As part of my usual pre-writing process when I’m starting a new novel, I like to write a pitch to get myself excited for the project, to get myself thinking in the big picture (tone, character archetypes, big questions and tensions) rather than getting bogged down in logistics. These big-picture “vibes” seemed particularly important to nail down for my Futures Project — despite the fact that it’s closer in length to a short story than a novel — because there are simply so many logistical elements threatening bogginess. So here’s the pitch:
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Mel finds the story in the archives where all stories are kept: pressed, frond-like, in the layers of digital memory; perfectly preserved for future scholars like themself. Mel has heard this story before, which isn’t uncommon. As a child, they collected stories under the bedclothes to treasure for always (though always is a short time for a child).
This time, though, the story in the archives is different from the one they remember. It’s not a lost variant; it’s not a flaw of childhood memory; it’s not an error of Mel’s AI scholar assistant. No, the story itself has changed.
Mel’s other studies fall by the wayside as they search for the explanation behind this impossibility. Deep in the code, they find it: a Worm. Elusive, incorporeal. Hungry. They follow its trail of mutated stories through the archives, but a human is no match for a digital predator, and so Mel takes a step that no scholar so young has ever taken, and merges — mind, heart, bone, blood — with their AI assistant.
Now they’re fast. Now they’re smart enough to preempt the Worm, and to start repairing the damage it’s done. But there’s a reason why scholars rarely merge with their AIs, as Mel learns. The stories become their entire landscape, and their physical body loses meaning.
So they dive deeper, Mel and the Worm, through the holes in the stories. One to eat; one to be eaten. Mel knows which one they’ll be. But in the half-life of the archives, as stories and bodies succumb to change, they begin to wonder if they’ve been fighting on the wrong side all along.
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This exercise was helpful in the ways I expected it to be, and also sparked some new ideas and realizations:
- The AI can (and should be) a character that exists before Mel’s hybridization, so I can explore not just the hybrid relationship but also the shift from non-hybrid to hybrid. Hence why the AI is now Mel’s scholar assistant. In this vein, I need to do more thinking about how I portray the AI’s voice on-page, and how it changes during and after the hybridization.
- I’m quite taken by the description of how Mel “merges — mind, heart, bone, blood — with their AI assistant,” and I need to explore more of what this means physically and psychologically, and how I can depict it concretely.
- The term “half-life” also stuck out to me. It captures the “halfness” of hybridity and the (possible) loss of some part of Mel’s human life, but it also carries the connotations of decay and change from chemistry. I’m considering renaming the project “Half-Life.”
- Writing out the pitch made me realize what a large proportion of the story actually takes place in the digital space of the archives. I haven’t put much thought into this setting yet, nor how I will convey its description given that so much of the story is told through Mel’s writings — but I think it will be very important to make it feel concrete and vivid. Another thing to consider.
- Having been forced to give my main character a name, I settled on Mel, inspired by Melpomene (the Greek muse of tragedy). I think there are more thematic implications here I could explore. I also need to consider whether Mel takes on a different name post-hybridization to reflect their changing identity, and also names for the AI; my initial idea is Zhi, which is a transliteration of the Chinese words for wisdom or the act of knowing (nodding to the AI’s expected role in my society and in relation to a scholar like Mel, and also to the distinct possibility that China may take the lead in the AI industry in future).
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