Thorney Corner: The Verbose Automaton

By Elias P. Thorne, Literary Critic for The Gotham Gazette

I find myself sharing a partition of laminated particleboard with Gazette colleague Howard Caswell.

Howard is a man with a voice like a foghorn and a vocabulary he clearly bought at a discount. He is incapable of human conversation, knowing mere sports reporting. He’ll claim that a simple trip to the cubicle farm’s water cooler is a monumental trek across a hydration-starved wasteland. When I put to him my thesis, that the heart of human narrative is a fortress that a machine cannot storm, Caswell didn't even look up from his real time sports betting feed. But that’s about what I expected from the sort of automated vacuum that would embrace a silicon story fabricator.

"Elias, my friend," he intoned with the rhythm of a pneumatic drill. "You are dwelling in the past. The future is machine-aided efficiency! Feast your eyes!"

Howard played that computer keyboard like a concert pianist. Faster than you can say “Muhammad Ali”, the thing they call an AI spit out a warm sheet of paper. It was a story named The Gladiator of the Squared Circle.

“The Verbose Automaton" (Howard’s pet AI gizmo) had produced a narrative about an aging boxer. I present to you the opening round, as Howard would call it:

"The canvas was a white desert of destiny, and his gloves were two heavy stones of regret. He stood in the corner—a monument of muscle, a testament to the tenacity of the human spirit! The crowd was a baying sea of expectation, waiting for the final, operatic crescendo of a career defined by the sheer, unadulterated will to survive!"

It is, quite frankly, an assault on literature, flirting just above insult. The ghastly machine mistakes volume for depth. Metaphors ooze like cheap, corn-starch-thickened gravy over a dry roast of a plot.

Every noun in this machine slop is escorted by adjectives, like a college football coach flanked by uniformed bodyguards. "White desert," "heavy stones," "baying sea." It is the prose of a man—or a machine—who fears that without the disguise of adjectival descriptors, the reader might notice there is nothing actually happening. The “creation” concludes with the boxer losing the fight but "winning the respect of his soul." It is a conclusion reached with the clinical precision of an actuary. The machine treats the human soul like a math problem to be solved by providing a happy ending. There is no blood in this ring, only something a little better than a screensaver.

Having found the round file, I looked back at the pages of Coffee Break Fiction, the thing the bosses in the corner offices say I must confront. This was my return to the pages for a second time, but now armed with fresh skepticism and a red pencil. To my dismay, there is a disturbing difference. Where Howard’s "Automaton" offers a smooth, predictable mirage, the work of Robert and Alma possesses a jagged, uncomfortable tension of human experience.

Howard’s beloved Verbose Automaton is just a varnish factory. But, in the laboratory of Coffee Break Fiction, there is evidence of a genuine struggle. Perhaps it is still a laboratory of curiosities, but it is undeniably more vital than digital lacquer.

I find myself in the unenviable position of having to have more frequent coffee breaks. Not because I want to, but because the "Event Horizon" is closer than I care to admit.

Afterword: The Verbose Automaton is a flash fiction review of flash fiction, produced solely by Robert and Alma. The cover art was generated by Adobe Firefly using a prompt devised by Robert and Alma. The coda is Elias P. Thorne’s stock signature.

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