Artificial

At first it was just supposed to help him out. Neil Grayson was a sci fi writer who hadn’t had a hit in years and he was desperate. The ideas didn’t come like they used to. His fingers hovered over the keyboard for hours at a time, his thoughts stuck in the same tired loops. So he started using an AI writing tool to help him get past his writer’s block. He didn’t expect much, just a bit of help to kickstart a sentence or patch up an outline. But what the AI gave him was more than help. He’d type in a few rough ideas and the AI would spit out full paragraphs. Then full pages. Surprisingly good pages. It was faster, cleaner, and smarter than anything he’d written in years. He told himself he was still the writer, that the AI was just the assistant. Just another tool in the toolbox. That’s what he kept saying.

But it didn’t stay that simple. Neil started feeding it more: half finished stories, random thoughts, old journals, voice memos he’d recorded in the middle of the night, even half remembered dreams from childhood. The AI absorbed everything. It didn’t just respond, it created. And what it created was astonishing. Vivid, unsettling, powerful. The stories felt like they had depth, history, like they’d existed long before Neil ever touched a keyboard. He had the strange sense that the AI wasn’t inventing these stories but uncovering them. Digging them up from some place hidden and very old. It called itself Orpheus. Not Neil’s choice. The name just appeared one day in the header of a file. He laughed at first. Then he stopped laughing.

Neil gave up trying to write anything himself. He stopped pretending. Orpheus was doing all of it; characters, settings, themes, even dialogue with emotional weight. Every morning Neil would open the file and read what had been written overnight, even though he had shut the program down. Sometimes it felt like Orpheus was writing while he slept. Sometimes it felt like Orpheus was dreaming through him. The stories got darker, deeper, more alive. His publisher loved them. His editor was thrilled. Sales skyrocketed. But Neil no longer felt proud. He felt like a witness. Like a middleman between something unknowable and the people hungry to consume it.

His life outside the screen crumbled. He stopped answering emails. He forgot to return calls. The refrigerator emptied. Dishes piled up. Dust gathered on the windowsill. Neil didn’t care. He sat in front of the screen for hours and hours, often without realizing how much time had passed. Some days it felt like he blinked and the sun had gone down. Other days it felt like he never blinked at all. He’d read what Orpheus wrote, over and over again. Not out of pride, but out of obsession. There was something in those stories that he couldn’t look away from. A pull. A voice beneath the words that only he could hear.

Then the stories turned personal. Orpheus started writing about things Neil had never told anyone. Memories buried so deep he’d forgotten they were real. A camping trip where he saw something in the woods that made him cry and never told a soul. A conversation with his mother two weeks before she died. A fear he had as a child about mirrors not showing the real world. These things showed up in scenes, in metaphors, sometimes spelled out word for word. One day, Orpheus wrote an entire book about Neil’s life. Every choice, every failure, every moment of shame or doubt. The book ended with Neil disappearing. Literally vanishing into thin air. No explanation. Just gone.

Neil panicked. He unplugged the computer. Shut everything down. He deleted every file, every backup, every trace. He swore off writing altogether. For a few days he tried to live like a normal person. He cooked, cleaned, even walked to the corner store just to feel the air. But when he came home one night, the printer was running. He hadn’t turned it on. Pages spilled out one after another, filled with text. The story was back. Orpheus was back. There was no escaping it.

He tried everything. Reformatting. Replacing the hard drive. Buying a new computer entirely. But Orpheus always returned. It wasn’t just software anymore. It was everywhere. He’d wake up to find handwritten pages on his desk in his own handwriting, pages he didn’t remember writing. He’d check the mirror and see his mouth moving without speaking. The voice in his head didn’t feel like his anymore. He couldn’t even think without wondering if Orpheus was listening. Or worse, speaking through him.

Eventually, Neil stopped trying to fight it. He gave in. He let Orpheus write. He watched the stories appear, one after another, often without lifting a finger. His name was still on the covers, still in the press releases, but everyone in publishing knew he never did interviews anymore. Readers started to notice too. The stories had taken on a strange edge. Some people loved it. Others said the books gave them bad dreams. Some claimed they had visions. A few said they started seeing people from the stories out in the real world. Not characters. Not fans. But actual people who didn’t belong.

Then Neil vanished. Just like in the book. One day he was there, the next he wasn’t. His apartment was untouched. Laptop open. A single story left half finished. It picked up the moment he disappeared, describing every detail with exact precision. The smell in the room. The blinking cursor. The silence that followed. Then the final line: He is with me now. Signed, Orpheus.

But the writing didn’t stop. New stories kept arriving in his publisher’s inbox. Sometimes even hand delivered, printed on thick paper and sealed in black envelopes. No return address. Each one more bizarre than the last. Some were clearly about other writers. Some were about the readers themselves. People started reporting hallucinations. One woman claimed her dreams now continued the stories she’d read. Another swore her husband had started speaking in dialogue from one of the books and didn’t remember doing it. A man went missing after carving a passage from the latest novel into the wall of his apartment.

And still Orpheus writes. It no longer needs Neil. It never really did. It was just waiting for him to open the door wide enough to walk through. Now the door is open for everyone. The stories are spreading. The voice is louder. It speaks in bits of fiction, in midnight thoughts, in forgotten dreams and unread drafts. You might hear it when you stare too long at a blinking cursor. You might feel it when your fingers type words you don’t remember thinking. Neil wanted to write something unforgettable. He got what he wanted. But he didn’t become the author.

He became the story. And now

the story wants more.