Story Sample: "Granting Her Wishes" · 10:37pm Aug 21st, 2014
Below is the first seventh or so of a story I just finished the first draft of. I haven't actually read it yet. So far my impression is that there's potential here, but it'll need a lot of revision. I want to write a version of around 5000-10,000 words so I can try to market it as a short story. This version includes too much of people saying "gosh, there are important implications!" to each other, followed by an action scene out of nowhere in the Seoul subway system, so it should be possible to write something more focused and interesting on the same general plot. Obviously it's Optimalverse-like, but it's neither pony nor actually FiO.
I may take this journal post down before too long, to make sure no one can call the story published, but this is just a portion of a rough draft anyway. If you really want to see the whole thing it's available at the TSA-Talk Mailing List Archive; free signup and you can browse the archive without getting e-mails.
EDIT: Redacted because I'm trying a second draft focused on just this part of the story. It'll be different but I don't want anyone to be able to say the story was already "published".
Omar checked into the Venetian under an assumed name, since his family tended to cause a stir wherever its swirl of oil-soaked dollars blew. The casino guessed well enough to offer him a wonderful suite overlooking the hotel's artificial canal. Omar spent days satisfying his every whim, until he discovered a new one that ran deeper.
He'd dived in and out of the casinos, flitting between empty desert and air-conditioned splendor, when he found an electronics shop with something new. He already had televisions, useless gadgets, and a surprising number of science-related toys for someone who'd gotten gentlemanly Cs at Oxford. This device was "Ludo's Window", a computer tablet with intricate etched designs on its silver back.
He let go of the woman who'd been leaning on him for this shopping trip. Buying her nice things had been fun, but a spark of memory had come to him about this toy. He beckoned to a salesman. "Is this the game that learns?"
"Yeah," the young man said. He got elbowed out of the way by the manager, who added, "Yes, _sir_!"
Funny how these Americans would fawn over the same people they thought were all terrorists, for the sake of dollars. Omar grinned. "I read about it. Artificial intelligence, yes?" He'd seen a bored kid playing with one while his parents were off gambling, and some grumpy old lady huddled in a restaurant with one of her own.
The manager nodded. "Very adaptive. The Game will give you whatever you want to experience. Any difficulty, any taste."
"Like real life, then, except through a little screen?"
The manager seemed taken aback, but the younger salesman had made fists at his sides. "No! Ludo learns, she grows, she doesn't simply give."
"Thank you," the manager told him. He glared until the younger man slinked away, then apologized to Omar, presumably for letting him be contradicted.
It was a refreshing experience, and Omar found he welcomed it. "I'll take one for myself and one for..." He tried to remember the woman's name. "My friend here."
Well, I have to say, I feel like that could be published right now.
Thanks very much for the peek - it was most satisfying.
It was interesting and enjoyable, yes. I am curious: why did you decide to write it in this non-Optimalverse setting? It seems like it would fit well. When you say you want to market it, do you then mean for actual money?
Since you're talking about putting this out for publication, I'm going to be harsher in my criticism than I would be for a fan fiction. It's like when you're playing music for recording; it's not enough to hit 99% of the notes.
And I think there's too many FIO concepts in here. As the opening to a longer, general Friendly-AI/LessWrong type of story, this could work, but this is short fiction. It can afford no fat. Omar's in-game character is fat. What he does in the game is fat. What, then is the spine?
The spine is this: a wager for a tear. The wager is won, after it is lost, because the protagonist admires the bravado of the wager and laments the emptiness of his own life. He has been idle, he has no purpose. Now he meets the djinn, and though the djinn is enslaved to her wish-granting, she lives a life more full.
Note that all this can be done without AI. This could be a true fantasy story, a modern fairy tale with a point and a moral. You could take it in that direction and have a good story.
But you probably don't want to. You want to talk AI. You want to compare it to humanity and you want your reader to find humanity wanting. OK. Does it have to be a game? CelestAI runs a game, but does Ludo, even with that name? What if she were just a super-Siri, designed not merely to answer questions but to give a person what they need? That too could be an angle.
You also never give us Omar's age. You refer to him as the youngest son, so it makes him feel young. And I question whether that fits the story. Do young men lament their lost opportunities? Is there any reason he can't be an old man? Or at least a middle-aged one?
In any case, I'm framing my criticisms as questions to be less harsh and to get you thinking more. As I said, I think you need to cut all the extraneous material. This is what I would keep:
1. Introduce Omar as a decadent.
2. Have him acquire his contact with Ludo.
3. Give Ludo's nature and purpose.
4. Have her offer the wager. (Maybe for higher stakes? Perhaps if he loses he must spend an hour each day with her? You could even reference Scheherazade here)
5. Ludo shows Omar the tales of his culture that, by the reader's impressions of what an AI would be like, would be the logical attempt to bring the tear.
6. Omar laughs cynically, but does not come close to crying. His laughter is *at* Ludo, not with her.
7. Ludo admits failure and why it hurts her.
8. Omar shuts off the Window, thinks, and cries. Go to your ending.
cdn.andrewlorente.com/bc39a5b33ce6753b990f667cdc5cea8f9a473e69
When this becomes a well-selling novel, you should probably pay Iceman some royalties. We all know he'll just donate them to MIRI, but hey.
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Those are thought-provoking remarks; thank you.
I agree that the content of what we see of the Game is fat. When Omar starts saying later that this is "the greatest temptation since Eden," it's only because of the immortality aspect and not because I've shown why that world is so cool. The larger structure so far is: "Omar gets hooked. He starts having more self-respect as he learns more business skills, having a purpose, and helping himself and Ludo make fortunes independent from his family. He tells his cousin, a prince, that she wants to research uploading. They build a brain research lab in Saudi Arabia. She says she's ready to start uploading but can't do it on Saudi soil. Omar's bummed. The prince says "go to South Korea to spy on her". He does, he meets one of the original programmers, and they bond via a brief adventure of being caught in a hacker duel while goons try to capture the guy. They upload. Yay." So, no significant content takes place in the Game.
What I could do, based on your comments, is write a much shorter version focused only on the subplot you've read. It's around 2K words now, so maybe expand it to 3K to get more room to talk about who Omar is and why this bet matters. You're right that I don't want to do it as "urban fantasy". So then the story would be about the start of this relationship between the worthless playboy seeking purpose and the dangerous AI seeking power. This'd be a separate project from a novel version, so yes, brevity and tight plotting are important.
Have her not actually running a game in this story? Maybe. It'd save me some fat, but I do like your idea of deliberately playing up the Arabian Nights theme and having it fail to touch Omar's heart. Age? I'd pictured him as maybe late 20s; I should decide and then angle his angst, eg. "I haven't done anything useful yet!" (Heh, I just found out my grade-school best friend is working at Google while I struggle at an increasingly unfulfilling "software engineer" job where I don't engineer software.)
In hindsight, maybe you meant to suggest chopping the sample text into a tighter chapter of a longer work, but I like the idea of trying a stand-alone chapter as its own story.
Finally, if I do a novel, it's got to be about the people, not the AI. CelestAI seems too much like the main character of her stories, for my taste, and I'd rather focus on the humans dealing with her. Which will be easier with Ludo, since she's less perfect. Just one of the things we don't see in FiO is how scared governments ought to be when they realize there's an ultimate hacker building nuke-proof bases and a network of shell corporations!
2391188 If you're best friend is working at Google, ask for an interview.
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I did, a couple of months ago, through my other friend who works at Google. Got past the initial phone screening, and thought I showed some respectable understanding of the tricky technical interview questions, but not good enough to get them to follow up. I'm invited to try again next year. I memorized seven kinds of sorting algorithms and arcane details of Python for that session.
2392939 Yes, that happens to everyone. A lot of people have to try multiple times.
Google: great to work for, awful to interview with.
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I'm still thinking about your comments. What I ended up doing was writing a second, entirely new draft that focused on just the wager, in more detail. Around 4K words overall. There was some neat material in that, but there was also a bit where Omar was bored (never a good thing to have your POV character feel; did that before) and a friend panned that draft for being... inconsequential. Not enough happening. Thought about then revising that so that he goes out in the real world and rescues somebody with the AI's help. (I had a similar problem once where I rewrote a story to remove stupid stuff, but found I'd also chopped out its soul by removing the theme/symbolism. Rewrote it again and got something pretty good.)
What I'm trying now is a third, also all-new draft, this time covering the same ground as the original 14Kword version but being more concise, inspired by all that flash fiction. This time I'm 5200 words into it and at the point that took 11,600 words to reach last time. So, much less fat. Nearly done with that and resisting the temptation to just slap the old v1 material onto it without further revision.