“I didn’t write a single fucking sentence today!” Trevor stabbed at the delete key, again and again. Click. Click. Click. “Not,” click, “a damned,” click, “word.”
Samantha felt the panic rising. Trevor was her star author, and she was expecting a raft of short stories within the month. “But, the stories…”
“That’ll have to wait.” Trevor slammed his keyboard tray shut and turned off his computer.
“What’s the problem?” Oh god, don’t let another writer flake out on me at the last moment.
“It’s the damned editing program, Sam. The one you gave me.” His eyes burned accusation at her.
She sighed. “I didn’t build that to make your life more difficult, just to make mine easier. But that software is solid. What’s the issue?”
He grunted a non-word response.
“Look, if you don’t want to use it, you don’t have to. You’re just a good candidate to shake out the bugs.” She shifted from foot to foot. “I figured, give it your work, compare what it does to what I’d do with…”
“That’s the fucking problem! I can’t do any work! The editor is filling my in-box and it won’t stop!” He dropped his head to the desk so hard that he was sure he left a mark. “Ow.”
“Hm. I added a mail function to send completed edits back to you. Maybe I messed up, and it’s stuck in a loop.” She pulled out her laptop and sat cross-legged on the floor to log in.
“It’s not a loop.” Trevor got up from his chair and laid on his back next to her. “What did you change since the last version?” He closed his eyes, trying to block out everything.
“Well, the editor uses machine learning, so the first version I fed all the TImes’ best-sellers for the last twenty years, and told it to consider those as ‘good.’ Then I fed in an equal number of total flops and told it to consider those as ‘bad.’” She shrugged. “The first version was ok, but a little stiff.”
“And then?” He didn’t bother opening his eyes.
“For the next version I added in a bunch of fair-performing novels and told it consider those as ‘acceptable.’ I increased the slang, dialect and foreign language vocabularies.” Sam was finding it difficult to log into her cloud account. “I also moved it to the cloud and added auto-scaling and fail-over redundancies.”
“I see.” He wasn’t really paying attention, but at least he wasn’t fighting the losing battle of his in-box. “What about version three?”
“That’s the latest version. I added a break-down of the six major stories, examples of each from several genres, and the most popular beat sheets.” Her cloud account dashboard was taking ages to load. “You need a better internet connection, Trevor.”
“No, I don’t. I…”
“Holy shit!” Sam’s face grew pale. “Forget the short stories, how many books did you throw at this thing?”
“None. Not me. Didn’t do it.” Sam chuckled. “Welcome to hell.”
“Wait, there’s hundreds of books here in the finished queue.” She scrolled through the listing. “But who…?”
“The editor. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.” Sam sat up. “It started with a twenty-seven volume space opera. Then came the nine-volume fantasy saga, and at least thirty trilogies in every genre. Mystery, western, romance, comedy, drama, sci-fi, steampunk, cyberpunk, procedural, thrillers, you name it. I think one of them was a medical mystery thriller comedy in a steampunk setting.” He stretched his back. “Can you stop it?”
“But, how…” Sam took in a sharp breath. “Oh no.”
“Oh no, you can’t stop it, or oh no a medical mystery thriller comedy in a steampunk setting?” Trevor chuckled. He couldn’t help that seeing Sam suffer made his suffering a touch more bearable. Schadenfreude, misery loves company, what’s the difference at this point?
“It scaled out in a big, big, big way.” Sam typed at a furious pace, her fingers flying over the keyboard. “It’s currently running in seven globally distributed data centers and costing me almost eighteen grand an hour.”
Trevor leaned forward to look at her screen. “If you need a place to stay after this, my couch is free.” His earlier amusement at Sam’s suffering turned into instant guilt.
“I got it shut down.” Sam leaned back with a heavy sigh. “Now I need to convince the cloud host I can’t afford that bill. My account is supposed to cap at a thousand a month in charges, so I can lay the blame on them and, hopefully, get this bill for… two hundred ninety grand wiped out.”
“Well, if they don’t, and you’re on the hook, at least you’ve got lots of material to publish.” He stood. “And I wasn’t kidding about the medical mystery thriller comedy in a steampunk setting. It was actually good enough on skimming the first chapter, I saved that one to read later.”
Sam opened another tab on her laptop. “It looks like I have 1872 novels in online storage.” She tapped the trackpad. “And they all have your name as author.” She continued to tab through the documents. “You say at least one of these is honestly good?”
“From what I could tell, when they first started rolling in, they’re all good. But I don’t want my name on ‘em, I didn’t write ‘em.” Trevor flopped back on the floor.
She closed her laptop. “You know what this means, right?”
“It means I’m done. You’ve just done to fiction writing what the camera did to portrait painting.” Trevor chuckled. “I’m obsolete. I guess that means my ex was right, at least about that.”
“No, no. It means I’ve built an AI with the ability to create. It’s creative, mixing up genres, recombining and making art.” Sam hugged herself. “It means I have a real shot at the Palos A-I prize. Two million dollars!” She poked Trevor in the ribs. “I’ll share the prize with you, since you were kind of the inspiration behind the project.”
Trevor rubbed his forehead. “I thought the project was for doing more one-off contract editing gigs. Not for my stuff.”
“No, I… uh…” Sam coughed. “I mean, it was your… uh…”
“Relax. My writing is rough. I get that. And my editing skills suck. That’s what I have you for.” Trevor stretched his back. Hours spent hunched in his chair deleting hundreds of emails had left him tense. “Ugh, or had you for, at least. Good thing I still have a day job.”
Sam set her laptop to the side. “Hey, Trevor. I have no plan to release this to the world. Shit, I don’t even plan on publishing anything it wrote, outside of two or three excerpts in my paper on it.”
Trevor shook his head. “You don’t get it, do you? It doesn’t matter if you release the editor. It’s already out there, somewhere. You said it was on the cloud. There is no cloud, it’s just someone else’s computer. I bet someone there thought the traffic was interesting enough to make a copy of one of the VMs.” He laid his arm over his eyes. “Hell, they probably already have a copy running in a sandbox somewhere.”
“To be honest, I didn’t even think of the possibility that someone might copy one of the servers.” Sam folded her hands in her lap. “Wow. Trev. I didn’t realize you knew so much about this stuff.”
“That’s because for you, editing is your day job. You do the software stuff because you love it.” He removed his arm from his eyes and looked at her. “You keep forgetting that I, like most writers, still have a day job. In fact, you’ve never even asked. But I’ll tell you now, I’m a software engineer.”
“No shit?” Sam rocked side to side, and her gaze focused somewhere beyond the wall of the room.
“Hey, I know that look.” Trevor leaned up on one elbow. “You’re getting another crazy idea.”
“Maybe… maybe.” She stopped rocking and shifted her entire body to face Trevor. “How about this… you come to work for me? We’ll get the editor working correctly, I’ll pay you whatever you’re making now, plus some. Once it’s working, you can write full time, except when we need bug fixes, tweaks and stuff.” She patted his arm. “I’ll keep paying you, even after all the software work is done.”
“Tempting, lady. But how are you gonna’ pay for all that?” Trevor guessed what her answer would be, and he wasn’t sure how he felt about it.
“I’ll just publish enough of its work to keep the income steady. I make enough from my regular editing work and writers workshops for myself, it’ll just be enough to cover your salary and expenses.”
Trevor groaned. He was right, and it put him in an uncomfortable position. “Part of me wants to say yes, but another part of me says I’m dirty if I do.” He laid back down. “I don’t guess it’s any less of whoring myself out than what I do now. Two hundred a year, medical, dental, optical, a 401k, and I get a cut of whatever you make on sales of the neutered version of the software. I’m sick of working on DRM, anyway.”
“Neutered version?” Sam folded her hands again. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, that the full-featured version that does all the top-notch editing and can write stories from scratch…” he sat up. “You know the version I’m talking about, the one that requires a ton of AI and machine learning and scores of highly available cloud services, that one. You don’t sell that one, or even access to it to anyone. At any price. You keep that for you. You get a software patent on it, now, and sue the shit out of anyone else who copies it. We write a version that can run on a local computer or tablet or phone, and talks to a subset version of the AI and sell that one. Access to the online services is a subscription, of course.”
“You can do that? Split out a weaker version?” Sam’s eyes were pleading.
“I can. Probably.” Trevor tilted his head. “That’s my offer.”
“Done.” Sam gathered up her laptop and stood. “I’ll have a contract over in the next couple days. In the meantime, the short stories for the anthology…?”
“I’ll see what I can do.” Trevor stood and stretched his back. “I’m thinking of one where a guy loses his job to a new technology, and to survive he has to take a new job keeping the technology working.”
“You’re being melodramatic.”
“What?” He smiled and shrugged. “Write what you know, right?”
