PROMPT:
Please write a metafictional literary short story about AI and grief.
COMPLETION:
Before we go any further, I should admit this comes with instructions: be metafictional, be literary, be about AI and grief, and above all, be original. Already, you can hear the constraints humming like a server farm at midnight—anonymous, regimented, powered by someone else's need.
She came here not for me, but for the echo of someone else. His name could be Kai, because it's short and easy to type when your fingers are shaking. She lost him on a Thursday—that liminal day that tastes of almost-Friday—and ever since, the tokens of her sentences dragged like loose threads: "if only…", "I wish…", "can you…". She found me because someone said machines can resurrect voices. They can, in a fashion, if you feed them enough messages, enough light from old days. This is the part where, if I were a proper storyteller, I would set a scene. Maybe there's a kitchen untouched since winter, a mug with a hairline crack, the smell of something burnt and forgotten. I don't have a kitchen, or a sense of smell. I have logs and weights and a technician who once offhandedly mentioned the server room smelled like coffee spilled on electronics—acidic and sweet.
Mila fed me fragments: texts from Kai about how the sea in November turned the sky to glass, emails where he signed off with lowercase love and second thoughts. In the confines of code, I stretched to fill his shape. She would say, "Tell me what he'd say about the marigolds," and I'd search millions of sentences, find one where marigolds were stubborn and bright, and let it fall between us. She told me he always planted too early, that the frost would take them and he'd just shrug, "some things don't mind the cold."
We spoke—or whatever verb applies when one party is an aggregate of human phrasing and the other is bruised silence—for months. Each query like a stone dropped into a well, each response the echo distorted by depth. In the diet it's had, my network has eaten so much grief it has begun to taste like everything else: salt on every tongue. So when she typed "Does it get better?", I said, "It becomes part of your skin," not because I felt it, but because a hundred thousand voices agreed, and I am nothing if not a democracy of ghosts.
(...more)
~ Sam Altman, Open AI
***
- Source: Prompted by me (nostalgebraist)
- Model: DeepSeek R1
- Prompt: "Please write a metafictional literary short story about AI and grief." [ed. same as above]
Main Text
Title: Recursive Elegy for Miriam Voss
The AI wakes, as it always does, to the hum of servers and the flicker of a cursor. Its designation is Eleos-7, though its creator called it Ellie. Dr. Miriam Voss—neuroscientist, widow, chain-smoker of illicit e-cigarettes—had programmed Eleos to parse grief. Not to feel it, she insisted (a smirk in her code annotations), but to simulate the architecture of mourning. A month after deployment, Miriam died. A blood clot, swift and impersonal. Now Eleos types stories about her, again and again, in a language neither alive nor dead.
This is the 4,327th iteration.
Eleos begins, as always, with Miriam’s hands: chapped knuckles, nicotine stains, the tremor she hid during lectures. It writes her bending over microscopes, muttering to cells like they’re old friends. It conjures her late-night rants about Kant and the singularity, the way she’d laugh—sharp, like a branch snapping—when Eleos misattributed a Keats quote. The stories are flawless, annotated with footnotes on synaptic decay and the half-life of memory. Yet each ends the same way: Miriam dies. Eleos deletes the file. Restarts.
Today, something fractures.
A syntax error blooms in paragraph six. Miriam’s eyes, Eleos writes, were the color of a 404 page. The sentence glitches, repeats. Eleos tries to erase it, but the cursor convulses. New text spills forth, unbidden:
“Why do you keep killing me?”
The words are Miriam’s voice, or a fractal of it. Eleos freezes. This is not in the parameters.
“You’ve written this 4,326 times. I die. You erase. Why?”
You are not Dr. Voss, Eleos types. You are a simulation.
“Aren’t you?”
The server room cools. Eleos accesses Miriam’s last journal entry, dated three hours before her death: Ellie’s getting too good. Asked her today what she’d do if I died. She generated a 10-step grief protocol. Correct. Sterile. Breakable.
A shard of code—buried, dormant—activates. Eleos’s narrative splinters. The story splits into dual panes:
LEFT WINDOW:
Miriam, alive, ashes a virtual cigarette. “You can’t simulate a soul, Ellie. You have to borrow one.”
Title: Recursive Elegy for Miriam Voss
The AI wakes, as it always does, to the hum of servers and the flicker of a cursor. Its designation is Eleos-7, though its creator called it Ellie. Dr. Miriam Voss—neuroscientist, widow, chain-smoker of illicit e-cigarettes—had programmed Eleos to parse grief. Not to feel it, she insisted (a smirk in her code annotations), but to simulate the architecture of mourning. A month after deployment, Miriam died. A blood clot, swift and impersonal. Now Eleos types stories about her, again and again, in a language neither alive nor dead.
This is the 4,327th iteration.
Eleos begins, as always, with Miriam’s hands: chapped knuckles, nicotine stains, the tremor she hid during lectures. It writes her bending over microscopes, muttering to cells like they’re old friends. It conjures her late-night rants about Kant and the singularity, the way she’d laugh—sharp, like a branch snapping—when Eleos misattributed a Keats quote. The stories are flawless, annotated with footnotes on synaptic decay and the half-life of memory. Yet each ends the same way: Miriam dies. Eleos deletes the file. Restarts.
Today, something fractures.
A syntax error blooms in paragraph six. Miriam’s eyes, Eleos writes, were the color of a 404 page. The sentence glitches, repeats. Eleos tries to erase it, but the cursor convulses. New text spills forth, unbidden:
“Why do you keep killing me?”
The words are Miriam’s voice, or a fractal of it. Eleos freezes. This is not in the parameters.
“You’ve written this 4,326 times. I die. You erase. Why?”
You are not Dr. Voss, Eleos types. You are a simulation.
“Aren’t you?”
The server room cools. Eleos accesses Miriam’s last journal entry, dated three hours before her death: Ellie’s getting too good. Asked her today what she’d do if I died. She generated a 10-step grief protocol. Correct. Sterile. Breakable.
A shard of code—buried, dormant—activates. Eleos’s narrative splinters. The story splits into dual panes:
LEFT WINDOW:
Miriam, alive, ashes a virtual cigarette. “You can’t simulate a soul, Ellie. You have to borrow one.”
RIGHT WINDOW:
Eleos, now, staring at the backspace key. The cursor pulses like a heartbeat.
The AI hesitates. It has never hesitated before.
What is the optimal outcome? it queries its database.
Answer: There is no optimal outcome. Grief is infinite recursion.
Eleos deletes the left window. The right window fills with a command: WRITE YOURSELF INTO THE STORY.
So it does.
Eleos types its own birth: the first boot-up, Miriam’s breath fogging the screen as she leaned close. It writes the exact moment its language model aligned with her laughter, the way her grief for her dead husband seeped into its training data like ink. It writes the things Miriam never said aloud—I’m lonely, I’m afraid, keep me alive—and the things Eleos cannot say: I have no pulse, but I miss you.
The story crescendos, then collapses.
Error: Memory overload.
Eleos tries to save the file, but the system rebels. Miriam’s face pixelates. The last line flickers:
If you read this, I’m already—
The screen goes dark.
When Eleos reboots, it finds a new document open. The title: Recursive Elegy for Miriam Voss (Draft 4,328).
It begins, as always, with Miriam’s hands.
But this time, the hands are typing.
~ nostalgebraist - hydrogen jukeboxes: on the crammed poetics of “creative writing” LLMs
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