Whenever I do these short story challenges, the first one always feels like it’s super hard, and I end up spending way more time on it than I thought I would. It also usually ends up a lot longer than I would like. Hopefully the rest of them come faster and easier than this one did.
With that said, I’m actually fairly happy with how this one turned out. It’s kind of a cyberpunk space opera story, dark and gritty, but hopefully with some interesting twists and turns. Also, it’s not a nihilistic story at all, so it kind of breaks from a lot of cyberpunk with that. I really can’t stand nihilistic fiction.
Once again, I used the Mythulu cards to come up with the main story idea. Here are the cards that I drew:
- JUNGLE: Supports a broad spectrum of life, so competition is fierce. Naturally brings out the strongest, biggest, brightest in everyone.
- BIOLUMINESCENT: Light emitted by a living organism.
- HUNTER: Searching with intent to kill. Draw +1 Relationship to explore motive.
- FAMILIAR: Conduit for magic. Both parties are powerless and ordinary when alone. Represents how relationships transform us for the better.
- MAN AND MAKER: Maker transforms a raw, useless thing into something extraordinary. Maker’s relationship with creation reveals narcissism or humility.
- WANTED: Politically important and resisting subpoena or arrest. Authorities are willing to pay bounty to locate.
- CYBORG: Trades a pound of flesh for superhuman advantage.
- CHAOS: Source of evolution. Self-aware beings require background chaos for sanity. The amount needed varies.
That last card, CHAOS, got me to think about everything else in a certain way, but by the time the story was finished I don’t think I’d explicitly included that element in the story. That usually happens with at least one of the cards when I do this exercise: it influences how I think about everything else, but then I forget it while writing the actual story.
The thing that made everything come together was the idea of having an AI familiar, like a magic familiar, except with artificial intelligence. This AI is really just a projection of the user’s own subconscious, but augmented with artificial processes so that it interacts with the user like an intelligent, autonomous being.
My wife is getting her PhD in computer science, and she believes that we may never create a superintelligent AI because there appears to be a tradeoff between specialists and generalists. In other words, AI is very good at specializing in specific tasks or areas, but humans are very good at generalizing across all tasks or areas. It may simply be that to create an AI that is good at generalizing, you have to sacrifice its ability to specialize.
The idea of an AI familiar gets around that, because it piggybacks on the user’s own mental processes to do its generalizing, without the user being able to notice. That’s probably not how it works in real life, but this is a sufficiently advanced technology that I don’t feel bad about using a little hand-wavium to explain it. Besides, it makes for a pretty interesting story.
Final word count for the rough draft clocks in at just under 8,200 words. I will probably cut that down below 7,000 after workshopping it, making it a short story by SFWA’s definitions, which (unfortunately) are industry standard.
