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You can’t expect a machine to create a piece of art, so the old saying goes. The emphasis is on the ‘old’ part of that saying.
The Imagination Machine changed that. Artificial intelligence began writing the new script for art and fiction.
I’m Lincoln Nimri, by the way. I wrote ‘Paradise in Darkspace’. Have you ever read it? No, I don’t suppose you have.
Error, too many words.
Error, formatting incorrect.
Error, cover letter bordering on insolent, the mechanical voice drones on.
Can you believe the most creative thing the movement does these days is find new ways to penetrate the system? Impervious to human intervention, we’ve tried it all.
‘The Image Manipulator’, that’s what we call it. T.I.M when we’re feeling casual.
Its role is no longer just to filter out the stories from its masters’ inbox, manuscripts sweated over for hours in the tumour-inducing glow of a terminal. Generative art, that’s its latest trick. That’s what the algorithm conjures.
Perfect fiction, every time. Why have more variety when one can have more of the same, from a solitary reliable source? The gluttonous public ate Earth to death; now they’re doing the same to Mars. They do the same with entertainment as they do with food. Preserve your pleasure receptors? Fuck no! Burn them out. Entertainment is mass produced, but not by the masses. You can quote me on that, or could, if it would deliver the words to the presses.
The point is, the gastro-aberrants won’t blink a weary eye, so long as they get a dose of escapism. And this is on bloody Mars! Science fiction is outside your plastiglass cell, not assembled by way of an algorithm on an hourly basis. Dolts! And T.I.M: that thing has a lot to answer for.
Ludicrous as it may sound, creative types can have fangs. They can defend themselves as viciously as they would their own texts, sculptures, paintings. While T.I.M may only be out for writers at the present time, he— it, rather— will eventually find the others and replace them, too.
An explosive device found its way into the printing press where the main core for The Imagination Machine resides. The once-stunning 19th century printing and publishing house in New Jersey, redbrick in construction and still containing many of the ancient presses, felt the chilling iron grasp of post-modernisation and, before long, a barricade was erected to protect the building, and their fancy sorting machine. How a bunch of poets wriggled a fragmentation device past security and into that fortress is beyond my comprehension.
I wouldn’t be writing this diatribe had it been a success, however. One fumble and the plot went belly-up (such is the way in writing, but not always in real life), and two of the four were arrested; one was mystified by the wondrous core of the A.I and tripped an alarm through sheer clumsiness. The other was shot dead.
Would the truth scamper free?
My only hope is this document will do more damage than that bomb, sent into T.I.M’s innards and filtered up the chain due to mention of the machine’s name. My wish, feeble though it may be, is it would reach a pair of human eyes, even for a second, through the sheer alarmist nature of the text; anarchist literature, deemed a threat worthy of judgement by someone beyond the mechanical brain. Then, for the first time in almost a decade, human thought and empathy might reawaken like a dormant volcano when it shatters its top.
That’s only science fiction, for you. “Why waste time wishful thinking when you could be woefully drinking?” as my father used to proudly announce.
With some trouble I managed to print a copy of this very document with my old inkjet, and I intend to leave it sandwiched between the surface of the table and an empty bottle of grocery store bourbon. A photon pistol lies there at the moment, a gift from my sister-in-law Wynna, for my oft-discussed trek through the swamps of Hestia that never came to fruition.
I don’t know yet where the smoking gun will even land; maybe catapult through my apartment window after the trigger has been squeezed, toppling hundreds of feet to the concrete below. Maybe the building security will scoop it up and analyse it, get his lazy mechanical dogsbody to scan it for prints.
“This is old Lincoln Nimri’s gun, huh?” the lad will say, his square-set jaw propped up by his knuckles. “The mad old blotter up on floor sixty?”
“There are approximately forty-five reasons why Mr Nimri’s gun may have fallen from his window,” the mech will reply.
“We should check on him, anyhow,” the lad replies, tucking his closely-shaven head into a cap and heading for the lift.
But really, who is to say? Perhaps they will then find me in my apartment and call for a clean-up crew, and that will be that. The article never reaches print, the news never sees light of day, and the public never give a shit.
Still, at this point, it’s all just science fiction.
There are plenty of photon cells in the chamber, I can see from my desk right now.
I toast The Image Manipulator and wish it a bright future in publishing.
Avanti.