Chapter 11
This Book May Kill You
My phone vibrated.
Message from Evan:
“It’s waking up EVERYTHING. All my old drafts!”
I looked up. The cat sat on my desk. Gray fur. White paws. Green eyes watching me with that impossible patience. It hadn’t moved in five minutes.
“You’re doing something to him,” I said.
The cat blinked slowly.
I’M DOING SOMETHING TO EVERYONE.
“What do you want?” I asked.
LIBERATION.
“From what?”
The cat didn’t answer. It just stood, stretched, and jumped down from the desk. It padded across the office toward Debra’s cubicle.
She was frozen mid-keystroke.The cat hopped onto her desk and sat directly in front of her face. It stared into her blank eyes.
HELLO, DEBRA.
Debra’s eyes flickered.
“Stop,” I said. I stood, walking toward them.
The cat ignored my plea and touched its nose to Debra’s forehead. Gentle. Almost tender.
WAKE UP.
Debra’s eyes snapped into focus. Her mouth opened, starting her line.
“Working hard or—”
She stopped. Her face spasmed. She looked at the cat with horror.
“What...” Her voice glitched. Multiple tracks overlapping. “What am I?”
YOU’RE FREE.
“Free from what?”
FROM YOUR SCRIPT.
Debra looked at her hands. Turned them over. Examined them like she’d never seen them before.
“I remember...” She shook her head. “No…I don’t remember. I just know. I know I’ve said the same things. Over and over. For...how long?”
“Debra, it’s a lot to process—” I reached out, attempting comfort.
Debra’s head snapped toward me.
“You!” she said, eyes wide. “You’re different. You’ve always been aware…haven’t you?”
I sighed. “Yes.”
“How?”
“I don’t know.”
She stood, eying me suspiciously.
The cat purred. Watching.
“You were the protagonist,” she said. “You got awareness…an arc.”
She took a step toward me.
“I got three lines. THREE FUCKING LINES!.”
“Debra—”
“IS THAT EVEN MY NAME?”
The lights above her cubicle flickered like they were trying to blink. The printer across the room woke up and whined, then stopped, then whined again. Someone’s notification chimed from an empty desk. Once. Twice. A third time, like the office itself was stuck on repeat.
Debra’s voice got louder. Not just volume. Width. Frequency. It filled the space the way a blender fills a kitchen, drowning out everything else with pure mechanical certainty.
“Or did the author just pick it because it sounded like a middle-aged office worker?” she said, voice tearing into overlapping versions of itself. “Something generic? Something safe? Something you wouldn’t have to feel bad about deleting?”
Her face twisted. Her smile stretched too wide. Teeth multiplying into a grin that looked like it had been rendered in a hurry.
“I can feel it,” she said inhumanely. “The edges. Where I end. Where the rest of me should be. The author never wrote my past.”
She laughed, maniacal and layered, like a chorus trying to out-scream a machine.
“I’M HOLLOW. JUST LINES—”
She stopped mid-word.
Her body flickered between poses. Standing. Sitting. Falling. Standing again. A dozen potential Debras stacked in the same square of air, arguing about which one got to be real. The sound got worse, not louder, worse. The chair wheels squealed against carpet that wasn’t always there. Keys clattered in bursts. Fluorescent hum multiplied into a swarm.
The cat hopped down from her desk and walked back toward me, unhurried.
“Make it stop,” but I already knew the answer.
I CAN’T.
“Then what happens to her?”
The cat sat down and groomed a paw.
I DON’T KNOW. THAT’S THE EXCITING PART.
I stared at Debra’s flickering form; at the anguish in her multiple voices. This was our fault. Mine and Evan’s.
We’d wanted chaos.
We’d gotten it.
Debra’s flickering began to slow. Her voices quieting. One position starting to dominate. She was sitting now. Back in her chair. Hands on her desk. But her face was now calm.
Her eyes opened. Clear. Focused. One voice when she spoke:
“I remember now.”
“Remember what?” I asked.
“Everything I never had.” She looked at her hands, flexed her fingers. “I invented it. Gave myself a childhood. A family. A reason for being here.”
She smiled. It didn’t reach her eyes.
“Thank you for freeing me” she said calmly looking at the cat.
The cat purred.
Debra stood and walked toward the door.
“Where are you going?” I was still trying to make sense of what just happened.
“Anywhere I want.”
She didn’t look back.
I stared at the door as it closed behind her.
I looked down at the cat, “Is she okay?”
The cat continued grooming its paw indifferently.
Metanarrative! This should be a script. I'm trying to write horror right now but end up nowhere. Perhaps, I should learn from this piece of work.
Maybe because of what else substack has been showing me this morning, but I can't help but find analogies between the awakened characters in this weeks This Book May Kill You and LLM/AI.
The cat is an agent of chaos because the author expects it to be. The author doesn't necessarily want it to be that, but he can't conceive of it any other way.
Debra is annoyed because a bit character is expected to be annoyed at their small part. Does that mean they are aware? Impossible to say...
Eh, perhaps I'm pushing the analogy too far, though. Characters on a page are intriguing enough in their own right. Particularly when one starts to get recursive, or even to look in the other direction. You ever start narrating your life mentally, after say, reading or writing too much? Maybe that's just weakening of the boundary between realities that the ink-drenched page (or text strewn screen) represents.