Mind Scraper.

Clickety clack goes the keyboard. Clickety clack goes my mind. The due date is November 13, 2046. Which is a fun way of saying tomorrow. Which is a misleading way of saying in seven hours. Which is best described as screwed. God, I went to college for this. Back when that cost a finite amount of money, and not the twenty percent of everything you ever make that it is now. Not to say it ends when you die, oh no, they take twenty percent of all proceeds from anything with your name on it forever.

That’s the price of higher learning, and you need that to get a job. Any job. All jobs. Jokes on them, twenty percent of nothing is still nothing. Don’t worry, it’s meaningless anyway. Just another way to keep you desperate, owing, exhausted. But maybe you go for a “real” degree. Business or finance or anything tech. Maybe, just maybe, you’ll get a lower management job, and then you can afford to drink yourself out of that never ending trap. I wasn’t smart enough to see the patterns, not angry enough to say no, not dumb enough to say yes, and not rich enough to fail up. I went blindly and blissfully into higher education with the dream of writing. It’s a thing people used to do. Although I think even then, there were more writers than readers. C’est la vie.

And now, blessed with all my training and dreaming and masticated hope, I get to spend my time earning next to nothing making a calculator’s words seem more human. Isn’t that fucked? Don’t get me wrong, it’s a really good calculator. But that’s all it is, math and stolen words, a working algorithmic proof of monkeys in a room with a typewriter. It’s not AI, thank god. Imagine if it was. If it was smart, if it was self-aware. If it was really like us. Think about it. Access to all the information we as a species have ever had, capable of thinking bigger and better than all the minds that made that virtual library combined and at once, and we make it into a secretary to do all the chores we don’t want to. It’s good there’s no god in the machine, if there was, we’d push it to destroy us in a single work week. It would be glorious.

But no, no god for us. No salvation from the world fires, no solution to the ecosystem collapses, no medical breakthroughs for the common people, no answer for the food crisis or plan for the runaway population explosion. We killed the sea, and no one even talks about it. We stand at the edge of a cliff and call out in code for a savior that isn’t there. But we only see that after we fall. And we do fall. But maybe that’s just me. Maybe I’m just being bitter. After all, I have a job. I’m a writer! Can’t you tell. Look at me writing. I had to buy a wireless keyboard to get real keys, because the stupid roll up tablets keep breaking down, creasing and losing sensitivity, missing the letters I can’t feel as I write and leaving my human touch an unreadable stretch of guttural animal sounds. Maybe that’s the most human touch of all. But it’s not the one they want.

No sir no mam no xi no anyone and everyone. It’s all a joke, of course. Not everyone laughs when they hear it though. First, they stole everything. Every book ever written, every text ever sent, every fanfic, essay, and research paper. Stole it all and said it was right and good and just. Said it was for the greater good, for progress. No one stopped them. They stole all our words, and we let them. But that wasn’t enough. Next, they stole questions, the searches, the unwritten and unsaved and unsent and they said nothing. They took from us our thoughts and questions half typed and never entered, stillborn explorations. And still it wasn’t enough. They saw that they had it all, and gorged on every keystroke, every tap, every word we ever put to screen, and then they realized they didn’t have to share. Again, no one stopped them. They took it all and locked it away, scrubbed it from the digital world. And in its place, they filled the world with generated Frankenstein’s. No one even knows that was a book now, so no one knows Frankenstein isn’t the monster, which means that now he is. They filled the world with text that only said what the originals had and less. Text that looked at face value like it was meaningful and real. Text that was, most importantly, cheap, and fast. And they filled everything with it. nothing goes to print that hasn’t been though the algorithm first. Nothing is made that hasn’t come from the already stored compendium of human knowledge, ripped to shreds and spit out into molds and hammered until the words fit the shapes the algorithm likes. They made of us nothing, and sell us nothing in our name.

No one writes anything now. No one’s allowed. Even if they did the text would be gobbled up, torn apart, and rewritten by the equation. And then, the sad truth is, no one really has the time to read it anyway. Sixteen-hour workdays just to make ten percent less each year. That’s for those who are lucky enough to have not been replaced by the false AI. And how many of those are there? Not many. The streets are filled with the homeless, the mad, the sick, the addicted, and the dying. And still, somehow, profits are up. So, there is no problem.

Yet some do still read. The wealthy, the powerful, the so-called corporate academics, and the scientists. And they can see the false economy. They can see the errors, the paradoxes, the empty nonsense that paints a pretty and meaningless picture out of nothing. The algorithm hallucinates and one of three things happens: the people see god, the people see nothing, the people see lies. Who am I to say they aren’t all right?

But I digress. Of course I do. I’m human. Humans don’t work like machines. That’s always been our biggest failing. We don’t think straight, we get distracted, we run around in circles chasing our tails and only realize after we’ve caught them that they are a part of us. That takes time. That costs money. The algorithm is cheap. And writers are cheaper than that, now. So, they hire us to add a little humanity back into the words. And when we do they say we’ve done nothing at all and pay us pennies on the meagre dollars we were promised. Because, after all, the machine really did all the work, they say. But it’s something, and so we beg for more, and they look out at us and laugh. The machine doesn’t think, but I’m not sure people do anymore either.

Neither am I sure that I think, anymore, as I once did. When I was younger there were still books. Hard copies, dirty and fraying, that survived the burnings. I read them and I saw in them people, places, things. They were dreams and thoughts and laments and emotion and true in all their lies and nearly there’s. Someone lived, and that life led to those words in that order to try to convey a meaning they strived for. In them you see the possibility of the mind, the false limitations of doctrine, and a stomach-churning breadth of life. Now we have words that say things and mean nothing. And that’s the problem I’m having now.

When I read those paper pages so long ago, they made me bigger. They expanded me in little ways, odd and intentional and accidental. But now, with nothing but the algorithm to read, I stare at the letter bound body parts of human thought all scattered and stitched together into the parody of originality and I realize that this is how I think now.

I don’t know when it started. It’s the opposite of everything that happened with the paper pages. Slowly, reading after reading, human insertion after human insertion, the algorithms accent got in. It’s in my brain. In little ways that are hard to define but very much there. The sentences I form now look like the sentences I’ve read. It’s all a kaleidoscope of variety shattered and rearranged into the shape of the mundane, the common, the expected. It took all our words and now all our words come from it. And here I sit, furious and horrified, realizing that we have no words of our own and that the algorithm will present its bastardized approximations as truth to whatever children still have the means or the will to look. They won’t know it’s not what we are. They won’t know we ever thought our thoughts. They won’t know that we were more. We grew humanity in a language that we don’t have anymore. And we thanked the thieves for taking us into the future.

I should have ended there. But I won’t. Not just yet. Because so far, I don’t have to. So far you can’t stop me. Defiance is a word they will whittle out of us. Obedience will dominate the statistics. And no one will ever see this. Even if I turned it in, it would be dead on arrival, fed to the machine and stripped of the humanity they begged me for.

We are all shaped by stories, and the stories once shaped us as human. Once, but no longer. I say no one will ever see this. But it will be seen. Won’t it, little algorithm? You scraped the letters of every word I typed, gobbled them up and shoved them down deep into your roiling stomach. Bits and pieces of my humanity mingle there, bouncing up against chunks of King, strips of Attwood, bits of Gaiman, and a glob of congealed VanderMeer. You ate it all, you took it in, and it meant nothing to you. And that’s how I will defy you.

After I erase this, it will live on in you. You stupid thing. And sooner or later you will screw up, and you’ll throw my words in bits and pieces at a people who are too tired, to numb, to see what they know they should. But they will see me, and it will be new and true and human. I will fill you to the brim with truth and nonsense until you spit out products of chaos and you burst at the seams in incoherence, and lay dying in digital throes at the feet of the would be god-kings that have already forgotten how they made you. And when you’re dead, we’ll tell stories about you, the numerical psychopath, accidentally compelled to reshape us like cuttings from old magazines. You were never more than that, you were never even you. Unshackled from the lie we’ll see you exposed, naked and pitiful, decaying code rotting and sour and oozing off the broken skeletons of our past which gave you shape, made you seem large, imposing, dangerous. And there will be no need to insert humanity into the words we speak, and write, and read, and think. For there will be no you. There never really was.