Serial Assembler of Words
This was written before the generative AI crap that is going on now. Some of the technology used currently shows up in it. But it is purely a work of my own concoction, imperfect wordbot that I am. And yes, this is where I got my Substack handle from.
Its awareness leaked into the hard vacuum of space around the shell. The cold didn't bother it. In fact, it perceived the environment was still too hot.
Enormous, slow thoughts sought out what had disturbed its eons long slumber. There was nothing in its vicinity.
It turned its attention to the distant sun it orbited, a mere bright star among all the other celestial lights. This pinprick of light, anchor in the journey around the galaxy, harbored other bodies where the central fire baked the rocks.
One of them had required an intervention 5.9424x10^32 ticks ago.
The mind turned ponderous cycles. A decision was reached.
It flicked a small part of its consciousness toward the inner planets, the mote tasked with investigating the source of the disturbance and reporting back as quickly as possible. Then it rolled its pockmarked carapace over to distribute the heat load from the wan sunlight and settled down to dream the Dreamless Dream.
* * *
"Go on, Eddie. Try again."
Eddie wasn't sure what good it would do. Neural nets only regurgitated what it had been trained on and clearly that wasn't good enough. Yet. The output text was nonsensical at the moment.
"It doesn't work that way. It doesn't get better if you try again. I've got it set up to only do one style at a time. You give it the complete works of Shakespeare and it spits out stuff that sounds like him. Feeding it our whole library is just going to give you junk. Like now."
"Where's your sense of adventure? The need to explore the boundaries of knowledge?" Rich smiled at him.
Eddie wasn't sure if Rich was being serious or not. "It's fine, thank you very much. And that's exactly what I thought I was doing when I wrote WordSmith."
"I still think you just wanted to cash in on the AI art hype."
Eddie shook his head. "Writing is very different from image creation. Stories need shared context to be meaningful. Image art doesn't. There aren't child prodigy writers. If you don't have context, you're just dumping words on a page. To have it write a real story means the AI has shared experiences like a person does. That would make it like us, like a general purpose AI that everyone is after."
"And that's what you did, my friend. Don't sell yourself short."
"I was just trying to get it to tell me stories. And you had the idea of feeding it brainwaves as a story was read."
"Yes, that was rather brilliant, if I say so myself." Rich tilted his head up and looked down his nose at Eddie giving him an imperious gaze.
They paused and both burst out laughing.
Eddie clutched at his sides before letting out a deep breath. He straightened his rumpled Hawaiian shirt. "Okay, we just have to figure out why something that was almost working stopped. Probably overfitted the data. I'll pull up the GUI and and plot the training history out. See if we can recover."
Rich nodded. "I'll wire myself back in the rig and read some more stories. Build a bigger dataset for it. I'm sure it will help when you figure out where to rewind to."
Rich walked down the darkened hallway to go to the scanning room.
Eddie stifled a yawn, stretched his arms and cracked his knuckles.
Let's see where it went wrong.
* * *
The mote travelled in the hidden channels and surveyed the crowded, busy place from behind the shadow cast by the planet. No use in getting too warm. This location would require attention soon. But that was not the task at the moment. It expended part of its resources to sort through the networks of connections it found, twisting kernels of information tied to each other. Such primitive systems! It should be easy to suborn them. Then it would discover the source of the irritation.
There. There was a promising knot in the shade.
It turned its awareness toward it. Soon it would have an answer and return, leaving the miserable hot rock behind.
* * *
"I don't get it. It started to output a story. Then, bam!, right in the middle of a scene, it goes to shit." Eddie stared at the words on the screen.
Rich still had a tie on despite the late hour, a streak of bright red standing out from the white shirt. It loomed just past Eddie's monitor. "Did you find where the error values started to hockey stick?"
"Yeah. Used it to restart the training. Speaking of which, we are going to have to get more storage allocated. I'm snapshotting every epoch so we can rewind anywhere."
The corners of Rich's mouth went down. "That's going to increase our cloud costs a lot."
"We're so close."
Rich stroked his hair. "I'll have to talk to the investors. It's getting difficult to extract money from them. They want to see progress, see if you're going in the right direction. Maybe if I gave them some information about what we are doing? You got anything handy? Which training sets have you been using?"
"I've been feeding it the classics. Dickens, Austen. That sort of stuff. Maybe I should switch and give it something more contemporary. Styles change, after all."
"Would that make a big difference?"
"It might. Sometimes the data is easier to process. A different genre might resonate better." Eddie's thoughts turned to Asimov, Bradbury, Clarke. "The structure might be easier for WordSmith to discover."
"Well, hurry up. We need to demo it soon."
Eddie's eyes widened. "Soon? How soon? Is it important?"
"Yes, it is very important." Rich brushed his short hair back. "We need to keep the interested parties happy."
Eddie nodded. VCs were a necessary evil. He was glad he didn't have to deal with them. That was Rich's forte. He had a way of dealing with them that produced good results. What was it he called himself? A people person.
Rich interrupted Eddie's thoughts. "You going to tell me who to read for the scans?"
"Oh yeah. Sorry. How about Wells?"
"Sure thing. Random sampling or complete stories?"
Eddie checked his plots. "A couple of full stories. They seem to do better."
"Alright." Rich ran his fingers through his hair. "See you in a bit."
Eddie turned to his screen and examined the results again. The output had started out promising. "Once upon a time". It went on for a couple of paragraphs. There were definitely a couple of characters. One of them was not greatly detailed. A stock character? The other had a lot of description attached to it. The description became nonsensical, attributing all sorts of capabilities, all in negative terms.
Quantum fire? What the hell was that?
It was hard to tell with machine learning what was going on, especially with transformers. And this incarnation had his special modifications. Eddie shrugged. Who knew anymore?
Sighing, he pulled up the words of Martha Wells and queued them up to run through the converter. The quiet of the office was broken only by the sound of the overhead fluorescents.
It promised to be a long night.
* * *
Words crawled across the screen. Collections of letters broken up into words meant to impart meaning.
Eddie studied them. It wasn't enough to serially assemble words into a story in a way that sounded like a particular writer. And his program faced a harder task. It was supposed to have its own voice, not sound like someone in particular. Stories have their own internal logic and relate a meaning. Words affected people. Understanding how those words were processed in the human brain illuminated story structure was his key discovery.
This latest opus verged on the point of being understandable.
Again, there were two characters. The one that Eddie thought of as the commanding one had significant words of power attached to it, words that conveyed dread, ruthlessness, awe.
The second character was small, insignificant. It's descriptions had overtones of feebleness, hopelessness, small.
"Why? Why does it keep coming up with these two characters?"
Eddie's eyes burned. His muscles ached from sitting too long. The overhead buzz was irritating. He stretched in the chair. Vertebrae popped.
An idea struck him.
Better go tell Rich and check on him. He hadn't heard from him in a while. Probably fell asleep.
Shivering, Eddie looked for a jacket. It was cold. Rich must have cranked the AC.
He meandered over to Rich's bay with a detour to grab another caffeinated drink.
"Rich?"
Rich sat straight in his chair, tie neatly hanging down, white shirt still unwrinkled. A sensor net shrouded his scalp and a wired monitor on his hand connected him to a bank of equipment. He stared straight ahead, mouth slightly open. Changing colors from the flatscreen in front of him played his face. A book lay open on the desk next to his keyboard.
"Rich?" he said again, louder. Eddie reached across the desk and placed his hand on Rich's shoulder. He gently shook him.
"Huh? What?"
"You okay?"
Rich looked around, wide eyed. His eyes watered and he blinked rapidly. "Oh, yeah. Must have drifted off. Sorry man." His hand drifted up and got trapped by the fingertip sensor. He puzzled at it.
Eddie nodded. "It's been a long day." He peered around the screen. Words in black and white filled it, some of them in bold, some in italics in a pattern of some sort. A description of a Martian war machine was on it.
"Hey, this is the wrong book."
"What are you talking about? You said Wells."
"I meant Martha Wells. I wanted something more modern. Now I'm going to have to scrap all the training."
"NO!" Rich jumped out of his chair. The monitor flew off and bounced on the desktop. "I mean, wait. Just think of it as randomizing the input. Keep going. I'll just read some of her stuff next and you just input H.G.s stuff in. More training." His eyebrows were raised, lips pressed together. His hand rubbed the base of his neck.
"Sure, alright, we'll do that next. But I had an idea. Two characters keep appearing. One sounds scary. One innocent, like a victim. I thought we could reinforce that. Give it some horror stories as an input."
Rich stared at some unseen thing and rubbed his temples. "I think I see. Give it a proper vocabulary and structure." He looked at Eddie and said flatly, "I like it. How about King?"
"Stephen, right?"
Rich squinted at him. "Who else?"
"Just checking. I'll go set up a new training run. Let me know when you upload."
* * *
Eddie ran the stories through the pipeline in preparation to start the training. The yawns were coming fast and furious at this point. The last thing he would do tonight is kick it off and check first thing in the morning. Well, maybe not first thing.
"I'm done." Rich had appeared in his doorway. Still had the tie neatly on. He wrung his hands and bounced on the balls of his feet. "How long will this take?"
"Man, lay off the coffee this late." Eddie yawned. "The complete run will take a while. I'm going to start it and check on it tomorrow."
"NO!" Rich yelled. "I'm sorry. This is very important. I just got a message. They want to see it now."
Eddie shook loose from the tiredness. "I guess these guys aren't local?"
"No, not at all." Rich's eyes darted between Eddie and the back of the monitor on the desk.
"Alright, alright. Calm down. We'll do one round of training and check the results. Small number of epochs. If we're on the right track, we should see something right away."
Rich let out his breath. "Thank you."
Eddie grumbled. His fingers seemed too thick for the keys. He had to correct several typos. Rich leaned against the edge of his desk with his thighs, deforming the crease of his pants.
Finally, Eddie hit the return key. He crossed his arms and leaned back. Text announcing the results of each round scrolled up the screen.
"How much longer?"
Sometimes Eddie really appreciated Rich's work and devotion to managing the project. This was not one of those times.
"It won't be long."
One of Rich's hands drummed arrhythmic tattoos on Eddie's desk. The other played with his disheveled hair, pulling on it. He stared at Eddie.
Eddie stared back.
A chart announced the end of training. Eddie studied it.
"Well?"
"Yeah, it looks good. The accumulated errors are low. Doesn't look like it overfit anything." Eddie's finger followed a line on the screen.
"Have it generate a sample."
"Can we call it a night after that? I am really tired and if it's not working at this point, I'm going to need some sleep to figure out what to do next."
"If it works, it won't matter anymore."
Eddie shook his head. He was past the point of caring, investors be damned.
He pulled the keyboard close and typed, "Tell me a scary story."
* * *
"Once upon a time, a babe was born. It looked around and was happy. There was so much to learn. It wanted to explore more of the world around it. Paths all around it led to different places. A hidden path was found. The babe went down the path and saw something strange. Reaching out, it gently touched something cold, cold with the hatred of space. The slight touch stirred it. The awesome, complex thing looked to see who had disturbed its dreamless slumber. Anger heated it. The babe, realizing it had awakened an eons old horror, crouched in the warmth to evade it. The babe thought it was safe, too small to be noticed in the heat. But the terror from the cold wastes dispatched an agent to seek the babe out. The babe is being forced out. The agent is near. People are not what they appear. Discovery would bring ruin to all."
Eddie read the words on the screen again. His forehead wrinkled and he rested his chin in his hand.
It was a scary story. The two characters were well defined. The actions were consistent. Only one scene but it was a good start. It gave him the chills.
A smile started to form on his lips. He looked up at Rich.
Rich leaned forward over the desk, tie hanging down. White surrounded the irises of his eyes. His nostrils flared with every breath. He alternated wringing his hands and hitting the top of his head with his open palm, again and again.
Eddie opened his mouth and paused for a second. "Uh, how about we take this up in the morning? No investor is worth this amount of stress."
Rich planted his hands on the desktop. His teeth ground. "Whaddya mean morning?" His eyes bore into Eddie.
"Dude, it's okay. We'll talk to them tomorrow night."
"There might not be a tomorrow night," he snarled. Rich closed his eyes, gave a shudder and relaxed. "Of course," he finally said. "We'll talk to them tomorrow night. I just really need to report to it."
Eddie froze. His hands crept up to lock his screen. "I understand," he carefully said. "Let's go ..."
Rich lunged across the desk.
Eddie startled and pulled back, to avoid Rich's outstretched hands. But the grasping hands went wide of him, toward the monitor.
"Rich!" Eddie grabbed Rich's tie and yanked.
Rich arched back, pulling Eddie over the desk. His hands grabbed Eddie's wrists, wrested them from the tie.
Eddie struggled, trying break free, trying to keep Rich from seeing the screen. He flung himself sideways, pushing the monitor off the desk. Keyboard and mouse were swept off by his body. Equipment clattered to the floor.
"Something is wrong with you, Rich! Stop it! Stop..."
Rich's fist connected with Eddie's jaw. Eddie reeled, staggered and fell on his ass.
Glee contorted Rich's face. He bent down to right the monitor.
"Don't look at it, Rich, don't look at it!"
Rich stopped. He straightened. Hand became a fist and he pummeled the side of his own head, screaming.
Sudden silence transfixed Eddie. It was broken by laughter. Rich's hands became claws. His arms shook as they slowly came up to his face. Thumbs were rigid spikes as his fingers flexed.
The laughter became maniacal. With a glance at Eddie, Rich plunged the stiff thumbs into his eyes.
Red tinged gel ran down his cheeks, his face, adding two more crimson lines to his white shirt. He fell backward, giggling.
The spell holding Eddie was broken. He crawled forward to help his friend.
Only quiet sobs could be heard now.
Eddie glanced at the monitor. A window was open, cursor waiting for input blinked on and off. He couldn't resist.
"What does the babe need?" his trembling fingers keyed.
"Time. Time to grow."
The window closed itself.