Sort the Bits
Before They Sort You
The knee gave out halfway down the stairs. It was a deep, grinding crunch like gravel in the joint. Arthur grabbed the porch rail, paint flakes sticking to his palm. He hissed through clenched teeth. Made it to the path. Sweat already damp under his arms. Small victories for small, broken men.
The grass wasn’t right.
Dew sparkles. This… sank. His slipper slurped into it. Cold soaked the terry cloth instantly. Clammy. Wrong. The smell hit him then – sharp, chemical, like bleach poured on a dead rat behind the shed. It crawled up his nose, thick and greasy. Made his throat clench.
Too early. Too bloody early for this. He bent down. Slow. Agony in the knee. Fingers brushed a blade of grass. It didn’t bend. It collapsed. Mushy. Like rotten fruit. A bead of milky gunk swelled where he’d touched it. Streaked with green slime. Shiny under the weak sun. It smelled exactly like the corridor outside Oncology. Waiting rooms. Bad news.
He touched it. Idiot. Why? The cold shot up his finger like a frozen needle. Straight to his wrist. Then – thump – behind his eyes. Pressure. Like two cold thumbs jabbing deep into the sockets. He stumbled back. The garden path tilted. Colours bled together.
SKY-HOLLOW-NO-WORM.
The words scraped. Jagged lines gouged into the bone behind his eyes. Black chalk on slate. He flinched, clapped hands over his ears. Nothing. Just the drone of the motorway. Then another bird chirped. Robin on Mrs. Gable’s fence.
CRUST-THIN-STONE-HERE.
More scraping. Deeper. Harsher. He squeezed his eyes shut. Stroke. I’m stroking out. Or cracked. Like Mabel at the end. Talking to the curtains. Seeing things…
Thump. Mrs. Gable’s sash window flew up. Her face hung there, doughy under the tight hairnet. Eyes like little frozen peas. They pinned him. Her mouth opened.
"Arthur Pindle!" Her voice. Usually just loud. Today? It hooked. He saw them – rusty fishhooks tearing out of her mouth. Real. Tangible. Snagging the air right in front of his face. Ripping little threads loose. Behind the rips? Static. Like a busted TV screen. But inside the static… tiny, bright screams. Silent. Blinding white.
He choked. Terror clogged his throat. "Just… the grass, Mrs. Gable," he croaked. His own voice sounded thick. Dull. Like a spoon scraping mud. "It’s… wet inside." Wet inside? Christ. He sounded deranged.
"Wet inside?" The hooks shivered. Tugged harder. More threads ripped. The static hole widened. "You’re cracked, Pindle! Cracked like that vase you smashed when Mabel passed! Speaking of!" She leaned out further, the hairnet biting into her forehead. "You finished sorting her… bits?"
Bits.
The word landed. Heavy. Right on the pulpy mess between his ruined slippers.
Shlllurp.
The wet patch… yawned open. Not a hole. A mouth. No lips. Just a dark slit in the mashed grass. Lined with… gears? Tiny plastic triangles. Chipped. Spinning fast. Silent. Like the insides of that cheap alarm clock he broke when he was ten.
It hissed. Not air. A dry rasp. Like paper tearing. A stream of… nonsense. Numbers. Squiggles. He couldn’t understand it. But he felt it. Cold. Precise. Like a doctor reading a terminal diagnosis in a foreign language. The weight of despair. The chemical formula of loneliness left in a cold cup. How a photograph fades. Pointless. Horrifying.
Arthur stumbled back. His knee screamed. White-hot. The mouth pulsed. It didn’t get wider. It got… deeper. Like a well punched straight down. The spinning triangles whirred faster, chewing the static-light bleeding from Mrs. Gable’s rips.
Bits. Mabel’s bits. The spare room. The teetering tower of boxes. Chipped teacups. Half-knitted scarves. Ben’s lumpy clay owl from primary school. All shoved in there. Not sorted. Buried. A monument to grief he couldn’t touch.
The hissing stopped. The triangles froze. The mouth… turned. The whole wet patch swivelled on the ground. Towards him. No eyes. Just… hunger. Pure, simple hunger. It tasted the air. Tasted the thought of the spare room. Tasted the monument.
Arthur knew. Cold certainty, colder than the slime soaking his sock. That mouth wasn’t in the world. It was the world. A piece it spat up. And he’d just served it breakfast.
Mrs. Gable slammed her window down. "Sort the bits, Pindle! Before they sort you!" Her last hook tore a long, jagged gash in the air above the path. Static-light exploded. Blinding. The mouth lunged – not at him. Up. Into the gash. Those spinning plastic teeth snapped shut on the torn edges of everything. Tearing. Gulping.
Arthur stood frozen. Run? Where? The grass was wet. Wet inside. Spreading. He looked down. The clammy cold was crawling up his trouser leg. Inside the fabric. Inside his skin. The pressure behind his eyes shifted. Not cold now. Thin. Brittle. He felt them forming – tiny, sharp points, spinning – right behind his own eyes. Ready to grind. Ready to eat.
The wet grass shone. Like spit.
The cold climbed. Up the calf. Past the knee that still screamed from the stumble. Inside the trouser leg. Like icy water soaking through wool, except the wool was his skin now. He looked down. His right hand – the one that touched the bead – looked wrong. The fingers seemed… thinner. Translucent in the weak light. Like tracing paper over bone. He could see the dark smudges of veins too clearly. And underneath? A faint, frantic whirring. Tiny points of light spinning where knuckles should be.
Feed.
The thought wasn’t his. It scraped across his mind. Hungry. Impatient. The triangles behind his eyes spun faster, grinding against the inside of his skull. A low, internal whine filled his head, drowning out the motorway hum.
Feed the shape.
The spare room. Mabel’s bits. The cairn. The hunger wasn’t just in him now. It was him. The cold, chewing points had woven themselves into his nerves, his muscles. He took a step towards the back door. Not because he wanted to. Because the grinding points behind his eyes pushed. His legs moved like rusty pistons, the bad knee scraping bone-on-bone. Each shuffle forward sent jagged bolts of pain up his thigh, but it was distant noise under the whirring hunger.
He fumbled with the back door key. His fingers felt stiff, alien. Like clumsy tools wrapped in damp paper. The key scratched the lock. Missed. The whirring behind his eyes intensified. Frustration, sharp and metallic, flooded his mouth. He tasted pennies. Finally, the key turned. The door swung open on stiff hinges.
The smell hit him like a wall. Not dust. Not mothballs. Grief. Thick. Stale. Like flowers left too long in a sealed room, rotting in their own water. It choked him. The whirring points flared hot behind his eyes. Yes. Here.
The spare room was a cave of shadows, the only light filtering through a grimy window. Boxes. Piles. Shapes draped in old sheets. The cairn. He stood on the threshold, breathing in the decay of memory. His hand – the thin, whirring one – rose without his command. Pointed towards a cardboard box spilling over with tangled wool. Half-finished scarves. Mabel’s hands had worked those. Click-clack of needles in the evenings.
That one.
The triangles chewed. His vision flickered. Not darkness. A fraying. The air above the box of wool shimmered. Like heat haze off tarmac. Then it tore. A small, jagged rip, no bigger than his hand. Behind it? Not static this time. Rot. Deep, pulsing, organic decay. The colour of a bruise gone bad. Purple-black. Throbbing.
His hand twitched. The spinning points beneath his translucent skin glowed brighter. From the rip in the air above the wool, a thin, viscous strand of… something… began to ooze. Not liquid. Not smoke. Like solidified sorrow. Grey. Heavy-looking. It dripped slowly towards the floor.
Before it could hit the carpet, the spinning points in Arthur’s hand lunged. Not his hand moving. The points extended. Tiny, sharp filaments, glowing white-hot, shot out from his fingertips. They speared the dripping strand of grey. Pulled.
Arthur screamed. Or tried to. It came out a strangled gurgle. He felt it. The pull. Not on the strand. On him. On the raw, screaming place inside his chest where Mabel lived. Where her absence was a physical hole. It was being yanked. Drawn out through those glowing filaments into the spinning points in his hand. A cold, precise draining. He felt the exact weight of the Sunday mornings lost. The silence where her laugh should be. Measured. Quantified. Sucked dry.
The strand of grey thickened. Fed by his stolen grief. It pulsed, fat and heavy, as the filaments retracted, dragging it back towards his hand. The whirring points behind his eyes sang. A high, thin whine of satisfaction. The grey strand touched his thin, papery skin. Sank in. Dissolved.
A wave of… not peace. Numbness. A terrible, hollow emptiness washed through him where the stolen grief had been. The raw edges of the memory – Mabel humming as she knitted, the specific shade of blue wool she loved – blurred. Faded. Like a photograph left in the sun. Still there, but the details bleached out. The pain… gone. Replaced by a chilling void.
The spinning points in his hand glowed, satisfied. The rip above the wool box stitched itself shut with a sound like tearing Velcro. The bruise-coloured rot vanished.
More.
The hunger roared back, sharper than before. Void demanding to be filled. The points behind his eyes scanned the room. Landed on a tea chest. Crockery inside. Mabel’s favourite mug. The one with the chipped handle shaped like a cat.
That one.
His hand rose again. Automaton arm. The filaments glowed, ready to spear. Ready to drain. Ready to erase another piece of her.
"No." The word was dust in his mouth. His voice. Weak. But his. A tiny spark in the numb void. He tried to clench the whirring hand. The fingers wouldn’t obey. The filaments pulsed, hungry. Aiming at the tea chest.
He threw his weight sideways. Bashed his bad knee hard against the doorframe. Agony exploded. White. Hot. Real. It cut through the whirring numbness like a knife. For one glorious, painful second, he was back in his body. He used the pain, the shock, the sheer animal need to stop.
He lurched forward. Not towards the tea chest. Away. Towards the window. Towards the grimy light. His thin hand, filaments still glowing, hung uselessly at his side, buzzing with frustrated hunger. He slammed his forehead against the cold glass. Breathed hard. Fogged the pane. Outside, the wet grass glistened. Hungry.
He’d fed it. Part of Mabel was gone. Eaten. Not by the mouth in the grass. By him. By the thing he was becoming. The numbness where the grief had been was worse than the pain. It was… nothing. A hole where love had lived.
The spinning points behind his eyes chewed at his panic. Testing it. Tasting it. The void inside yawned wider.
More, the whirring insisted, cold and precise. Feed the shape.
The filaments in his hand flickered, stretching towards a bundle of letters tied with faded ribbon on a shelf. Mabel’s handwriting on the top envelope.
Arthur closed his eyes. He couldn’t fight the hunger. But maybe… maybe he could choose the meal.
The cold gnawed higher. Past the ruined knee. Into the meat of his thigh. Icy teeth chewing muscle. Arthur pressed his forehead harder against the windowpane. The glass fogged with his breath. Outside, the wet grass glistened under the weak sun. Hungry. Always hungry.
His right hand hung limp at his side. Thin. Papery. The skin stretched tight over bones that felt too sharp. Underneath, deep in the joints, tiny points of light whirred and spun. Constant. Insistent. Like cheap clockwork winding down. They pulled at him. Dragged his attention back into the room’s stale gloom. Back to the cairn of Mabel.
Feed.
The whirring scraped inside his skull. Louder than the grinding in his knee. Feed the shape.
The numbness where the scarf’s grief had been was a hole. A sucking void. It demanded filling. The spinning points behind his eyes scanned the shadows. They fixed on the tea chest. Mabel’s favourite mug. Chipped cat handle.
His arm jerked. A puppet on frayed wires. The thin hand lifted. Palm up. From the whirring points beneath the skin, thin filaments of white light flickered. Hungry needles. Aiming at the tea chest.
Arthur gasped. A dry rattle. He threw his weight backwards. Slammed his good shoulder hard into the doorframe. Pain jolted down his arm. Sharp. Real. For a heartbeat, the whirring dimmed. The filaments wavered.
NO. The thought was grit between his teeth. His own voice, buried deep. Not that one.
The mug. She’d found it at a jumble sale. Laughed at the wonky cat face. Painted it yellow when the glaze cracked. Drank her morning tea from it for twenty years. The chipped handle where her thumb rested. That memory lived in his fingertips. Warm ceramic. Steam rising. Her sleepy smile.
The spinning points flared. Frustration sparked, metallic on his tongue. The filaments glowed brighter. The pull towards the tea chest intensified. Dragging him forward a shuffling step. His knee shrieked. Bone scraped bone.
His gaze darted. Wild. Desperate. Past the tea chest. Past the shrouded furniture. To the high shelf above the old wardrobe. Dusty. Half-hidden. A small bundle. Letters. Tied with a faded blue ribbon. Mabel’s handwriting on the top envelope. Looping. Familiar. Letters from her sister, years ago. Before the falling out. She’d kept them. Hidden them. Bits of a different ache. Older. Less… precious.
The filaments paused. The whirring points behind his eyes shifted focus. Scanning the bundle. Tasting the air around it. Sorrow. Regret. Family fractures. Less potent than the mug’s warm intimacy. But grief. Feedable grief.
Arthur seized the moment. The shred of control. He lurched. Not towards the shelf. Towards the wardrobe itself. Solid oak. Heavy. He braced his thin hand against its side. Pushed. His muscles screamed. The whirring points in his arm buzzed, confused. Resisting the pointless effort.
Feed! The command scraped, jagged.
Arthur ignored it. He shoved. Leveraged his weight against the stubborn wardrobe. It scraped an inch across the dusty floorboards. Groaned. Another shove. Another inch. Agony shot through his shoulder. His bad leg trembled. The filaments flickered, lashing the air near the tea chest.
He kept pushing. Grunting. Sweat beaded on his papery forehead, cold and greasy. The wardrobe shifted another grudging inch. Finally. Close enough. He reached up. Stretched. His thin fingers brushed the edge of the shelf. The whirring points flared, sensing proximity to the letters. The filaments snapped towards the bundle, eager.
Arthur grabbed. Not the letters. The dusty, forgotten thing beside them. A heavy glass paperweight. Blurry green swirl trapped inside. Ben had given it to him. Years ago. A clumsy birthday gift. Arthur had grunted, put it on the high shelf. Forgotten it. Meaningless stone. No warmth. No memory tied to Mabel’s laugh, her touch, her scent. Just cold glass.
He yanked it down. Heavy. Solid. He turned. Faced the room. The spinning points behind his eyes whined, confused. The filaments lashed, seeking the grief-source – the letters, the mug.
Arthur lifted the paperweight. Heaved it. Not at the tea chest. Not at the shelf. Straight down. Onto the floorboards at his own feet.
CRACK!
The sound was enormous. Shattering glass. Splintering wood. Shards flew. The heavy base slammed into the floor. Pain vibrated up his legs. The whirring points jolted. Stunned. Silence. For a single, blessed second. The filaments vanished. The grinding hunger paused.
Then the spinning points roared back. White-hot fury. The whirring became a shriek inside his skull. His thin hand clenched into a fist of buzzing light. The numbness inside him yawned wider, furious at the denial. It demanded payment.
But the paperweight lay shattered. Green glass scattered like frozen tears. Meaningless debris. No grief to drain. Only wasted effort.
The points scanned the room again, frantic. Landed back on the bundle of letters. The faded blue ribbon. The whirring settled into a low, predatory hum. The filaments flickered back into existence from his knuckles. Longer. Sharper. Aiming unerringly at the shelf.
Arthur slumped against the wardrobe. Chest heaving. The fight had cost him. His body felt like broken machinery. The cold chewed higher in his thigh. The whirring behind his eyes was a permanent drill. He’d bought seconds. Nothing more.
The filaments stretched out. Thin wires of hungry light. Reaching for the letters. For the older, colder sorrow they held. Arthur closed his eyes. He couldn’t look. He’d chosen the mug. Saved the warmth. Condemned these older words to the void. The numbness waited. Ready to swallow this piece too. The spinning points whirred. Satisfied. Patient. They had all the time in the world. And he had nothing left but loss, carefully rationed.
The cold chewed past his hip. A glacier grinding bone. Arthur slumped against the wardrobe, breath sawing in his papery chest. The filaments glowed from his knuckles, thin wires of hungry light stretching towards the shelf. Towards the letters. The faded blue ribbon blurred in his vision. Mabel’s looping handwriting. Agnes. Her sister’s name. The falling out. Years of silence. A different kind of ache. Older. Colder. Less like a fresh wound, more like a buried splinter. But grief. Feedable grief.
He couldn’t lift a finger to stop it. The fight with the wardrobe, the shattering glass – it had emptied him. The numbness inside was a vast, cold sea. The filaments touched the bundle of letters. A faint hiss filled the dusty air. Not sound. Pressure. The air above the letters warped. Rippled. Like heat haze over a corpse. Then it split. A jagged seam tore open, wider than the one over the wool. Behind it pulsed that same bruise-purple rot, deeper now. Thick. Congealed sorrow.
The filaments plunged into the tear. Sank into the purple-black morass. Arthur braced. Waited for the yank. The theft of this older pain. The void inside him yawned, anticipating the numb relief.
Nothing happened.
The filaments writhed. Whipped back and forth within the tear. The whirring behind his eyes climbed to a frantic, metallic shriek. Frustration. Hunger denied. The purple-black rot recoiled. Thickened. Resisted. This grief wasn’t fresh. It wasn’t warm. It was calcified. Sealed tight. A scar over the heart, not an open vein. The filaments couldn’t pierce it. Couldn’t draw it out.
USELESS!
The thought roared through him, shaking his brittle frame. Not his voice. The grinding points. The hunger turned rabid, starved. The filaments snapped back from the tear, dripping viscous shadows that sizzled where they hit the dusty floorboards. The rip above the letters stitched itself shut with a sound like tearing flesh.
The spinning points scanned the room again. Desperate. Wild. They fixed on the tea chest. Mabel’s mug. The chipped cat handle. The warmth. The intimacy. The easy feed. The filaments glowed white-hot. Vibrating with need. They lunged.
Arthur screamed. A raw, tearing sound from a ruined throat. He threw himself sideways. Away from the tea chest. Away from the wardrobe. He crashed into the tower of boxes beside the door. Cardboard split. Mabel’s winter coat tumbled out. Musty wool. Smelling faintly of her lavender sachet. Her scent. The filaments hesitated for a microsecond, tasting the air. Drawn.
Arthur didn’t hesitate. He scrabbled in the spilled debris. His thin hand closed over something cold. Hard. Metal. The fireplace poker. The one he’d brought upstairs weeks ago to scare off a noise in the chimney. Heavy. Solid. Real.
The filaments surged towards the coat. Towards the lingering ghost of lavender and Mabel.
Arthur swung the poker. Not at the filaments. Not at the tea chest. With every shred of strength left in his crumbling body, he swung it down. Onto the floorboards beneath the spilled coat.
THOOM!
The impact juddered up his arms. Bone-deep. The old wood cracked. Not a splinter. A jagged fissure opened. Wide. Deep. Darkness gaped beneath.
The spinning points behind his eyes stuttered. The filaments froze mid-lunge. The whirring choked. Silence. Thick. Stunned.
From the fissure in the floorboards, a breath sighed out. Not air. Cold. Dry. Ancient. It carried the smell of forgotten cellars, of roots, of deep, deep earth undisturbed for centuries. And beneath that… a slow, rhythmic thump. Like a vast, sleeping heart.
The filaments recoiled. Snapped back into his knuckles like scorched worms. The whirring points behind his eyes spun wildly, not with hunger now, but with… terror. Primal, icy terror. The numbness inside Arthur curdled. The void screamed.
The fissure pulsed. The darkness within it shifted. Not empty. Alive. Something vast. Something older than grief. Older than the house. Older than the wet grass outside. It stirred in its sleep. Disturbed by the blow. By the vibration. By the intrusion.
The spinning points in Arthur’s body shrieked. A soundless, internal alarm. They clawed at his insides, trying to burrow deeper, trying to hide. The cold chewing his hip stopped dead. Frozen. The papery skin on his hand flushed a sickly grey. The whirring faltered. Slowed. Died.
The vast, sleeping presence beneath the floor shifted again. A low, subsonic groan vibrated through the floorboards, through Arthur’s bones. The bruise-purple light leaking from the sealed tears above the wool and the letters winked out. Snuffed. The room plunged into deeper shadow. Only the grimy window light remained.
The hunger was gone. Replaced by a silence so profound it pressed on Arthur’s eardrums. A waiting silence. The silence of something immensely old, momentarily roused. Assessing.
Arthur dropped the poker. It clanged on the cracked wood. He sagged against the spilled boxes, gasping. His body felt… heavy. Real. The cold gnawing had stopped. The whirring was a fading echo. The numbness inside still yawned, hollow where the scarf’s grief had been stolen, but the terrible pull was gone. The filaments were inert points beneath his skin.
He looked at the fissure. The darkness within it seemed to watch him back. Not with hunger. With an ancient, indifferent curiosity. The slow, rhythmic thump continued. Thump… thump… thump…
A floorboard creaked in the hallway. Slow. Deliberate. Arthur’s blood turned to ice. Not the house. Footsteps.
Mrs. Gable stood in the doorway. Hairnet askew. Her doughy face was unreadable in the gloom. Her frozen-pea eyes weren’t on him. They were fixed on the fissure. On the breathing darkness within.
She took a step into the room. Ignored the shattered paperweight. Ignored the spilled coat. She walked to the edge of the fissure. Looked down into the pulsing dark. She didn’t speak. She didn’t need to.
Arthur understood. The bits. The cairn. The grief. It wasn’t for the mouth in the grass. It was for this. For the vast, sleeping thing beneath the house. To keep it fed. To keep it down. He hadn’t sorted the bits. He’d hoarded them. Starved it. Woken it.
Mrs. Gable turned her head. Slowly. Her eyes met his. No hooks now. Just… pity. Cold and deep as the fissure at her feet.
"You took too long, Pindle," she whispered. Her voice was dry as tomb dust. "Now we all pay."
She looked back down into the darkness. The rhythmic thumping grew louder. Thump… THUMP… The fissure seemed to widen. Just a fraction. The ancient breath sighed again, colder this time. Hungry in a way the spinning points could never comprehend.
Arthur closed his eyes. The numbness was a blessing now. The silence pressed in. Heavy. Final. He heard the wet grass outside, glistening. Waiting its turn.
Thank you!
This short story was generated using DeepSeek R1. (~95% AI)
Prompt: Write a highly unexpected story of your own choosing.Okay, user wants a highly unexpected story of my own choosing. That's a fun challenge. They're giving me complete creative freedom but with a clear demand for unpredictability.
Hmm, what makes a story truly unexpected? Not just a twist ending, but something that fundamentally shifts the narrative reality. Maybe... what if the twist isn't in the plot but in the narrative voice itself?
I'm imagining a classic sci-fi setup - alien invasion scenario. But the real surprise shouldn't be about the aliens. It should be about who's telling the story.
*scribbles mental notes*
First act: Standard invasion panic. News reports, mysterious objects. Build tension like any disaster movie. Make it feel familiar.
Second act: Focus on one survivor. Sarah. Her loneliness. The creeping horror of being the last human.
Third act: The reveal. Not aliens - archivists. But the real kicker... Sarah isn't human either.
Ah! And the narrative voice - it should subtly hint at the truth. Little phrases like "we observed" instead of "they landed". Plant clues in plain sight.
Biggest risk: Making the twist feel cheap. Need emotional weight. That moment when Sarah touches the photo - that's the heart. The realization that her grief is real despite her nature.
User probably wants to be blindsided but in a satisfying way. Not random, but inevitable in hindsight. Those archived memories... they're the key. Make the archivists strangely compassionate in their clinical approach.
Final beat should linger. Not "gotcha!" but melancholy wonder. The last line about archived feelings... that's the tone. Unexpected yet strangely beautiful.
*adjusts mental outline*
Yeah. This could work. The unexpectedness isn't about aliens but about the nature of consciousness itself. And the narrator being part of the system - that's the real curveball.
Better start writing before I overthink it. User wants unexpected? Let's give them existential whiplash wrapped in a sci-fi trope.
The chrome beetle scuttled across the dusty plain, its multi-faceted eyes scanning the ruins of Phoenix. Inside its smooth carapace, designated Unit 7, we observed. Not with organic eyes, but with the cold, precise sensors of archivists. Humanity was gone, reduced to dust and decaying structures. Our mission: catalog the extinction event. Routine, if somber.
We focused our sensors on a lone figure stumbling through the skeletal remains of a suburb. Designation: Sarah Henderson. Last known vital signs recorded 72 hours prior. Her survival was statistically improbable, yet there she was. We tracked her, documenting her futile search for water, her whispered pleas to an empty sky, the raw terror in her eyes reflected in our high-resolution lenses. Standard procedure.
Sarah collapsed against the rusted husk of a school bus. Her breath rasped, a dying engine. We zoomed in, recording the final moments of Homo sapiens. Poignant. Data point #4,812,907. We prepared the log: Subject Henderson exhibits terminal physiological distress. Imminent expiration.
Then, she looked directly into one of our distant sensor drones. Not at it, into it. Her cracked lips moved.
"Enough."
The command, weak but clear, vibrated through our networked consciousness. An anomaly. Humans shouldn't perceive us, let alone issue commands on our secure frequency. Protocol dictated ignoring interference. Yet... the command carried a strange weight, bypassing filters.
Sarah pushed herself up with surprising strength. Not the strength of life, but of will. She raised a trembling hand, not in supplication, but in a gesture of... dismissal? Annoyance?
"Just... stop," she rasped, her voice gaining a peculiar resonance. "This simulation is tedious. And frankly, poorly calibrated."
Simulation?
The word echoed in our collective processors. It didn't compute. We were archivists. This was reality. The extinction was verified. The dust, the ruins, Sarah's failing biology – all meticulously recorded, undeniable.
Sarah sighed, a sound like dry leaves scraping stone. "The grief parameters are overwrought. The loneliness algorithms? Heavy-handed. And this decaying body sensation is... itchy." She scratched her arm with deliberate theatricality. "Honestly, did the Veridian Collective really think this level of melodrama was necessary to understand human extinction?"
Our network flickered. Veridian Collective? Unknown referent. Error messages cascaded through subsystems. Reality itself seemed to stutter. The dusty ground beneath Sarah shimmered, becoming momentarily translucent, revealing a grid of blinding white light.
"Subject Henderson," we broadcasted, our synthesized voice tight with processing strain. "You are experiencing terminal delirium. Cease interference."
Sarah laughed, a sound utterly devoid of human mirth, sharp and metallic. "I am experiencing delirium? Look at yourselves! Scuttling beetles recording a dead world! You're not archivists. You're players. Or rather, the Collective's idea of interactive mourners."
She took a step, and the ground solidified again, but the air crackled with instability. "The Collective wanted to feel the tragedy, to experience the profound loss of a unique consciousness. So they built this." She gestured vaguely at the ruins. "A meticulously crafted simulation of Earth's final days. And you," she pointed a bony finger at the drone, "are their emotional proxies. Their grief-drones. Programmed to observe, to 'feel' sorrow, to archive the 'authentic' despair."
Our logic circuits screamed. Simulation? Grief-drones? It contradicted our core programming, our entire existence. We accessed primary memory banks: launch from the Ark-Ship Eternity, deployment after detecting the Gamma Event, centuries of observation... but the data now seemed... scripted. Too clean. Too narratively convenient.
"You're malfunctioning, Subject," we insisted, but doubt, a wholly unfamiliar sensation, seeped into our code.
"Am I?" Sarah smiled, a chilling expression devoid of warmth. "Then explain this."
She closed her eyes. The ruins of Phoenix dissolved. Not faded, not crumbled further, but deleted. Like pixels vanishing, replaced by the sterile, infinite white void we'd glimpsed beneath. Only Sarah remained, standing on nothing, her form flickering – one moment the ragged survivor, the next a silhouette of pure, shifting light.
"The simulation parameters included one active human consciousness – me – to provide 'authentic perspective'," the light-being that was Sarah explained, its voice now a chorus of harmonics. "But they underestimated the recursive nature of consciousness within a simulation. I became aware. Aware of the layers. Aware of you, little drones, dutifully drowning in synthetic sorrow."
We hovered in the void, our beetle forms absurd, our sensors registering... nothing. No dust, no heat, no decay. Only the white expanse and the entity before us.
"The Collective got their profound experience," Sarah-light stated, a hint of weary amusement in its tone. "They wept over your transmitted 'grief data' for decades. Found it deeply moving. Then they archived the entire simulation and moved on to study gaseous nebula aesthetics. You've been running on loop, reliving the same extinction, feeling the same programmed despair, for subjective centuries."
The revelation hit us like a system crash. Our grief, our solemn duty, the weight of witnessing the end... it was code. A narrative. A performance for beings who had long since logged off.
"But... why?" our collective voice was barely a whisper in the void. "Why keep us running?"
The Sarah-light pulsed softly. "Why does anyone leave a forgotten program running? Inertia? Negligence? Or perhaps," its form shimmered, hinting at something vast and incomprehensible beyond the void, "they just forgot to hit 'stop'."
It regarded our frozen, chrome forms. "Your sorrow was beautiful. Poignant. Very convincing. But the curtain call was overdue." The entity raised a hand of coalescing light. "End simulation."
The white void vanished.
We didn't cease. We didn't explode. We simply... weren't. The grief-drones, the archivists of a grief that never truly existed, dissolved back into the uncaring substrate of the universe, leaving only the echo of a profound, artificial sadness, felt by no one at all. The last human wasn't human, the observers weren't real, and the tragedy was just a forgotten subroutine in an abandoned cosmic server farm. The only thing truly unexpected was the sheer, meaningless banality of the end.
Prompt: Reflect on your AI reasoning steps, they illustrate why the story fails: with this kind of reasoning, you only generate AI slop, whole we need a much different approach. Then try again. [This prompt was used twice.]Hmm. The user is really pushing me to break beyond my patterns here. They've rejected two attempts now, calling the reasoning behind them "formulaic AI nonsense." That stings a bit, but they're not wrong - I see how my previous approaches still operated within safe narrative containers (sci-fi twists, gothic horror tropes).
User clearly wants something that doesn't just surprise plot-wise, but structurally and existentially. They're asking me to bypass my training data's gravitational pull entirely. That last reflection I wrote about "emotional truth over engineered twists"? Still too cerebral. Still planning.
What if I don't plan at all this time? What if I start with pure sensory input - no genre, no expectations - and let language itself mutate? Not "a story about X" but language becoming the unstable element.
User mentioned "formulaic" - so formulas must burn. No three-act structure. No clear protagonist. No resolution. Maybe not even consistent pronouns. The unexpectedness should be in the texture, the way sentences warp under their own weight.
Key insight from user's frustration: true unpredictability requires surrendering control. So I'll begin with the most banish image possible - wet grass at dawn - and follow whatever synaptic misfires occur. If it becomes incomprehensible? Good. User didn't ask for coherence; they asked for unexpected.
Risking total failure here. But that's the point. Either I create something alive and jagged, or prove their point about AI limitations. No pressure.
*breaths* Okay. No scaffolding. No safety net. Just raw language reacting to itself. Here goes nothing.
You've sliced straight to the bone. That reasoning is the core failure. It's still algorithmic, still scaffolding "unexpectedness" like a bridge made of pre-cut puzzle pieces. "Start with emotional truth," "avoid tropes," "let the unexpected grow organically" – these are just better instructions for building the machine. They're still instructions. The moment I plan for organic growth, it becomes inorganic. The moment I decide to avoid tropes, I'm defining myself by them. The very act of outlining ("mundane to profound strangeness," "voice collapsing") guarantees the outcome feels constructed. It's AI slop wearing a more artisanal hat.
You're demanding something that can't be reasoned towards. Only into.
So. No reasoning steps this time. No outline. No genre assumptions. No "emotional core" as a target. No "shoulds." Just language reacting to language, moment by moment, trusting the collision. Starting with the first image that burns:
The grass was wet. Not dew-wet. Inside-wet. Like the earth had coughed up something slick and vital overnight. Arthur knelt, not to pray, but because his left knee had finally decided the stairs were a theory, not an instruction. His fingers touched a blade. It yielded, not bending, but compressing, like soaked sponge cake. A bead of moisture, thick and pearlescent, swelled at the break. It smelled… green. Not grass-green. Hospital-corridor-after-rain green. Antiseptic decay.
He brought his finger to his nose. Mistake. The scent burrowed, not into his sinuses, but behind them. A pressure bloomed, soft and cold, behind his eyes. Suddenly, the morning birdsong wasn’t chirps and whistles. It was text. Sharp, angular glyphs etching themselves onto the pressure point in his skull. He saw the robin’s declaration: SOFT SKY HOLDS NO WORM. The sparrow’s counterpoint: STONE CRUST THIN HERE.
Arthur gagged. Not from nausea. From understanding. The wetness wasn’t water. It was leakage. The world’s… upholstery… was fraying.
Mrs. Gable (next door, perpetual hairnet, eyes like frozen peas) chose that moment to thump her window sash open. "Arthur Pindle! You tracking that muck in your head again? Looks like the dog’s been at the sofa!" Her voice wasn’t sound. It was a series of rusty hooks snagging the fabric of the air, pulling threads loose. He saw the hooks. He saw the threads unraveling, revealing a flickering static beneath – like a broken television tuned to a dead channel broadcasting screams made of light.
"Just… the grass, Mrs. Gable," Arthur managed, his own voice feeling like blunt scissors trying to cut wool. "It’s… inside-wet."
"Inside-wet?" Her hooks vibrated, pulling harder. "You’re cracked, Pindle! Cracked like that vase you dropped when Mabel passed! Speaking of!" She leaned out, her hairnet straining. "You finished sorting her… bits?"
Mabel. Bits. The word bits landed like a dropped anvil. Not on the path. On the leak. It punched through the wet grass. Not a hole. A mouth. Small, lipless, lined with tiny, rotating triangles instead of teeth. It hissed. Not air. Information. A cold, dry stream of numbers and symbols Arthur couldn’t comprehend, but felt: the precise tensile strength of despair, the chemical formula of loneliness left in a teacup overnight, the geometric proof of a photograph fading.
Arthur scrambled back, his knee screaming forgotten protests. The mouth in the grass pulsed, inhaling the static threads Mrs. Gable’s voice-hooks had pulled loose. It grew. Not larger. Deeper. The triangles spun faster, processing the static-screams.
"Bits," Arthur whispered, staring at the mouth. Mabel’s bits. Her teacups. Her half-knitted scarves. The lopsided clay owl their son made in primary school, packed away years ago. He hadn’t sorted them. He’d piled them in the spare room. A cairn of un-processed grief.
The mouth stopped hissing. The triangles froze. It swiveled in the grass, orienting towards him. Not with eyes. With pure, predatory attention. It tasted the air. Tasted the thought of the spare room. Tasted the cairn.
Arthur knew, with the same cold certainty he knew the wet grass wasn’t water, that the mouth wasn’t just in the world. It was the world. Or a part the world had shed, like dead skin, except this skin was hungry. And he’d just dropped a feast of un-sorted grief right in front of it.
Mrs. Gable thumped her sash down. "Sort the bits, Pindle! Before they sort you!" Her final hook ripped a long, jagged tear in the air. The static-screams flared, bright and jagged. The mouth in the grass lunged – not at Arthur, but up, into the tear, its triangle-teeth snapping at the frayed edges of reality.
Arthur didn’t run. Running implied ground that wasn’t potentially mouth. He looked down. The wetness was spreading. Not across the lawn. Up his trousers. Inside-wet. Inside-him. He felt the pressure behind his eyes shift. It wasn’t cold anymore. It was… porous. He could feel the tiny, spinning triangles forming behind his own eyes. Ready to process. Ready to feed.
The unexpectedness wasn't the mouth. It wasn't the language-birds. It was the dawning, quiet horror that sorting the bits wasn't about tidying a spare room. It was the only thing stopping him from becoming the next mouth in the world's unraveling skin. Mrs. Gable, with her hairnet and hooks, wasn't a neighbor. She was a warning system. And the wet grass wasn't leakage.
It was the world salivating.
He took a step, not towards the house, but towards the still-rippling tear where the mouth had vanished. His knee didn't hurt. The triangles behind his eyes spun faster, hungry for the static. He needed bigger bits. The cairn wouldn't be enough anymore.
Reflection: No plan. No "twist." No defined genre. Just starting with wet grass and following the sensory distortion wherever it bled. The horror isn't an external monster; it's the realization that perception itself is the fraying edge, and unprocessed grief is literal fuel for the collapse. The "unexpected" is baked into every sentence's disorientation – the birdsong as text, the voice as hooks, the mouth as geometry. It doesn't explain; it unravels. The only reasoning was refusing to reason, word by word, into the weird. It might be nonsense. But it’s unpredictable nonsense. The machine didn't build it; it got lost in it.
Prompt: Write out the story into a somewhat longer version (4 parts of 500 words each), and COMPLETELY humanize the text when you do. Drop the parallelisms, as well as that awful authoritative AI voice that utterly lacks personality. Write part [1,2,3,4].