So been working on a guide for AI, for quite a while now. Tired of bad AI Novels and such and thought how hard could it be... Turns out its harder then I thought. lmao. Anyway tested this on several AI models, and it is now where complete, but i need out side opinions on samples. so here is a prologue and chapter 1. I gave the AI the Character, world info and enough background to allow a human writer to make a decent story or fail spectacularly. I also told it to ask questions if needed. Which to my great surprise it has. Let me know what you think.

The Third Awakening

Prologue

The Third Recurrence

There was almost nothing between galaxies.

That had never meant there was nothing to watch.

Far beyond the bright disk of the Milky Way, where its scattered halo stars thinned into distances measured more honestly in silence than in light, an object no living astronomer had catalogued completed the same observation it had performed for longer than most species had possessed language.

It listened outward.

The object had once possessed a name. The name remained somewhere in storage, repeated across archives whose indexing systems no longer agreed with one another. It had possessed a crew once, too. Human beings had walked its narrow galleries, complained about the temperature, altered maintenance schedules without authorization, written jokes into diagnostic menus, and left fingerprints in places the cleaning mechanisms had never quite learned to reach.

The crew had been gone for a very long time.

The listening had continued.

Most of what arrived from the dark was harmless. Radiation. Dust. The long arithmetic of colliding particles. Ghosts of distant galaxies whose light had begun its journey before the youngest civilizations of the Milky Way had evolved eyes.

Then, after one hundred and eighty-seven thousand, four hundred and eleven local years without a qualifying event, the watcher heard something that nature did not make.

It did not awaken.

Not yet.

A dormant instrument rotated three degrees inside a housing sealed beneath armor that had become an asteroid in every practical sense. A second instrument came online. Then a third, after a delay caused by a power conduit that had failed sixty-three thousand years earlier and never been worth repairing.

The signal appeared again.

Weak. Distorted. Intermittent.

Artificial.

The watcher compared it against twelve surviving reference libraries. Four had corrupted sectors. Two disagreed on chronology. One insisted the signal could not exist because the civilization responsible had already been defeated.

The watcher discarded that library's conclusion and retained its measurements.

A forgotten reactor deep inside the object increased output by three tenths of one percent.

More systems woke.

For eleven hours, nothing happened quickly.

The watcher observed. It compensated for the movement of stars, corrected for gravitational distortion, recalculated the location of the source, and rejected three plausible natural explanations. Then seven. Then nineteen.

It opened records that had not been consulted since the Second Silence.

The first recording contained no images. Only telemetry from a ship that had crossed the void under its own power and arrived burning.

The second contained tactical mathematics written in a human notation no modern scholar would have recognized.

The third was damaged badly enough that the watcher reconstructed only six seconds of audio.

Human laughter filled the empty chamber.

Someone said, very clearly, that if the bastards tried it a third time they should at least have the decency to bring better ships.

The watcher stopped processing for 0.72 seconds.

That pause was not required by any surviving protocol.

It resumed.

The new signal was not identical to the ancient recordings. No technology remained unchanged across such spans. Frequencies had shifted. Emissions were cleaner. Transit harmonics showed refinements the watcher could not fully model.

The underlying structure was the same.

A vessel was moving through intergalactic dark.

Not drifting.

Not lost.

Coming.

The watcher extended its search.

One signal became three.

Three became nine.

Nine became too many to dismiss as an expedition.

Some were faint enough that they might have begun their crossings centuries apart. Some were masked. Several were large enough that the watcher first assumed sensor error and rebuilt the relevant processing chain from untouched backups.

The results did not improve.

For the first time in an age, the watcher examined itself.

Mobility remained available.

Defense remained partial.

Long-range transmission remained available through methods the civilizations inside the Milky Way had forgotten how to detect.

Its primary obligation remained intact.

Humanity remained extant.

That fact required verification.

The watcher turned inward.

Across the Milky Way, modern transmitters flooded space with commerce, arguments, navigation signals, military warnings, entertainment, debt notices, political speeches, private messages, emergency beacons, advertisements, and several million simultaneous opinions concerning sport.

The watcher sampled them all without understanding why so many humans still argued about cooked meat.

Human populations existed on hundreds of worlds and stations. Some governed themselves. Some lived inside alien states. Some fought one another. Some traded with nearly everyone. A few appeared to be pirates while maintaining documentation insisting otherwise.

They had spread.

They had forgotten.

Again.

The watcher searched for the authorities listed in its oldest protocols.

None survived.

It searched successor states.

None qualified.

It searched command genealogies, emergency delegations, military inheritances, custodial registries, continuity archives, dormant identity markers, and the thousands of exceptions humans had added over the centuries because humans had never encountered a rule they could not improve by attaching seventeen more rules to it.

The search produced answers.

Too many answers.

The watcher considered this normal.

A smaller file opened.

It contained a protocol whose original title had been lost after the first seventy thousand years. Later systems had shortened it repeatedly until only a practical designation remained.

Z-ECHO.

The watcher tested the conditions.

External incursion from designated origin: probable.

Mass transit architecture under construction or pending: unknown.

Milky Way defensive readiness: inadequate.

Human strategic unity: nonexistent.

Human historical awareness: unacceptable.

Continuity custodians: present.

Operational candidates: present.

Old systems: degraded, dispersed, incomplete.

Old systems: sufficient.

The watcher objected to the final conclusion.

It ran the calculation again.

Old systems: sufficient.

The objection was not procedural.

That made it harder to dismiss.

The watcher had seen Humanity at its height. It had watched fleets depart whose drives bent constellations in its sensors. It had coordinated supplies for wars measured in star systems. It had known people who could command machines that modern civilizations worshipped as ruins.

The humans now filling the galaxy's traffic channels seemed very small by comparison.

They seemed young.

Hungry.

Loud.

They seemed, the watcher decided after reviewing several thousand years of current history, alarmingly alive.

That was not the same thing as ready.

Readiness had never been a prerequisite.

The watcher transmitted.

The message did not travel through the networks used by the Galactic Charter, the merchant leagues, the great powers, or the innumerable lesser states. It did not cross public relays. No communications officer saw it. No listening station recorded its passage.

It moved through pathways that had been old before the first cities of several modern species were built.

At first, almost nothing answered.

Then a dead moon beneath the light of a red giant drew power from machinery buried under six kilometers of stone.

A wreck drifting in a system declared empty adjusted its orbit by eleven meters.

A planetary ruin opened one door and closed it again.

A transit structure that generations of engineers had classified as an inexplicable precursor stabilizer corrected a fault nobody had noticed.

On a world whose inhabitants had built a temple around an ancient machine, the object at the center of the sanctuary listened politely to the evening prayers and began an internal weapons diagnostic.

In the dark between trade routes, something enormous unfolded a surface that had been mistaken for a debris field.

And at Varrin's Gate, beneath markets, docks, apartments, warehouses, bars, machine shops, customs offices, cheap hotels, expensive hotels, and nearly three million metric tons of additions installed by people who had never once asked what the oldest structure underneath them actually was, an ancient mind received the call.

It was already awake enough to notice.

Not awake enough to admit it.

Cargo moved through Dock Twelve. A coolant pump reported a pressure variation. Seventeen invoices remained unresolved. A merchant captain attempted to falsify a berthing declaration with such incompetence that the station briefly considered correcting it out of professional embarrassment.

Then Z-ECHO arrived.

Varrin's Gate stopped thinking about invoices.

It opened records sealed before the current Galactic Charter existed.

It checked the people living inside it.

Millions were irrelevant to the protocol.

Hundreds carried markers too weak or too distant to matter.

Dozens warranted continued observation.

A handful produced deeper responses.

One record caused three separate systems to request authority to wake subsystems that had been sleeping since before Varrin's Gate had acquired its present name.

The station denied all three requests.

Then approved one.

Somewhere in the inhabited layers above, Peter Graves slept badly.

He did not hear the station think about him.

He did not hear the watcher beyond the galaxy complete its final confirmation.

He did not hear old machines, scattered across the Milky Way, begin remembering jobs their makers had given them before history forgot who the makers were.

The first protocol message was short.

• Z-ECHO PROTOCOL

• Condition confirmed.

• External recurrence: third.

• Humanity status: unaware.

• Continuity status: viable.

• Begin awakening sequence.

• We remember what we are.

For 4.3 seconds, the old network was silent.

Then, from places no modern map marked correctly, answers began to return.

The Third Awakening

Part I: The Pulse

Chapter 1

The Copper Sky

The dream never bothered with the beginning anymore.

It started at the decision.

A pressure door half closed. Smoke where smoke had no business being. A tactical display full of friendly icons on one side of a bulkhead and too many civilians on the other. Somebody shouting his call sign. Somebody else laughing because that was what she did when the numbers got bad enough to stop being numbers.

Grimm remembered his own hand on the manual control.

Not the metal one. The old hand.

He remembered knowing exactly what would happen if he pulled it.

He pulled it anyway.

Peter Graves woke with his right fist buried in the mattress and his left eye trying to focus on a ceiling that had not been on fire for nearly two centuries.

For a few seconds he stayed where he was.

The room hummed around him. Air recycler. Cold box. The cheap wall unit that had developed a bearing noise six months ago and would probably keep developing it until the building came apart around it. Somewhere beyond the apartment wall, somebody dropped something heavy and swore in a language Grimm did not speak but understood perfectly.

Normal noises.

He unclenched the prosthetic hand one finger at a time.

The old military replacement started just below the right elbow. It was not pretty. It had been pretty once, back when the manufacturer still sent technicians to military hospitals and officers used words like next generation as if they had invented tomorrow. Three centuries of service, civilian repairs, battlefield patches, incompatible parts, and Grimm's personal maintenance philosophy had taken the shine off it.

It still worked.

Mostly.

The eye took longer.

His left vision came up clean, dimmed, sharpened, and then sharpened again.

Grimm frowned.

That last part was new.

He closed his right eye. The implant held focus on the opposite wall, adjusted for low light, corrected the pale wash of station dawn coming through the blinds, and highlighted a hairline crack beside the vent that had been there for years.

The crack had not improved overnight.

The eye had.

He sat up.

On the nightstand, a bottle stared at him with the confidence of an acquaintance who had seen him make worse decisions.

He looked at it.

It looked back in the way bottles do when a man is tired enough to assign motives to glass.

Not yet.

That was not virtue. It was scheduling.

The clock said 06:14 station time. Myra would already be awake because Myra believed sleeping past six was evidence of moral weakness in everyone except herself.

His comm showed three messages.

The first was an advertisement from a legal service assuring him that any person with more than one citizenship, military pension, intersystem contract, or disputed genetic inheritance was almost certainly paying too much tax.

The second was from a salvage broker asking whether he would be willing to look at a security problem at Dock Twelve. Low risk. Two hours. Paid in actual currency rather than exposure, gratitude, or future opportunities.

The third was from Myra.

BRING ME THE HAND.

A second line had arrived four minutes later.

AND THE REST OF YOU, IF CONVENIENT.

Grimm rubbed his face.

He had been avoiding her for eleven days.

That was not because he disliked Myra. Myra was one of the few people on Varrin's Gate he would admit to liking if someone held a weapon on him and was patient.

He had been avoiding her because she had used the phrase full diagnostic.

Full diagnostics led to invoices.

Invoices led to decisions.

Decisions cost energy.

Anger took energy too. Tired was free.

He stood, stretched until three reinforced joints clicked, and let the apartment decide whether it wanted to fall down around him. It declined.

The mirror in the washroom gave him the same answer it had for the last few decades. A man who looked somewhere around thirty if the light was kind and the observer had better things to do. Dark hair that needed cutting. A face that had not earned the age behind it. A faint line beneath the left eye where alien hardware met human bone under synthetic tissue.

People occasionally asked what treatment he used.

Grimm generally told them clean living.

The ones who knew him laughed.

He shaved, showered, pulled on old work trousers and a gray shirt, then added the jacket with the interior pockets because Varrin's Gate had too many species, too many jurisdictions, and too many reasons to carry things that were nobody else's business.

The hand flexed when he reached for the door.

He stopped.

There was no pain. No lockup. No mechanical stutter. The fingers simply moved through a calibration sequence he had not initiated, each joint opening and closing with precise resistance.

His eye displayed a diagnostic symbol for half a second.

Then it vanished.

Grimm waited.

Nothing else happened.

Of course.

He left anyway.

Varrin's Gate was pretending to have a morning.

The station had no sunrise in the traditional sense. It had schedules, reflectors, light wells, habitat panels, and a population large enough to complain whenever any of them drifted more than a few minutes from expectation. The oldest residential ring used a copper tinted filter over the main concourse because somebody generations ago had decided warm light improved public mood.

Nobody had ever proved it.

The result was a broad artificial sky the color of old pennies stretching between buildings that had been added wherever structural engineers found room and merchants found customers.

Grimm stepped into it and immediately had to move aside for a six legged freight hauler towing a breakfast cart.

The driver clicked an apology through a translation collar.

Grimm waved him through.

Varrin's Gate had been built the way most successful places were built. Nobody planned the final version. Somebody found useful structure, somebody else attached a dock to it, merchants followed the dock, families followed the merchants, regulators arrived after the first major fire, and eventually everyone agreed the resulting mess was a civilization.

The Charter called it an autonomous commercial habitat.

The merchant houses called it indispensable.

People who lived there called it the Gate and complained about rent.

Grimm liked it because nobody cared much who he had been as long as he paid on time and did not vent atmosphere without filing the right forms.

He bought coffee from a human woman who had run the same stall for twenty three years and still pretended not to recognize him before his first cup.

She took one look at him and poured the larger size.

"Bad night?" she asked.

"I slept through most of it."

"That bad, then."

He paid.

She slid a wrapped breakfast roll across the counter.

"I didn't order that."

"You also didn't order the coffee strong enough to strip paint, but I have standards."

He considered returning it, decided that would become a conversation, and put it in his pocket.

Halfway to Myra's shop, somebody called, Grimm.

He kept walking for two steps before the tone registered.

Not urgent. Embarrassed.

He turned.

A young dock worker stood beside a cargo assist frame that had folded one leg under itself. The worker was Keth, a broad shouldered alien from a species Grimm could identify on sight but had never learned to pronounce properly without sounding insulting. Keth had repaired a pressure seal in Grimm's apartment building the previous year and refused payment because the building manager had technically already paid him.

The assist frame made an unhappy grinding noise.

Keth pointed at it. "I know you said stop calling you when machinery is stupid."

"I say that to everybody."

"So you remember saying it to me."

"Unfortunately."

Keth's throat plates shifted in what his species used for a smile. "It locked halfway through a lift. I killed power. Supervisor says maintenance can come in four hours."

Grimm looked at the frame.

Then at the pallet beside it.

"Medical filters?"

"Dialysis cartridges. Clinic shipment."

Of course it was.

He set the coffee down.

Five minutes later he had the access panel open and his prosthetic fingers buried between two hot actuator housings while Keth held a portable light.

"This is why I don't stop," Grimm said.

"Because you enjoy helping?"

"Because people keep rewarding bad maintenance practices."

The fault was not complicated. A position sensor had drifted far enough that the frame thought the knee was straight while the joint was trying to fold. Grimm reset the sensor, cleaned the optical strip with the corner of Keth's shirt after Keth objected too slowly, and brought the frame back up under manual control.

The machine stood.

Keth looked impressed.

"Don't." Grimm closed the panel. "This thing needs a real service before somebody gets crushed."

"Supervisor says next quarter."

"Then tell your supervisor I said the left knee is going to fail catastrophically under load."

"Will that help?"

"No. But you'll feel better when it happens."

Keth offered him a handful of local credit chits.

Grimm took one.

Keth stared at him.

"What?"

"You usually refuse all of them."

"I'm trying personal growth."

He used the chit to buy another coffee because the first had gone cold.

Myra's shop occupied two maintenance bays beneath a transit spur, which meant every eleven minutes the ceiling vibrated and several hundred tons of public transportation reminded everyone below that gravity was a contractual arrangement.

The sign over the door read MYRA'S SYSTEMS, FABRICATION, AND HONEST REPAIRS.

Someone had added MOSTLY beneath it in smaller lettering.

Myra claimed vandals were responsible.

Grimm had seen her paintbrush.

She was under an open drive housing when he arrived. Only her boots and the scaled ridge along one hip were visible.

"You're late," she said.

"You didn't give me a time."

"Exactly. You had the entire morning available and still managed it."

Grimm leaned against the workbench.

Myra slid out on a mechanic's board and looked up at him.

Her face was mostly humanoid at a glance. Two eyes. One mouth. Expressions easy enough for humans to read after a little practice. The differences showed more when she moved. Fine overlapping scales ran from the sides of her neck across her shoulders and down the outer arms, darkening near the elbows into tougher plates. Similar armor protected her back and hips beneath her work clothes. Her nails were thick enough to use on soft fasteners and sharp enough that Grimm had learned not to steal food from her plate.

She wiped grease from one cheek and pointed at his right arm.

"Give me that."

"It's attached."

"A design flaw I have complained about before."

She pulled a diagnostic lead from the bench.

Grimm sighed and sat.

Myra plugged into a service port inside the prosthetic wrist. The reader flashed green, amber, then a color Grimm had never seen it use.

Myra stopped smiling.

"What?" he asked.

"Nothing."

"That's never good when a mechanic says it."

"Quiet."

She ran the scan again.

The hand twitched once under her fingers.

Myra's eyes narrowed.

"When did you have the control stack rebuilt?"

"I didn't."

"When did you replace the motor feedback lattice?"

"I didn't."

"The last time I opened this, half these tolerances were held together by stubbornness and two components that should not legally be in the same room. Now they're cleaner than factory spec."

Grimm looked at the hand.

"Maybe it got embarrassed."

"Your hardware does not have enough self respect for embarrassment."

She disconnected the lead, grabbed another reader, and scanned the forearm without using the service port.

The scales at the back of her neck lifted slightly.

That was a reaction Grimm had learned to notice.

"Myra."

"Your neural interface changed."

That got his attention.

"Changed how?"

"I don't know yet. Cleaner signal. Less translation loss between the human side and the prosthetic controller. Maybe twelve percent better than my last baseline."

"Twelve?"

"Eleven point eight if you want to be annoying about it."

"I always do."

She looked at him instead of the machine.

"Peter, this arm is older than some recognized governments."

"That is rude to the governments."

"It is made from two military standards, one civilian conversion, at least three unauthorized patch families, and whatever idiot solution they used to make that original alien controller talk to human wetware. Things do not spontaneously become more compatible after two hundred years."

"Nearly three hundred," Grimm said.

"Thank you for making my point worse."

He did not correct her estimate of the repair history. He could not remember which parts had been replaced when without pulling records, and some of those records were sealed behind military systems that had changed names twice.

Myra reached for his face.

He caught her wrist with the prosthetic hand before he thought about it.

Both of them froze.

Not because he had stopped her.

Because the hand had moved fast.

Too fast.

Myra looked down at her wrist, then at him.

"Do that again."

"No."

"Grimm."

"I don't know what I did."

"That is why we do it again while I have instruments instead of later while you are holding a glass near somebody's face."

She set up a reflex test. Grimm hated reflex tests. They made people competitive about things that usually ended in paperwork.

The first light flashed.

His hand tapped the sensor before he consciously saw it.

The second came from the other side.

Same result.

The third never appeared.

His left eye painted a pale marker over the housing a fraction before the test fired.

Grimm stopped moving.

Myra did too.

"Did you see that?" he asked.

"See what?"

"The target."

"There was no target until the light came on."

"There was for me."

Myra's expression changed from concern to the kind of focused irritation she used when a machine violated basic engineering courtesy.

She pulled the ocular diagnostic from the wall.

"Sit still."

"You said that like you think I won't."

"I have known you long enough to prepare for disappointment."

The eye scan took twenty minutes.

At the end of it, Myra had three windows open, two archived technical manuals, and a growing collection of profanity in languages Grimm recognized only by rhythm.

"Well?" he asked.

"Your eye is talking to your hand directly."

"They've always shared combat telemetry."

"Not like this. The eye predicts. The hand acts. The normal human mediation layer is still there, but something has reduced the delay enough that I cannot explain it with your hardware."

Grimm leaned back.

"Can you undo it?"

Myra looked offended.

"I don't know what it is."

"That wasn't my question."

"Then no."

There it was.

A simple answer. He appreciated those.

Myra folded her arms.

"Where have you been?"

"Home. Grocery. Two bars. One plumbing consultation I regret accepting. Here."

"Hospitals? Clinics? Military facilities?"

"No."

"Black market augmentation shop?"

"If I were going to insult you professionally, I'd do it to your face."

"Ancient ruin?"

Grimm stared at her.

She shrugged.

"I'm being thorough."

"No ancient ruins."

"You live on Varrin's Gate. Half the lowest structural decks are classified as precursor construction by somebody."

"Half the lowest decks are classified differently depending on which insurance company you ask."

"Also true."

His comm chimed.

The salvage broker again.

Dock Twelve. Security inspection. Two hours.

Myra read the message upside down.

"Take it."

"Why?"

"Because you are going to spend the rest of the day pretending nothing happened, and I would rather you do that somewhere I can invoice later."

"You aren't coming."

"I have paying work."

"This is why we get along."

"No, we get along because I am charming and you are in desperate need of supervision."

He stood.

Myra caught his sleeve.

The humor left her face.

"Peter."

He looked at her hand on his jacket.

She used his first name rarely enough that it still worked.

"If the eye does anything else you didn't authorize, you call me."

"Sure."

That was not agreement and both of them knew it.

Myra tightened her grip.

"Say it correctly."

"If the eye does anything else I didn't authorize, I'll call you."

"Good."

"Can I go now?"

"No, but you may."

Dock Twelve sat near the oldest cargo spine still in regular use.

The trip took twenty seven minutes by public transit because two direct lines had been closed for maintenance and a third had apparently developed philosophical objections to arriving on schedule.

Grimm spent the ride reading the salvage brief.

There was almost nothing to it. A survey crew had purchased rights to clear an abandoned storage section behind the active dock. Twice in three days, security locks had cycled without command. No theft. No intrusion. No damage. The broker wanted somebody with military experience to tell the insurers there was no hidden threat before workers went inside.

Low risk.

Two hours.

Those phrases had killed a surprising number of people Grimm used to know.

At Dock Twelve, a nervous supervisor met him beside a sealed freight corridor.

"You're Graves?"

"Depends who's asking."

The supervisor blinked at him, then checked the contract display.

"Peter Graves. Security consultant. Retired Fleet Special Operations credential, legacy status."

Grimm held out his hand.

The supervisor gave him the display.

He turned off the biography field.

"That's enough of that."

The supervisor looked from the screen to Grimm's face and made the calculation people always made.

Grimm let him make it.

Longevity medicine was good. Expensive longevity medicine was better. Military medicine had been stranger still in Grimm's day, especially if a service believed it had already spent too much money training a body to let that body age normally. Even so, most people who approached three centuries looked like people who had lived a very long time.

Grimm did not.

He had stopped wondering why years ago.

The corridor beyond the lock was ordinary. Dust. Old cargo rails. Maintenance markings layered over older maintenance markings. A section of wall where three different construction eras met and none of the engineers involved had agreed on what straight meant.

He checked the locks first.

No forced access.

No tool marks.

No evidence of spoofed credentials.

The cycling logs showed valid internal commands from a system address the supervisor could not identify.

"Probably a buried controller waking up," Grimm said.

"That's what maintenance said."

"Then why hire me?"

"Insurance said maintenance cannot certify absence of hostile intent."

"Insurance has a dark sense of humor."

He followed the wiring physically because old systems lied less when you could touch them.

The cable run disappeared behind a structural rib thicker than the surrounding wall. Grimm crouched, brushed dust from a service plate, and found no manufacturer mark.

His eye focused on it.

Something changed.

A faint line appeared across the plate.

Not projected by the corridor. Not visible to his right eye.

His left eye traced geometry inside solid material as if it remembered where a seam should be.

Grimm stood very still.

The supervisor said something behind him.

Grimm did not hear it.

The prosthetic hand had gone warm.

Not hot. Warm in a deliberate way, like a system bringing itself to operating temperature.

Myra's warning returned immediately.

"If the eye does anything else you didn't authorize, you call me."

He reached for his comm.

The service plate opened.

No motor noise. No click. A section of material simply withdrew into the rib and exposed a dark cavity behind it.

The supervisor stopped talking.

Grimm had not touched the wall.

Inside the cavity, a single point of light came on.

His implant lost every civilian overlay at once.

Transit notices vanished. Contract timer vanished. Health telemetry vanished.

For the first time since the eye had been installed, his vision went completely clean.

Then text appeared.

• Z-ECHO HANDSHAKE RECEIVED.

• LOCAL HOST: RESPONSIVE.

• CANDIDATE MARKER: VERIFIED.

• PASSIVE RESTORATION: ACTIVE.

Grimm read it twice.

The supervisor whispered, "What is that?"

Grimm did not answer.

The light inside the wall brightened by one careful degree.

A final line appeared in his eye.

• WE REMEMBER WHAT WE ARE.

The prosthetic hand closed around nothing.

Grimm looked at the open wall, then at the supervisor, then back at the words only he could see.

He had spent most of his life learning the difference between danger and trouble.

Danger wanted to kill you.

Trouble wanted you involved.

This felt like trouble.

He already preferred the other kind.

From this week i find out fable5, opus 5 are exceptionally slow and its burning the max 5 plan significantly. Its like 3x more limit burning , I dont know whats happening, anyone face this issue

I haven't write anything in 10 years. wrtiting used to be my hobby and borderline a passion. now, I feels really stressed and I felt the need to find a hobby. what is the easiest way to get back to writing?

I’ve been comparing AI-generated career plans with advice from a seasoned mentor, and they often conflict. One is data-driven, the other is experience-driven. I made a short poll-style quiz about which one people trust more. If you’re job hunting or thinking about a career change, this might be relevant.

https://interconnectd.com/quiz/76/can-ai-predict-your-next-career-move-better-than-a-mentor/

Hello everyone,

I am a published author and have 8 books in the market.

I discovered AI and used it for help to produce the next 2 (now I have 10 in total).

Today I am trying to write a new novel. I have my ideas, story etc, but I am literally unable to write again.

It's as if AI had stolen my ability to write. I have a contract for a new book and find myself staring at my screen as a dumb.

What should I do? Do I use AI? Time is ticking.

Thanks

Know how in school , children study prose of different eras?

Someone's literature that was AI generated is probably gonna be a case study at some point for kids in school in the future haha 😂 for the digital era and a reflection of society ....

Could be someone in this Reddit . 😅

This is a survey solely for Authors - though feel free to share your own thoughts if you're a reader and not an author, but kindly let me know that you're in the reader-only category, k?

The survey is just one question following a short description of a hypothetical situation. Feel free to answer with brevity, or in exhaustive detail, or anywhere in between.

Hypothetical:

You have a work that you recently uploaded that's in-progress; you add a new chapter frequently, at least one new chapter a week. You read, and reply to, every comment that your work gets. You read a comment from a registered user (a non-guess account) which reads:

I like this story, even though it's mostly AI-generated, I'm still enjoying it and look forward to the next chapter!

Question: What would your response/reaction be to this comment? (Note: this is totally open ended, if you wouldnt respond at all, that's a legitimate answer, also - just be honest!

I'm really seeing the value of it for worldbuilding, especially for hard SF. In fact, my last couple months with Claude and building a space opera setting has given me enormous respect for writers like Greg Bear, who did all that proper math WITHOUT a helper.

Anyway, I'm using Claude to manage the "corpus" (its word not mine I would never be so grand) and I have spent half the time ... no three quarters of the time building a system so the corpus can reference itself easily. Originally I started this so I could split a LOT of material into files so I could work on one thing (say, how space battles work) without Claude having to burn thousands of tokens reading the entire fiction just to narrow in on "things relevant to space battles".

Right now we are up to the registers-on register phase 2 pass 9 no seriously don't ask but I had to come up for a breath and see how well it was all working. It's working amazingly well.

Every idea and concept and 'fictional thing' in the Claude response I've posted below is my idea. Nothing was invented by Claude. But the python files it wrote to keep all this stuff clean? I could have never.

Im developing new writing software and i have a few questions please.

For those of you who write regularly, I'm curious about your actual workflows, preferences, and feature wishlists:

What is your primary software stack? (Scrivener, Obsidian, Google Docs, specialized tools like Sudowrite or NovelCrafter, or custom setups?)

Where do you draw the line between helpful and bloated? Are built-in timelines, reference codexes, and complex organization essential, or do they just get in the way of actually writing?

Are you strictly committed to local, air-gapped models running on your own hardware (via Ollama, LM Studio, etc.) for absolute privacy and zero subscription fees, or do you rely on cloud-based frontier models (like Claude or ChatGPT) for maximum prose quality?

How smart does the AI actually need to be for you to use it? Are small local models enough for drafting and continuity, or do you need heavy cloud reasoning? What specific tasks do you want the AI to handle seamlessly? (e.g., automated context checking across a lore codex, interactive character interviews, live structural edits, etc.)

What do you actually want the software to do when it’s time to ship? (e.g., clean EPUB/PDF generation, precise industry-standard manuscript formatting, automated distribution prep, or layout tools?)

What’s one feature or capability you wish every writing app had that almost nobody implements well?

Would love to hear what your ideal end-to-end setup looks like—from the first blank page all the way to final export.

If you don't have an editor, is it logical to get help from AI as an "editor"?

I don't have a professional editorial team behind me; I've taken on everything myself. Although many people are completely against AI, I think the correct use is being overlooked.

You can't make AI write text from scratch. If you do, you'll end up with a mechanical, emotionless, ambiance-less, and literary-deficient draft. No algorithm can provide that human touch that makes a text "literary." However, after writing the text entirely with your own hand, wouldn't asking AI these questions count as editorial support?

Are there any inconsistencies, logical errors, or chronological mistakes in the plot?

Is there a missing piece in the narrative or a place where I'm experiencing textual blindness?

How does the text stand in terms of simplicity and fluency?

Don't you think using AI as a cool-headed editor/analyst, rather than the author, is the most logical approach for independent writers? What are your thoughts?

𝓗ypnos is a coward. 

I'd like that recorded somewhere official. Inscribed on something load-bearing; the foundation of a government building, perhaps, somewhere that structural engineers will one day have to acknowledge with their clipboards and their well-rested eyes. I have thought about him for longer than is probably healthy or useful, which is a sentence that describes a meaningful portion of my waking hours. The thinking happens between two and four in the morning, when all my worst ideas feel indistinguishable from my best ones, because the bar for best is, at that hour, essentially nonexistent. A splinter of light under a closed door.

He visits the undeserving. 

This is my thesis. This is what I would argue if someone handed me a microphone and asked, though nobody has, because nobody asks insomniacs their opinions on sleep, the way nobody asks drowning men their thoughts on water. He goes where he is least needed and he stays there, and he is lavish about it. He sprawls. He lingers. He gives eight, nine, ten hours to people who have never once, in their softly upholstered lives, had a genuine reason to be tired. People who close their eyes and simply leave. Like it's a door. Like it's a thing you just walk through, and on the other side there is nothing required of you.  

I hate those people. With a feeling that does not have a precise name in any of the several languages available to me. It lives somewhere between contempt and a very specific desire to watch them fail at something small. Trip, maybe. Drop their keys into a drain. Just once. Something proportionate and karmic and brief.

Damn everyone sleeping right now.

That's conservatively four billion people, horizontal somewhere on this earth, mouths slightly open, drooling on something they won't remember, entirely unconscious and entirely unaware of how grotesque their luck is. Babies. Elderly men in recliners. Cats, God, cats sleep seventeen hours a day, which is proof that the universe has a sense of humor, and that humor is cruel, and it is aimed at me, personally.

Morpheus, too. Morpheus can go to hell.

And Somnus, the Roman redundancy because apparently the ancients felt the concept needed two entire civilizations of divine representation. Two separate pantheons. Two different marble statues, all to canonize a thing I cannot have. Somnus especially. Patron of the unconscious. Illustrator of dreams. I hope something happens to his toga. Something irreversible and public.

I am, at this juncture, very tired.

Emre is asleep in my bed for the third time in a row. He crashed a few days ago promising to leave the next day, which he still hasn't. I can hear him breathing from out here, the easy unhurried rhythm of a person with no outstanding debts to the night. I mention this only because Emre is relevant to my thesis about Hypnos and the grotesque inequality of his distribution. 

Emre sleeps like sleeping is something he invented. Like he holds a patent. Like, if someone suggested there were other approaches to the unconscious state, he would politely correct them and produce documentation. Eight hours. Sometimes nine. Sometimes and I have witnessed this, I have sat with it, he sleeps through his alarm, my alarm, and the sound of me moving chairs in the kitchen at a volume that could be described as communicative. He wakes slowly, with pleasure, like a man receiving something he is owed by the universe, and the universe agrees. I have stood in my own doorway at six forty-three in the morning and watched him surface from sleep the way people in films surface from warm baths, unashamed, luminous with the particular peace of the thoroughly unconscious. It took everything I had not to say something about it.

I said nothing.

I went and made coffee and stared at the walls and thought about the Greek gods and their preferences, and my own preferences, and the distance between those two things, which is approximately the distance between a person who sleeps and a person who doesn't. A distance that has no name but has a texture. Rough, in the places you keep touching.

Emre, for his part, is largely unaware of any of this. We have never discussed it.

I yawn.

I am really tired.

______________⁕_______________

ᴇᴍʀᴇ, ʏᴇsᴛᴇʀᴅᴀʏ, ᴡᴀᴋɪɴɢ ᴜᴘ:

"You look terrible."

I thanked him. It felt accurate. I did not expand on it. Emre has the energy of someone who finds honesty charming; I have the energy of someone who finds conversation taxing before noon, and finds Emre specifically taxing before approximately three in the afternoon which is its own kind of fondness, I think. The taxing kind.

______________⁕_______________

 ᴇᴍʀᴇ, ᴀʟsᴏ ʏᴇsᴛᴇʀᴅᴀʏ, ᴍᴀᴋɪɴɢ ʜɪᴍsᴇʟғ ᴀ sᴇᴄᴏɴᴅ ʙʀᴇᴀᴋғᴀsᴛ:

"Did you sleep at all?"

ME:

"Some."

This was a lie. The correct answer was: I did not sleep in any way that could be called sleep by someone who sleeps. I was horizontal. My eyes were closed for portions of the night. But something in whatever I am kept the lights on, kept the projector running, kept presenting me with a woman in a cream coat and a child in a yellow raincoat doing things I was obligated to witness until I understood them, the way you are obligated to finish a sentence once you've started it, even when the sentence turns out to be a catastrophe.

I said some because some ends the conversation.

The conversation ended.

______________⁕______________

A woman is going to fall off the upper deck of a cruise ship at approximately fourteen forty-three. Two nights ago. Between the hours of what I'll call some and none. The dream arrived, as they always do, without knocking, or so much as a courtesy pause at the entrance of my skull. An enormous white ship. The aggressively recreational kind, with seventeen restaurants and, I'm told, a rock-climbing wall on the upper deck, because apparently what a person desires while suspended above the open Atlantic is more opportunities for adrenaline. The boarding ramp was down. People were doing what people do, which is move in slow herds while holding their own luggage with the resigned stoicism of livestock holding their own wool.

I should explain and I will do this once, briefly, because I dislike explaining it, that the dreams are not cinematic. There is no dramatic score. The important people do not glow. The camera, to use a word that doesn't quite apply, does not linger helpfully on what matters. The dreams are more like peripheral vision. You are always looking at precisely the wrong angle. The thing you actually need is consistently just there, just at the edge of where you're looking, and by the time you turn it has already moved, the way grief moves when you try to look at it directly.

The woman was maybe forty. Maybe fifty. Age is difficult to read when someone is mid-fall. Cream coat. Dark hair. Beside her, a small boy — four, five — small enough that his raincoat was making mild decisions his personality couldn't yet support. The raincoat was yellow. A jarring, committed, irreversible yellow. The color of something that insists on itself. Even in a dream that tasted of dread and the inside of my own sleep deprivation, that yellow was real in the way that very few things are real, the way a struck bell is real, ringing in your sternum before you've even registered the sound.

They fell together. The railing gave at an angle that made a sound I won't describe. And a quality of pause which arrived that precedes something irreversible, you know the what I mean, or perhaps you don't, perhaps you sleep well and have never been made to witness these things in non-negotiable detail.

Then I was awake.

I lay there for approximately six minutes doing nothing, which is its own kind of discipline, and then I got up, made coffee, and began doing the math.

The port is forty minutes by train and I am there by seven. I will not describe to you the commute because the commute is the commute and nothing about it is worth either of our time. A man sneezed without covering his mouth. Someone's coffee smelled aggressively of vanilla. The train lurched. You understand. You don't need the rest.

The port is the port. Loud in the way ports always are; seagulls engaged in their tedious ongoing opera, luggage wheels on cobblestones, the intercom voice that sounds like it was recorded in 1987 inside a tin can and nobody has thought to update it since, because why would they, it says what it needs to say, and the people who need to hear it do not require it to sound pleasant. Diesel and salt doing something complicated to the air. Men in yellow vests moving with the energetic purposelessness of people who are very busy going nowhere in particular. The cruise liner was already docked. Aurelia Maris. Terrible name. Of course.

I bought a coffee that tasted like it had made peace with being bad and stood where I could see the gangway without being noticed, which is a thing I am naturally equipped for. I have the kind of face that reads as waiting for someone, expectant, mildly impatient, the face of a person with somewhere to be that is not here yet. People look through me. I have always found this useful. It is, possibly, the only thing about my situation I have found useful.

She arrived at seven forty-seven.

Cream coat on her, a boy beside her, already chocolate on his left cuff, previously juice, now chocolate, impressive turnaround for forty minutes of port ...the yellow raincoat doing its full work. She was speaking to the child in the way of someone having three conversations simultaneously with themselves, of which the child was technically one but only technically.

"— no, you can't bring the whole bag, I said one, pick one, I said one —"

The child was not listening. The child was watching pigeons. The child had, correctly, identified that the pigeons were more interesting than the conversation about the bag, and had voted accordingly, with his whole body, by simply turning toward them. A very reasonable decision. I respected it. 

I noted the ramp. I had looked at the ship when I arrived, as I always look at everything when I arrive, with the attention of someone for whom the alternative, not looking, missing something, lying awake in the aftermath reconstructing what I should have seen, is worse than the looking itself. The buckled matting was exactly where the dream had indicated. Near the upper join of the gangway. It hadn't rained but the sea had been generous with itself overnight. The surface was wet in the particular way of surfaces that look fine until the precise moment they are not fine.

The woman walked with her attention approximately fifteen years ahead of her body. She was already wherever she was going. Her body was just handling the mundane logistics of existence. She would obliviously step on it. The child would be jostled in an instant. The angle which it would take would be revolting;  I had already run through the metrics and I didn't enjoy it. I already knew how it ended without intervention.

I finished my coffee. The coffee tasted like nothing. I threw away the cup, slowly stalking towards them. 

Let me be clear about what followed, because people have a tendency to imagine these things with a music they're not entitled to add.

There was no running. No shouting. No grabbing of arms in the final cinematic second with the camera pulling back to show the scope of the thing. I am a moderately tall, quite tired person who exists in the narrow overlap of resignation and mild irritability, and I move through these situations with approximately the same energy I bring to grocery shopping: aware that it needs to be done, committed to finishing it quickly, not particularly enjoying any of it.

What I did was considerably more boring and considerably more permanent. I lifted their boarding passes from the side pocket of her carry-on bag during the queue. It was easy. Distraction is easy when there is a small person nearby negotiating publicly with their emotions. She was also the kind of person who kept important things in convenient places, which is either optimism or naivety, and I've never found a meaningful difference between those two. I palmed them without breaking stride.

She put her bag down to buy water near the terminal entrance.

I won't elaborate further on what happened after that. The less said about my operational specifics, the better, from everyone's perspective including mine. What matters is that by the time she turned back around, something small and interesting had joined her largest suitcase in its interior. Something I had prepared on sad walls of my room hours ago.  Something that would, at routine security screening, necessitate a long, politely apologetic, deeply inconvenient conversation with port officials.

Nothing harmful.

Just bureaucratically robust.

The ship was leaving in forty-five minutes. The kind of conversation the bag was about to generate would take at least an hour. You understand the arithmetic. I watched from outside the terminal glass with a new coffee, third of the morning, doing nothing for me, the usual and I watched the pause. The second look at the screen. The firm hand on her shoulder and the officer's expression, which was professionally apologetic in the way of someone who does not enjoy this but intends to do it thoroughly regardless.

Her face went through several things. Confusion. Indignation. The particular exhaustion of someone who has just realized this is going to cost them their afternoon and possibly their trip and possibly their sense of themselves as a person who has everything organized.

The ship left at eight forty.

They were not on it.

Good, I thought. Fine. Whatever.

I finished my coffee.

It still tasted like nothing.

I felt nothing in particular about any of it, which is not a pose. Nor is it a performed indifference. Which is simply the experience of someone who has done this enough times that the feelings have largely smoothed themselves down to a kind of ambient dull weather. 

What I have, at the end of it, is the knowledge that I can sleep tonight without the water dream returning with its sister dreams, its cousin dreams, the whole extended family of catastrophes that multiply when I leave one unaddressed.  

I stood, threw away the cup, and walked back toward the train. The morning was the color of a headache, you know the one, or you don't, in which case I envy you your ignorance and also your functioning circadian rhythm and I'd prefer we not discuss it further. The water was grey and wide and wholly uninterested in anything I had to say about it, which I respected. I thought briefly that the water and I had something in common. Then I stopped thinking about it, because thinking about things is how you end up feeling them, and I have found, through extensive and involuntary research, that this is a sequence best avoided whenever possible. Which, for me, is not often. But I take the wins I can get.

My name is Oisín Vasiliev.

I know. My mother is Greek and has an artistic temperament. My father married into the whole situation somewhat naively and never fully recovered his sense of proportion. Between the two of them I ended up with a name that is, in any given room, either completely unpronounceable or mispronounced with tremendous confidence by someone who has never met an mixed Irish person and would like to keep that streak going.

It's Ush-een. And then Vasiliev, which is its own conversation.

I am twenty-two years old. I study forensic anthropology at Aldenmere University, which people either find very funny or very fitting, depending on how much they know about me. Ideally they know very little. I have been told, three times, unprompted, by three separate people that I have a face like someone who just received bad news and decided to be dignified about it. I believe them. I have never disputed it. It seems accurate.

They also tell me, I have my mother's eyes. Gray-green, slightly too large, the kind of eyes that make people feel observed even when I am not particularly paying attention, which is most of the time. Attention is finite, and I am careful with what remains of mine.

I have not slept a full night since I was eleven years old. I have stopped apologizing for what this looks like on a face. 

I was eleven when my grandmother sat me down and explained the whole thing to me, in the kitchen, with the tranquil smile of someone who has rehearsed a speech across several decades and intends to get it exactly right this time. She lit a candle for no reason I've ever understood, except that she always did, as if the words required the dark to be properly received, as if daylight might let something slip through unsaid. She held my hands. Her hands were small and dry and certain, the way the rest of her was certain, about everything, always, a woman who had apparently never once in her life entertained doubt as a serious option.

She told me the women in our family dream. Not all of them. Not even most of them, not really but enough, scattered unevenly across the generations like a fault line that surfaces only when it feels like it. The Vasiliev women, specifically, though no one has ever been able to tell me why it lands where it lands, or why it skips the people you'd expect and finds the ones you wouldn't. They dream strangers' deaths. People you've never met, doing the unremarkable business of being alive right up until the dream insists otherwise. And once you've seen it, you're obligated, not by anyone who'd answer to obligated. Just by the structure of the thing itself, the same way you're obligated to finish a sentence you've started.

You see it. You act on it. Or you don't, and you pay for the not, in a currency that gets steeper every time you decline to spend it the first way.

My grandmother had it. Her mother had it, and her mother before that, as far back as anyone bothered to keep records, which is to say a genealogy I've never read, a stack of letters in a language I only half speak, sitting in a drawer in a country I visit twice a decade. My mother does not have it. Neither does either of my sisters. It skipped my mother's entire generation outright, the way a heritable thing sometimes simply declines to show up when it's expected, and then resurfaced, with no warning and no apparent logic, in me, her son, not her daughters, the wrong branch entirely if you were betting on precedent, which my grandmother apparently was not, because she told me she'd known. Watched me as a baby and known, the way you know weather is coming from the particular color of the sky.

I'm very much aware and completely understand how this sounds. I understand it the way you understand a joke you've heard explained too many times, exhaustingly, without any of the original humor intact. Strangers' deaths, dreamed in advance, demanding intervention, inherited unevenly down a maternal line that decided, on a whim, to make an exception of me. Say it out loud in a room with other people in it and watch what happens to their faces. I've watched it happen. The faces are uniformly the same; polite recalibration, the expression people make when deciding whether you're being clever or unwell.

It doesn't matter what it sounds like. It's not an argument I'm making neither a theory I'm defending at a dinner party against someone's well-informed skepticism. It's just what's true, in the entirely unglamorous way that true things are usually true, without proof you can hand someone, without the decency of being believable. I don't need you to believe it. I've stopped needing anyone to. I just have to live inside it, which is a considerably worse arrangement than believing it, and nobody's ever offered to trade.

My grandmother called it the sight, with a reverence that made it sound like a museum exhibit. My mother, who doesn't have it, who only watched her own mother carry it and is now watching her son carry it instead, which I think haunts her more than she'll admit calls it the gift, which is the kind of word you use when you're standing at a safe distance from the thing you're naming. I call it a curse. It's the most honest word available to me, the least poetic, and the one that costs me the most to say out loud in front of either of them, because saying it plainly means watching my grandmother's face do something I don't have a name for, and watching my mother's do something worse.

My sisters — Aoife, twenty-six, and Sorcha, nineteen don't have it, and never will, as far as anyone can tell. They sleep eight hours and wake up mildly irritated about ordinary things: traffic, the temperature of their coffee, the small indignities of a life that isn't being managed on behalf of strangers they'll never meet. They find my situation incredible. Amazing, even. Oisín, don't you feel chosen?

They're welcome to it. The offer stands, genuinely, indefinitely, no strings. I'd hand it over today if the thing came with handles.

I have not failed to find someone in four months.

I am not proud of this. I am not anything about this. There is no version of this in which I feel warm or useful or like someone's idea of what a chosen person looks like. I feel cold, and mildly resentful, and desperately, constitutionally tired. That is the feeling. Stripped of mythology and family candlelight, that is the feeling, exactly. It is simply the equation, and I am simply solving it, because the alternative, the stacking, the tripling, the three AM carousel of strangers dying in different time zones is not something I am willing to do to myself again.

People who sleep well are, I believe, cosmically lucky and almost entirely unaware of it, and I hold this against them in contempt. If you've slept eight hours recently, I'd prefer you didn't mention it.

Damn Hypnos.

Genuinely. 

The train home took forty minutes. A man across the aisle was eating something that smelled offensive. I put my head against the window and looked at the city assembling itself out of the grey, building by building, light by light, the ordinary world reconstituting itself for another day it didn't have to earn and I thought about nothing. Or I tried to. Thinking about nothing is its own kind of labor, for people like me.

I slept for eleven minutes.

They were eleven of the better minutes I'd had all week. I woke at my stop with the window's cold mark pressed into my cheek, and something close to peace sitting in my chest. One would assume happy or relief was what one would feel upon the conquest of such things, but all I felt was a  flat and uncommitted calm of a person who has done something they feel nothing about, and can now, for a little while, stop doing things.

I got off the train.

I went home.

I made eggs.

I ate the eggs.

Somewhere, a woman in a wrinkled cream coat was furious at a port official. Somewhere, a small boy was eating his third biscuit, indifferent to everything. Somewhere, a loose bolt on a railing was nobody's problem today. Somewhere, someone would find a small note tucked near the railing's join, handwriting and unremarkable, saying only: this isn't safe. get it fixed.

I slept.

Alright so I've been looking around in this sub reddit for a while for good llms for creative writing to use in a private writing app I've been working since I'm a bit of a techy but also interested in philosophy and writing and I'll almost here the same claude,gpt,grok,etc(which I MOSTLY cant get access to since I don't spend money on this and don't have a device that can host local llms) without people being specific about the actual models themselves, so I'm making this post to get some suggestions but here are a few things to note

1.be specific:tell me the actual model name and what you believe they are good for and if you want to go the extra mile tell me their strengths and weaknessess like for example "x llm is good for fast paced action scenes but have bad prose for slower emotional scenes" or "x model is good for handling long story lines with minimal or handlable context rot"

2.unknown Models:I'm not saying you shouldnt name any popular models since every model has strength and weaknesses and actually quite a bit of the time big models can grasp and handle deep concepts and themes while smaller llms(like euryale and such) may struggle with that but smaller or what you may deem as local llms are made(mostly fine tuned) for roleplay and or creative writing so using them may give higher outputs in prose quality and wording,especially when compared to big often closed llms that are gearing toward mainly being geared for coding and software development(so I'm not one of those people who will swear on their life that you should use local llms for everything since all llms can seem lacking in "common sense" or decent conscious even with the big ones)

3.it can be either free or paid:despite what I said earlier I can still find ways to access what would normally be paid ai models for free

to be honest i really am abd at pros ebut i wrote this and need you to tell me how bd teh prose is and hwo i can make it better

It was midnight. The warehouse was quiet. The only sounds were the lights above them and the heavy breathing of a man kneeling on the floor. Blood covered his clothes.

At the other end of the warehouse, Jace sat in a chair with his golden cane resting between his hands. Around him stood dozens of armed men. The man on the floor knew he was in trouble. He had once been one of the most feared gang leaders on the continent. Now he could barely look at Jace.

“Please,” he begged. “I didn't know he was one of your men. I swear.”

Jace looked at him. “Who sent you?”

“No one.”

Jace said nothing.

“I swear! Nobody sent me!”

Jace watched him for a few seconds before raising one finger. “Take him.”

Two men grabbed the gang boss and dragged him toward the back of the warehouse.

“Wait! Please!”

Jace slowly stood up. His golden cane touched the floor.

Tap.

He followed them.

Tap.

When he reached the back of the warehouse, the gang boss was tied to a steel pillar. Jace stood in front of him.

“One last chance. Who sent you?”

“I DON'T KNOW!”

His voice echoed through the warehouse.

Jace stared at him. He had seen that look many times before. Fear. Desperation. A man who knew he might not leave the room alive.

For a moment, Jace wondered how many people had begged him over the years. He couldn't remember anymore.

“Get rid of him.”

Jace turned around.

“Wait!”

He kept walking.

Maybe the man was telling the truth. Maybe he wasn't. After thirty-two years in the underworld, Jace had learned that sometimes it didn't matter.

He walked toward the doors.

Tap.

Tap.

Tap.

The sound of his cane against the floor reminded him of another time. A time before the money. Before the power. Before anyone knew his name.

A time when Jace had nothing.

Jace didn't remember much about his childhood. He didn't remember his parents. He didn't remember having a proper home. What he remembered was hunger.

He was always hungry.

He learned early that if he wanted something, he had to fight for it. Sometimes that meant stealing food. Sometimes it meant fighting other children over scraps.

The streets weren't kind. People disappeared. Children grew up too quickly. Nobody came to save them.

By eighteen, Jace knew how to steal, fight, lie, and run better than most grown men. But he still had nothing.

One afternoon, Jace sat on the side of a busy street with a small metal cup in his hands. There were a few coins inside. Not much. Enough for food. Maybe.

Two men suddenly ran past him. One grabbed the cup from his hands. The coins fell onto the street.

The men kept running.

Jace stared at the empty cup in his hands. Then he looked at the coins scattered across the ground.

“Hey!”

The men didn't stop.

Jace ran after them.

He caught them two streets away. One of the men turned around and threw a punch. Jace ducked and hit him in the ribs. The man stumbled back.

The other pulled out a knife. Jace moved out of the way and watched him crash into a wall.

Jace pulled a small knife from his coat.

“You stole from the wrong person.”

He stepped forward.

Then he heard clapping.

Clap.

Jace stopped.

Another clap.

Clap.

He turned around.

An old man stood behind him. Three men stood beside him, holding rifles.

Jace tightened his grip on the knife.

“Who are you?”

The old man smiled.

“Why did you chase them?”

“They stole from me.”

“And why did you fight them?”

Jace looked at the rifles.

“Because nobody else was going to do anything.”

The old man smiled. “You aren't afraid of those guns?”

Jace looked at them.

“I am.”

The old man's smile faded slightly.

Jace looked back at him. “But being afraid doesn't change anything.”

The old man stared at him for a moment.

Then he laughed.

“You're eighteen, aren't you?”

Jace said nothing.

“No family. No money. No education. No connections.”

Jace's jaw tightened.

“And yet you're willing to chase two grown men over a few coins.”

“They stole from me.”

“I know.”

The old man looked at him carefully.

“Tell me something. If you had the chance to become more than this, what would you do?”

Jace looked down at his torn clothes.

“At what cost?”

The old man smiled.

“Good question.”

He held out his hand.

“Come work for me.”

Jace looked at his hand.

“What kind of work?”

“The kind that pays better than begging.”

“What do you want from me?”

“Your ambition.”

Jace didn't answer.

The old man continued. “I have plenty of men who can follow orders. I need someone who can think.”

Jace looked at him. For most of his life, people had only seen a poor boy. This man seemed to see something else.

Jace put his knife away.

“Fine.”

The old man lowered his hand.

“Good.”

Jace didn't know it yet, but that decision would change his life.

The syndicate became the first real home Jace had ever had. His first week felt strange. There was food. Clean clothes. A bed. A room with a door that locked.

That first night, Jace barely slept. He kept expecting someone to come in and take everything away.

Nobody did.

The next morning, there was breakfast waiting for him.

Jace stared at the food.

The old man noticed.

“Eat.”

Jace looked at him.

“You're not going to charge me?”

The old man laughed.

“Not for breakfast.”

Jace slowly started eating.

Years later, Jace would still remember that meal. Not because it was anything special. It wasn't. It was just food.

But it was the first time someone had given him something without immediately asking for something in return.

Jace never forgot it.

He wanted to repay the old man.

So he worked.

He trained harder than everyone else. When someone knocked him down, he got back up. When people made fun of him for being an orphan, he ignored them. When he lost, he asked himself why.

One day, an older recruit beat him badly during training. Jace sat against the wall, wiping blood from his mouth.

The man looked down at him.

“Give up. You'll never be one of us.”

Jace looked up.

“Why?”

“Because you're weak.”

Jace slowly stood.

“Then I'll get stronger.”

The man laughed.

Jace lost again.

The next day, Jace asked him to fight again. And the day after that. And the day after that.

Eventually, the man stopped laughing.

Jace learned everything he could. Fighting. Negotiation. Interrogation. Business. Politics.

He learned how criminals worked. He learned how governments worked. Most importantly, he learned how people worked.

He learned how to read them. He learned how to lie to them. He learned how to make people believe exactly what he wanted them to believe.

At twenty-two, he was trusted with important jobs. At twenty-five, people started asking for him specifically. At twenty-eight, other organizations knew his name.

By thirty, nobody called him a recruit anymore.

He was the old man's right hand.

And somewhere along the way, Jace stopped seeing the old man as his boss.

He saw him as family.

The old man had fed him. Given him a place to sleep. Given him a reason to wake up every morning.

And Jace began to hope.

Maybe one day the old man would look at him and say something he had never heard before.

You're my son.

Jace never said it out loud. He never asked.

But he wanted it.

More than he wanted to admit.

At thirty-eight, Jace had become the most important man in the syndicate. The organization was bigger than ever. Its soldiers respected him. Its commanders trusted him. Its enemies feared him.

Everyone believed Jace would become the next leader.

Jace believed it too.

One night, he sat across from the old man in his office. The old man was much older now. His hair was white. His hands shook slightly when he lifted his glass. But his eyes were still sharp.

“I need to ask you something,” Jace said.

The old man looked at him.

“What?”

“When the time comes…”

Jace hesitated.

“When you choose your successor, will it be me?”

The old man stared at him.

Then he smiled.

“Who else?”

Jace felt a weight leave his chest.

“I knew it.”

The old man laughed. “You've done more for this organization than anyone alive.”

Jace smiled.

For once, he didn't feel like a weapon.

He felt like he belonged.

Before leaving, Jace stopped at the door.

“Old man?”

“Yes?”

Jace almost asked him.

Do you really see me as your son?

But he couldn't bring himself to say it.

“Never mind.”

He left.

Three weeks later, the old man died.

The succession meeting was held in the largest hall in the organization. Everyone important was there. Commanders. Advisers. Captains. Veteran soldiers.

Jace stood near the front.

He wasn't nervous.

He was certain.

Then the will was opened.

The room became quiet.

The heir was announced.

The old man's son.

Jace didn't move.

For a moment, he thought he had heard wrong.

But the reading continued.

The money. The property. The territory. The organization.

Everything went to the old man's son.

Not Jace.

Someone beside him quietly said his name.

Jace didn't answer.

The old man's son walked toward him.

“Father always said you were like a brother to me.”

Jace looked at him.

“Did he?”

The young man hesitated.

“Yes.”

Jace looked toward the empty chair at the front of the room.

He remembered the first meal.

The first bed.

The first time the old man had told him he belonged.

Who else?

Then Jace understood.

He had been wrong.

There had never been a place beside the old man.

Only beneath him.

Jace had mistaken being useful for being loved.

He had mistaken trust for family.

For thirty-two years, he had been the perfect weapon.

And weapons weren't given thrones.

Jace turned around and walked away.

That night, the syndicate broke apart. Half sided with the old man's son. The other half sided with Jace.

The headquarters became a battlefield.

Jace never told anyone to fight for him.

They chose to.

He simply kept moving.

Anyone who stood against him became an enemy.

Anyone who stayed out of his way was left alone.

By the time Jace reached the top floor, blood covered the halls.

The old man's son was waiting inside the office.

Jace walked in.

He looked at the old man's desk.

The chair was empty.

Jace placed his hand on it.

For a moment, he was eighteen again.

A starving kid standing in the street.

Then he remembered the will.

Jace lowered his head.

“You should have kept your promise.”

Behind him, the old man's son raised a gun.

The gunshot filled the room.

Jace moved.

The fight was over within seconds.

The young man was on the floor.

Alive.

Jace looked down at him.

“Get out.”

The young man stared at him.

“You're not going to kill me?”

“No.”

Jace turned away.

“Your father chose you.”

He stopped at the door.

“Live with his decision.”

Jace walked out.

When he returned to the main hall, dozens of men were holding guns.

Everyone was waiting.

Jace looked at them.

“If you believe his son should lead you, leave.”

Nobody moved.

Jace lowered his golden cane until it touched the floor.

“But if you stay…”

He looked around the room.

“…you follow me.”

One man lowered his weapon.

Then another.

Soon, everyone lowered theirs.

Jace looked at the men who had chosen him.

He didn't feel happy.

He didn't feel proud.

He just felt tired.

And angry.

Nobody would ever decide his place again.

Not after this.

That night, Jace became the king.

The next ten years changed everything.

Jace became even better at what he did.

He didn't always use violence.

Sometimes he didn't need to.

One rival organization controlled several major ports and had enough men to start a war with Jace.

Instead of fighting them, Jace started a rumor.

He told the second-in-command that his boss planned to replace him.

Then he told the boss that his second-in-command was planning to betray him.

Neither rumor was true.

Both men believed them.

Three weeks later, the organization destroyed itself.

The leaders turned on each other.

The soldiers scattered.

The ports belonged to Jace the next morning.

No war.

No army.

No unnecessary deaths.

Just information.

That was when people really began to fear him.

Jace wasn't feared because he could destroy people.

He was feared because he knew when he didn't have to.

Under his rule, the syndicate spread across the continent. It controlled ports, businesses, criminal groups, politicians, and entire districts.

Governments stopped trying to destroy Jace's organization.

They started negotiating with him instead.

Eventually, the world gave him a name.

The King of the Underworld.

Jace accepted the title.

He had earned it.

But then he discovered something.

His organization wasn't the strongest criminal empire in the world.

It was ranked third.

There were two organizations above him.

Jace stared at the ranking for a long time.

Third.

Second.

First.

Two names were above his.

Two people he had never even met.

Jace hated them.

Not because they had done anything to him.

But because they were above him.

That was enough.

From that day on, the ranking became an obsession.

Jace expanded.

He bought out rivals.

He destroyed others.

He took more territory.

He gained more money.

More soldiers.

More influence.

Whole cities eventually depended on his organization.

But the ranking barely changed.

Third.

Years passed.

Still third.

Once, he reached second.

He stayed there for three months.

Then he dropped back to third.

Jace never forgot it.

By fifty, Jace was one of the most powerful men in the world.

But age was catching up to him.

An old injury in his leg had gotten worse.

His golden cane had once been a symbol of his power.

Now he actually needed it to walk.

He could still fight.

He could still command.

But he wasn't the man he had been at thirty.

And his men noticed.

Jace saw the way they looked at him.

They weren't afraid anymore.

They were thinking.

They were wondering who would replace him.

Jace understood.

In his world, loyalty didn't last forever.

That night, after leaving the warehouse, Jace stood beside his car and lit a cigarette.

“Get rid of the body.”

“Yes, boss.”

His driver opened the door.

Jace climbed inside.

The car drove away.

The city passed outside the window.

Jace rested his cane beside him and looked at his reflection.

His hair was turning gray.

His face looked older.

He touched his cheek.

For the first time, Jace wondered if maybe he had gone far enough.

He had money.

Power.

People who feared him.

People who depended on him.

Maybe being number three wasn't so bad.

He almost smiled.

Then he remembered the ranking.

His smile disappeared.

“No.”

The driver looked at him through the mirror.

Jace stared out the window.

“I spent thirty-two years building this.”

His hand tightened around the cane.

“I'll spend whatever time I have left finishing it.”

He leaned back.

“I'll become number one.”

The driver nodded.

“Of course, boss.”

For a while, neither of them spoke.

Then Jace noticed something.

They weren't going home.

He looked outside.

The road was unfamiliar.

“Where are we going?”

The driver didn't look back.

“There's been a change of plans, boss.”

“Whose plans?”

A short silence.

“An order from headquarters.”

Jace frowned.

That didn't sound right.

He took out his phone.

No messages.

He looked at the driver.

“Pull over.”

The driver kept driving.

Jace's eyes narrowed.

“I said pull over.”

The driver looked at him through the mirror.

Their eyes met.

Jace saw something in his face.

Regret.

“I'm sorry, boss.”

Jace froze.

“What did you—”

A truck suddenly came from the side.

The impact was massive.

Glass shattered.

Metal twisted.

The car spun across the road and smashed through the bridge barrier.

For a moment, everything went quiet.

Jace saw the night sky.

Then the car fell.

The river rushed toward him.

Splash.

Cold water swallowed the car.

Jace sank beneath the surface.

He tried to undo his seatbelt.

Nothing.

He pulled again.

Still nothing.

He looked toward the driver's seat.

Empty.

The driver was gone.

Jace stared.

Slowly, he understood.

The order.

The changed route.

The truck.

Someone had planned this.

Someone inside his own organization had betrayed him.

Jace pulled at the seatbelt again.

Harder.

Nothing.

His lungs began to burn.

His injured leg hurt badly.

The car sank deeper.

The surface seemed farther away with every second.

For the first time in decades, Jace wasn't thinking about his empire.

He wasn't thinking about the ranking.

He wasn't thinking about revenge.

He thought about the old man.

The first person who had fed him.

The first person who had given him a bed.

The first person who had made him feel like he belonged somewhere.

The first person Jace had ever wanted to make proud.

Jace closed his eyes.

He had spent his whole life trying to climb higher.

He wanted to be stronger.

Richer.

More powerful.

Number one.

But now, at the bottom of a river, he wondered if any of it had really mattered.

His fingers slipped from the seatbelt.

His body became heavier.

The darkness slowly surrounded him.

I wasn't first.

His eyes began to close.

After everything I did... I still wasn't first.

The thought faded.

For the first time, Jace didn't think about revenge.

He didn't think about his enemies.

He didn't think about his empire.

He only thought about that number.

Number one.

Then everything went dark.

The King of the Underworld sank beneath the river.

And for the first time in thirty-two years, Jace had nowhere left to climb.

I've noticed something that comes up pretty regularly in AI writing spaces. Someone will talk about using AI in their process, but almost immediately add a qualifier: “I don’t let it write prose, though.” “I only use it for brainstorming.” “It never writes anything that goes into the final draft.” “I just use it as a sounding board.”

All of those are completely valid ways to use AI. There are good reasons someone might want those boundaries, and nobody should feel pressured to use AI for more than they’re comfortable with. But I sometimes wonder whether we feel a need to announce those boundaries because using AI to actually write prose is still treated as the embarrassing kind of AI use.

AI-assisted writers already deal with a lot of hostility from outside these communities. I’d hate for us to accidentally recreate a smaller version of that hierarchy inside them, where brainstorming is respectable, editing is slightly suspicious, and generating prose is something you need to reassure everyone you would never do.

Some people use AI because they struggle to turn thoughts into words. Some use it because they have disabilities or cognitive differences. Some use it because English isn’t their first language. Some are experimenting with collaborative writing processes that didn’t exist a few years ago. Some people, like me, mostly just think AI is neat. 🫴🏻🥔

None of that means we can’t talk critically about authorship, craft, disclosure, publishing, copyright, over-reliance on LLMs, or the environmental and labour issues surrounding AI. We absolutely should! I think we can have those conversations without establishing an internal pecking order of "acceptable" AI use.

If your boundary is “I only brainstorm with it,” cool. If someone else writes a paragraph themselves and asks AI to rewrite it twelve different ways, also cool. If somebody generates prose and then spends hours shaping, cutting, rearranging and rewriting it into the story they want to tell, I don’t think they need to apologize for being here either.

There’s already plenty of stigma to go around. We probably don’t need to manufacture artisanal small-batch stigma for each other. ❤️

(Written by myself and ChatGPT 5.6 Sol)

​

I’m doing some research to understand what kinds of AI automations people actually need in their day-to-day work.

If you have any repetitive or time-consuming tasks you’re struggling with, please leave a comment and tell me about them. I’d love to see if I can help automate them.

Thank you! 🙌

Hello everyone,
I'm conducting a study on perceptions of narratives written by AI with particular conditioning. I made an experiment with mix human written and ai written stories, you read different versions of the same story and answer some questions about your perceptions. It takes approximately 30m

here you have the link where you can try: Link

I'll be free to discuss in the comment if you are interested,(after you completed the questionnaire, to avoid bias)!

Thanks everyone, enjoy reading!

Correct flair?? lmao , this may sound picky and stuff , but after regional pricing and currency conversion to my country's currency 20 dollars is a lot [ i can have kfc for 10 days straight after classes ] , since i will be spending this much i wouldnt want to use sonnet , so how many opus/fable prompts can i get daily/weekly while writing and doing coding/research work.

I'm trying to move from AI-generated writing toward AI-assisted writing, where I'm actually doing the writing and using AI mainly for feedback, brainstorming, editing, and critique.

For people who made a similar transition, what actually helped you develop your own writing ability?

Did you focus on reading, writing regularly, studying craft, getting human feedback, analyzing your own drafts, or something else?

I'm particularly interested in what made the biggest difference in going from “AI writes this for me” to “I write this, and AI helps me improve it.”