I want to try something different for these weekly posts. The notes in the digital garden stand on their own, and I don’t feel the Logbook entries add much. So, let’s try something new. How about working together with AI to create flash fiction prompts based on my digital garden? Sounds like a challenge, let’s do it.
The methodology is simple:
- Feed the added and updated notes to a conversational AI and let it generate a writing prompt, following a set of predefined rules.
- Use the prompt to compose a piece of flash fiction.
The idea is to create a work of expression based on these notes, based on my digital garden, but with the help of conversational AI to extract the essence. This has potential to be a fun way to combine both my own creativity and make use of the tech to create new and engaging stories around my digital garden. And of course the weekly piece of AI art will also be based on the story, to give another dimension to the piece. Let’s give this a try!
The Prompt
You wake up to find that your biggest fear has manifested itself into a physical being, but it turns out to be more afraid of you than you are of it.
The Story
Well, this was unexpected. I mean, she seemed fine just a few minutes ago. Where to start. She had successfully swallowed her fears on Monday morning. It was going to be a rough week. She had no time for this, she thought as she dumped an entire carton of breakfast cereal into her body. She wanted to bury that monster, she wanted it to drown in a sea of soy milk, pop tarts and crunchy chocolate bits. And so she kept eating, consuming everything that she could find. At work, she won the race to the complementary fruit bowl. Every single day. But it wasn’t just food. She willingly subscribed to an ever-giving playlist of menial tasks and to-do’s. And her evenings were spent watching broken hearts and fake what-if’s. The wonders of reality television kept her demons at bay. And yet, this one kept fighting its way up through the rubbish faster than she could swallow.
Then came Friday night. And just when she thought it was all over, just when she thought she had killed off the monster, buried it alive within the caverns of her belly, she started regurgitating violently all over her bed. It just wouldn’t stop. It was a disturbing scene to witness, deeply uncomfortable. And it wasn’t just remnants of undigested Cheerios splattered all over the ground, you could discern pieces of everything she has devoured that week. Shades of Shane’s perfect pecks, Patricia’s augmented lips and Chloe’s glistening teeth – even parts of TV’s favorite b-stars had made it onto the floor.
But what was perhaps most surprising was to be found in the middle of all this: a creature, a monster, relatively small, round, wet from all the soy milk, with pieces of microwave lasagna forever ingrained into its fur. It had the eyes of the devil, bloodshot red. She wiped the remains of homogenous goo from her mouth and got up. To her absolute surprise, this being was shivering all over. Was it cold? As she approached it, she saw everything she had ever been afraid of reflected in those demonic eyes. But it couldn’t hurt her, it could barely move. That furry ball of monster crept back towards the wall with every step she took, gasping for air. It sounded like a dying cat. Is this what she was trying so desperately to kill off? A week ago she might have been able to have a conversation with the fellow, but now, there was not much left. The creature was clearly in the process of dying. Unsurprising, considering what it had been exposed to for the last 5 days. Waves of potato chips, soft drinks, the occasional Xanax. All those staged "I love you’s" and "I hate you’s". Not even your darkest demons could withstand such an insurmountable mountain of meaninglessness. And yet she lived to tell the tale. Whatever this creature was, wouldn’t. She kneeled down beside it and removed just enough sticky lasagna from its head to show her fears one last sign of compassion.
