Yesterday I drew A Picture

Jones came in late and took his place at his computer. Instead of turning it on, he just sat in front of it, staring up at the ceiling with a dreamy smile on his face.

“Jones,” I said, taking off my headphones. “Where were you yesterday?”

“The most incredible thing has happened…”

“And?”

“I don’t know if it was a change in my medication or a stray cosmic ray, or maybe even God himself reached down and blessed me, but I’m free. I’m finally free.”

“What’s that?” I asked. I had lost interest, put the headphones back on, and missed part of what he said.

“Yesterday I had the most spectacular day, and I need to tell someone about it before I forget or a building falls on me or something awful like that, but it was a day that must be shared. Can you put down your headphones and turn off your screen for a few minutes?”

I sighed but complied. “So what is it?”

“Yesterday I drew a picture, and it was amazing.”

“Oh is that all? If I missed it on your feed, it’s because I was so busy.”

“I didn’t share it on my feed,” he said.

“That’s why I didn’t see it then,” I explained. “Give me the inputs; I’ll generate the picture myself, and we’ll have a look together.”

“I didn’t use AI. I just drew it. Here, look.” He then pulled out his tablet and showed me a horribly plain picture of a house. The lines were crooked, the proportions were wrong, and the colors were completely unrealistic.

“Well, it’s not very good,” I said sadly.

“I know, it’s wretched. But it’s mine. It’s the Miller house, down on the corner,” he said.

“Oh, hold on, I have an app that can do much better.” I turned on my computer and loaded the app. I punched in the address as he sat there complaining, and in seconds I had the photo-realistic image of the house he had tried to draw. I checked a few boxes and selected some options from a drop-down menu to add more artistic style and a responsible theme to the image, then shared it on my feed. Nine thousand people liked it, and I saw the notification that 1.19 liters had been deposited into my water tank. Someone even sent a snack to my fridge.

“See, much better. Didn’t I tell you about this tool?”

“Yes, but—”

“But I don’t get it. What message were you trying to send?”

“None.”

“Well, what social cause were you trying to support? Surely this can’t be the best way.”

“None.”

“Well, what artistic boundary were you trying to break down?”

“None!” He nearly shouted. “I just wanted to draw a picture of a house. Not for anyone or any cause or to show support or rejection of some idea, just a house that looks neat.”

He seemed to be too worked up, no doubt feeling bad about his drawing turning out so poorly, so I tried to shift the subject to something else to get him to calm down.

“Did you hear the new song that Pop-Lar released? It got over a billion listens in a day. Can you imagine?”

“No, I didn’t hear any new songs yesterday except the one I wrote.”

I felt a twinge of nervousness at that comment. He stared at me with wide eyes, waiting for me to ask more about it.

“What genre?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said, his eyebrows wrinkled in worry.

“You had to have typed it in when you generated the song. It’s up at the top above ‘artist’ and ‘bpm’ and ‘subject’,” I reminded him.

“I didn’t use the song generation tool. I found an old website that had a keyboard that mapped to your computer’s keyboard, and I poked around at that until I had something I liked.”

My morning just kept getting worse. It’s one thing to draw your own images. It’s another thing to write your own music without using one of the licensed generators. He could be confessing to a serious crime and making me an accomplice. I had to ask him more about it to stall him so I could alert the authorities.

“That’s nice,” I said. “Tell me more about it. Which of the five approved chord progressions did you use?” As he thought of his answer, I opened a small window on my screen and hurriedly clicked through the website to find the ‘Report’ button.

“I didn’t use any of them. I just made some music that I thought sounded good.”

“Mmm-hmm,” I said. The horrible website made it impossible to find what I needed.

“Can I hear it?” I asked, desperate to buy some more time.

He nearly leaped out of his seat at my request. “Yes!” he said. The recording was already waiting on the screen before I asked. Premeditated.

The song stumbled its way through the air around me. Notes were played in a strange time signature, something I couldn’t identify. I heard one part go A, A#, B, and C all in a row. There’s no scale that has four notes in a row. And knowing this, knowing how he was torturing me, he continued anyway, delighted in his sealing of my fate along with his.

“Jones, please turn it off,” I begged.

“You didn’t like it?” he asked.

“This is all too much for me,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

“I know it isn’t very good. It is my first song, though.”

“You’ve made hundreds of songs, though,” I reminded him. “Many of them were great. That Jimmy Hendrix version of Katy Perry’s Firework. That got over a hundred thousand likes. You can make great music. I don’t know why you would stoop to this.”

“I didn’t want to make a someone-else’s version of a who cares existing song. I wanted to make a Jones version of a Jones song. Don’t you get it?”

He had grabbed the arms of my chair and spun me around, facing him. I leaned back as far as I could as he towered over me menacingly.

“Sure, Jones, sure.” Something had pushed him too far. I could only hope for the authorities to arrive before he did something truly awful.

“There’s more,” he said. “Let me tell you this last bit, and I’ll let you go back to your feed.”

Oh, please, no. But I couldn’t risk antagonizing him even more. Maybe when this last bit was out, he would feel better.

“Okay, Jones, let’s hear it. What else did you do yesterday?” I asked.

He let go of my chair and leaned back into his. He sat silently for a while—maybe seven or ten seconds. It felt like an eternity. The urge to look at my phone for a distraction was overwhelming.

“I wrote a story,” he said finally.

“Oh, okay. Well, what kind? A novel?” I asked.

“Oh no, certainly not.”

“A novella, then?”

“No, definitely not.”

“Then it must be a novelette, right? Or a short story? What was your word count?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t pay attention. I just wrote until the story was finished, and I didn’t bother with word counts or fitting it neatly into a size category.”

I was confused and maybe a little curious as to how he could do that, but I decided to come back to that later.

“Tell me more. What genre?”

“I’d say fantasy would be closest.”

“Closest? For a story to be a story, it must fit into a genre,” I explained.

“Then let’s say fantasy.”

“Okay. High fantasy? Modern? Epic? Low? Contemporary?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t think about it.”

“Well, which style did you use? Martin? Tolkien? Sanderson? Jordan? Lewis? Pratchett?”

“No.”

“Okay, we’ll set that aside for now. How about age? Was it a children’s book? Young Adult? Adult?”

“It’s for anyone who wants to read it, I suppose.”

“But how would you market it?”

“I wouldn’t. Don’t you see? That’s what I’m trying to tell you. I spent the whole day not worrying about marketing, likes, word counts, or any of that. I made the story my way, without any algorithms, AI, templates, or style guides, to make it as scientifically perfect as it could be. I set aside all considerations and grabbed a piece of paper and an old pen, and I wrote until the story was finished. I did the entire thing just for myself, for my own amusement and no one else’s. Do you understand?”

I was in tears at this point. Absolute hysterics. I was trapped in a room with someone confessing to using a pen and paper. They were outlawed for good reason: someone might use them to write anything they like without any consideration for who might read it or what effect it may have on the world, and it sounds like Jones had done exactly that.

Luckily, I was saved before any further damage could be done. As Jones sat there staring at me with an intensity that still shakes me to remember, begging me to join his madness, the door behind him flew off its hinges, and armed guards stormed into the room and drug him away, with me screaming after them all of the things he had confessed.

It was hours before I could even look at my screen again, and days before my hands stopped shaking from the excitement of it all.

The whole series of events kept rattling around in my head, banging off corners and re-aligning. It was days later, when I was sitting in my chair, watching a live stream of someone playing an old video game, when the streamer asked how everyone had been doing, that it all coalesced into something new. It was like all of the events played out again in my head, but differently. The people involved were different, and the whole situation was different, but somehow it had the same feeling. The strangest thing is that this story—not the one that actually happened but the one that the real events had shifted into—was not based on any other book I’d ever read. It was all based on something I had experienced in my own life, outside of my computer or a book.

I raced to my closet and pulled out an old shoe box. Inside, I found my dad’s old cell phone. I plugged it in and let it charge, the whole time jiggling my foot impatiently. When it had enough energy, I turned on the phone, opened the notes app, and started typing out the story.