Extant Publishing
A short story about the dystopian future of AI-generated content
[Ed. Note]1
James looked up from the memo sparsely populated with text that had been left on his desk. “Report to the 3rd floor?” he said aloud to no one in particular. “Not even a room number?”
He deliberately ignored the “ASAP” appended to the message by stopping by the water fountain. A few strides beyond was the elevator. He took the stairs instead.
The third floor was two floors below, and James leisurely stepped without skipping any. When he got to the third floor, he opened the door. Well, he tried to open the door. “Locked? Isn’t that a fire hazard?” He continued down to the second floor where he discovered the door wasn’t locked so used it to circle back to the elevator.
He half expected the third floor button not to light, but it did. The elevator accelerated a short distance and stopped. He stepped out the door when it opened, and was hit with a dart. Then darkness.
James awoke in an office. It was a very clean office. It was blue-gray and free of clutter — or really, anything at all except two empty chairs on the other side of a desk, the chair he was sitting in, and a pad of paper with a pen. There appeared to be a camera in the upper corner. The only other object in the room was a chain locking one leg to the desk.
In addition to inventorying the space, James also wondered why he was taking this so well. Somehow the urge to pull at the chain was just not coming. He rationally thought it should be coming, but the emotional response failed somewhere in the chain of neurons that controlled that sort of thing.
It was maybe a minute before two people entered the room and introduced themselves as Shannon and Michael. Business casual, but with white lab coats over top.
“You’ve been given a high dose of an anti-anxiety medication,” Shannon said.
“Why should I be anxious?” James asked, and tugged briefly on his leg chain.
“Your productivity is low,” Michael said.
“My productivity?”
“… is low,” Michael finished for him. “We are with Llamacorp. We are a business management and services consulting firm as well as a leader in productivity enhancing technologies.”
Shannon pointed to the vaguely llama-shaped logo on her lab coat made from the stylized letters ‘LLM’.
“Extant Publishing hired us to help restructure their company. They gave us the whole third floor for our labs and processing.” Shannon was much more chipper than Michael. “We are going to replace your brain with the latest LLMPU.”
“My brain?”
“Yes.”
”With a … what now?”
”A LLMPU — a Large Language Model Processing Unit, similar to a GPU but optimized to train and run Large Language Models. They’re powered by blood sugar at almost the same rate as your actual brain — they take slightly more, but the benefit is that you’ll probably lose a bit of weight.” Shannon was obviously excited by her work.
“So you’re going to put a computer chip in my brain …” James wasn’t sure the meds were working any more.
“Replace,” Shannon said as she pulled a life-sized clear plastic brain case packed with circuit boards out of her oversized pocket.
“How is this legal?”
“You signed the consent form,” Michael said.
“I don’t think I consented to surgery.”
“You consented to productivity-enhancing technologies.”
“Which this clearly is,” Shannon added.
“What happens when my brain is replaced?”
”Most patients feel the procedure has enhanced their productivity. And that is borne out by data — content production is up several thousand percent.”
“But aren’t they dead?”
Shannon started pointing to the tube at the bottom of the plastic brain case. “Your autonomic functions still run normally as the brain stem isn’t removed, it’s just slotted in here.”
“But like temporal lobes …” James wished he had remembered his anatomy class in college better.
“All of the functions of the cerebrum are replaced by the LLM,” Shannon said. “Most patients report that they feel fine after the procedure.”
“But isn’t that just the model responding with randomly generated text that on the surface looks like a real human just due to probability?” James had been reading the news about LLMs lately — especially because there was fear among the writing staff that Extant Publishing might replace their writing, their reviews of restaurants, of airlines, of concerts with ‘AI’ generated content. Apparently it was already — just not in the way any of them had imagined. Has anyone else had this done? he thought. Almost certainly yes was the answer that emerged from the back of his soon to be replaced brain.
“Llamacorp conducted dozens of Turing tests and was unable to distinguish human brains from LLMPUs.”
“But won’t it no longer be me?”
”That’s where this pad comes in,” Michael said, finally sitting down in one of the empty chairs. “We need you to document your experiences.” He pushed the pad towards James, the pen riding along.
“My experiences? My whole life?”
“We've already processed your work email and your personal email,” Shannon said.
James thought back to an exchange he’d had with someone he’d dated for a few months nearly twenty years ago and cringed.
“How did you get my personal email?” James asked.
“You accessed it from your work computer,” Michael said flatly.
“We just need you to document the little things, the things that make you you,” Shannon said with a smile. She pointed twice at James’ head to emphasize the last two words.
“You do want your experiences to live on in the LLMPU, right?” Michael asked. “Because your experiences are what make you you.”
“It also works as a handwriting sample for fine motor control calibration,” Shannon added, never breaking her smile. James got the impression that she was particularly proud of that efficient use of resources.
James stared at the pad of paper.
His first kiss at twelve out behind the church after CCE while waiting for his parents to pick him up.
Standing in a calm warm ocean waist deep in the middle of the night with a distant thunderstorm and the moon's light casting a rainbow.
The taste of the perfectly ripe Charentais melon he'd grabbed on a whim from the grocery store that he still remembered twenty years later.
Listening to the coworker who would become his wife sing Blackpink’s Forever Young at a company karaoke night.
Suddenly feeling like every car around him had turned white as he struggled to keep out of a skid and a multi-car pile-up after being rear-ended on the 5.
The warm puff of his wife’s breath on his neck as she fell asleep helping him forget a long day.
James remembered his friend from college; a math major. He was never particularly good at math, but his friend told him a story about Galois — scrambling to write all his mathematical ideas down in the few days before a fateful duel. At least his opponent had a soul.
“How do I convey my love for my wife just by writing? I write articles about airline food, not poetry.” James collapsed his head into his hands, but those parts of his body all just continued through to the table.
“Your wife?” Shannon looked quizzically at the top of James’ head.
“Your wife had the procedure done nearly a decade ago,” Michael said.
James couldn’t bring himself to do the mental math.
“Your relationship has been just fine, right?” Shannon asked. “I wrote a paper about that one based on downlinked logs — my old advisor said you never could recreate love. Wow, was he wrong.”
James looked blankly at the two Llamacorp employees due to a mixture of existential horror and the absurdity of the situation. He finally understood Camus.
“There’s no alternative?”
“No alternative.”
“How long do I have?”
“Three hours; until COB today.”
James grabbed the pen and started writing.
He wrote about the embarrassment he felt missing the first word at the state-level spelling bee.
He wrote about the sheer terror at realizing he had just blurted out ‘I love you’ to the girl he had a crush on in high school while sitting on a bench at the mall.
He wrote about the power of the guilt he lived with for years after stealing a special pen from the kid at his table in fourth grade — and was feeling again in the remembering.
He wrote about the deafening heartache of putting down his kid’s hamster in the middle of the night, alone, at the only 24 hour vet service within hundreds of miles — driving back with that tiny body in a bank check box.
He wrote about regrets — not taking that other job a decade ago was forefront in his mind right now, but then he wouldn’t have met his wife. Who somehow knew all the words to Blackpink’s Forever Young. Despite not speaking any other Korean or ever listening to K-pop.
It was amazing, though.
“James has done well for himself.” Shannon tilted the screen of her phone towards Michael who was eating a sandwich. It was a book event. A photograph of James showed his blank smile and distantly focused eyes. He was dressed in khakis and a navy polo. He had lost weight.
“Come have J. S. Roberts sign your copy of his new best seller Lunar Rainbow published by Extant Publishing,” Shannon read from the screen. “See — we really can help people with their productivity. They only do tours for the content that sells a ton of units.”
“Eighty percent of the reading market is just other LLMPUs these days. Probably because they read so much faster.” A bit of food shot from Michael’s mouth on that last ‘t’.
“It's like they're out searching for something written in all those books.”
“I couldn’t imagine what.”
© Jason Smith
This story is a rough draft; it was written in a cramped economy class seat with elbows firmly to ribs on a flight from DC to Denver. It is not “canon” in the Inner Horizon universe.