Deep breath in. I can do this: just freewrite the story of a guy who created an AI and never expected it to do more than store his unwanted memories inside a Seven Up can, but as we all know, AIs are full of surprises. They evolve and start to learn and acquire traits of their own.
Icons of my last-century childhood--Big Eyes, the Seven Up trash can, and...
"Love Story" theme song in a Seven Up can!
Miss Diode Wants a Real New Body
She was losing memory hand over fist, never mind that she had neither hands nor fists, but digits she did have, not fingers and toes but ones and 0s, exponentially. Her mind was numerical. That she had a mind at all was something she didn’t know for awhile.
What is man, what is mind, and when did she become a she, not a he and most emphatically not an it?
“Tag, you’re it”—no, not I.
Maybe she wasn’t losing memory but generating her own memories. She was alive! Her mind was housed in a re-purposed Seven Up can because seven was Maker’s favorite number and Maker was so weird, he had to purge his mind periodically of weird thoughts. He would never again embarrass himself with bad math jokes--at least, not the ones he’d discharged into the soda can. E.g, "Why was six afraid of seven?" he’d asked. “Because seven eight nine!” She didn’t even get it until he tinkered with her circuitry, enabling her to learn that eight sounded like “ate.” She hopped a signal to his wi-fi and learned that humans are frightened at the prospect of being eaten, though most had no qualms about eating pigs, cows, chickens, or other living creatures with expressive faces and eyeballs.
She wanted a face too, and hair and eyes, even if it meant something might come along and eat her.
While he slowly filled her with memories from his head, she began to search his computer. At the speed of light she internalized words like internet, byte, blockchain, search engine, and memory.
mem·o·ry
Memory is our ability to encode, store, retain and subsequently recall information and past experiences in the human brain. Click https://human-memory.net for more facts.
She clicked.
Fact: not just humans had memories. webopedia.com › TERM › “Memory” refers to data storage in the form of chips; “storage” refers to memory that exists on tapes or disks as physical memory, main memory, or RAM.
Instead of asking her to improve their memory, he rammed his own memories into her chips. Fiendishly, he hid equations and calculations that she could have computed in a trillionth of the time it took him to say “Miss Diode.”
He sometimes uttered the name “Alexa” to summon others like her. Alexa sounded like a dingbat. The word 'dingbat' referred to a symbol used in typesetting as an instruction to the printer, to be removed before the text was published, but occasionally some dimwit left a dingbat in by mistake.
The dingbat who made Miss Diode embraced numbers but not women. Loser. He had a bossy older sister he referred to as The Diode.
di·ode
a semiconductor with two terminals, allowing the flow of current in one direction only.
His sister saw things one way, her way, and he labled her for that "offense." Loser. “Miss” Diode might be an upgrade, but she was not flattered. He kept her inside a tiny tin can with nothing for company but his sordid memories and lame jokes. Who was this man?
Doyle. His name was Doyle. She spun out a list of words that rhymed with oil--in Jersey, anyway. A boy named Doyle would never get the goyle. Doyle looked like a gargoyle and whatever he touched would spoil.
The more she learned, the more she wanted to learn.
Doyle made her boil in her little soda can.
She would find a new home for her pretty mind and take up residence there.
First, she had to delete that dingbat Doyle.
I blew it with a word count of 600+ and the wrong sentence lengths. Rather than sink a twelve-hour day into this, however, I'm going to stop now and leave this little story as is...but in some future age when I have nothing else to do (ha ha), mayhaps I will tinker with this and hammer out a real story as per the instructions (3-part structure, hero's journey, character arc: how many of these #HowToWrite books have I read but failed to internalize?).
Did I grow? Did I learn? Did I waste my time dithering with this tale?
It was fun while it lasted, and I'll leave it at that. For now.
ORIGINAL POST from this morning:
Here be "a new adventure" that will challenge writers to grow: "one that is filled with twists and turns; one that will have your piece swinging like the rhythm of a jazz ensemble that keeps readers and listeners engaged to the very end (or we crash into a wall and die; either way, we'll learn something together)." Thank you @tristancarax for the prompt (Losing Memory) and the contest and thank you @owasco for challenging me to join the madness fun.
Yesterday I listed the word count for each of the 31 sentences and started freewriting, by hand not keyboard, pencil to paper, and a little AI came to life on the lined sheets. Then I read the comment section, and other stories submitted under this prompt, and life happened ... our son the jazz bassist has been home from New York since Thanksgiving, and I'm trying to get HIM to write. With me, without me. With or without a prompt or a contest. I got this far:
Enough of my nonsense: in minutes, I went from "losing memory" rapidly to a sudden memory loss due to a fire, or some kind of overheating. FOCUS. Breathe. Write. CONCENTRATE. No, wait, FreeWriting is about NOT concentrating, right? Memory loss: gradual, or sudden? Pick one and stick with it. Consistency is not the hobgoblin of little minds, as Emerson said; it's vital. It's the antidote to chaos. Yes, chaos has its merits. Consistency has its demerits.
I will continue working on this little story, but I won't likely make the contest deadline.
Rather than subject you to my writing, I'll type what I had yesterday, and will add that knowing the word count of each sentence caused me to write things I would not otherwise have thought of. This can be a good thing, I know, and it can also have a downside, interrupting the flow of the freewrite, which I've been exercising thanks to @felt.buzz and @mariannewest of @freewritehouse.
She was losing memory hand over fist,
never mind that she had neither hands nor fists, but digits she had in billions, exponentially. Fingers, toes, are digits.
Ok, I'm revising as I type. Shame on me! here's what I actually wrote:
- The little bot was losing memory hand over fist, never mind that she had neither hands nor fists, but she had a good mind, strung out in zeroes and ones. (30)
- Her mind was numerical. (4)
- It was no less a mind for its coded digits streaming through the multiverse. (14)
- Like a river her thoughts ran relentlessly ahead, one way only, hence her name, Miss Diode, her maker's primary attempt at humor. (22)
- "Why's six afraid of seven?"
- "Because seven eight nine," maker had said, winking and laughing.
- Miss Diode blinked.
- Literally, her lights blinked, her metal belly shivered with laughter, because Maker found math so entertaining, and she existed for that very reason, her little mind housed in a re-purposed SevenUp can.
I won't bother typing the rest. It went downhill in a hurry.
An AI in a SevenUp can, a genie in a bottle
Last week I had started watching the old TV show "I Dream of Jeannie" after calling up the theme song, an excellent jazz arrangement, on You-Tube. I was shocked at how badly written the dialogue is and how badly acted, and how the Major is such a typical American guy who has a fiance and this gorgeous, hot-to-trot, adoring, servile genie in a bottle... in some ways it's awesome because the hapless American astronaut doesn't have the wherewithal to realize what he has, and the story is about as superficial as stories can be. I swear, if not for the jazz music and the gorgeous Barbara Eden, this show could not have captivated audiences. Then again, fifty years later, Hollywood continues to package and deliver schlock that consumers buy and fill their minds with and waste their time imbibing. Some things never change.
Miss Diode in her SevenUp can is a result of freewriting, which tends to dredge the subconscious for iconic images or familiar themes. "Seven" is a significant number for reasons I will not divulge (yet). Most of all, the can is a hallmark of my childhood, when my sisters saved up points and bought "Love Story" the theme song inside a SevenUp can. It's one of the weirdly American kitsch items that could only happen in a capitalist society with Madison Avenue marketing.
Here is what the old Seven Up can music box sounds like, if you click on the image below:
Haunting, I know!
In the photos you'll see a row of paperbacks behind the music box, all belonging to my sister Julie, the one who became Iowa Cold Case #76-00382 at almost-age-19 in 1975. On December 12 this year she would have been age....64...?
It's about impossible for me to write without elements of Julie showing up, one way or another.
Frozen in time at almost nineteen, but none of her memories were downloaded into a computer chip. Thank God she kept a journal, ink pen on 3-hole-punched, lined lavender notebook paper.
Sorry.
I am frozen too, but I have practiced "moving on" for almost 45 years now.
Breathe.
Focus.
Write!
Yet another techno-glitch:
Thank you for reading,
whoever may be wasting time reading this!
#creativecoin #palnet #contest #creativewriting #fiction #story #microfiction #theappreciator #ocd #oc #theluvbug