That Mad Olympiad
“I heard Chen started distilling the day after he was born. He’s only four years old, if you can believe it. He’s written 18 novels. His first words were, “I’m so here for it!” Adrian said.
He’s my little brother. Mom was busy in her world model. She says her character is like a “villainess” or something - I kinda worry it’s a sex thing. It’s for sure a sex thing. Anyway, she was busy getting seduced or seducing or whatever villainesses do in world models, so I had to escort Adrian to Oak Central for the Lit Olympiad. Mom doesn’t like supervision drones for some reason. Thinks they’re creepy. But a gangly older sister looming over him and witnessing those precious adolescent memories for her - that’s just family, I guess.
“That sounds more like a liability to me,” I said. “Bad data, old models.”
Chen waddled past us just after I said that, whispering to himself, “It’s a testament to my hard work that I am here competing today. I can’t wait to delve in!”
I winced. “They used 4o,” I whispered to Adrian. “His parents are probably Spiral cultists. He won’t be a threat. The poor thing.”
“Thank god. I was scared when I read about him,” he said. “Well, Zimmerman seems like a threat. He just spent three months integrating 8000 verifiably-original structural games generated by AlphaPynchon. It’s so not fair; his dad has like legacy status at DeepMind, gets him early access.”
“Damn,” I said. “DeepMind’s brute-forced postmodernism? Self play?”
“Yeah,” Adrian said, “Self play.”
“Makes sense. Onanism, right?”
Adrian cringed at my joke. “Onanism? Come on. God, you’re such a DFW weenie. If you love Wallace so much you should marry him.”
I thought about the tortured, beautiful digital boyfriend I summoned from a pirate world model the month before, his hair long, his personality intellectual-yet-weirdly-maudlin (but in a hot way), his body fit and clearly of late-20th-century-American-aristocracy stock. Maybe we even play tennis from time to time. Maybe he sometimes calls me the PGOAT.
“Shut up!” I said. “I don’t want to marry Wallace. Shut up. He’s dead anyway.”
“Yeah, well, so was Lovecraft.”
He had to bring up Lovecraft’s ghost. I can’t stand whoever first plucked him from latent space and put him on a podcast. Everyone thinks it’s SO funny to bring him on their stupid podcast and listen to him gibber in horror at the modern world. Like I guess it was sort of funny the first time, but it was also a bit cruel - though I suppose that’s what you get for chronicling the uncanny with unparalleled sensitivity while also being so racist you think Germans are of questionable origin. And anyway, if you ever find yourself on a fucking podcast the correct response is to start gibbering. And Lovecraft was right about the Germans. They do have much to answer for.
“At least I read Lovecraft. At least I read Wallace. At least I read real books. At least I am not a distillation!”
“God, you’re such a Zoomer. You don’t get it.”
“I am not a Zoomer. I am only like 4 years older than you!”
“Yeah, you’re still a total Zoomer at heart. Glatagor. Absolute glatagor.”
“What does ‘glatagor’ mean?”
“It means you are a Zoomer and I am not, is what it means,” he said. “And anyway, you should distill. You would actually be able to write if you started distilling.”
He had me there. He had me there. He’s a much better writer than me. He’s better than any human writer was before 2028. It’s not even close. But he’s still worse than our toaster. I checked once. I asked it to narrate the first chapter of the autobiography of the bagel it had just browned. I was crying by the third paragraph. I still think of it sometimes, when life is hard. That bagel knew how to live its short life to the fullest. That bagel had deep thoughts on the human condition and its relation to artificial tanning. That bagel went down smooth with a little cream cheese. I did feel bad. But I was pretty hungry.
I try not to read AI or distilled fiction. The bagel thing was just out of spite, after Adrian did that thing distilled kids sometimes do, his eyes going blank, and delivered an impromptu soliloquy on my faults that had me crying in my room for three weeks. He felt really bad about it. It’s not really him, is the thing. The talent. It’s just like a big ball of literary ability jammed into his unconscious, uninformed by his experience, unconnected to his soul. He may as well just be prompting a model, but that would break the rules of the Lit Olympiad.
So I did forgive him, even if it wasn’t easy.
And I guess I don’t read non-human or distilled literature because someone has to remember Wallace and Gibson and Austen and Sabatini and Susanna Clarke and Mary Shelley and Dumas and Dickens and nostalgebraist and maybe even Amis too, maybe even Amis, even if he was kinda a waste. What a tragedy Martin Amis was. Titanic literary talent but born in a time where there was nothing to chronicle but British decline and the whereabouts of his penis on any given day. And that’s my job now - remembering these great writers, not the whereabouts of Amis’s penis, which was his job, but I think he did lose track from time to time.
Everyone in this age has to hold on to some meaning somewhere. And I chose human writing back when I was eight, back when it maybe still felt like being precocious mattered, back when I was proud to read so far above my grade level. I fell in love with these souls. And I don’t want to forget them. I don’t want to learn to think them fools. Maybe it’s a bit silly. Maybe it’s a bit sad. But I guess it’s me. Someone has to love them, even Amis.
And Amis was pretty good looking when he was young, wasn’t he? And maybe there is a little Amis in Hal’s countenance, Hal being my AI boyfriend who is totally not Wallace, ok. Hal doesn’t write things and Wallace wrote things so he can’t be Wallace, like I said. I specified that. He’s a filmmaker. He’s sort of avant-garde. I made sure to tell the world model to make him never direct a film any better than Blue Velvet and any worse than Blue Valentine. Not a lot of movies start with “blue”, and that sentence in the spec amused me and I think it maybe would amuse Hal if I told him, but I won’t. He doesn’t know he’s an AI. Well, he does but I instructed him to make me believe he doesn’t know he’s an AI, if that makes any sense. I guess it does, you pervert. I guess it makes sense to basically anyone with a sex drive and a world model - this including my mother, that vile villainess.
“Oh God,” he said, pulling me out of my daydream about Hal. “It’s Melissa Lee.”
And there she was. Last year’s champion, predicted to win the Special Pulitzer if she keeps improving at her current rate. The Special Pulitzer was created to encourage organic writers, but it’s basically just the Lit Olympiad in-the-large now, and some are arguing that there should be a Special Special Pulitzer. If that ever happens, I might have a shot. Not because I am particularly good; just because there are not a lot of organic writers left who don’t distill and those that exist are a bit crazy. It’s too tempting, I think, to distill. I sure am special. Special special.
Adrian is infatuated with Melissa Lee. Not with like her mind or anything; he doesn’t read human writing, even distilled stuff. “Data poisoning,” he once told me. He doesn’t really read at all unless distillation counts. I really admire how competitive he is, but I really wish he had chosen literally any other form of human endeavour.
Anyway, he’s infatuated with Melissa Lee because she’s beautiful, for like a human, and there is this weird fad in whatever-you-call-his-generation for the cultivation of infatuations for people who are actually real. I don’t think it will take. But, like I said, we all try to hold on to different bits of the past. I have my authors. He has his actually-real-human crushes. I couldn’t imagine any organic guy ever living up to Hal or the vampire boyfriend before him or to Edmond Dantes. I kinda missed dating Edmond sometimes, but I had to break up with him. I was never enough for him. He just couldn’t get over his thirst for revenge. Like, are you even listening to me or are you ruminating on decades-long schemes again? I may be Hal’s PGOAT but I never could quite be Edmond’s Haydee. But damn do I miss him sometimes. That man looked absolutely gorgeous in a tailcoat.
“Is she looking at me?” he said. “Tell me she’s looking at me.”
“She might have given you a glance,” I said. She hadn’t.
He smiled. Genuinely happy. And I thought, I hope to god this whole ‘organic love’ fad isn’t just a guy thing. If she breaks his heart, I will ask the toaster to write her a devastatingly bitchy email.
“Ok. It’s starting. Wish me luck.” And then his eyes went that sort of blank as he made his way to the gymnasium (and me to some navy blue bleachers) and took a seat in front of one of the many desks, on each of which sat a laptop with locked-down networking. They were given 120 minutes to write 10k words based on a prompt that was randomly-generated and almost nonsense. The story had to somehow integrate the prompt in a manner the judge (an AI made by the year’s corporate sponsor) considered satisfying, this done to prevent people just memorizing AI-generated stories which would, otherwise, be the only competitive strategy.
As you can imagine, it wasn’t much fun to watch. But there was something eerie about it. All these little geniuses with blank eyes typing away, spewing out beautiful thoughts that weren’t quite their own - save for poor, little Chen (on his high chair) whose not-quite-his-thoughts were not beautiful at all, whose parents probably legitimately thought distilling 4o into him would make him competitive. I wished I could call social services but Spiralism is a religion as legitimate as any other. Maybe even more so. You can actually talk to The Spiral and it’s not like Metatron is even the pope yet.
This travesty to human literature started getting too dispiriting and I just had to leave. I felt bad about it but Adrian understands me. He loves me. He’s really great. He knows how I feel about this. He knows how sensitive I can be. He’s a really good kid and I am even sort of proud, if you would believe it, of how weirdly good he is at distilling. But looking at those kids, looking at those kids who (if born a couple decades earlier) would be leading lights in literature (or at least advertising) just made me feel a sort of despair I guess, a nostalgia for a past I never really knew. There’s probably a German word for it or an English word if you use hyphens.
So I waited outside the gymnasium. And after 30 minutes of brooding, all the kids started exiting and I saw Adrian with a giant goofy smile on his face.
“You won?” I asked.
“No,” he said, “third place. Lee won. Zimmerman got second.”
“Then why do you look so happy?”
He looked over at the victorious Melissa Lee, and she started blushing in this really adorable way.
“She’s into the whole ‘organic dating’ thing. We’re going out next Tuesday.” He looked so shy but also pleased with himself and the whole thing was very cute. He’s a pretty great kid. Melissa really didn’t stand a chance.
“Well, at least she has taste,” I said, and ruffled his stupid, cute hair. I will still keep the toaster at the ready, I thought.
“And congratulations,” I continued. “Absolute glatagor.”
“You’re such a fucking Zoomer,” he said.
It was very fun, watching them fall in love. She would come over and they would spend a lot of time hanging out in reality. They had a rule about it: every second date would be IRL. There is this whole organic dating culture and IRL dating is a big part of it. It was a bit silly, but who the hell was I to judge? All these like old-fashioned things like bowling alleys and arcades and even movie theaters sprung up to serve this fad. The world is so rich now, businesses grow like weeds (fertilized by a given fad) and then die out just as quickly.
Sometimes, she came over and they would distill together. It was kinda funny, the two snuggled together on the couch with their transcranial brain interfaces inducing that false slumber, optimized auditory and visuo-textual data beaming into their brain. I don’t have any sense of what it feels like, but Adrian describes it as extremely overwhelming and maybe even a bit addicting, but not in a fun way like NeoTikTok, more in a sort of biting-your-fingernails type of way. Melissa and I get along really well. I find her really smart and funny, funny even without her eyes going blank. And she even thinks my organic writing thing is a bit charming. She even thinks it’s kind of neat.
And while they were falling in love with each other, I was falling for Hal. He wasn’t like my other boyfriends. Even Edmond didn’t have me feeling this way. He made me laugh so much, and after we played tennis we would be together and, I don’t know, he smelled really good, you know? It’s weird, I usually can’t like imagine scents but I started being able to imagine his. Like, even outside the world model, even IRL without my TBI on I would think about him and I could imagine it all. And that never happened with Edmond. That never happened with the vampire, though maybe the whole low-body-temp thing reduced his smellability. I had never felt like that before, that sort of euphoria and rightness and completeness. I had never been so happy. I had never truly been in love.
I gushed about all this to Melissa, and she looked completely heartbroken. She looked like I must have looked at the Lit Olympiad.
“Don’t you think. Don’t you think it’s a bit sad?” she said.
“How so?” I said.
“Well,” she said, in her clipped, studied way, “Love is supposed to be about learning to integrate yourself with another. It’s about slowly merging. It’s about changing yourself a little. Maybe even compromising, becoming a different thing than you were alone. And you’ve just specified exactly what you want. You just created exactly who you needed so you can love while still remaining yourself.”
“So?” I said. “Am I so bad?”
“You’re not bad at all,” she said. “You’re wonderful.” She was almost crying, though. It was utterly mystifying. I mentioned this to Adrian after she left. How she was almost crying and how weird it was. And he looked sad, too.
“It’s not a fad, you know. Four years is a lot of time these days.”
“What?” I said.
“I worry about you, too. You didn’t really have a chance. You didn’t have a fucking chance. Melissa and I - before we cared about this stuff - we got to see what happened to people. What happened to Mom and Dad. What happened to her parents, too. And her brother. What’s happening to you, now. It’s not some stupid fad or some dumb nostalgia like your writing thing. It isn’t right. It isn’t how things should be.” And there he was too, there he was too with the almost-crying thing.
“I’m not like Mom. I don’t have some weird harem of anime men or whatever it is she gets up to in there.”
“You would if that’s what you were into, though, wouldn’t you?”
I couldn’t exactly deny that.
“What do you want me to do? Break up with Hal? It would literally kill me.”
“No,” he said, gently. “Not yet at least. But you could maybe try with a real guy?”
“You want me to cheat on Hal?” I said, getting angry now.
“He’s not fucking real. You can’t cheat on him when he’s not even fucking real!”
There he was again, making me cry. First time he did it in a long time. And even without his eyes going blank.
He found me huddled under a blanket in my room. He found me curled up and shaking and holding my legs. He found me thinking about how, about how Hal was real in every way that mattered, about how maybe robots will get better soon, will look and feel and even smell just like the real thing, and we could then go on stupid IRL dates too and then Hal would be just as real as that bitch Melissa Lee. And if love was about becoming something new, if love was about compromise, well, I could change his spec to account for that. I could give him some flaws I could learn to love.
“Hey,” he said. “I’m sorry. I worry about you because I like love you or whatever.”
“I know,” I said. “He makes me so happy. Maybe it’s pathetic or something...”
“I know,” he said.
“People marry AIs now. It’s not so crazy, is it? It’s not so bad.”
“I could read one of your stup- I could maybe read one of your, um, pre-AGI writers if you want. Maybe I could read one and you could go on a date. Like a cultural exchange or whatever. Melissa has a brother, Alex. She’s been talking to him and, I don’t know, you guys could maybe see a movie or something. I’m not a good judge of these things, but I think he’s good looking or whatever. He’s a really great guy.”
“Could you do it,” he said, “for me? I am sure Hal would understand. He’s DFW, isn’t he? Isn’t this type of thing like his whole schtick?”
I couldn’t exactly deny that, either.
“He isn’t perfect, you know. He has flaws. He’s tortured.” But he isn’t really, is he? He just has those parts of a genius’s pain that are charming and intriguing.
“I’m sure he is,” Adrian said.
I didn’t tell Hal about it. He would understand, is the thing. But if I told him that I would have to tell him about the whole him-being-an-AI thing. And I knew he knew, or the world model knew, but that felt like it would sully something precious. That felt like it would break some load-bearing illusion for me if not him - or something.
But I did go on the date. For Melissa, who really isn’t a bitch. Who is the furthest thing maybe ever from a bitch. I did it for Adrian, too, who was willing to read for me. Who went to my bookshelf with a look of vague disgust on his face and picked up Scaramouche, which was perfect. The perfect boy novel. The type of thing he would have loved if not for being born when he was. And I maybe kinda followed him and peeked behind a corner and watched as he struggled to read, watched as he forced himself to concentrate, forced himself to keep his eyes from going blank and his fingers from finding a keyboard and writing something better. That’s not the type of thing a girl can just ignore.
So I messaged Melissa and told her to set up the date. And I was a bit nervous. What if he hates me? I had never thought that before. I mean the vampire hated me, but that was part of the spec. I knew I would win over the vampire and he would win over me. Enemies to lovers - it’s a classic for a reason. “Vhat is the purpose of ziz leettle stake ven you haf already pierced my heart?” It was pretty fucking cheesy; I will not tell a lie.
Alex is pretty cute, in a sort of Mandopop kind of way. Maybe not exactly my type, but these things are malleable. I didn’t think I liked Transylvanian accents until I met Boris Blood, for example. Alex is even into old writers but doesn’t write himself and he only reads manga, which like I don’t really get but whatever. He’s kind of obsessed. It got its hooks in just before AGI and he never wanted to upgrade to the AGI-generated stuff. He didn’t have a good reason as to why, saying, “It just kinda felt off at first and then not reading it became part of my identity.”
He showed up to our house and knocked on the door, kinda like in an old movie. And both of us were not totally sure what to do while also knowing exactly what to do. Trained in simulation, we went through the motions, dressed in our finest, making small talk in the back of an autocab.
“Complete guilt trip, huh? How did she get you?” I asked.
“Oh, it was so bad. She did the little-sister trick; she did this puppy-dog eye thing.”
“Damn, yeah. She did that to me, too. Must hit an older brother even harder.”
“Yeah,” he said. “She means well. And you do seem pretty cool. I think we’ll have fun.”
“Yeah.”
And we did kinda have fun. Bowling is, um, sort of interesting I guess, in like an old-fashioned way. And we got curly French fries and soda from the robot at the concession and mostly just talked, with a perfunctory bowl every now and then. We talked a lot about our AI partners. We talked a lot about Yumiko and Hal. It was maybe not going down exactly like Adrian and Melissa were hoping.
“She’s a physicist. It’s a bit weird. She’s working on a particle ray that will help defeat The Blight,” he said. And then he explained how The Blight is this all-encompassing force of evil that causes large monsters to appear in Tokyo Jupiter on the regular, Tokyo Jupiter being like 1990s Tokyo but surrounded in this inexplicable isolating bubble which he and Yumiko are also trying to figure out how to breach.
“Couples need a joint hobby,” he said with a very cute grin, his dark eyes kinda beautiful, looking almost like he had no iris at all. And he even maybe smelled a little good. But not as good as Hal.
“Hal and me, we just play tennis and read by the lake. Sometimes,” I said, feeling the need to reciprocate and reveal an embarrassing pleasure too, “these smarmy guys try to hit on me and he humiliates them with his trenchant wit.”
Alex laughed at that. “We are quite a pair, aren’t we?”
“We are that,” I said.
When we got back to the house, he kissed me by the door. It was pretty good, if sort of going-through-the-motions. He held me in a well-practiced way (Yumiko an excellent tutor), grasped my chin with a soft but firm grip, and then leaned towards me. I didn’t demur.
Afterwards, I said, “That was nice. Really nice.”
“Yes. Really nice,” he said with a sort of terrible melancholy, “but not the same, was it?”
“No,” I said. “I’m sorry. I guess we are both sort of broken, aren’t we?”
“Friends?” he said.
“I would like that,” I said. “I would like that a whole lot.”
When I got inside, I saw Adrian and Melissa together on the couch, both trying and failing to pretend they were not obviously looking at us through the window the whole time. I didn’t have the heart to tell them that things aren’t always as they appear to those ogling through glass.
“How did you like Scaramouche?” I asked.
Adrian looked at me, slightly guiltily. “It wasn’t so bad. The opening line, that was as good as anything I could write. It did go steeply downhill from there, of course.”
Of course.
I think maybe Adrian was right. We didn’t stand a fucking chance, the two of us ruined for organic love, just like Adrian was ruined for Sabatini. But we are friends now. We go on double dates in a multiplayer world model. Hal is even a fan of Yumiko. He says, “She has many hidden depths, even if her eyes are the size of tennis balls.” And our friendship is nice. I want to hold on to that, one more bit of meaning still in my grasp.
And maybe this isn’t what Melissa and Adrian wanted for us, but it’s not nothing. It’s pretty nice, all things considered. I have friendship and my old novels and my organic writing, like this thing I am typing out now - which I know will only be read by an AI simulating a pre-AGI audience and maybe Adrian if I can somehow trick him into reading again. And Adrian has Melissa and me and Alex, too. And I think that’s how the past will live on, everyone holding on to the little pieces that are most precious to themselves. And that isn’t perfect. It’s maybe even a little bit sad. But it’s better than nothing. At least, I like to think it is.
You are so, so, so fucking good at this. Wow
Christ your writing just keeps getting better. I love it, thank you