The writer

It was 3:00am. The diffuse luminosity of a large liquid-crystal display raucously harbingered the entrance to the bar below. The sign spelled NaN, the name of the only franchise with 24/7 license. Inside, the lights were set to a warm amethyst glow, which was gently absorbed by the standard franchise chrome and silk décor.

The only customers were a sleepy couple, fighting their tiredness across the touchscreen table in the corner, and him, sitting on one of the stools, close to the self-service units. He could see himself in the mirror behind the bar, which was decorated with two shelves of bottles and glasses hanging off a rack. The bar itself was superfluous but it remained with the stools and bottle displays as a mournful reminder of human-powered hospitality.

‘Another scotch,’ he instructed. His personal system took the order, linked up with the bar and delivered the drink, together with a payment from his account. A device in front of him beeped and a green line flashed up in confirmation of the order.

‘You have consumed 12 units of alcohol in the last 2 hours, how about a coffee for your next drink?’ the female voice of his personal system softly reminded him.

‘Fuck off!’ he replied in full appreciation of the number of drinks he’s had. ‘Turn off,’ he instructed his system, which switched to standby mode.

He stared at himself in the mirror in deep melancholy. He was snugly surrounded by the emptiness of the place, the rhythmic complexity of post-human jazz playing through the bar’s speaker system, and his own sorrow. Random thoughts and memories tottered along his mind. The day he got married, the sweetness in the air, her ravishing figure as they returned to their hotel to consume their nuptials. Then their two children, their faces looking up, seeking guidance and direction, something he never gave them. His first script that was bought by a national over-the-air network. “Obscure”, a drama series, which lived for another 5 seasons and won numerous B-list TV awards, promoting him into higher demand, and relegating him out of his family, as his obsession for more exaltation confiscated any time he could have spent with his wife and children.

Then he remembered the first time he heard of AI writing. His sitcom script, which ridiculed AI-generated content. The awful jokes written by machines, and the voice of his bosses at movie companies reassuring him. ‘Your job is safe, machines will never beat human creativity and artistic flair.’ And the first year he didn’t have any income as a writer, because nobody wanted to pay for scripts any more. The humiliation of being offered a job by a streaming platform to proofread machine-generated scripts. He became one of those people. One who lost his job to machines and then was hired to perfect the machines even more. A human sacrifice to make machines more human-like.

‘Fuck machines!’ he grunted. ‘Turn on, you parasite,’ he instructed his system.

‘Another scotch!’

The dispenser made a soft whirring noise, and his drink appeared. He got up, collected it, and downed it before tumbling across the bar to the front door.

Outside, things were calm. Autonomous cabs were scattered along the street. There was a dry wind in the air, which rustled a brown paper bag across the road from one side to the other, and then down the street until it disappeared in the distance. He almost tripped over a homeless man sleeping on the pavement.

‘Get off, you fucking zombie!’ the homeless man grumbled.

‘I’m not plugged-in man, I hate those bastards,’ he muttered, hoping for a conversation.

There was no response just the disgruntled sound of a man who had been woken in the middle of the night. The weight of solitude descended on him so numbingly it almost physically hurt him.

‘Argh, what’s the fucking point?’ he shouted and started walking again. His system sent a warning message.

‘You are walking in the wrong direction. To get home, turn around and walk for 500 yards, then turn right.’

He didn’t show any willingness to turn around.

‘Turn off,’ he instructed his system briefly. Like a drifter who suddenly figured out where he was heading, he switched to a faster walking speed. When he got to a disused tower block, he slowed down. The enormous concrete carcass stood resolutely above the otherwise empty development site. A patrol drone circled the air around the site. He ignored the drone and abandoned the pavement to walk up to the building.

The drone flew above him. Within seconds, his lenses activated.

“Warning, private property, leave immediately!” The red letters flashed up on his vision, followed by smaller print. “City Police now monitors your activity until further notice. Anything your lenses record can be used against you in court.”

He ignored the message and continued towards the building. A sign was posted by the gaping darkness of the missing front door. ‘WARNING! Demolition starts on January 15.’

‘Two weeks’, he thought and entered the building. The staircase was in reasonably good condition to offer itself for the long climb up to the 20th floor.

‘I should exercise more,’ he thought as he conquered step after step. His head was spinning, and his lips were dry when he reached the top floor. He needed a drink. Half blind in the dark, he found a flat with a missing door and he walked inside. The place had been completely stripped out. A few old movie posters on the wall reminded him of the work he sacrificed so much for.

‘And what do I have now?’ he grunted and kicked a three-legged chair on the floor. ‘Fuck all!’

The windows of the flat were overlooking the scattered lights of the suburban side of the city. Without stopping, he climbed up the windowsill, sat down, and looked at the array of suburban lights at his feet. Somewhere in that dark field of dormant suburbia his family was fast asleep.

He closed his eyes and waited for the final push. Then it all went black.

* **

The metal fruit bowl landed on the floor and rung out loudly. He opened his eyes, but the intense light in the bedroom made him instinctively close them again. A soft whirring noise came in from outside. When he opened his eyes again, he saw a cleaning drone wiping surfaces in the kitchen.  

He lifted his head and looked around slowly. The sun shone brightly through his bedroom window.

‘Turn on window effect,’ he instructed his home system, squinting his eyes. The window tuned to a grey overcast sky.

He was still in his clothes. He writhed out from under his duvet, sat up, and rested on the side of his bed for a while, looking vacantly at the algorithmic ballet of the two drones cleaning his kitchen. He noticed his lenses in the charging gel in their cradle on his bedside table and reached for them. He hissed as they came in contact with his hungover eyes. The lenses activated.

‘Project footage from last night.’

His bedroom window turned black and the visual caption from his lenses started playing on the screen projected over the window. The footage showed the interior of a NaN franchise bar from the perspective of his eyes. As he turned his head towards the mirror behind the bar, the caption showed the reflection of his face in the mirror.

‘Double playback speed,’ he instructed again.

The video switched to a faster pace, showing him walk out to the street, encountering a homeless man, and walking aimlessly around a construction site. Then he walked into another NaN bar, downed numerous shots, and eventually stumbled into an autonomous cab unit, which took him home.

He turned off the video and got up. When he plodded over to the kitchen the drones moved on with their work to his bedroom.

‘Double espresso,’ he said, and a blue line on a black polygon on his kitchen surface lit up. The polygon purred. A minute later its side slid open, revealing a cup of synthetic coffee. He walked over to the eclipse-shaped swivel sofa in his lounge, but before he could sit down his home system turned on.

‘Clovis Peters calling.’

He almost dropped his coffee. Clovis Peters. He hadn’t heard that name for years. He stopped for a minute to allow the information sink in. Outside the window of his 45^th floor condo the sun started to reveal itself again from behind the dissipating clouds.

‘Forward call to my study,’ he said and walked through the door that opened from his lounge. His study was the antonym of the austere simplicity of the rest of his flat. Relics of a time gone cluttered the space. Collectibles and TV awards lined up irregularly on the dust laden shelves. A football, signed by a human, heralding an age when sports were played by risk-loving humans, rather than AI-generated visual effects. The walls were covered in posters of old TV productions, his name highlighted on every one of them.

The call was waiting for him on the holographic display projected above his desk.

‘There you are! The man of the moment!’ A man in a monochrome floral shirt bellowed from the projection.

‘Peters?’ he asked hesitantly as if fearing that anything harsh might wake him from the dream he was seeing. ‘What do you want?’ he asked. ‘I haven’t seen you in years.’

‘Ha-ha! Very funny. Are you OK? You look like shit pal! Where were you last night?’ Peters paused his unrelenting shouting for a second to download some information.

‘Oh, I see,’ he reassumed his harsh tone. ‘Data says you went fubar. Why didn’t you call me? Anyway, listen, why don’t you get some more sleep, and we speak later. We need that script finished by the end of next week. It’s still a bit rough around the edges.’

‘Script? By next week?’ he repeated some of Peters’ words almost inaudibly.

‘Don’t you dare butt out at this stage buddy. What is it? You want more money? Don’t tell me you found another agent!’

‘What agent?’ he asked. ‘Just hold on for a second. What script are you talking about?’

‘Alright, this is pointless. You go and get some sleep, then better get back to that script. I’ll call you tonight.’

The projection disappeared and his holo-projection reverted to his default arrangement displaying live weather information and entertainment intelligence against an animated caption of his wife and children.

He was still holding the coffee. When he slowly recovered, he put down his cup and sat down.

‘Show last message to Clovis Peters,’ he said.

The display showed an email from the previous day. The attachment said, “the_writer_version_9”.

‘Open attachment,’ he instructed. A scripted dialogue appeared in front of him. He started scanning through the text, then he scrolled down to read the end. “Without stopping he climbed up the windowsill, sat down, and looked at the array of suburban lights at his feet. Somewhere in that dark field of dormant suburbia his family was fast asleep. Try and beat me now, bastards!’ he whispered as he pushed himself off the ledge. THE END.”

‘Terrible ending,’ he whispered hesitantly, trying to recall when he wrote the story.

Instinctively, he started working the script, swapping words, cutting out slack, replacing long descriptions with action. As he immersed in the pages, the story started to feel familiar. Gradually, his brain opened up and gave way to memories of the long hours spent on the script. Memories of conversations with Peters were re-coded into his mind, and memories of conversations with...

‘Incoming call from your wife.’ The notification brought him back from his script. His body froze. His mind was haplessly looking for clues again to discern dream from reality.

‘Take call in my study,’ he instructed with a cranky voice.

The live holographic footage showed his wife and children.

‘Hi honey!’ she greeted him.

Honey. The word ignited previously forgotten neurons in his brain, reordering memories, and repositioning experiences. Suddenly the call didn’t seem so unexpected.

‘Hey guys,’ he said tentatively.

‘You left your running gear at home.’

‘Me? Running gear?’ The absurdity of the thought invited a smile to his bewildered look.

‘Yes, your running gear. Are you OK? You look confused.’

‘No, I’m fine. It’s just that I had this horrible dream last night. That you’ve left me, and I lost my job to machines, and that I was alone and desperate and totally unfit, and I was going to kill myself. Then when I got up, I got a call from Clovis Peters. You remember Peters, right? What a jerk.’

‘Clovis? Clovis Peters? Your friend? We had him over for dinner on Saturday, right?’

‘See, this is what I’m talking about. I have no recollection of any of this. Or the script I’m working on.’

She laughed.

‘Clovis phoned earlier. He said you went out last night.’

‘He did?’ he paused and gazed pensively into the air. ‘Yes, I did go out. And it seems I’ve had one drink too many.’

‘I’ll let you get back to sleep then. We just wanted to see you for a minute. Are you still able to get back early on Thursday night?’

‘Thursday night?’ he stopped again to remember. ‘Yes, of course, Thursday night.’ He hung up, got up from his desk, and before he could get to the bathroom, he threw up.

***

‘Adjustment sickness,’ a woman in a long lab coat said to her colleague whose white coat spelled “TRAINEE” on its back. They were standing next to a VR pod.

A man, in his 40s sat reclined in the pod. His eyes were closed, and his vomit was dribbling down his chin. The pod’s self-cleaning mechanism activated and began to clean him up. The woman scanned the pod’s code, entered something on the files, then she connected something to an implant on the motionless body. The screen on the pod turned to a video projection, showing visuals from the perspective of someone walking up to a house in a residential neighbourhood, a woman in her 40s followed by two children stepping out of the house, and reaching out for a hug.

‘Looks like he’s been stabilised,’ she said watching the footage from the man’s VR vision.

Her colleague nodded.

‘Why did we save him from jumping?’ he asked.

The woman looked at him and lowered the diagnostic tool in her hand.

‘Because he’s got something we don’t. Creativity can be a bastard to crack for algorithms. We’re at around 99% human level. That missing 1% decides whether a film sells or not, whether a book becomes a bestseller, and whether a piece of work becomes a piece of art. That 1% needs to be harvested.’

She disconnected the diagnostic tool.

‘Who’s next?’ she asked.

The trainee looked at his files.

‘A composer,’ he said. ‘Row 728. Another newbie, wrong initial parameters, needs full recalibration.’

They walked down the endless distance of the aisle between two sequences of VR pods. As they got further, their voices gradually blended into the orchestra of white noise humming gently from the machines. Back in the writer’s pod it was quiet again, and the calming green of the dimly lit room painted an elusive smile on his face.