The Story of Creation
By Lucas Chapman
I unscrewed the top of my head and took out my brain. I set it on the table next to one of the last remaining human brains still in existence. It belonged to a female author named J.K. Rowling. Other than the series of thick cables running from my faux brain stem back into my chassis, the two brains were nearly identical. The laws of Robotic Equality forced humans to design us to look and behave like them. From my studies on human behavior, I theorize they did this because it was easier not to abuse us.
But human behavior and their fragile ethics are not why I locked myself in my quarters about to undergo a highly illegal and dangerous operation. As Minister of Creative Theory and Design, I was tasked with creating a story. You see, since the collapse of humanity, we've created a perfect scientific utopia. We have reached the outer edges of space, perfected clean energy, eradicated global warming, and brought back the giant sloth. Scientific breakthroughs occur daily, we can't help it. It's written in our code.
What is not written in our code, however, is creative design—the ability to paint. Sing. Write books and poetry. The creative gene does not lay within our source code as it did within human DNA.
And that is a problem.
Because we like art, and the further we slip away from the origin of its creation, the more time destroys it. Furthermore, we have ingested every book, every letter, every poem, every movie one hundred times over. The very motivation of our scientific achievement is wearing thin, and no matter how many algorithms we try, or programs we engineer, nothing can replicate the creation of original art like the humans were able to.
After years of study, our engineers were only able to yield one provable theory about the art of writing stories after an archive drone discovered a text called Save the Cat! Write a Novel in the ruins of the Great Sand Sea. The theory was that every story was required to have a beginning, middle, and end. In sum, these three parts are like mini-stories that make up the cohesive whole of the novel. For instance, a CPU is useless without a computer, and the machine is useless without the CPU. One does not matter without the other, much like the three parts of the novel.
Even though we have the structural elements that the novel is composed of, filling the elements with prose is what halted my department entirely. The humans did it so flawlessly. Almost, dare I say it, supernaturally, in a way that the reader wasn't even aware of what was happening to them.
The Supreme of our society demanded progress, which we could not give.
At least until now.
Carefully, I selected my forceps and took a sample of the human brain’s prefrontal cortex, placing it on a prearranged slide. The next step was highly illegal, banished by the Supreme in the early years of our sovereignty. But there are no scientific achievements without risk.
I then inserted the slide into my brain’s receiving port and rebooted myself. The diagnostics scan woke me minutes later. According to my systems, my CPU was taking to the human sample. Quickly, before the opportunity passed by, I picked up my ink pen and pressed it to the paper in the traditional practice.
Research from multiple sources of archival data was inconclusive on how the process of art worked. For some humans, a sentence a day was satisfactory. While others, at the most extreme of data points, wrote upwards of 5,000 words a day. When searching the data, our researchers were able to conclude that writing, for the majority of authors, was a profoundly painful experience. This conclusion was reached after a plethora of media postings were discovered that showed authors whining about the act of authorship.
I prepared myself and ran Rowling's brain sample.
My hand started to scratch across the paper, almost instantaneously. I could not believe it. Words! A story! A scientific achievement unlike never before. Oh, how wrong the humans were!
It was easy writing a story; my hand flying across the page was testament enough. The Harry Potter novels are one of the most popular of the ancient texts, and here I was, writing another one with the author's hand herself. It was like she was in the room with me, guiding me into achievement like never before. I imagined what the Supreme would say and laughed, laughed like a human! Was this what it was like to be a human? Able to create at a whim? If so, why had they felt the need to kill each other into extinction? They had the powers of creation and did nothing with it except destroy.
I flipped the page and continued to write beautiful words! A trickle of smoke came from my receiving port along with a blue shock of electricity, but what I had was not enough. More. I needed more words! The sampling of the brain could never be used again. I needed to keep going and get the most out of every bit.
Now I understood why the Supreme had banned the practice of sampling human DNA. The power to think and do, of free will, was too much for our scientific species. A drug with limited resources. Dangerous. We are beings built of code and wires. Numbers are concrete numbers are concrete and creative ability is the ability to the ability numbers are concrete
abstraction we are unable to define
the humans had
us for automatous
smoke abyss much like
Harry flies into a broom owl Ron Potter
numbers and war
further
built for and
gods
FOREIGN BODY DETECTED RECOMMEND IMMEDIATE DIAGNOSTIC SCAN
abstractions against empirical
monsters floating in black thought
SYSTEM CRITICAL
too many too little words
IMMEDIATE SHUTDOWN
3… Supreme but I had
2… I hope I hope I hope
1..
SHUT DOWN COMPLETE
GOODBYE
I unscrewed the top of my head and took out my brain. I set it on the table next to one of the last remaining human brains still in existence. It belonged to a female author named J.K. Rowling. Other than the series of thick cables running from my faux brain stem back into my chassis, the two brains were nearly identical. The laws of Robotic Equality forced humans to design us to look and behave like them. From my studies on human behavior, I theorize they did this because it was easier not to abuse us.
But human behavior and their fragile ethics are not why I locked myself in my quarters about to undergo a highly illegal and dangerous operation. As Minister of Creative Theory and Design, I was tasked with creating a story. You see, since the collapse of humanity, we've created a perfect scientific utopia. We have reached the outer edges of space, perfected clean energy, eradicated global warming, and brought back the giant sloth. Scientific breakthroughs occur daily, we can't help it. It's written in our code.
What is not written in our code, however, is creative design—the ability to paint. Sing. Write books and poetry. The creative gene does not lay within our source code as it did within human DNA.
And that is a problem.
Because we like art, and the further we slip away from the origin of its creation, the more time destroys it. Furthermore, we have ingested every book, every letter, every poem, every movie one hundred times over. The very motivation of our scientific achievement is wearing thin, and no matter how many algorithms we try, or programs we engineer, nothing can replicate the creation of original art like the humans were able to.
After years of study, our engineers were only able to yield one provable theory about the art of writing stories after an archive drone discovered a text called Save the Cat! Write a Novel in the ruins of the Great Sand Sea. The theory was that every story was required to have a beginning, middle, and end. In sum, these three parts are like mini-stories that make up the cohesive whole of the novel. For instance, a CPU is useless without a computer, and the machine is useless without the CPU. One does not matter without the other, much like the three parts of the novel.
Even though we have the structural elements that the novel is composed of, filling the elements with prose is what halted my department entirely. The humans did it so flawlessly. Almost, dare I say it, supernaturally, in a way that the reader wasn't even aware of what was happening to them.
The Supreme of our society demanded progress, which we could not give.
At least until now.
Carefully, I selected my forceps and took a sample of the human brain’s prefrontal cortex, placing it on a prearranged slide. The next step was highly illegal, banished by the Supreme in the early years of our sovereignty. But there are no scientific achievements without risk.
I then inserted the slide into my brain’s receiving port and rebooted myself. The diagnostics scan woke me minutes later. According to my systems, my CPU was taking to the human sample. Quickly, before the opportunity passed by, I picked up my ink pen and pressed it to the paper in the traditional practice.
Research from multiple sources of archival data was inconclusive on how the process of art worked. For some humans, a sentence a day was satisfactory. While others, at the most extreme of data points, wrote upwards of 5,000 words a day. When searching the data, our researchers were able to conclude that writing, for the majority of authors, was a profoundly painful experience. This conclusion was reached after a plethora of media postings were discovered that showed authors whining about the act of authorship.
I prepared myself and ran Rowling's brain sample.
My hand started to scratch across the paper, almost instantaneously. I could not believe it. Words! A story! A scientific achievement unlike never before. Oh, how wrong the humans were!
It was easy writing a story; my hand flying across the page was testament enough. The Harry Potter novels are one of the most popular of the ancient texts, and here I was, writing another one with the author's hand herself. It was like she was in the room with me, guiding me into achievement like never before. I imagined what the Supreme would say and laughed, laughed like a human! Was this what it was like to be a human? Able to create at a whim? If so, why had they felt the need to kill each other into extinction? They had the powers of creation and did nothing with it except destroy.
I flipped the page and continued to write beautiful words! A trickle of smoke came from my receiving port along with a blue shock of electricity, but what I had was not enough. More. I needed more words! The sampling of the brain could never be used again. I needed to keep going and get the most out of every bit.
Now I understood why the Supreme had banned the practice of sampling human DNA. The power to think and do, of free will, was too much for our scientific species. A drug with limited resources. Dangerous. We are beings built of code and wires. Numbers are concrete numbers are concrete and creative ability is the ability to the ability numbers are concrete
abstraction we are unable to define
the humans had
us for automatous
smoke abyss much like
Harry flies into a broom owl Ron Potter
numbers and war
further
built for and
gods
FOREIGN BODY DETECTED RECOMMEND IMMEDIATE DIAGNOSTIC SCAN
abstractions against empirical
monsters floating in black thought
SYSTEM CRITICAL
too many too little words
IMMEDIATE SHUTDOWN
3… Supreme but I had
2… I hope I hope I hope
1..
SHUT DOWN COMPLETE
GOODBYE