If you haven’t read the short story already, then do so. Link here. Don’t be a moron and continue reading without reading the short story first. That would be a stupid thing to do.

While I’m programming or quietly despairing, I often present ChatGPT with strange notions, sometimes related to dilemmas. In general, any random shit that popped into my brain. Like what if a company created a VR headset that copied your neurological makeup into code, and they found out that the copies were sentient? Like what if you hired a escort to lose your virginity, but it turned out that the escort was your mother? Like what if as a Japanese teenager, you had gotten isekai-d, saved the world from the Demon King, and ended up returning home as a nobody with your experiences and no powers, but twenty years later you were summoned again? Like what if an earthquake opened a cave in your land, and in its depths you discovered an hibernating alien?

Earlier today, an image popped in my mind: that of a hulking man lifting a bear over his head, seen from the perspective of an unseen witness. I asked ChatGPT what it would do if it were the witness to this strange event. Then I started getting into it.

If you’ve been following me for a good while, you may have recognized that the couple are the thinly-veiled fictional versions of my daydream self and Alicia Western. For more than two years now, or it feels like it, I’ve been relying on mental visits to Alicia Western at that cursed sanatorium for emotional self-regulation. It’s like visiting my subconscious before it got wrecked in my childhood. And the one visiting Alicia isn’t the 41-year-old utter wreck of a human being that I’ve become, but an idealized self that I never was nor ever will be. My daydream self saves Alicia, then they go on to make a better life for themselves.

As I asked following hypothetical situations regarding that bear scenario to ChatGPT, like for example what if the hiker saw them again a bit later, I realized that the witness was me. I had been watching these two from afar for two years. I had been watching similar echoes of my lost childhood second self, that creative female presence, for many, many years. Always watching from emptiness and the sense that I would never measure up and recover what was lost. Recognizing versions of her in many different faces, and being fully unable to move on.

I asked LLMs, as I don’t trust people anymore (and they would never play along with the hypothetical scenarios I present to LLMs on a daily basis), about what my personal issues and psychological state say about me. Complex PTSD. Obviously high-functioning autism and Pure O OCD. Maladaptive daydreaming. There’s the guilt of having hurt people in the past because I needed them to reflect what I lost as a child. There’s the knowledge that this will never change, not that it matters now as I’m an old bastard and I often fantasize about stepping out before my time.

I’m surprised that the short story came out that clean and good, particularly for something cobbled together in a single day. One of the final sentences, I thought my life was a long apprenticeship to the moment I would lift the bear above my own head, hit me in the chest the way they do when you know the core has been breached. That’s it.

This one was worth it.