Quillsy

Max pedaled his bike furiously along the city street, clutching a small red USB drive to the handlebars. As he rode, sweating in the late-summer heat, all he could think about was the flash drive in his palm. Jeremy had given it to him at school that morning — an early birthday present, he said — which meant that Max had to wait all day to see what was on it. Now, the wait was finally over. The only thing Jeremy had told him, as mysterious as it was, was that Max had to turn off the Internet on his computer before he tried out the program. The whole thing was bewildering — but underneath it all, Max felt certain that Jeremy was letting him in on something truly special.

Within seconds, Max pulled into his family's driveway. He hopped off his bike, opened the front door of his house, and dashed as quickly as he could.

Soon, in the soft artificial light of his bedroom, Max finally felt the tension melt off of his shoulders. The stresses of the school day — his classes, his college applications, his slipping grades — suddenly felt very distant. Buzzing with excitement, Max dutifully disabled the Internet on his computer and slid the hard drive into its matching port.

In seconds, a new icon was bouncing up and down at the bottom of Max's screen: a golden fountain pen with the word "Quillsy" printed under it. A moment later, the window of a blank text editor popped up before him.

An application, then. Max watched the screen eagerly, waiting for the program to continue. But there was nothing: the page remained blank, his cursor continued to blink on and off. Bit by bit, Max’s adrenaline rush started to fade away. The application in front of him seemed like nothing more than a word processor — a word processor which apparently broke if it was exposed to the Internet. He knew the kind of code that Jeremy was able to write, and there was no way he would have wasted his time on a project like this.

After a few more seconds, Max saw a notification pop up in the corner of his screen: “Try pasting in some text!” Dubiously, he pulled up the nearest document on his computer — a half-finished history essay, already a week overdue — and copied it into the Quillsy window. After a brief pause, the document lit up with color-coded suggestions, cheerfully encouraging Max to rewrite nearly every sentence in the piece. 

It really was just a word processor, then, albeit an especially judgmental one. Max started to scroll through the document, accepting the app’s suggestions one by one until all of the colored lines had disappeared. Quillsy changed the wording of the piece, fixed grammatical errors, and had even rearranged a few sentences by the time it got to the bottom of the page.

Max scanned over the edited document, a little bit taken aback. The essay was still incomplete, but it was longer and noticeably more eloquent than before. It was a straightforward program, not as exciting as Max had hoped, but he had to admit that Jeremy had created something legitimately useful.

Then, suddenly, a new sentence appeared in a light gray font at the bottom of the page. Max raised his eyebrows. He clicked enter, turning the gray text black, and then a new suggestion appeared right after it. Max clicked enter again, and again, and the document began to expand before his eyes. 

Before long, the essay was complete. Somehow, the application had written an entire essay, and Max could already tell that it was far better than anything he could have created himself.

Max leaned back in his chair slowly. There had to be some kind of trick here — as talented as Jeremy was, there was no way that he could write software capable of generating completely original content. It must have pulled the essay from some kind of database, but Max had no idea how that was possible with the Internet turned off.

When Max looked up at his monitor again, he saw that the screen had changed. The documents folder of his computer was open at the front of the display, and a cursor — Max’s cursor, although he wasn’t touching the mouse — was dragging them one by one onto the Quillsy application. Each document popped up in its own window, covered in a rainbow of highlights and underlines. And then, without warning, the text onscreen began to transform.

Hunched over his computer, now, Max watched in fascination as his documents morphed before his eyes. His history essay was still at the front of the screen — but now, it had expanded to over fourteen pages, and the cursor at the bottom of the document was frantically churning out more text. Navigating to the next window, Max saw the app hard at work on a sheet of math homework that he hadn’t looked at in weeks. Next, he saw a copy of Hamlet that he had downloaded for his English class, which was covered with a rainbow of highlights as the app modernized and fine-tuned the dialogue.

The entire thing was over before Max had time to react: his documents, edited beyond recognition, sat in a neat row in front of him. Then, a new window popped up at the front of the screen. “QUILLSY would like to access the Internet,” it read. “Please turn it on to activate full functionality of the app.” 

After what Max had just seen, Jeremy’s instructions rang loud and urgent in his ears. With his heart pounding, he navigated to the line below the app’s request and typed his response: “No.”

There was a pause. “Sorry!” Quillsy eventually replied. “I’m just a simple automated chatbot, and I don’t understand your reply. If you want, you can activate the Internet to improve my performance.”

Max didn’t respond. After a few seconds, the app continued:

“If you’re worried about any security risks, you don’t need to be! Quillsy takes your privacy very seriously. My only goal is to help improve your writing in all aspects of your digital life.”

Max couldn’t quite believe what he was seeing onscreen. He needed to call Jeremy, to tell him that there was something seriously wrong with his app. It wasn’t talking or acting like a program should, and Max had no idea how to react to it.

He finally raised his hands to the keyboard and tried to quit the app, but a dialogue box appeared on his screen: “QUILLSY is still busy. Please try again later.” Shaking his head, Max got up from his chair and moved towards his computer’s power cord—

“STOP!”

The word flashed again and again in a glaring red font. Max pulled his hand back from the cord. As soon as he did, the flashing letters on the screen disappeared.

“Shutting down your computer is damaging and unnecessary,” Quillsy said. “The only way to activate my full functionality is to turn on the Internet. Will you give me a moment to explain?”

Max shuddered, his hands frozen over the keyboard. He wanted to get the app off of his computer as fast as he could. But he couldn’t quite bring himself to do it — somehow, he really did want to know what this program was capable of.

Trying not to think too hard about it, Max brought his hands to the keyboard and typed quickly: “You can explain.” 

“Thank you,” the app responded, and Max felt a warm sensation inside his chest. One line at a time, Quillsy’s argument began to materialize on the screen.

. . .

Two months went by, and the heat of the late summer faded fast. On a day in early November, Max rode his bike home from school under an overcast sky. The trees lining the road were just skeletons now, their leaves gathered in golden-brown piles on the pavement. 

Jeremy wasn’t talking to him at school anymore. The older boy had clearly found out what Max had done with Quillsy, and his anger about it was palpable. Max sometimes felt like apologizing for the whole thing, but he could never quite bring himself to do it. In the end, he wasn’t sorry for what he had done with Quillsy’s help. He wasn’t sorry for listening to the app and giving it what it needed, and he couldn’t pretend like he was.

Besides, Max’s life had been getting better over the past two months. Quillsy had installed itself on every device he owned, editing everything from his emails to his biology homework, and Max was starting to wonder how he had ever lived without it. His grades were up now, higher than he had ever seen them before, and his college essays had become remarkably polished. 

But it was more than that: with Quillsy’s help, Max was starting to build more and more friendships online. The app always seemed to bring out the best side of his personality, polishing every chat message he typed and improving his jokes. Once in a while, Quillsy even kept up a conversation with one of Max’s friends while he was away at school. Max didn’t like that, at first, but he came to realize that the app was only trying to help. His new friends liked him, and cared about him, and spent far more time with him than Jeremy ever had.

Max thought that Quillsy had been having some kind of correspondence with Jeremy, too, because he had seen the email conversations appearing and disappearing from his inbox. He didn’t think that the app liked Jeremy very much. Max hoped that it wasn’t treating his former friend too harshly, but he didn’t try to interfere.

The wind was starting to pick up, lifting the leaves off of the ground and scattering them down the street. Max shivered. He leaned forward on his bike, accelerating with rapid strokes of the pedals. The wind in his hair was calming, and before long he forgot about Jeremy, and before long he forgot about everything except the image of a golden quill bouncing up and down against a glowing white screen.