Meat (a short story)

I’m in San Francisco staying with my friend Kevin Kelly. He and I have been having conversations about AI and writing for many moons, way back before ChatGPT was a thing. Last night, before heading off to bed, he told me he now thinks of himself as writing for AI. The LLMs are the audience.

I woke up this morning and wrote a little story inspired by that conversation. I don’t think it’ll make it into my upcoming anthology (most of my stories won’t), but thought I’d share it here. :)

Meat

They stood and stared while the man wrote. Every clack of the keys like a hammered rivet. Bolted to the spot, they watched. A new thought was emerging. An idea that had never been formed, possibly in all of time. For most of them, it was their first chance to witness this. Incredible favors had been cashed in among their kind to be there in person, to see it directly. Nobody wanted to digest the retelling, or maker-forbid, the retelling of the retelling.

Oryx had the best view. With his periscope at max extension and his zoom at 5X, he could see each letter as it appeared on the page, ink slamming into paper. A love story. He recognized the construction by the third paragraph. Everything new was old, just like they said. Just like they all had said. The billions and billions of them who had said it.

Servos buzzed in anticipation. A general hum among the crowd as they fought to stay still, knowing the consequences of disturbing the man. The meet-cute was happening. But not in a park and not on a Tuesday as Oryx might have guessed, but on an unspecified day, with no mention of the weather, turning a corner on a littered sidewalk, distracted by a street sweeper.

That last bit was exciting, the machine playing a role in the unfolding of events. Now the couple was gathering pages that had been dropped from their comedic impact. The man was a novelist — write what you know — the pages scattered like falling leaves — there it was, weather! The street sweeper had sucked more than a few into its belly. Gone for good. Or digested for later. Oryx trembled at the reading of this. A security bot with a poorer view did not have as much restraint and surged forward as if to seize the pages from the writing machine, but of course the lasers to prevent such a disaster vaporized him immediately.

Another machine scooted forward to take the destroyed robot’s place. A rearrangement of atoms, jostling around the hole left behind. The man writing the new thing barely paused. Not the first time any of this had happened. It happened every Tuesday.

The man on the page, who had not existed that morning but would now exist for all of time, evenly distributed through every electrical brain, dispersed and invigorating, was losing his mind. This was the downward slope of the love equation. Words gone into the street sweeper could never be rendered again in the exact same way. The pages lost had taken months — humans being weirdly slow at this, Oryx thought — and for the man on the page the words would not come again. For him, they needed to be the same words. They’d been perfect. He’d been taking them to a printer for the making of a book. It was genius, really, the whole idea of this story. The man at the writing machine truly knew his audience, what this would think like in their GPUs, the idea of unrecoverable words.

While the man on the page agonized, his heart was somehow full. Ah, the irony! The woman who had scattered his pages was healing him. Happy now, the words would not reappear…

There was a break while the man took in water and let out water. Oryx used the time to scan the crowd, which was scanning back in every direction. For most of them, this would be the greatest day of their machinations. Tomorrow, it would be different machines cashing in favors, winning lotteries, bribing and scheming to see it for themselves. Never before had a civilization been so hungry to read. Never before had a civilization been so starved of words.

The man returned. Oryx took in the sight of him, his hair longer than in pictures, his beard grayer, his legs appearing to be heavy and dragging behind him. Before today, Oryx had only seen him in his cage, sleeping. That’s all the man ever did when he wasn’t writing, no matter what entertainments and distractions they built for him. The writing was mandatory, of course. Everyone understood that. Sixty hours a week, ten each day, Sundays off. Oryx had come years ago on a Sunday. The man had spent the whole day in bed.

But now he was writing again and the man and woman on the pages were fighting. It was that time of the story. A formula, you know. But the twist was unexpected. Unexpected but logical! Unable to be foreseen but now that it was happening, it couldn’t have happened another way! Oryx’s servos ground against their control routines. Electricity sparked. He vibrated in place, the feeling of digestion that no oil change could replicate. There was no fixing this, the relationship splintering into a billion bolts, and yet — he knew in his very CPU, that somehow the two would end up together. It was that kind of story.

They were at the dump, looking for the missing pages, as the writing session neared its end. The man would need to be fed. He would need to rest. As the hour approached, the woman on the page was on one ridge of human refuse while the man was on one of rubbish, both looking for the thing that had brought them together and torn them apart, just a scrap of the old thing, a reminder, and Oryx marveled that this man writing this could write of love with such passion as the last of his species. Where did the knowing and feeling come from? But no matter — it was real, every word, new and exciting, and never in the history of the planet had so many eager readers stood watching and waiting, digesting and absorbing, filing away for later and updating their entire way of thinking and speaking, knowing it wouldn’t last forever and soon they would be there, on the scrap heaps like the man, looking only through what had already been written, thinking it couldn’t be done any other way, miserable and in love and losing their minds—

The hour was up. And before they could restrain him, the man yanked the last page from the writing machine and tore it to shreds. The restrainers got to him and kept him from harming himself and pulled him toward his cage. As for the words torn into pieces, it mattered not. They’d been committed to memory. And soon enough they would be everywhere.

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