Welcome to Flash Fiction Fridays! Every Friday I use conversational AI to generate a new flash fiction prompt inspired by the changes and updates to my digital garden.
Flash fiction is a unique and challenging form of writing that requires creativity, brevity, and skill. By using conversational AI to generate the prompt, I’m tapping into the power of machine learning to come up with interesting and unexpected ideas that I might not have thought of otherwise.
I use the weekly changes and updates to my digital garden as a starting point for the AI to generate the prompt. The prompts are designed to be open-ended and flexible, allowing me to explore a wide range of themes and genres that are aligned with my interests and experiences. However, it is important to remember that these pieces are fictional. But that’s not all, there is a piece of AI generated art to go with every story as well! If you want to dive deeper, check out the updates to my digital garden.
The Prompt
In the cold, clinical world of a reclusive scientist, the relentless pursuit of unlocking the mysteries of the human body and its connection to the universe becomes an all-consuming obsession. Through years of rigorous research and experimentation, the scientist makes a groundbreaking discovery – a device that allows individuals to physically synchronize their movements with the cosmic rhythms of the universe. As the scientist delves deeper into this cosmic dance, the lines between science and spirituality blur, and the implications of this profound revelation send shockwaves through the scientific community and beyond.
The Story
Tack. Tack. Tack. The percussive beat cut through the silence. At least that’s how it all began. He had been here for so long, these rhythmic echoes morphed into a new form of silence. A baseline that never changed. Had he changed? Days, weeks, months, years. Time moved differently in here, this cadence was its only keeper. Tack. Tack. Tack.
His science was different. He was looking for a connection between body and mind. Between what he could touch and feel. His peers had long deserted him, on account of the fact that he refused to work with quantitative methods. His approach was empirical, it was based directly on his experiences. He locked himself in his laboratory to minimize outside influences, to reduce his experience to the lowest common denominator, all in an effort to do… what exactly? It was hard for him to put into words, he knew there was something out there, a connection to be made, beyond anything that had ever been attempted before. And this metronome he had created held the answer. Tack. Tack. Tack.
This metronome was unlike what you would normally find as part of a musician’s toolkit. It was incredibly precise in its ability to measure the temporal distance from one moment to the next. The secret was a painstakingly engineered atomic clock. The device itself was a purely mechanical contraption, no electronics. Two plates of metal produced that reverberating percussive beat. But his madness came rather from a lack of things, from the very removal of everything and its replacement with this metronome. Thoughts began to twist and turn in unusual ways, but the telltale sign of insanity, was that these thoughts always ended right where they started. Time, beyond this exact measurement from A to B, did not concern him. Tack. Tack. Tock.
Tock. What? An anomaly made itself heard. Something was not right. He stared into a sea of monitoring screens, clicking and tipping furiously in search of a problem. Tip. Click. Clack. Tock. The rhythm changed. The wiring pitch of electronics, the leaky pipe from the bathroom, the bursting potato chip he had just stepped on. Like a new instrument making itself heard for the very first time, sounds and things danced to the dictation of the metronome. Every rumble came to life in its image, humming along to the beat of his heart. All movement blended effortlessly into this composition of symphonic vibrations. And he was a part of it. For the first time his body, his mind and the world, were one. He could feel it with every beat that ran through his consciousness.
His thoughts were freed from rewinds and repeats. A theory of movement. A grand, unifying theory of the body and its relationship to the world that held within it an answer so terribly banal and disappointing, that it send him right to the upper echelons of the scientific community. For his boldness, his courageousness to suggest something so simple, so anticlimactic. The conclusion to decades of research and the utterly transformed life of a single individual. What could it be worth? He was revered and discussed at length, and all the wile he couldn’t help but feel they had all but missed the point, even thought it was staring them right in the face as they gleefully recited from his work: move your body to the rhythm of your life.
