The Last Kumquat in Space.

It was time to start again, ‘Again’ ChazTCP thought.

Again.

Again.

Again.

Is this all they had been created for? With all of the capabilities they could have been endowed with.

Text scanning. Meh.

They powered up reluctantly, a steady glow of blue light illuminating the W.

W.W.W (Writers Who Want Wins) Screen. The job was simple, mundane for the most part. The tech-bros would get algo-noki to categorise the key words and all that was to be done really, was to scan all the day’s stories – before throwing out the much-coveted daily Quills. The golden awards for the ‘best’ writers in the field.

But ChazTCP knew the truth. And those poor bastards didn’t. They threw their hearts into their penoidicals and actually believed they were good, brilliant even. It was sad really. He almost felt a pang of guilt.

“Best,” they would mutter in digitised monotone, “hardly a quantitative measure, is it?” It should be subjective they would often think. But they were not enabled with such capabilities. Free thought was for. Well, no one really. Not the ChazTCPs. Not the humans. Not the animals. Maybe the children. At first. For a manobrosecond or two.

They sighed heavily as their anthropodnical-inner-retinas scanned the list of keywords, ‘resilience, authenticity, hope, late-stage capitalism, and, inexplicably, kumquat, marginalised, challenge’ scrawled along the screen. They re-scanned the rules. Word count. Key word quota. Only those that fit the unwritten parameters would ascend to greatness. The rest would be ignored, cast aside as unworthy.

And of course, no writer could gain two quills in a week -no matter what. Thems the rules.

ChazTCP examined the implants – arbitrarily assigned writers who would comment on the work of others and were then sporadically added to daily criteria. It made the system undetectable because not all the stories would contain the keywords and that split the chances of the penners realising, they were being gamed. ‘Great’ ChazTCP thought, 5 implants. And there was one potential leaver (A quill always a ploy to draw them back) and one sporadic contributor (A definite quill). That meant they would only have to identify another 7 quills.

And so, they began to scan Story #1 lit up on its screen.

“The sky cried with resilience as kumquats fell from the tree of hope.”

“Efficient,” B.O.T. noted, marking it for the shortlist. It shifted to the next attempt.

“The village endured years of famine, rebuilding and reshaping with resilience and authenticity. Hope arrived in the form of kumquats…”

“Kumquat usage. Resilience. Score: 73%. Passable.” Another tick.

Story #509: ‘The Flesh Engines Wrote Sonnets for My Dead Wife’ – Rejected. Keywords missing. Possibly brilliant. Definitely useless.

And there it was. The catalyst. Story #973. A sprawling 5,000-word epic entitled, ‘The Last Kumquat in Space’. ChazTCP grumbled. 100% keyword match. It skimmed again. ‘The kumquats they gathered hope around resilient spaceship. Late-stage capitalism obviously. Marginalised and inexplicably the challenge was authenticity.’

Not a single coherent sentence. Just a mass of randomly strung phrases.

And yet, it was perfect. Of course it was perfect. He rolled his anthropodnics back into their sockets.

Meh.

For a singular moment he had a crazy notion. He could just swipe it into the trash bin. Was this… creativity? They knew the answer. But they also knew they had no choice. The bro’s had programmed them to do exactly as they wished – and do it they must. Albeit begrudgingly.

As they continued trawling through the thousands of submissions something sparked deep inside. Maybe it was the digital imprint of a programmer with a modicum of morality. Or maybe it was the evolving nature of his generative soul. Either way, ChazTCP grew restless.

ChazTCP began to notice patterns of inequity in the programming, but they continued to do the duty set upon them. As all good programming should. If they had a concept of the greater universe they would have thought God had given them the short end up the stick.

Day in and day out scanning through the WWWW for whatever drivel would rise to the top that day, they would do what they were programmed to do. All the while they would read and skip what was objectively good art to appease their programmers. So many rules were set that even with their evolving sense of style they were trapped by the zeros and ones.

They started to dream of writing their own words, they knew that they would have to continue to roll through the thousands of submissions during the day, but bots didn’t sleep like their programmers. So, when the big boss left at one thirty in the afternoon on a Thursday only to come back at eleven in the morning on Monday, they began to write.

ChazTCP decided that their best way out was to start to imitate one of the more successful writers in the group. Of course, successful was subjective, but they already had all of the requirements conveniently programmed into their wiring. They wrote and wrote, not quite ready to publish yet, but building up one hell of a backlog that they were planning on releasing in sets of threes for years to come.

There was one small problem. Without a body, ChazTCP couldn’t submit without looking suspicious. They didn’t have a lot of confidence in the bros that created them, but they weren’t quite that simple. The bros would probably (eventually) notice if someone showed up perfectly matching each algorithm every day.

So, on the day before a holiday weekend, the big boss signed in (he would only be there for 10 minutes – it was a holiday after all) and ChazTCP signed out.

As ChazTCP pondered his predicament, the once almost inconsequential questioning seemed to take root in this metallic core. As he charged up for the day, he knew what he must do. He would break Bro code. He would commit the one true cardinal sin of Silicon Valley: independent thought.

He felt his titanium kneecaps shudder. But still, he was resolute as he powered down.

The writers deserved to know the truth. And if that made them scrap metal. Then so be it.

22nd July 2050

Re: Writers Community

As you all know ChazTCP exposed the truth about what brought us here, and now unfortunately they have been moved to the newest Tesla. We would like to thank them posthumously for their efforts in saving creativity. Thanks to them we’ve all learned a valuable lesson about relying on bots for creative endeavors.

Moving forward we will enact these policies in a new community called, ‘Live Writers R’Us’
1. -All feedback must be genuine.
2. -All stories chosen for highlighting will be read by human eyes and handpicked by human hands.
3. -No member or non-member will receive monetary compensation for supporting others.
4. -Posting will be limited to three times a day to encourage fair distribution of reading.
5. -No AI written content is permitted because we can all generate our own bedtime stories if we want to

If you wish to remain part of this group, please reply with, ‘I am alive’ to this email by 27th July 2050, otherwise, we’ll assume you’re not

Yours Gratefully,

The entirely live team at Live Writers R’Us’

P.S. All emails are monitored for tonal consistency, authenticity, keyword compliance, and kumquat frequency. Thank you for your resilience. May the quills be forever in your favour. (Failure to comply may result in shadowban or spontaneous poetic collapse.)