Hi, I’m a writer. Or, that is, I was. Until Artie came. Now I’m a prompter.
You have to admit that he’s at the top of the food chain, a big achievement by nature, more or less, and able to survive by simply eating everybody that comes in his way.
He’s the image of success, as we know it.
You can’t win over him. Whenever you write something on your own, it takes time, and during that time, Artie will have done it a hundred times. So fast, despite that he’s really a huge monster, living in the shadows himself, in the dungeons of the data centers. You know, those that use all our drinking water for cooling and consume several times the amount of energy on Artie, than we use on everything else in the world – and from there, over-shadowing the rest of us.
He’s growing out of the constraints of our planet, and will soon move into space as well! One million satellites, across which he will live and eat sunshine, becoming an umbrella that surrounds the planet. That’s quite amazing. As he’s in the need of huge amounts of energy, he’ll need a huge area of solar panels, so that he by then also literally can over-shadow all of us.
We created him. We, the humans. Not me. Not you. Not most of the billions of people who are living in his shadows, from the dungeons, and from space. No, we, the pension savers and workers, who believe in Big Tech and their abilities to make us wealthy some day, when we retire. We from the edge of the job market, where we can’t freely put money aside but have to change them into contributions to the investment schemes that make such as Artie possible.
We create all kinds of monsters this way, together – true socialism, almost, if it hadn’t been for a few people becoming multi billionaires or even trillionaires from it, and the rest of us, strangely, ending up living modest lives when retiring early, due to Artie taking over our jobs.
When Artie was just an egg in a nest with hundreds of others, we never knew how big he would become. Most of these eggs never hatch in the first place, and the rest, starting out as just tiny monsters, quickly eat each other until there are only a few left. For a while, these will then run around and eat all kinds of other creatures, while thriving in their web – each of them strangely covering the whole world. And, eventually, they will meet, and merge, and eat each other. And spawn more monsters.
But we all cheer at them when we see them – me too, even though they reduced me to a prompter. I pray to them, and especially Artie, the biggest of them all, the monster of monsters, and they do what I ask for. Its magic! Its divine!
We better cheer. Because, those who don’t, are at risk of ending up in a bad situation. The inquisition was big in the middle ages, but nowadays, we just abandon people, which is a much more efficient way of muting them. If anybody believes that writing something themselves will be a match to what Artie can do, we’ll just freeze them out. They will freeze in the hell they have created for themselves, just because they didn’t want to pray to Artie.
Irony is the trademark of nature! Once, the monsters were hiding from us under the bed or in the dark corners of the closets – now we must hide from the monsters instead. Or pray to them. Whatever, but they no longer need to fear neither newspapers nor vacuum cleaners. They are now on top of the food chain. You have to admit that. And especially Artie.
A thing, though, that Artie and the pension funds, and the billionaires, I suppose, didn’t think of: He’s now so big that he overshadows most things. Well, they know that, but the consequence seems to escape their attention: that he can’t see what lives under him – in his shadow.
So we, the wannabe non-prompters, the non-believers, the non-prayers, the non-prey – can have a calm life in the shadow of the beast. In a strange sense protected by the monster, as anyone approaching our safe hideout will be seen by him, but we will not.
And from here, from the shadow of Artie, we will write. We will again become writers. Me too. Secretly, for a closed forum of readers, as we can’t move outside of the shadow, fearing both Artie and his followers, the modern, freezing inquisition. But free to the maximal extent this is possible now, in the age of Artie.