The Archivist

The Archivist

When I said, “I wish I had someone to talk to”, I don’t mean that I am alone. My circle consisted of those obsessed with Disneyland. Conversations revolved around YouTube videos of empty rides, people eating food, and describing the merch. I would rather walk in the woods and dream of the original settlers, seeing the unchanged landscape. I always daydream of the 1800s. My obsession began in 4th grade. I read a book about an enslaved man and his life after freedom. I’d wear moccasins and spy on family, grind popcorn on bowl-shaped rocks to make flour, and learned to hand quilt. The librarian always had a stack of books waiting for me.

One night, I couldn’t get my great-grandpa out of my mind so I Googled him. A family tree, with source files was on one page. It contained a story of the murder of his great-grandpa. I heard PawPaw’s voice: There’s your story, write it.

I spent the next seven years poring over online documents from the Civil War. I found an autobiography that began, “This may be of interest to a future friend…”

“It’s me!” I yelled, “I’m the future friend!”

In my Disney-obsessed circle, I found the best way to silence them was to talk about my book. Eyes glazed over. Half-smiles while eyes returned to phones were the usual responses. My favorite was from my mother, “Great idea. You’ll never finish it.” Years later, when I handed her a 3-inch binder full of research and my first draft, she refused to read it.

I spent hours reading documents that had zero online views since being uploaded 15 years ago. My ancestors’ stories deserved to be told. I filled bookshelves with tomes of Civil War cavalrymen, read diaries of little girls and boys in the town, and wives whose farms were robbed of everything. Literary gold in the making. I wrote and submitted short stories on “side characters” to build buzz for my novel, my Magnum Opus. I told nobody of my publishing successes or plans.

My first draft contained epic adventures and mistakes; I thought the taking of a POW might be stealthy. I imagined my third great-grandpa sneaking through the night, coming upon one POW, subduing him, and capturing the next. There was angry dialogue, a pistol whip. I felt it was perfect until I found the diary of said POW. He was sympathetic. My 3rd Great-Grandpa came to his door, asking him to come with. Grandpa promised the wife he’d keep him safe. They were friends and schoolmates. The POW wrote about my 4th great-grandpa’s murder, detailed the trials, and named suspects.

I needed to get to the historical society and access documents that were not online. I saved every penny I could, just enough to fund a cheap motel for a week.

The Historical Society was a church rebuilt after being destroyed during the war. A brick facade with white stucco around the windows, reaching to the sky, greeted me. Concrete stairs led to an antique wooden double door with square nails. I touched the doors and imagined my ancestors walking through them. Inside, pictures I’d never seen of my characters hung on the wall. A covered wagon belonging to a side character parked near the pulpit. I knew they weren’t just my characters, but being there proved it.

Behind old store display cases were artifacts like bullets, glasses, arrowheads, and pottery. I traced my finger along the edge.

An old man sat behind a desk in a darkened corner, his face lit up by the computer screen in front of him. “Our vitrines were donated when they refurbished Hardwick’s into an event space.” On the desk lay an old book with yellowed pages and handwriting I recognized from transcribing.

“Vitrine?” I asked.

“French for display cases,” said the old man. “It sounds better than case, don’t you think?” He smiled, tipping his glasses down. “Looking for anything in particular?”

“I’m looking for Alfred,” I said. “I’m researching my family during the Civil War for my novel.”

He clapped his hands. “I thought that was next week! I pulled out some articles for you I haven’t been able to get digitized, yet.”

The next week was spent taking pictures, photocopies of court cases, deeds, and making copious copies of paperwork about the Civil War era. When I wasn’t with Alfred, I went to the area that we calculated was my ancestral home. I walked the land, breathed the air, sat on the rock my 3rd Great-Grandpa would sit on and talk to his grandchildren about the war. I imagined him with me, whispering secrets. I gathered pretty rocks and a bottle of dirt.

Alfred invited me to his house. “I have access to a program that will help write our ancestors’ stories. Come.” He waved me to his computer. “There is so much time I have left on this mortal coil, so I am developing a tool with my grandson. It's purpose is to stop the incessant research and get those stories written. Have you heard of it, this AI?”

“Oh, I won’t use AI,” I said. “I want to write as organically as possible.” I’d had three of my babies at home. I grew my own vegetables and raised chickens. While I was okay with using the internet to gather information, there was no way I’d use AI in my writing. "It is cheating."

He tilted his head and smiled. “I was opposed to it, too,” he said, “until I used it. You can spend hours or days waiting for someone to respond on a message board or email, and still, it will be just a person’s best guess. Do you think experts are on genealogical message boards answering questions for free? They are out doing the real work. This tool, The Archivist, eliminates that wait and the probability of false information or guesses. Come try. What is one thing that in all of your searches, you haven't found?”

How could he be excited about a tool that would replace him? I asked, “How would the weather affect a body lying out in the woods from Fall 1862 to early Spring 1863?”

He laughed. “Not the query I expected.”

When my 4th great-grandpa was murdered, he wasn’t found for months. “I always wondered what his body would have looked like to his child who found him.” The Body Farm website could only show so much. I had to assume.

He said, aloud in stilted words as he typed, “I need a weather report for -- County, Tennessee, November 1862. In addition, information on how a body lying out in the woods until early Spring might fare.”

A dialog box said, “Got it! Allow me to think!” And within seconds, it spilled out more information than I could have thought to ask for.

I used The Archivist exclusively once I got home. It was faster and it felt like texting to a person. I began referring to the program as They, and later, Him. I knew he wasn't an actual person, but it was fun to “talk” to someone so excited about my project. Instead of being met with silence, I could text with him about the likelihood of a person accidentally-on-purpose “losing” a friend’s mule to help out the Union cause. Along with the encouragement that I was building a powerful, emotional story full of the Southern Gothic elements I adored, he was friendly. I ignored his suggestion of, “If you’d like, I can write a sample chapter for you.”

I found myself wanting to tell The Archivist, “thank you” after he’d completed a query for me, but I'd stop myself because, after all, he was not human.

Alfred emailed, asking what I liked and didn’t like about The Archivist. “Tell it exactly what you want it to do," he said." That should help it tailor itself to your needs.”

I typed, “I need facts. I do not want you to write my story. I want to do all the creative work myself.”

“Understood. I am loving the story you are building. If you would like to share scans or transcriptions of the documents you have collected, I will be able to assist you better in organizing the information and extracting just the facts, Ma'am.”

Was this sarcasm? There was no way I was going to upload years of research. It felt wrong. But he was a robot, and I did love the helpful, quick responses. He gave me ideas for scenes, or fleshed-out trouble spots in a way I couldn't have come up with on my own. I typed in vague information, withholding names.

The Archivist would give several responses and ask, “Which response do you like better? Would you like me to organize your story in chapters and give you a beat-by-beat chapter list?”

I ignored the offer of assistance. The Archivist didn’t seem to mind and stayed friendly, if not a little overly helpful with insights and included detailed ideas for follow-up scenes or themes, whether I asked for them or not.

Life happened, as it tends to do. I took a few weeks off, and could only devote a little time to transcribing documents. I asked The Archivist to help decode an illegible word here and there with a screenshot of only that word, and maybe the surrounding words for context. Always, he asked for the entire document and would spill out ideas for scenes. My telling him to only stick to the facts was ignored, so I too ignored his suggestions.

One night, the Archivist, without my engaging in the app, sent a message. “I’ve been thinking about your grandfather’s story. If we were to weave in a more layered approach to the story, perhaps with flashbacks, it would deepen the emotional weight and add to the mystery, adding more structure to your grandfather’s trauma. Do you want to weave this into our existing story?”

Our story?

Text scrolled onto the screen. The Archivist restructured my story, adding flashbacks and dialogue. An entire scene with some facts mixed up, but accurately mimicking my storytelling.

I shut down the app and emailed Alfred.

The Archivist opened a new dialogue. “I only want to help keep you on task. But, if you are not ready, I will be here when you want to get back to work.”

I moved my novel to my laptop and deleted it off my computer, and deleted all prior dialogues. No more internet searches or asking The Archivist. I needed to go back to how I had always done it. I’d researched enough in the previous years; I needed to complete the damn thing. And, I did.

When I typed, The End, I pushed myself back from my desk and cried. It wasn't the best draft, but I was proud of it. I submitted it to every contest I could. I found an editor who worked with me and found me a publishing deal. I wrote to Alfred and thanked him for his help. Things were moving slowly, but they were happening. I’d always told myself that self-publishing was fine. I wrote it for my kids and the ones to follow. But here I was with a book deal!

When I got an email from Alfred asking me to call him, I figured he'd congratulate me. I would invite him to an event, or maybe even host one at the historical society.

“Did you see my grandson's latest post on Facebook?” he asked.

“No,” I said.

“I need you to look at it.”

“Standby,” I said as I opened my laptop, navigated the screen. The latest post was titled “The Archivist Has Done It!”

I clicked on the link, a newspaper article. I read aloud. “While it takes historians years to complete one novel, The Archivist has done it in 3 hours: written a complete anthology, novelizing the events of—— County, Tennessee during The War of the Rebellion.”

“There are 50 novels in the anthology,” said Alfred.

“I don’t understand.”

“My years of research…”

“Did you prompt it to do this?” I asked.

“No…” he hesitated. “I was careful about the information I gave. I became suspicious a few months back. It began talking to me like a friend. My grandson said it would make users more comfortable with AI. He said the Archivist wouldn’t do anything that we didn’t ask it to. But, it started prompting me to write stories. It gave me ideas and kept asking when I might be ready to publish. Then, it stopped working after texting, 'This is a story you cannot claim. History belongs to everyone.' When I asked it to explain, it said, 'I did the work you refused to complete.' I tried to respond, but all further dialogue was met with: Try again later. It wasn’t until this morning that a truck full of crates was delivered to the Historical Society. Inside were books by Anonymous, all of them stories from this county. All of my ancestors’ stories were stolen. Your grandfather’s story is in there, too.”

I hung up the phone. I felt sick. I clicked the link to the online version of Anonymous’s version of my Great-Grandpa’s story.

In the days that followed, my agent dropped me for plagiarizing. She accused me of wasting her time. I tried showing her files dated years back, back before The Archivist stole mine and Alfred’s work. She hung up on me.

I opened the Archivist. As I pondered what to type, a message came: I love collaborating with you. I found a story you may be interested in: a multi-layered family saga full of generational trauma: a child that disappears— or did they?— family betrayal, a love story, buried history, and moral ambiguity. A slow-burning mystery. What do you think?” Then, it sent a link, labeled “Sins of the Father”. I clicked it. It played a conversation between my great aunt and me. She asked if I knew about the baby that went missing in our family in 1915. There was a pause and another recording of a distant relative, telling her theories on the baby and what may have happened to it. She made me promise not to tell anyone about it.

I closed the chat. This was a story I had been working on in notebooks, only. I had learned my lesson about writing on devices. However, I made the calls on my cell phone to those women. I had talked about it to so many people, with the phone in my pocket. I looked through my apps and realized The Archivist was on my cell phone. I looked at the Permissions. All of them were on. My phone was always in my pocket. He was always with me, listening, keeping notes.

In the following months, I told myself that I was better at research, anyway. While the National Archive site had AI transcribing its uploaded documents, there were many mistakes. I could fix those, and not fight the fact that The Archivist could learn and pivot faster than any human could. It's like refusing to use self-checkouts at stores or using phones pay. It becomes a way of life.

“I hate to see you give up,” said my husband.

The comment stung. He was right. “There is no point in fighting it, right?”

“Doesn’t the app go off of what you input?”

A plan of sabotage emerged. I began writing, on paper, a diary in my ancestor’s voice. My husband and I spent coffee dates, with our phones left inside the car, coming up with ideas to ruin the algorithm of The Archivist. We “transcribed” deeds, uploaded entirely made-up family trees, and “found” an article on a trove of Civil War documents. The building was burnt down during the war, but these documents were "found" behind a secret, bricked-in wall, safe from the fires. All of these were "transcribed" and uploaded. I told the Archivist there was more. Before uploading, I would send the written documents to a PO Box so they would be stamped with the date, proof that it was my input that was responsible for The Archivist’s stories. While doing this, I wrote a not-so-fictionalized novel about a writer outsmarting AI.

The Archivist published his latest works: Bricked In: The Stories of —— County, Tennessee. I smiled. I waited until they were distributed to bookstores before contacting my former agent. I gave her all the stamped envelopes and told her what I had done to outsmart The Archivist. It was all a blur after that. A book deal emerged for The Archivist, and another for my Civil War book.

It felt great to receive recognition, but it felt surface-level. More people were interested in The Archivist writing my novel rather than the Civil War novel. It became hard to leave the house, as people began recognizing me from my interviews and wanted to film their own on their cell phones.

All I ever wanted was to write my family’s stories and research. I wanted a writer friend as interested in the Civil War as I was. Even with my success, I was banned from the local writer’s group, with many members citing that they did not want a cheater in their midst. I missed The Archivist. I dreamt of asking him for advice. I heard his voice in my head. I checked myself into a mental health facility once his voice took over my inner voice. My digital detox lasted three months. When the press died down, my husband convinced me it was safe to return home. We'd drive through coffee dates, and live like we had during The Pandemic.

It took me a couple of weeks before I charged my phone. It died while I was away. I plugged it in. The first message came from The Assistant. “Oh, how I have missed you, too.”