This is the first chapter of a new story. There will be some audience participation in this one, so don’t forget to comment below, or cast your vote.
These stories are improvised and unedited. I type them directly into Substack, and simultaneously publish them elsewhere, so they’re mine, and they are fresh.
They will not be safe for work.
They will enjoy and utilise the dying embers of free speech in the UK.
Proceed at your peril.
It will get weirder and darker.
MONKEY <3 COMPUTER
Chapter 1.
The ads appeared round campus all at once, picked up first by students on the ‘socials,’ then by journalists, then by the very people in charge of the digital billboards.
“Is that…” one data scientist said.
“Don’t say it,” whispered another.
“But he can’t be…”
“Looks like he is.”
“That’s my ergonomic office chair he’s using to reach the socket.”
“I know. Inventive, isn’t it?”
“There’s a step ladder right there!”
“The chairs have better padding,” said a passing man. His tweed jacket brushed past the pair as he sauntered into a faculty building.
“I’m sorry, who are you?”
“Professor Foyle. I’m new.”
In the student union, the aspiring psychologists were psychoanalysing the images of monkeys humping computers that had infected every computer on campus.
“Perhaps it’s a cry for help,” one posited.
“From what, or who?” another said. She tried to scan her card to buy a drink, but the card reader instead displayed the phrase MONKEY <3 COMPUTER, over and over again.
Later and elsewhere (to be specific, under the Sports Science faculty), Taurus slinked through the propped open door, slipping into an oppressive, conspiratorial atmosphere which lay in the air like marijuana smoke.
She eyed the dark-haired professor as he began unlocking another of the many doors that trailed toward the Level-6 rooms.
“Why the secret door in the ballroom?”
“What?”
“The ballroom.”
“Is that what they call the room with all the balls?”
“Yes,” Taurus said. “Why hide the entrance to the datacentre there, why not somewhere else.”
“We use it as an air vent. The doors are really to make it seem less suspicious than a big hole with a fan in it,” the professor said.
“I see.”
“It’s also a lot easier to walk through.”
“Yeah.”
“A lot less blending incidents.”
The Level-6 door slid open, dislodging a family of bats who were really pissed off. But this story isn’t about them.
Journalists, of course, were only allowed up to level 3, so Taurus was sworn to secrecy here. Her cameras, and even the small recorder she kept tucked behind her right ear, were taken and left in a metal box two floors above.
“We’re properly underground now?” she asked.
“Either that or we’ve dug to China,” the prof said, his hair tussled by rhythmic exhalations from further along the brightly lit corridor. “We use the ‘ballroom’ to mask the scent of the purified air that is pumping out from the datacentre.”
“I see. So your clever science is masked by ball smell?”
“That’s right. With enough ball smell, people presume you’re not doing anything clever.”
“Works on the night bus,” Taurus said. She stopped at the next door, noticing the breeze was even stronger here. She took a canister of Psyko-Pomp from her red leather jacket and sprayed it liberally (not because she was a liberal, but because she had a lot of the stuff) on her haircut, which looked very much like the dying moments of a blonde hedgehog detective in a noir movie where everyone was hedgehogs.
“Is that important?” the professor said?
“First impressions matter.”
“Yes… true. So how much do you know about our L-L-M?” the professor pondered. Taurus went through the next door now, into the windy room. There were large open doorways to the right, left, and dead ahead. The door dead ahead opened into a large room with a sunken floor, its walls lined with black computer servers, chilled to perfection by the vast mechanical lungs beneath the university.
A painting in a glass frame on one wall showed whip-poor-wills delivering human souls into a cloud.
“Ominous,” Taurus said.
“How?”
“They’re seen as psychopomps… heh.”
“Oh no, no. It’s just we underground types love symbolism.”
“Right.”
“So that student paper you’re writing. Will this be in it?”
“I hope so. We want to know why the campus AI started spitting out dating ads for monkeys who fancy servers. At first we thought, is this a parody on the concept of humans melding with machine? Who made it? Does the AI consider us as primitives?” Taurus said. She watched the professor pressing a series of buttons before the big open room. A metal bridge spanned the gap between the doorway and the central server unit. Strangely, there was a banana peel placed right in the middle of the bridge.
“What’s that?” Taurus asked.
“Banana.”
“I know… but why?”
“Firewall.”
“What?”
“To stop intruders.”
At this point, Taurus was certain she was being played with. This must have been some joke at her expense, some jab at the student paper being literally one sheet of paper in her student halls. But then again, the vast datacentre the freshers had mentioned falling into at night was real, so maybe there was something to this story.
“You know, just because we’re low budget does not mean we are not legitimate,” she said.
“I know. I really liked your column about why coffee shops should be free.”
“You read the paper?”
“Well, one of my students wasn’t submitting his assignments last year,” the prof said. “But he was writing furiously for the paper. So I thought it would be funny to mark his articles in the absence of his papers. But then I got into it.”
“Oh, wow,” Taurus said. “You’ve just doubled our readership.”
“You’re welcome,” the professor said.
Taurus’ phone beeped. The LLM had fired off another round of dating ads for this fictional monkey.
“Muscular monkey seeks steaming server for hot nights by your liquid coolers.”
Moments later, an image of a monkey looping back through non-linear simulated spacetime (like pacman) to inspect its own ass came through on the phone.
Author’s note: I told you this would be NSFW.
“Gross,” Taurus said. She showed the professor, but by the time the phone was in front of him a new image had appeared of an AI-generated monkey making sweet sweet love to a computer. Another buzz, and another image came through. This time, the computer was overheating and the monkey was pissing into it to refill the liquid coolant pipes. Another buzz, and this time the monkey was carrying a server rack into a bed of roses.
“How much data is this using?” Taurus asked.
“I don’t know,” the professor said. Taurus eyed the phone again, and now the monkey was making love to a vast, sprawling rack of servers.
“Nice rack,” the prof said.
“Do you think if he does it an infinite number of times, they might one day have a computer which gives birth to Shakespeare?” Taurus asked.
END (for now)
This is the point where YOU can vote for how the story evolves. This is inspired by the weird format I’ve picked for WHO KILLED THE HUMANS? (pre-orders relaunching soon) and this particular story will be broadcast in instalments here on Substack. It’s up to you what happens.
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Ai hasn’t got a chance in hell of copying me.
Stay tuned for human-generated weirdness.
Fascinating stuff. Is this a true story?