Random Story :
Along the Barnacled Chain
Author: J.B. Draper The clanking of the elephantine chain binding …
Exit Ticket
Author: Brian Genua
When the mirror-toxin was injected in the base of my skull, it rendered me paralyzed from my eyelids down.
What happens when big-tech, big-pharma, and the NLP community come together to solve the national education crisis? The hybrid protocol known as Theraceuticals™.
My first experience with a Theraceutical called mirror-toxin came after I asked my cousin how I could improve my writing. She never lost her ability to type or write from memory like the rest of us. Only people who belonged to certain writing unions, like the Dramatics Guild, preserved their native writing skill. My language started to suffer before the prevalent use of generative AI, and soon after it was utterly destroyed. It degraded to the point that the last time I had to write a birthday card by hand, I borrowed my company’s micro projector and traced an auto-generated message with a cloned pen font of Barack Obama.
My cousin suggested I enroll in a course taught by a brilliant PhD in the basement of my local community college.
Now, his voice penetrates my auditory system by physically vibrating my inner ear through psychoacoustic induction. In other words, he’s typing and the words, which are traveling through my doped bloodstream and vibrating my inner ear. It’s like hearing the voice of an agitated ASMR artist from every possible angle inside and around your skull.
“A good writer can describe themself out of any situation using only prose.”
The mirror-toxin also sends my mental linguistic output, and shows what I imagined looked like the dashboard of a flight simulator, onto his screen monitored in real time.
“I see you reaching, there is no little grey search bar to help you. Write! Use your own blood, brains, and intelligence, whatever’s left, to describe your way out of this room.”
Without the use of my hands, my mind is still reaching. For anything: OpenAI, Safari, a dictionary, auto-text. Every time I do he punches a command that activates random combinations of nerve bundles, including rear teeth, soft palate, liver, and lower back simultaneously. I would convulse out of my seat if I wasn’t immobilized. There’s pain, and then there’s whatever this was. White lightning that shocked my nervous system into parallel dimensions.
It only took two knocks before I retreated to the part of my mind that I used to know well. The spaces where I kept words, composed phrases, and started sentences. I spent a few years there writing double-spaced essays in blue books.
What I am writing is hopefully what you are reading now. A coherent (enough) string of syntax that allows me to walk again.
He calls this today’s “exit ticket.”
Either way my cousin is right, this guy is brilliant.