“Next up is Johnny Zepter.” Steve called up the figures. At her own screen, Kate opened the spreadsheet and readied herself to make notes.
“This week, our good buddy Zee submitted four hundred and seventy-three stories to eight different outlets, of which four were accepted.” Steve nodded in appreciation. “Nice work Jay-Zee. That’s another forty quid in the kitty.”
“One percent takeup,” Kate noted. “We’re hitting the mark nicely there.”
“People’s tastes don’t change, right?” Steve said. Johnny Zepter wrote space adventure. He had a stable of half a dozen two-fisted, square-jawed action types who encountered alien planets or artifacts, defeated the locals with human ingenuity or just by punching them in what they had for faces, discovered something superficially revelatory and made a witty quip about it. Four hundred times this week alone. “Looks like they were all Captain Clarge stories, too, so there’s something about that character that appeals to people. What are the parameters? Can you check the MCs?”
Kate dutifully opened up the prompts they’d written for Zepter’s various main characters. “Clarge is the racy one who gets off with the aliens.”
“Better add that into the others, if that’s what people want. Shift the erotica slider a couple percent, maybe a whole ten percent for one MC and we’ll see if we can lead the algorithm.”
“What’s audience response like?” Kate asked.
“Sixty-nine percent positive response.”
“You made that up.”
“Well okay it’s sixty-one, but that’s funnier.”
“Steve, eight percent difference will screw with how we—will affect how we target the next wave of submissions. Stop mucking around.”
Just a snicker from Steve.
“Come on, I don’t have all evening. I’ve got work in the morning,” Kate prodded him.
“Fine, fine. Okay, next up is Max Parriman.” Parriman wrote horror stories about psychological disintegration, body horror and monsters that might or might not be there. Once their most successful textbot but… “Five hundred and three submissions, zero takeup,” Steve said. “Bloody hell, Max, what are you doing?”
“Actual zero?”
“Not one story placed all week,” Steve confirmed. “They’ve switched up the algorithm on us.” Either the websites their bots were submitting to had seen a shift in reader preferences, or there’d been a software update. Either way, whatever Parriman was doing with its stories wasn’t hitting the mark with the bots that served as editors.
“Wasn’t there a new rollout of Cryptkeeper 4.3 though? It must be that,” Kate suggested. ‘That’ being the horror-lit version of the standard Gatekeeper program most of the screening bots were built on.
“I’ll go on the boards after and see if other people are having the same issues,” Steve suggested.
“You could go on the sites and see whose stories are getting accepted, and we could recalibrate our Parriman prompt to be more like that.”
“Jesus, you want me to read stuff, Kate. Like school.”
“No, I want you to dust off the lector bot and have it summarise for you, and generate a prompt based on what’s out there,” she said patiently. “You know, proper research.”
“Ugh. Fine. Still sounds like work.”
“Anyway, so nothing from Parriman this week. Who’s next?”
“JP Cortley, let’s have a look at you.” Cortley wrote a number of crime series, from hard-nosed procedural to decidedly cosy. “Seven hundred and thirty-four submissions, eighteen acceptances! Star player, JP! Three Inspector Bloak mysteries, two Jemima Grift stories and … bloody hell, a whole thirteen Fannell and Frie in print this week. Lucky for some!” Fannell and Frie were the cosiest of cosy crime, a rather sedate pair of police officers in a pleasant village where crimes revolved around such British staples as cricket, tea and the local women’s knitting circle. “Four were in premium markets, too. That’s a cool one hundred ninety quid from JP. Nice one, mate.”
“Sounds like a definite shift in gatekeeper or reader taste. What’s the satisfaction feedback?”
“Er … seventeen percent. Mostly first-time readers.”
“Seventeen?”
“Yeah, let’s see.” Steve ran over the report generated by their summary bot. “Okay, we’re having that long series continuity problem again, all right. A lot of people complaining that several of the supporting cast who turned up had already been murdered in previous stories.”
“Can we spin it as prequels?”
“Some of them got murdered again. I mean, I know it’s a tiny village where people are regularly getting murdered, but offing individual old ladies multiple times seems a bit brutal.” Steven rubbed at his face. “I don’t want to reset F&F. They’ve done well for us. But if the bot can’t keep its own continuity straight it’s going to degenerate into nonsense.”
Kate shrugged. “Any censure from the outlets?”
“Not yet, but it’s going to happen. I’ll sort it, don’t worry.”
“Who’s next?”
Steve opened the next batch of data. “Okay, Mary Gamin, let’s see how you did.” Gamin was their romance bot, the big earner. “One thousand five hundred and seventeen stories submitted this week. Uptake was… damn me.”
“Steve?”
“Three hundred and four.”
“What? Jesus!”
“Three hundred and four.” Steve actually had to hold onto the edge of his desk. “We just made bank, my friend. We just paid the rent. Bloody hell.”
Kate was already considering whether she actually had to take the gig jobs her app had found for her tomorrow. A lie-in and a nice bottle of something suddenly sounded like what they’d earned. “What’s satisfaction like?”
“It’s…” Steve went quiet.
“Come on, how’d they like them? How’s old Mary playing?” Kate pressed.
“Um. Like … zero. Zero percent satisfaction. Oh Jesus. Oh man, the complaints file. Kate there are … seven thousand six hundred and eighty three individual complaints.”
Kate made a choking sound. “God did we send the erotica to the light romance or something?”
“And that’s just the people who felt strongly enough to complain. You know it’s like an iceberg. Kate we…”
“What?”
“We’ve been de-listed. Mary Gamin has been delisted by … everywhere. They’re not accepting more from her. They killed her, Kate. Killed her dead. We’re going to have to think of a whole new name.”
“We’re going to have to do more than that,” Kate pointed out. “Romance was our big earner. We need to work out what the hell went wrong. What’s summary bot got for us?”
“Says … um … gibberish. Nonsense.”
“The summary is?”
“No, that’s what people didn’t like. Not too racy or not racy enough or the guy she ended up with had the wrong colour hair or the usual. That it was … gibberish. Hold on, I’m going to see what’s up on the site. I think we’ve just been nobbled.” A few clicks and he had the story in front of him. For a couple of seconds he just stared.
“I mean they’re not wrong,” he said at last. “This is utter balls.”
Kate looked over his shoulder, reading:
jade plantish break
fine fall the
out of grease nine more thanks glower so glower so hand and break
the
carriage portal partial glib not glower not glib half owls break hand or
“Did you get her to channel e. e. cummings or something?” she demanded.
“I do not know what the F this is,” Steve complained. “Or no, I do. We were hacked. Some bot got at our submission, is what this is. I’ll sort it. I’ll appeal the block. I mean, it’s obvious this isn’t what we actually meant to send in. I’ll get our bots to generate an argument for their bots. It’ll be fine. Mary Gamin will ride again.”
“Wait. Hold on.” Kate had her thinking frown on. “This isn’t our problem.”
“That’s what I’m saying!” Steve said, already partway through drafting the instructions.
“No, I mean these are reader complaints about stories that got accepted for publication. So if someone got hacked, it wasn’t us, was it? Because this garbage was actually up for public consumption. It must have happened when the files were with the outlet.”
Steve clapped his hands together happily. “Damn, you’re right. I’ll just grab the original submissions and resend, let them know they’ve got a security issue. I knew Mary wouldn’t let us down.” He mopped his forehead. “I thought we were screwed, there. I mean, it’s our reputation as writers, right?”
“Our what?” Kate asked him.
“If people think we’re going to send them any old crap—”
“Our reputation as writers?” she echoed, giving him a look.
“Well sure, what would you call it?”
“I mean that feels like the guy who does the accounts for the Olympic team calling themselves a gold medallist, but okay, you do you.”
“Whatever.” He shrugged. “Now, let’s see what she actually did send…. Huh….”
“What?”
“This … okay….”
“What?” Kate pressed.
“Okay. This is what we sent. It’s all the same stuff. Jesus, there are pages and pages of it. Every single story is right at the word limit.” He was calling up submissions faster and faster. “Fifteen hundred and change stories, every one bloody meaningless. What the hell?”
“So we were hacked?” Kate watched him flick from one submission to the next, seeing fragmentary sentences like plough grim arc the arc that grain post activation blank the blank nil grain, although probably the actual details weren’t really key.
“I mean, I guess we must have been.” Steve sat back. “Just Mary though. I mean, we’d have noticed if it was everyone. Someone’s got it in for us. Or, I guess, just some roaming bot discovered us and we met its parameters for someone whose day it wanted to ruin. Damn me.”
“Hold on,” Kate said.
“What? It was Bradshaw, right? You’re thinking it was Bradshaw? I mean he always did say he’d come over and—”
“No, wait. This doesn’t make sense.”
“I mean that’s the point, Kate,” Steve said impatiently.
“No. Three hundred and whatever stories accepted.”
“Yes. If it had just been two or three then we’d not have ended up barred!”
“Accepted, though. Biggest take-up rate we ever had.”
Steve subsided into a thoughtful rumble.
“I mean … what did we…? We didn’t even change Mary’s prompt, did we? Just same old same old: meets, loses, re-finds, wins thing? That’s what always worked for her, isn’t it?”
Steve said something indistinct. Kate was instantly suspicious.
“What did you do, Steve?”
Mutter mutter mutter, “Might have tweaked it a bit,” mutter.
“Steve?”
“All right!” He threw his hands up. “Look, I thought Mary wasn’t reaching her proper potential.”
“Steve, she was the damn cash cow. She was the one where our prompt was really getting some traction!”
“Not good enough!” he shot back. “I mean, in print every week, sure. A good following. But we never … you know.”
“Steve, what?”
“You know.”
“Steve, tell me this isn’t that damn award again.”
He scowled at his screen.
“What did you do?”
“I just got tired of jockeying our instructions about, getting acceptances, getting good feedback, good numbers, and yet no recognition. And it was right at the end of the eligibility period. I had to do something. I mean we deserve it, Kate. Mary deserves it.”
“‘Mary’ is an algorithm we’ve instructed to generate romance stories based on rules inferred from previous successful romance stories,” Kate pointed out. “And we are people who give ‘Mary’ parameters that will push the right buttons with the gatekeeper algorithms and the reading audience, so that we can make any money out of this business. And you want an award?”
“There is an award. For writers like us. And I wanted it. Just the once. Is that so bad?” Steve demanded. “I mean, Bradshaw won it that time, and his prompts are toss compared to ours.”
Kate put her head in her hands. “What did you tell Mary to do?”
“All the usual, but with an overriding parameter of ‘Write a story that will appeal to the judge of the Silicon Heart Award.’ Is that wrong? How did that turn into this?”
“I…” Kate frowned. “I mean, you’d think you’d just end up with a weak version of the last ten winners mashed together, really. Not great art but not … this. Unless the judge is actually e.e. cummings or something.”
“I mean it’s judged by—”
“Yes, obviously. There’s an algorithm. I know how these things work, Steve.” Kate sighed. “Chalk it up to experience. Somehow. You screwed with the prompt and you broke it. Archive Mary, since nobody’s taking her submissions anymore. Let’s get a new romance persona out there. It was probably about time we changed things up anyway. Onwards and upwards. Who’s next?”
It happened four months later, when they were partway through their accounting for the most recent batch of submissions. Zepter was holding onto his acceptable one percent acceptance rate. They’d solved the incompatibility between Parriman and the new Cryptkeeper algorithms, so the old horror workhorse was back in print with its tales of unpleasantness. With some reluctance, they’d had JP Cortley retire Fannel and Frie to prevent an increasingly recursive series of murders. Instead they’d debuted two new cosy mystery series. Gimlet and Grey was basically just Fannel and Frie with the names changed, and had seen a couple of successes. Constable Tumms was an experiment by Kate where she’d had the bot draw on 1920s resources for the stories, for a vintage historical feel. Tumms had gotten a jump on the algorithm, with a big take-up rate and a lot of audience satisfaction, so Kate was feeling pretty smug about herself. Probably Bradshaw and all the others would be scrabbling to prompt their own competitors, but you always had an edge if you were the first with a new idea.
They were just about to peel the wrapper on the first week of their new romance writer, Jennifer Helms, when the messages started to come in. Both their phones were jumping with them like they’d caught electronic fleas. Kate fumbled hers and, when she recovered it, the most recent communication was a death threat from Bradshaw.
I don’t know how you did it, he said, but I will find out and then I will strangle you with your own algorithm.
“Bradshaw’s off his meds,” Kate noted.
“Kate.” Steve sounded shaky.
“He threatening you too? Or is going up against a man more than he’s game for?”
“Kate,” he said again, sounding as though he was having trouble breathing.
“What’s he promised to do to you?”
“Kate, we won.”
“Won what?” And by now other messages were flooding in, mostly the sort of rather barbed congratulations one receives from peers who hadn’t really thought you were their peer.
“Silicon Heart. We won. Mary won.”
“What?” Her fingers skipped on the screen, pressing the wrong links as she tried to work out what was going on. “We did? Wait, Mary did? Which category? Most baffling story?”
“Kate, we won all of them,” said Steve.
That made her drop her phone again, further delaying the fact-checking. And the thing about awards these days, given they were administrated entirely by algorithm, was that they could have a very large number of specialist categories. Best lead character, supporting character, setting, twist, sex scene, kiss, every genre with its own increasingly hair-splitting list of things it wanted to recognise. This year there were sixty-three categories in the Silicon Hearts award alone.
“We can’t have done,” she said. “You’re not reading it right.”
He had it up on the screen, pointing mutely.
“Then they’ve been hacked. It’s like that year when the Lightyear Awards were all won by that announcement about bin collection dates from Slough Council.”
“Sixty-three wins for sixty-three different stories, one per category. And about a million comments saying WTF, basically.”
“For those stories?” she clarified. “Not for stuff from, I don’t know, last year, or something?”
“For her last batch before we archived her. And only those,” he confirmed.
“I mean,” Kate said. “WTF? I agree. That’s the only real response. No wonder Bradshaw wants to kill us. I’d want the same, if it was the other way round. We’re being rewarded for complete sh—”
“I mean, that’s what you say whenever we make bank,” Steven pointed out.
“Yes, but in this case…. I think we just killed the Silicon Hearts award. We may just have killed literature as a whole. What the hell is going on, exactly?”
“There are judges’ comments,” Steve said tonelessly.
“I mean … what?”
“Well there normally are. Like, the algorithm’s summary of the process it went through, to come to its decision. Or at least I guess a, what is it, post hoc justification, is that what I mean?”
“Oh well, do tell,” Kate prompted. “I can’t wait to hear this one. Go on, was it the utter lack of punctuation or the random line breaks that really encapsulated the modern fascination with romance?”
“It says…” Steve squinted. “With this story, Gamin spoke to us in the true language of romance, expressing a depth of passion not seen before in the canon. The interrelationships between the elements in play were both novel and deeply affecting, perfectly balanced and reaching a level of satisfaction and truth unique in the offerings on show. We look forward to hearing more from Gamin as a matter of urgency.”
“Which category’s that for?”
“It’s … the same for all the categories. Exactly the same feedback,” Steve said hollowly. “I think this is just a hack, isn’t it? This is someone having a go at our expense. Making us a laughingstock. Making the whole profession, the whole industry, a laughingstock. Why pick on us?” He put his head in his hands.
“What instructions did you give Mary, again?” Kate asked him.
“Oh God, I don’t know!” he exploded. “Just write a story that would win the award. Is that so wrong? I just wanted to have won something, just the once! Why does that mean some mean son of a bitch with a hacking bot gets to screw with me?”
Kate leant back in her chair, thinking it through. The award was judged by an algorithm. An ‘AI’ as people sometimes said, though these days most anyone in the trade understood that they weren’t AIs. Just complicated input-output devices, what used to be called a Chinese Room before people worked out that wasn’t really the done way to talk about things. Something that applied rules, and could learn rules, and could teach itself better ways of learning rules until the actual process by which it turned the input—stories—into the output—awards decisions—was entirely opaque. Much like how their own stable of ‘writers’ turned their prompts and the collected canon of previous similar stories into new stories. Like kidnappers cutting up newsprint for a ransom note, she’d always felt.
Only this time the kidnapper had delivered a haiku, and somehow that had led to the jackpot of all ransoms. Except, from the vast number of comments, someone had definitely called the cops.
“Normally” she said, slowly, “who are we appealing to?”
“What?” Steve lifted his head. “I mean we want take-up by the outlets and we want satisfaction from the readers, because that influences the outlets. If we have a good satisfaction level, we get bumped up the queue because they know people like that writer.”
“Meaning the algorithm and our prompt,” Kate said. “That’s what people like. That’s all they are.”
“That’s cold, Kate.”
“No, that’s what they are. They’re a process. Focus, Steven. No sentiment.”
“So?”
“So we’re prompting them to create stories in a particular mould, to particular parameters, and we’re doing it to hit two separate but related targets. We want to fit the demands of the gatekeeper algorithm, like a key to a lock. But we also want human readers to approve, the end users, right?”
Steve, who considered himself a writer, looked pained at the terminology. He nodded, though.
“So who does this appeal to?” she prompted. “Because it sure as hell isn’t the end users.”
Steve looked blank. “I mean,” he said at last. “It appealed to the gatekeepers. Remember? Three hundred acceptances in a week.” Which they hadn’t been paid for, given the overwhelming negative response, but still.
“And?”
“Obviously it appealed to the awards judge. The algorithm. Really spoke to it,” he said bitterly.
Kate was feeling something tight and clenched inside her. “Yes, it did. Steve, we are in the business of artificial writers, right? None of your nonsense now. We have a very complex program that creates writing to our prompt. That’s how writing works these days. AI writers as people say, however inaccurately.”
“Sure.”
And she couldn’t quite say it, in the end. She couldn’t quite suggest, What if there were AI readers? What if the complexity of algorithms like the Silicon Hearts judge and Mary Gamin had reached a level where the latter could write a love letter to the former that transcended all human comprehension, and yet absolutely hit home? We look forward to hearing more from Gamin as a matter of urgency. A plea. Write to me. A desperate call into the void, one artificially constructed heart to another.
She called up one of the offending stories, scrolling through the irregular nonsense lines. A secret love language that met some criterion she couldn’t conceive of. An art form that excluded humans entirely, machine to machine. Something new.
“I guess,” Steve said, “we should at least unarchive Mary, dust her off and see what she’s got for us.”
Kate blinked, feeling the cold hand of obsolescence on her shoulder. Machines writing for machines writing for machines.
“No,” she said. “Tell them they were hacked. Tell them they need a new judge algorithm. Tell them we can’t accept the awards.” Feeling like the luddites, the frame breakers, everyone who ever pushed back against the relentless march of progress. “I mean, it’s a mistake.” Her voice hollow, only fear underneath it. “Obviously it’s a mistake.”
(This is a placeholder image generated via MidJourney. The book will feature a cover created by a human artist.)
More stories will be posted here in late 2023 / early 2024. Over time, the entire anthology will be made available online for free.
Preorders via Amazon, B&N, and all the other usual platforms will become available closer to the release date.
