broke when a notification for a new email flashed on the bottom right of his screen. He wouldn’t have bothered with it, except the subject line hit too close to home to ignore: Need a plot? Because staring at a blank page sucks.

He wondered who would send marketing emails at 2:55 AM. Curious, he clicked on the notification. The email simply said:

The Quantum Plot Generator

You bring the fear. We’ll make it real.

Try Now>

Rolling his eyes at the theatrics, and even though he was almost sure that it was spyware, he clicked on the link; figuring he had nothing to lose since his finances already belonged in a crime scene. But a vertical line formed between his brows when the link took him to a barren website—no logo, no credits, nothing to hint at who or what was behind it. The only text on the page was:

Summon a prompt

Be warned—it may stay with you longer than you’d like

Write your story before time runs out

The clock starts the moment it speaks. Don’t waste it.

Submit—and wait

If it accepts your offering, you’ll be rewarded.

And there was a single button with a word that felt more like a dare than an invitation: “Invoke.”

He had meant to close the website—to try and write something for a silly plot generator, and failing, would be the final blow to the day already circling the drain. Yet—bracing for whatever virus he was about to download—he found himself clicking on the “Invoke” button. Text in a cursive font appeared on the screen. Underneath it was a text box with a blinking cursor, along with a timer that had already started—set for two minutes.

But what left him stunned was the name—his agent’s name—that appeared within the ridiculous plot.

Plot: Melanie Whitaker died alone in her apartment

Twist: The cause of death: sudden implosion

As he thought that there was no way he was going to entertain this preposterous idea, the words had already begun to take shape. There’d been times when he’d wanted to strangle his agent. But until this moment, he hadn’t grasped the raw intensity of his own thoughts—how often he’d wanted to see her mangled, and above all, quiet. The timer showed he had less than two minutes to play out his fantasy. Downing the last of his whiskey, he started typing, his fingers moving furiously over the keys. And the more he wrote, the more he began to enjoy reshaping her in his mind.

Melanie Whitaker had just stepped out of the shower when she began to come apart. It began with her teeth grinding against each other until they splintered and cracked. Then her eyes slowly sank into the bone beneath, and her nose curled inward, boring into the soft tissue of her skull, as her face imploded in a frothing pulp of nerve, bone, and spit. A moment later, her chest burst outward, as if something inside had finally decided it couldn’t bear her anymore. When it was over, nothing left on the tile resembled Melanie—only a twisted, quiet thing, still and finally at peace. Or at least, no longer speaking.

Marcus broke out of his trance when the timer beeped, showing he only had seconds left. His brows rose when he saw that the submit button was captioned “feed”— an odd word, one that he wouldn’t associate with an online submission, but with pets, or perhaps…demons. He clicked on it nonetheless and waited as his entry went through, wondering why he was this invested in something so inane.

Maybe it had to do with the fact that whenever he shared his writing with anyone, he almost always imagined—in increasingly long silences, or repetitions of encouraging cliches—the boredom that people try to hide. The pitying looks that silently affirmed that he was out of his depth, steadily losing his balance. But this was a machine, devoid of silent gestures to convey its dislike or how sorry it felt for him.

The screen still showed that the entry was ‘processing’. Starting to lose interest, he poured himself more whiskey. But then—between one sip and the next—his gaze drifted across the room and landed on something that made him choke on the whiskey in his mouth.

On the television, Melanie’s face filled the screen, with a running ticker that said:

Bizarre death of a woman sends shockwaves

He sat stock still, listening in utter unbelieving shock to the news commentator describe Melanie’s death with details he knew intimately. What finally brought him out of his daze was a fleeting glance at his laptop screen, where the plot generator congratulated him on his accepted entry.

***

At first, Marcus felt like he was going insane. His mind oscillated from nausea to disbelief, seized with guilt, but for what, he couldn’t say.

This can’t be murder, he thought, even though it felt like it.

But as hours—or maybe it was minutes—passed, pacing the floor of his apartment, the realization came to him by degrees: that somehow his words had become reality. Then the thought poking at the edge of his mind sank its teeth into it—what else could he do with this?

Armpits damp, heart pounding, he walked back over to where his laptop was. He sat down in front of the screen again, which was set to the homepage of the Plot Generator, ready to Invoke another plot.

This had to be a figment of his imagination, he thought, fueled by too much whiskey and not enough sleep. Or just a surreal coincidence.

But what if this was real?

There was only one way to find out.

He clicked on the Invoke button, and once again, cursive text appeared on the screen.

***

Entry rejected

This was the fifth submission that the plot generator had rejected.

Though his words vaguely revolved around the generated plots, this time he had steered clear of death, blood or violence of any kind. Instead, he’d inserted things he longed for—money, fame, fortune.

On the verge of giving up, he clicked on the Invoke button once more—but the generated text hit him like a blow.

Plot: Emma Johnson wants what she’d once lost

Twist: She must get rid of what’s standing in her way

Once again, a name that he knew stared back at him. He’d dated Emma in his first year of college. And, like an idiot, he let her go. Back then, he hadn’t realized how much she meant to him. Years later, after others came and gone, he finally did—but by then she was married, with kids, and was long gone.

Would he want her back if he could?

The answer was yes.

He glanced at the timer and saw he’d wasted too much time—only seconds remained if he wanted to submit an entry. He hesitated for a moment longer, then started typing, with barely enough time to write a single sentence.

Nothing could stop Emma Johnson from getting back with her ex.

He’d just clicked on “Feed” when a loud bang rattled his front door; his breath suspended until there was another bang. A flurry of flat-palmed, furious pounding that followed made his stomach drop. Slowly, he unfolded from the chair and walked to the door on numb legs. As he neared it, the desperate blows continued, but now he could also hear someone sobbing. Not gentle weeping, but gasping, ragged cries—the kind pulled from the gut.

Reaching the door, he willed himself to look through the peephole, and what he saw destroyed his sanity in one clawing stroke. The world abruptly went grey, and he staggered backward, his vision blurring, panic filling his mouth like bile.

Emma stood on the other side of the door, her eyes wild with a crazed look, every inch of her covered in blood.

“I know you’re there, Marcus! Open the door!”

When he remained silent, the banging on the door grew louder.

His heart flatlined before somersaulting in his chest when he heard her scream, “I killed them. I killed them for you!”

On the verge of fainting, he held on grimly until the world swam back into focus. He turned and sprinted back to his laptop. On the screen, he could see that his entry was accepted.

He wanted to hurl the damn thing like it was a coiled snake.

But he ordered his body and mind to still, to calm, as he considered what to do next. He thought of calling the police, but remembered what he’d written: Nothing could stop Emma Johnson from getting back with her ex.

Believing he had no other choice, he reloaded the website with trembling fingers and clicked on the Invoke button. The generated plot felt useless, and he frantically hit reload. Suddenly, the banging at the door fell silent—only to resume, harder than before, the doorframe shuddering beneath the blows.

Emma was trying to break open the door.

He kept reloading the website, until—

Plot: Marcus Clarke could have his heart's desire

Twist: What is he willing to pay for it?

Reading it made him feel simultaneously sick and exhilarated. He didn’t know if this was a waking dream or a hallucination, but he knew he'd been waiting for it—a chance to make a wish with his name on it. Emma was now throwing her body against the door, and he could see it starting to cave. But it didn’t matter; the timer had started, and he was running out of time. He had only one chance to get it right.

Why were only two of his entries accepted? The only things they had in common were an intense desire and…death.

He began writing—

Marcus Clarke is a bestselling author…

But he immediately deleted it. He didn’t want to author a bestseller that wrote itself. He wanted to be the one to write that book.

Marcus Clarke carried a bestselling novel in his head—brilliant, burning, and undeniable.

Glancing at the door, now splintering at the edges, knowing what he had to do, he added—

And writing it had cost a life.

His cursor hovered over “Feed” for a moment before he clicked on it.