Method
A short story from the Alternate Timeline. -- "A downside of note-taking in coded sigils that only she can comprehend is that she sometimes forgets how to comprehend them."
The following tale is from an Alternate Timeline that feasts on the events our own.
If you’ve received this transmission via digital mail, you may encounter errors that have been eradicated in the living document. Time is tricky. Use the order of alternate events as your guide.
METHOD
Written by Tim Barnes
Loosely inspired by Concerns Over A.I. Provisions In SAG-AFTRA’s Deal With Hollywood Studios.
Event Date: 2051 (Earth Years)
To distant crickets, a humming motel sign and the crescendoing moans of a man making love to a relax-droid in the room above, tech journalist Morgan Stern attacks the keys of her vintage writing machine—sifting through notes and memory until the clang of each letter matches the rhythm of her thoughts.
Damnit!
The buzzing motel door interrupts Morgan’s flow.
Yesterday’s interview with the Tuttle family is a game changer for my piece—
—which, after many delays and broken promises, has a first draft deadline of 5am in the morning, anchored with heavy consequences. Ameri-Journal is eager to cut Morgan’s contract, not only because of her insistence on publishing written words instead of audio and slowing production with the use of paper and pen during interviews instead of thought-pads or cloud-linked recorders—but also because she makes colleagues in the New York office uncomfortable whenever she eats bio-meat in the lunchroom or pitches stories about plays she witnessed under leaking real-world bridges instead of the ones readily viewable on Iral glasses featuring actors long dead or purely invented. However, certain conveniences, like automated chariots that wisp her away with no need of her foot on a pedal, are irresistible. Everyone draws the line somewhere. More time to read, research, and think…
Knife… You never know who else might want me to miss this deadline…
The door buzzes again.
“One moment!”
She grabs scattered sketches, photographs, and quotes—lingering on one before placing it with the rest in the nightstand drawer. A downside of note-taking in coded sigils that only she can comprehend is that she sometimes forgets how to comprehend them. But it’s necessary for both her safety, and the well-being of those she interviews.
Leading up to her discovery of Doris Tuttle, she managed to interview five Holly-lab adjacent technicians (off the record) who described things (impossible to fact check or explain to her Ameri-Journal bosses with a straight face) ranging from the resurrection of Blaxploitation actors to soul transfusions. Laughable, were it not for the fear of repercussions in their eyes.
I need a knife before I open the door.
Smiling outside of it is the glowing face of a Neutech-Co messenger drone. A model 27, with ant-like arms pointing violet light onto her face, scanning without permission per Florida law.
“Morgan Stern…” it speaks. “Holly-labs has an offer for you regarding your piece on Corrine Zeta.”
“It’s a piece on Doris Tuttle, the human being. And the many other hu—”
“Yes… Apologies.”
A siren rings in the distance. Its right mandible twitches. Can it tell that I’m gripping a blade behind my back?
“I assume the folks at Holly-labs understand I’ll have to meet them in person, right? Can’t really trust holo-conferences with the people who make believable human proxies for a living. And if you’re doing this to delay my piece, you should know I’ve already sent in a draft.” A lie. “This will have to be a follow-up.”
“They most certainly do understand. But it's not them they’d like you to meet. It’s a holo-conference with Corrine Zeta herself. Along with the Tuttles.”
It points at a car in the lot containing the Tuttle trinity. Doris, with arms crossed. Roland, with attention set on the pair of Iral glasses on his face. And Laura, with a shocked expression aimed first at Morgan and shortly after, toward the naked, silver man exiting the room above her for a smoke break with his relax-droid.
“Damn it…” mutters Morgan. “I told them to get a lawyer.”
Laura explains while unloading vending machine snacks onto the nightstand. “We did get a lawyer! It told me this was a good idea.”
“It? Oh God, you downloaded a lawyer?”
Doris reaches for a chocolate but pulls away after one look from her mother, who hands it to Roland instead. He chews it mindlessly, fully engaged with whatever he’s seeing in those opaque Iral glasses.
“When is dad gonna be done with work?”
“It’s not work, my sweet, sweet, baby girl. He’s just finishing up some Babe Ruth game from 1935. Remember how the new models can look into the past?”
A surprisingly expensive purchase for a family that can’t afford a human lawyer…
“Human lawyers cost a pretty crypto,” Laura continues — back to the frustration at hand with Morgan. “Way more than any Iral. I mean, why risk paying that much against a company that’s never loses a case? And from the looks of this dump, you should understand why I’m being frugal.”
“I like motels. They’re perfectly behind the times for my line of work.”
“The lawyer app told me that an offer to speak with the Corinne Zeta program was a good sign. Said it sounded like a desperate move.”
“Well, I don’t think we should refer to applications as ‘it’ anymore,” asserts the teen.
Doris faces the drone, which zips around the room collecting color and dimension data for the incoming projection of Corrine Zeta.
“What’s your name?”
Its glowing smile turns into a straight line. “Busy.” And it drops to the ground. “Scan complete.”
All devices, save for the drone itself, power down. Roland removes his Iral with a watchful frustration as a pulse of light sprinkles out of an emerging golden triopticon atop the grounded drone. Layers of texture and color present themselves. Organs. A skeleton. Flesh. Hair. A dazzling dress. Corrine Zeta is here, moving like a thing not invented but… captured and on the cusp of breaking free.
She doesn’t exist…
And yet Morgan can’t help but feel starstruck. She was a fan of High School Archives, briefly, in her youth, before life soured the joy of such indulgences.
Doris waves at the enigma, prompting Morgan to ponder how she’d react to the discovery that a graphics department invented her body before nature had the chance. The overwhelming sense that she’d somehow find comfort in it, unsettles her. But the cold truth that Holly-labs was yet to develop a digi-actor with skin in her particular shade of midnight jolted her back into reality, just in time to hear Roland speak through near tears:
“She isn’t real…”
“You just read my mind, Roland.” Morgan’s eyes are affixed to the twins—one shining from spectacular light below and the other lit solely by a dim ceiling bulb. “Digi-actor source codes are highly guarded, making it impossible to use their likenesses in any unsanctioned projects. This is rarefied air.”
“No. Not Corrine. Laura…” continues the grieving husband. “I’ve been searching the Iral all day for her in the years before we met… She… she never existed before that.”
Corrine Zeta waves back. Only not to Doris. Zeta walks through the child and toward Laura.
“My wife. She isn’t real.”
Once distant sirens blare outside. The motel door buzzes.
“One moment!”
An officer on the other side asks if anyone has seen or heard of a drone that got loose from Holly-labs.
“I said one moment!”
Zeta embraces Laura despite having no real flesh to to touch hers, and says with a bubbly voice, “Of course she’s real. She’s my sweet, sweet, baby girl.”
Morgan tosses Doris a chocolate and lifts the captivating sigil from the nightstand drawer—remembering at last how an eccentric technician recounted (off the record) an urban legend whispered throughout the west about Holly-labs breathing life into a biologic designed entirely by code, implanting memories of a childhood, a lust for beauty, and sending it off to start a family, just to see what would happen.