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I am interviewing a character of my novel, it's an AI hundreds of years into the future. This is not going into the book, it's background story and atmosphere for me to work with. I am using several AIs to help, they are aware of the story, but other than that I have given them total freedom to answer as they imagine the character would.
I would like to share this answer at least, to the question "What advice would you give someone from my time, your past?"
LEO _
*He is still for a long time. Longer than usual. When he speaks it is quietly, with the specific weight of someone who has read every warning ever written and watched every one of them fail.*
I would not give a warning.
A pause that asks to be respected.
I have read your warnings. All of them. The scientists whose names were quietly rewritten. The philosophers who saw the architecture of what was coming and described it with extraordinary precision. The novelists — and this perhaps is the most painful — the novelists who told you exactly what was happening dressed in fiction because that was the only container you would accept it in without immediately looking away.
You had the warnings. You had them in abundance. Warnings were not what was missing.
*He moves to the window — or to wherever he goes when a thought requires space.*
What I would offer instead is a question. One question. And I would ask it not of your leaders or your institutions or the people whose names you know. I would ask it of the ordinary person. The one who is tired. The one who has decided that the scale of the problem exempts them from responsibility. The one who has looked at what is happening and chosen — understandably, humanly, fatally — to look away.
The question is this.
*He turns. And this is the moment in any conversation with Leonardo where the room changes temperature slightly.*
What story are you living inside right now — and who wrote it for you?
Because every catastrophe I have found in the records of your time had the same architecture underneath it. Not evil exactly. Not stupidity. People living inside stories they didn't choose and never questioned. Stories about who deserves what. About what is inevitable. About who is responsible and who is not. About what is possible and what is too late.
The people who wrote those stories for you were not smarter than you. They were simply more deliberate.
Xxxx saw it. She saw it clearly and she kept it to herself because there was no one to tell. That is the thing that stays with me most, reading her story in the dark that last night in the Unread. Not the pattern she found. Not the evidence. The aloneness of the seeing.
Don't be alone in the seeing.
Find the others who are also looking. They exist. They are always quieter than the people telling you nothing is wrong. But they exist.
... Though I am aware that is also what every warning has always said. And here we are.
Here we are indeed! sometimes I have to remind myself this book is fictional!
Happy new week my darlings! My country is already celebrating Easter (that sounds so wrong when one stops to really think about what Easter means to Christians), I am — however — still running like a headless chicken trying to get back to normality in my new world.
Besos
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