TELL ME WHAT IT MEANS TO BE HUMAN
BY ESMÉ KAPLAN-KINSEY
WRITE ABOUT A WISH GONE WRONG
At the bottom of the well, there is a penny from 1984.
Phil threw it down there last night, and he regrets it now. Laurence bought it for him for their first anniversary, back when things still felt shiny. It is a valuable coin, in mint condition, showing a rare doubling error which collectors seek out–Lincoln’s copper ear printed twice, one curve superimposed on the other.
Last night Phil found the coin, still plastic-wrapped, in his coin drawer. He’d been drinking, and the glint of copper stirred up a childish urge to take poetic measures. He sent it spinning into the echoey dark of the well with a prayer for rebirth, like some kind of hippie. This morning, he drinks coffee and thinks about how he could have used any penny for that. It was the nicest thing Laurence ever gave him.
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WRITE ABOUT WRITING
If asked—once in a great while, it still happens—Phil no longer knows how to answer when a student poses the question, why did you become a writer?
Because he was a lonely kid. Because he fell in love with a whole string of boys who wanted to be poets. Because his ego was bloated yet easily punctured. Because he was afflicted not only with the impulses of the historian, but with the cursed desire to insert his personal opinion into the narrative, as if anybody cared.
If the student seems genuinely curious about his work, he might tell them he’s writing something new. Maybe it could be a book one day, he says. By some definition.
Usually he just responds, I’ve always found words to make good companions. Phil first put that sentence to paper in his 2032 book Silver Inferno. It had been taken out in the second printing—his editor thought it cast the act of writing in an unnecessarily solipsistic light.
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WRITE A FAILED ATTEMPT
In the afternoon, there are papers to grade, but instead Phil finds himself hanging over the well’s stone wall, pointing a flashlight into the slippery dark. The water throws back slick black shine, nothing but the flashlight’s reflection. His shirt is streaked with slime mold when he stands back up.
Phil walks back to the ratty armchair on the porch, which he occupies so frequently its foam has molded to his shape. He opens his computer, closes the tab of his manuscript —its placeholder title is Where Words Go to Die, and he feels suddenly taunted by it. He clicks on a folder of ArtCre8 submissions and gets to work.
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DESCRIBE THE DAY-TO-DAY
Ever since Laurence left for Europe, things have been going to shit, a fact Phil makes no pretense about. The house is far too big for one person—Phil and Laurence bought it together a decade ago, a renovated farmhouse on a few acres outside of town. Back then, they were crazy in love and planning for the end of the world. They paid an exorbitant price for the property, banking on the implosion of the lending company, the economy, anything to render their student loans irrelevant. They thought they’d start a farm in preparation for the inevitable supply chain collapse, live off free-range eggs and potatoes, watch society dissolve from a comfortable distance. But neither of them had any idea how to farm beyond a vague, original impulse, an Adam-and-Eve type fantasy. The cornstalks wilted before the ears could ripen, and the chickens, caught up in some cannibalistic fancy of their own, took to devouring their eggs, a crime committed earlier in the morning than Phil was willing to wake up.
This year, the house feels colder than it used to in winter, and warmer in summer, like Laurence carted the insulation off to Europe along with their shower curtain and Phil’s dead mother’s most iridescent pair of heels. Once in awhile, Phil has a vision of Laurence dancing in those shoes, somewhere in a noisy, faraway dark, friction blistering his ankles. Or drinking with groups of faceless friends, at gala events full of accomplished, undoubtedly sexy academics like himself, flashing the seductive glitter of those shoes. Phil has no doubt Laurence is doing well for himself, which is aggravating.
Meanwhile, Phil rereads retro-fic novels in the musty living room and pawns his least favorite coins to make mortgage payments. When he’s got it in him, he works on his manuscript. He has a ludicrous hope of writing a narrative that reroutes the market back towards human thought. He hasn’t shown the manuscript to anyone—he’s quite aware it’s terrible, that even the simplest art-fic generator could do better.
Most evenings, he sits on the front porch and reads his students’ stories. Most write very little: ninety percent have opted to submit their ArtCre8 prompt for grading alongside its generated story, rather than compose the text themselves. For the last five summers, Phil has petitioned the creative writing department to ban artificial fiction in coursework, but the pushback from faculty and students has been harsh. He’s giving it up this year; he’s got his tenure track to look after. His objection was principled, sure, but it was also because art-fic made his job so damn boring. Back in the day, he’d plow through a mountain of nonsense stories, enjoying how each piece was so phenomenally distinct. Every story possessed a new point of view, no matter how poor the writing. Now, even when the stories are good—and sometimes they are, ArtCre8’s algorithm is much more narratively proficient than the average undergrad—Phil can’t get past the fact he’s effectively grading a computer.
But that’s not how his colleagues see it. He recalls one impassioned email: this is not about individual principles. It’s about your students learning how to navigate the job market. To expect a return to retro-fic methodology is to deprive your students of opportunity in the reality we live in.
Phil knows the world is different now. Really, just about everything he can think of is different, and Phil fears his struggle against the onslaught of art-fic may have been his last attempt to push back the forces of entropy. Maybe that’s why he’s fought so hard, he reflects, as he washes dishes, pours himself a coffee mug full of wine. The campaign represented something tangible against which to throw his weight. But he knows fighting physics is pointless, has been hit over the head with that conclusion more times than he can count. He’s about ready to call it quits.
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WRITE AN UNEXPECTED DEVELOPMENT
In the evening, Phil opens his inbox to find a startlingly enthusiastic email from a grad student who has read Silver Inferno. She’s written, I’d love to come to your office hours and discuss your inspiration, or maybe get coffee on campus?
Phil responds that he’s free to get coffee the following morning, taking care to strike a tone which conceals his gratification. In the attentive selection of words, turns of phrase, punctuation, he finds himself writing an easy-going, authorial self into being the same way he would a character—a consciousness existing only in marks on a page, but still, something that breathes.
Phil hates to pay for a cup of coffee when he can make a perfectly serviceable one at home, but he recalls the pecan muffins at the campus cafe are surprisingly good. He doesn’t go there often these days—because he has food at home, and not a whole lot of money to throw around, and because he and Laurence used to study there during their MFAs. Laurence had been on a poetry kick back then, and he was writing about horses and teeth and winter all the time. Phil was in the early drafts of Silver Inferno. One late night, walking back to their apartment, Laurence told him he thought it was the worst thing Phil had ever written. You’re misreading the cultural attitude, hon. You’re looking back instead of forward. People will read this and think you’re anti-progress—conservative, even. And Phil said, that’s about the meanest thing you could say to me, you know, and Laurence had kissed his cheek and said, better me than your agent—you’re still drafting. You can turn the whole project around.
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WRITE THE MEETING AT THE CAFE
The grad student’s name is Melissa. She is taller, prettier, and altogether more of a person than Phil was anticipating. She orders a dirty chai and a croissant and when Phil turns from the counter, she is squinting at him from a table by the window. The look on her face makes him realize she’s been anticipating this conversation for awhile, maybe years. He hasn’t gotten one of those in a long time, and he’s not sure he’s equipped for it. She’s the sort who would have showed up with a list of questions. He’s got no answers these days.
He sits down at the table, starts with something easy. “What do you think of Sutton?”
“I went here for undergrad,” she says. “Not much has changed, has it?”
Debatable, Phil doesn’t say. She’s got a typewriter tattoo on the back of her hand, which is holding a notebook. He nods to it.
“That’s a blast from the past, eh?” The notebook, he means, and the tattoo too.
“Isn’t that what we’re doing here, Mr. Cooper?” she says.
“I don’t know what you’re doing here.” Phil sips his coffee, which is decidedly inferior to the pourover stuff he makes at home. “Have you tried any muffins here lately? Are they good?”
“I’m here to talk about retro-fic, Mr. Cooper,” says Melissa.
Phil puts his coffee down.
“I’m writing a thesis exploring the rise of artificial intelligence in writing. My advisor put me onto Silver Inferno. It’s been really influential in my research.”
“That’s nice to hear,” Phil says.
Inside, he winces. His memoir, his devastatingly personal experience of the death of retro-fic, is a textbook for studies of the technology which torpedoed his career. It’s very nearly funny.
He makes eye contact with Melissa for the first time since he’s arrived. Her brow furrows; he notices a mole below her ear. If he were to write her into a story, that mole would matter, would be a dark pinpoint window into her psyche, but in life it’s nothing much, not really, just a bodily blip she runs a finger over as she waits for his response.
He’s at a loss for words, his least favorite state. This girl is so driven, so earnest. He doesn’t have anything to say that won’t make him sound like an asshole.
“I’m most interested,” she says, “in the idea of the Silver Age of fiction. That the demand for alternative reality increases as the world destabilizes, how it’s opened up new avenues for art-fic and creative AI.”
“Melissa,” he says. He likes that name. In his second or third year of undergrad, he once wrote a short story whose protagonist had a sister named Melissa. The character was a real mess, a confused binge-drinker just like Phil had been back then. He’d loved his sister, though. All these years later, those are the only details Phil can recall.
“Did you ever want to be a writer, Melissa?”
She considers it. “Yes, when I was young. I always liked to see what words could do.”
“Were words an escape, for you? Were they friends you could play with when you were lonely? Were they rooms you could barricade yourself inside of?”
“Mr. Cooper,” she says, “I’m sure you’re a busy man.”
It takes everything Phil has not to laugh out loud.
“I’m writing a novel,” he says instead. “Retro-fic.”
He hadn’t meant to tell her. But she’s poked at a topic uncomfortably close to his ego—he feels the need to defend it.
“Hard sell these days, no?” says Melissa.
“The words will speak for themselves,” says Phil. “Words shifted the market—who’s to say it can’t shift them back?” He wishes he’d kept his mouth shut, pivots for a way out. “Do you have a copy of Silver Inferno you want signed?”
She pulls the book out of her bag. That familiar black-lined cover. The pages are dog-eared, smudged with blue ink. He learns something about Melissa, a small real thing, from the state of that book.
He flips to the dedications page. For Laurence, it says, in swooping italics. He writes For Melissa and then has nothing else to say, scrawls out an impersonal Thank you! and shuts the book.
When he looks up, she’s already at the counter paying the bill. Phil stifles a pang of regret for evading her questions, for derailing her research, for being so old and boring. He shakes her hand as she returns to the table, mumbles something about assignments to grade, sidesteps the cup-laden tables, makes his escape.
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WRITE AN AFTERMATH
When Phil gets home, he drinks a bottle of wine and lays the entirety of his coin collection across the floor. In the sink of afternoon sun, the equidistant spots make little footpaths of copper and silver, gleaming and leading to nowhere.
Phil photographs each coin, making sure to catch the most flattering angle of shine. He posts the pictures on eBay, and by the end of the night has a range of offers. He doesn’t feel sad about the dwindling of the collection. Perhaps his coin-collecting days are behind him.
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WRITE THE FACTS
These are the facts.
No one wants to read retro-fic anymore.
The world is progressively more fucked up by the day. Fires in the hills, rivers surging poisonous green, tree-stump spines stabbing into a sky roiling blue-gray with smog. Drought, food shortages, contamination and contagion. A gradual, constant destabilization of the natural order, and a proportionate acceleration of human suffering.
Phil has a class tomorrow, and no plan to speak of. When morning rolls around he will find himself talking, as usual, out of his ass.
The reason art-fic is so popular is because it is created by a consciousness which has never had to navigate being alive.
The problem with retro-fic is that it makes the alluring mess of human existence impossible to forget.
No one wants to read that shit.
In recent years, art-fic has become the dominant method of storymaking. Laurence Klein (formerly Klein-Cooper) published the wildly popular ArtCre8 novel, TELL ME WHAT IT MEANS TO BE HUMAN, in 2034, marking a turn in the literary market towards generated narrative. These days, writing retro-fic is seen as something of a dated hobby, like archery, or coin collecting.
Phil is aging and lazy and full up to the brim with regret. When he shines a flashlight into himself, all he sees is black dazzle. That surface, opaque, impenetrable.
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TELL ME WHAT IT MEANS TO BE HUMAN
The phrase “tell me what it means to be human” refers to a 2034 text by Laurence Klein. Due to copyright restrictions, ArtCre8 cannot produce an answer for this prompt. For further information on Klein’s work, check out this link.
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WRITE A CLASS
The students are sleepy and inattentive this morning, just like Phil. He is giving a lesson on how to compose ArtCre8 prompts. He’s never been good at it, so he’s stolen a list of examples off Laurence’s old computer and is presenting them as his own. Intellectual property is on its deathbed—he might as well take advantage of it.
“Be specific,” he tells the class, “attend to tone, detail, desired content. The outcome is all about the precision of vision.” It’s not bad writing advice, really, not for real writing, so of course no one is listening.
A young man at the front of the class raises his hand.
“What happens,” he asks, “if the prompt doesn’t do any of that? No detail, no specifics? Will ArtCre8 still write a story?”
“It usually will,” says Phil. “I get lots of terrible prompts submitted in these classes, and sometimes the algorithm still pulls it out. It’s a lot smarter than you, or me, or probably all of us put together.”
“So can you use ArtCre8 to generate prompts for itself?” asks another student.
“Are you asking,” Phil says, “whether you can remove the human from the writing process entirely?”
The student, who clearly was just hoping to cheat on her homework, looks startled. “I didn’t intend to.”
“I can’t answer that one,” said Phil. “Why don’t you give it a try and get back to me?”
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WRITE AN ENDING
Phil comes home from class to a frightening envelope: he has missed multiple mortgage payments and has been issued a fine.
He also has a terse email from Melissa in his inbox. Thanks for meeting. Wondering if you could put me in touch with any colleagues who can offer further insight on the rise of art-fic.
Phil goes on eBay and lists the remainder of his valuable coins. All told, they are worth about $600–most of his prized pieces were bought weeks or months ago. He is kicking himself for throwing that pricey penny down the well.
He forwards Melissa’s email to Laurence. They haven’t been in contact since last summer, when Laurence emailed Phil an extensive photo album of him on a Barcelona beach. He’d written, Hey Phil, hope everything isn’t too far gone over there. Hope your students are giving you things to think about. Miss you. Phil wrote back Looking good! Living the life, I see. Miss you too. Then he had drunk a bottle of gin and debated, with an even blend of ironic self-indulgence and solemnity, whether or not to drive his car into the river.
Laurence loves to share his expertise with students, and Melissa could hardly have hoped for such a well-placed contact. Phil has made some small sort of amends.
Still, no one is buying the coins. The officially stamped letter crouches on the corner of Phil’s desk like something predatory.
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WRITE A HAPPY ENDING
Phil writes, I’m sorry about earlier. Can we meet again?
Melissa responds, why don’t you buy me a drink and we can go from there?
They meet at a mediocre cocktail bar downtown. They don’t even talk about writing. Phil spends the night at her apartment.
From there, it is all roses and sunshine. It is coffee in bed, walks around the periphery of campus, conversations of a quality Phil thought he’d never experience again. They are engaged ten months later. Melissa moves into Phil’s house. She knows how to tend a garden. They hatch chicks beneath a heat lamp, eat potatoes fried fresh out of the dirt. They sit on the porch reading poetry aloud to each other. While the world caves in on itself, they live happily ever after.
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WRITE A BETTER ENDING
Phil opens his computer to an email from his agent, who has not contacted him in several years. The syntax spikes his heart rate—the publishing company wants a retro-fic manuscript and wonders if he’s got anything he’d like to send.
Phil pulls up the manuscript he’s been banging his head against. Where Words Go to Die is about humanity and love and loss and hope and, as usual, it hurts to look at.
He rereads the email, and a deadline jumps out at him: the agent wants a draft by next week. So it’s impossible. So it will never happen. He can’t put this literary dumpster fire out into the world.
Well, there is a way, a forbidden one.
But how would anyone ever know?
Phil opens ArtCre8 in a new browser. Before his conscience can stop him, he pastes his entire document into the text box.
FINISH THIS MANUSCRIPT, he types into the prompt field.
He sits back in his chair, sick to his stomach, watching his magnum opus write itself.
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WRITE A PLAUSIBLE ENDING
Phil panics awake in the middle of the night, the envelope from the mortgage company glowing in his mind. He needs some sort of break. He needs to keep the house. He needs a hug from Laurence which he will never ever get.
He needs a last resort. There’s a ladder in the basement. Phil carries it upstairs, pictures himself Jesus on his limping way to crucifixion, then laughs at the idea of himself as any sort of holy.
The ladder is just long enough to get him into the well. Phil climbs downward, careful in the blackness. The well smells just like a well, mold and rain and cold stone. His feet are in the water, already going numb. Another two rungs down, he loses his body to the cold, inch by inch. But there’s a penny in there, waiting for his scrabbling hands, a coin flip that could turn his life around. Phil thinks to himself, I guess my wish won’t be coming true. He holds his breath, uncurls his fingers from the ladder, waits to sink like a dream into the dark.
