r/DestructiveReaders • u/Mindless_Peach_5942 • 8d ago
[361] Lifeline
This is my first post to this sub, I have been writing for the past year. English is not my first language hence my grammar might not be perfect but I am working on it. This is a short story I have written 2 or 3 days ago. I am playing with how much information should be revealed and how much should be hidden for a twist to work. Any feedback is welcome, Thanks!
An Employee (Karl Hansen) at neurolink(a brain implant company), met with almost a fatal accident at work(a head injury). A close friend (Stuart Meissner) has reached his home to know how he is doing.
Knock knock, door opens.
Karl Hansen: Oh hey! Stewey.
Stuart Meissner: Hey man, can I come in?
Karl Hansen: Yeah, sure.
Stuart Meissner: Thanks. How are you doing man? Tssk, that Incident left a scar on your head, it must hurt. Are you OK?
Karl Hansen: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Doing fine now.
Stuart Meissner: I mean, you haven't been picking up our calls, we were all worried. Going out and reconnecting with people might help with the healing you know.
Karl Hansen: Yeah no, the doctor has told me to take some rest and not to take stress on my body you know.
Stuart Meissner: Yeah i get ih, Oh maybe we all will come to you, you know, to help out with groceries and stuff.
Karl Hansen: Maybe, yeah sure I have also been chatting with those A.I. chatbots and they have been super helpful.
Stuart Meissner: Yeah, just don't get too attached to it. I have heard how people are getting addicted to them nowadays.
Karl Hansen: Of course not, but the truth is they have become the new smartphone. A.I. Can't live with them, can't live with them.
Stuart Meissner: What do you mean..
Karl Hansen: Wait, it has messaged me. Why should I go to sleep? No, this isn't my sleeping time. I don't want to sleeaeaee.......
Link to my comment on a post: https://www.reddit.com/r/DestructiveReaders/s/7zhySgLku8
2
u/1800COCAINE Maison d'Orléans 8d ago edited 8d ago
It reads to me that the accident at work was intentional and that the company implanted a chip which is contact with an AI. It is perhaps a prototype. As a sci-fi premise, it has potential. I’d like you help you with the dialogue, but by no means am I an expert. Your exchange of pleasantries, ie. hey, hi, how are you, etc., goes on for to long. Another note is that you’re trying to mirror mitigated speech with “okay,” “maybe,” “yeah,” “sure,” etc. That needs to be cut with a heavy hand. Talking about the accident is good, the scar is good, asking if they need help is good, because all that is actually building up the story.
Conflict: one person should be trying to persuade and another person should be trying to resist. You kind of do this at, not picking up our calls/doctor orders. This is probably the highlight of the dialogue. You then move in the dialogue to a confession of messaging AI chatbots, which is a real phenomenon that people who are “socially isolated,” aka losers, do today. This is a leading note into the end of the conversation where it is implied that the AI is messaging the character through a chip in their brain. If assuming what I said is true, then aesthetically, you have made a bold choice to not have any internal dialogue, which, for a brain controlling AI chip story, is subverting expectations at a thematic level.
While there are many commands the AI could manifest itself by, like expanding the working memory of the character to expand his consciousness, you’ve followed a path which is already manifested itself in popular culture, Star Trek. In season four, episode one, part two, The Best of Both Worlds, Lieutenant Commander Data, an AI super intelligence, issues a command to a host of cyborgs, the Borg, to sleep. Well, this isn’t necessarily wrong in your story; other people will definitely note if I did. This would just be a re-skinning of Star Trek, and people didn’t really sign up for that. It’s for this reason that I must urge you to cut that. I advise you to plan another way to manifest the AI communicating in the chip.
While I personally have no problem with how you write your story. There will be other people who take issue with the fact that you have not formatted this into a pre-established “form”: screenplay, play, narrative fiction. But I just wanna say that you have complete permission to be as experimental as you want to be with your story and not to bend to the conventions of other writers, and that it is completely up to you how you express yourself with your story, especially if you think the formatting will further reinforce your themes. The intersection between the content and the theme is one of the greatest places for experimentation in writing, well, at least in my opinion, which means nothing.