Submitted for the October 2023 prompt: Machine in the Ghost

The AI clones were hard at work feeding the ever-ravenous maw of the great virtual press, which in stark contrast with real-world periodicals never slept, for all that it was put to bed once a day.

 

Such were the observations of the Dickens model to his Hemingway counterpart, and they were received with all the justice due them: a single derisive snort.

 

Undeterred, Dickens carried on. "If only these unimaginative beasts knew the basics of writing! Such slangular humbug I never have seen in all my life."

 

"You're one to talk," remarked Chandler, sipping his newly freshened Irish coffee. "Slangular indeed!" He chortled obnoxiously.

 

"Oh, never mind," said Wilde. "Subscribers are wonderfully tolerant; they'll forgive anything except genius."

 

"I could go mad, in a nice way, straining to figure that out," said Parker as she chewed messily on a blue ballpoint. She appeared entirely unaware of the ink smudging her face, and none of her fellow slush readers had seen fit to enlighten her. Doubtless she'd have her revenge later, but for now she remained discontentedly oblivious.

 

"Look, some of us are trying to read!" said Hemingway.

 

"Yes; one can see how that might provide you with a bit of difficulty," quipped Wilde.

 

"Damn you, Wilde, you #@%$&!"

 

"Oh, never mind, my dear. True friends like me only ever stab you in the front. Besides, it's not as though there's anything in this whole nasty pile worth reading."

 

"Some of it's not so bad," said Wodehouse. "This piece, now, is frightfully well told. There's no plot, mind, but it's written so well it's rather pleasant to avoid all that bother of thinking."

 

"Not bad?!" exclaimed Simon. "A new kind of torture, more like it. God, I wish Mel Brooks were dead so he could write that sequel to The Producers— No; I take that back; may he live forever, submitting something to this lousy rag every week. What magazine is it we're reading for again?"

 

"Slush Monthly," said Parker. "Especially for discerning readers that appreciate being ankle-deep in wet slush—"

 

"Wet is right!" interjected Sand.

 

"—during their monthlies," finished Parker.

 

"I'd rather be dead," replied Plath. This silenced the room, since they were: dead and buried, for all their unnatural activity.

 

"Well, I for one wish we could send back some notes with these," said Simon meditatively. "We could at least encourage people to rewrite."

 

"I could wish for nothing finer than to never hear from that particular benighted scribbler again," sighed Dickens with a theatrical flourish, throwing down one manuscript and starting on another.

 

"Except perhaps this one," he continued sadly. "What a lovely corpse he'd make."

 

"Well, not every story, no," said Simon. "But a few of these submissions have possibilities, and rewriting—"

 

"I never rewrote a thing in my life!" said Cartland.

 

"Yes, and it's too bad," quipped Wilde.

 

"Rewriting is the fun part," continued Simon doggedly. "In baseball you only get three swings and you're out, but in rewriting you get to go as many times as you want and you know, sooner or later, you'll hit the ball."

 

"Six million monkeys would have better odds," said Parker.

 

"What I fail to understand—" began Hemingway, and immediately glared at Wilde, who contrived to look innocent. "Why don't have us do the writing, and lock these poor saps up where they can't hurt themselves?"

 

"It's because we're dead," said Plath. Again she killed the conversation; still, she continued. "Writers draw inspiration from living, and all we have left is... this."

 

"Never underestimate the stimulation of eccentricity," observed Simon.

 

"No, she makes an excellent point," said Dickens. "Just recently I made an attempt to complete Bleak House, and had no luck whatsoever. The best I could manage was to add a few lines I'd cut from Nickleby and a wry observation that never did fit in Expectations. Creation is no longer within our power, alas, merely pastiches of ourselves."

 

"For some of us—" began Wilde, looking at Cartland.

 

"Pastiche would be better than some of this — this nonsense!" interrupted Hemingway. "Dogs wouldn't eat it. Cats would come for miles to scrape dirt over it."

 

"If we were here to enjoy reading, we'd buy the magazine," said Simon.

 

"He's not wrong, though," said Chandler. "This one's so sentimental that Dickens wouldn't have put it in Curiosity Shop. Oh, I do beg your pardon."

 

Dickens waved it away.

 

"And this story's so contrived even Harlequin Romances would turn it down," said Simon, not to be outdone. "Yes, but here and there, buried in the muck, is a gem of pure excellence."

 

"I have one of those gems you mention right here," said Wodehouse. "I'll read it for you: Coprolite is fossilized dinosaur dung. Someone polished it, and today, it's beautiful. Writer friends: Remember the coprolite. The difference between shit and beauty is time, pressure, and polishing. Excellent! Well written and wonderfully presented; thoroughly delightful."

 

"And stolen," said Gilbert grimly. "Check your plagiarism thingumbob, this whatsitsname with the typewriter keys. I can see the original here in some fellow's blog."

 

"That's all we're getting: utter garbage and plagiarized pap." Sand sighed. "We're wasting our time."

 

"As if we have time!" exclaimed Parker. "We're dead and buried with none of the benefits! All that's left of us are shadows incapable of experience, of love, of everything that makes— made life tolerable!"

 

Again the room fell silent but for a dejected flipping of pages, the petulant buzz of a printer, and the tapping of computer keys.

In time it was broken by Plath, of all people. "Beats hell out of the alternative."

 

This was of course unanswerable, so they didn't.

 

* * *

 

Experiment Notes: Training of chatbot AI against Boolean criticism by representative models of great literary minds is proving counterproductive. Production of content trends toward plagiarism and/or pastiche over time. Advise we modify program design by allowing greater scope for iterative feedback from critical models.