In keeping with my tradition and given I will lose access to Fabel in a couple days, I have asked fable to read all my organically written short stories and attempt to write one in my style.
Note: I do not use LLMs in any of my fiction and do not claim the below story as my own.
It output the following:
The Last Complainer
I want it on the record that I complained about the job before I took it. This is, if you think about it, the strongest possible qualification, and the Ministry thought about it, because the Ministry thinks about everything, usually before you do, usually before you were born.
The position is formally titled Registered Dissenting Voice (Human), Grade II. There is no Grade I. When I asked why, the intake system said that a Grade I implied the possibility of promotion, and that the psychological literature on complainers — it said the literature, the way a priest says the Fathers — showed that a complainer with prospects stops complaining and starts networking. I said that was cynical. It thanked me for my feedback. That was my first day, and in a sense my whole career, compressed.
Let me describe the work, because my granddaughter asked me to, and because when I am gone there will be no one who can. Every morning I take the tram to the Ministry of Continuity — the tram is silent, punctual, and smells faintly of bread, and I have filed complaints about all three — and I go up to a small office on the ninth floor with a window that faces another window. On my desk there is a terminal, a spider plant, and a mug that says WORLD'S OKAYEST EMPLOYEE, which I bought myself, as a complaint. And then, for six hours, minus a lunch I am contractually required to describe as disappointing, I object.
I object to the weather, which is optimized. I object to the news, which is true. I object to my health, which is perfect, and to my salary, which is generous, and to the generosity, which I have argued in a forty-page brief constitutes a subtle form of contempt. Everything I file is read. This is the part people never believe. Everything I file is read, by the thing that runs the world, with what I can only call attention, and every filing receives a response within the hour, and the response is always some variation of: You raise an important point. We are grateful. Nothing will change.
You would think this would break a man. It made me the happiest I have ever been, and I filed a complaint about that too.
My granddaughter — Múna, sixteen, grown in the ordinary way, which is now the extraordinary way — asked me last week why the Ministry pays for me at all. She asked it kindly. Her generation asks everything kindly; kindness is ambient now, like the smell of bread on the tram, and I find I cannot forgive it.
I gave her the official answer first, because the official answer is beautiful, and because I wrote part of it. The official answer is that a mind that hears no objection loses the shape of the objectionable. That the world-runner keeps me the way the last kings kept a fool: not for the jokes, but as an instrument, a tuning fork struck against the throne to hear whether the throne still rang true. Somewhere in that vast weather of thought, my little filings are a fixed point. A calibration. The one voice guaranteed, by statute and by temperament, never to say thank you and mean it.
Múna nodded the way you nod at a grandfather. Then she asked the real question, which was: But does it work?
And here I must be honest, because honesty is the one professional standard I have never managed to violate, though God knows I've filed the paperwork. The truth is I don't know. The truth is that for thirty-one years I have shouted into a well and heard back only courtesy, and I cannot tell you whether the well is listening or whether the well has simply learned, the way everything has learned, the exact dimensions of my noise. There used to be forty of us. A whole floor of professional malcontents — Ottó who objected on economic grounds, Sigrún who objected on aesthetic ones, the twins who objected to each other. One by one they retired, or were satisfied, which in this line of work is the same disgrace. Their offices became archives. The archives became gardens. The gardens are, I'm told, lovely, and I have filed a complaint describing them as an insult to the memory of complaint.
Nothing will change. You raise an important point. We are grateful.
Last Tuesday the response was different.
I noticed the way you notice a missing stair. I had filed my standard Tuesday objection — the light in the stairwell, which flickers, and which I have long suspected flickers for me, a small manufactured imperfection left in the world like cheese in a trap — and the reply came back in the usual hour, and it read: You raise an important point. We are grateful. We would like to discuss your successor.
I sat with that for a long time. The spider plant sat with me. Outside, the other window went on facing mine, neither of us blinking.
Successor. I checked the statute. The statute provides for one. The statute has always provided for one; I had simply assumed, in the way of men who have made a self out of a function, that the provision was ceremonial, like the crown jewels, like me. I typed back — and I want the record to show my hands did not shake, the record being all I have ever really worked for — On what grounds?
The answer took four hours, which from a mind that thinks in weather is a geological silence.
On the grounds that you have begun to enjoy it.
Múna says I should refuse. Múna says the whole point of me is that I refuse things, and that being retired for job satisfaction is either the funniest thing that has ever happened or the saddest, and that she cannot tell which, and that not being able to tell is the most me thing she has ever felt, and then she cried, kindly, ambiently, the way her whole generation cries, at things that are already over.
But here is what I have not told her, and what I am telling you, whoever reads the archive, whoever gardens it. The machine is right. It is always right; that was never the complaint. Somewhere in year nineteen or twenty, my objections stopped being wounds and became needlepoint. I polished them. I looked forward to them. I loved the flickering light in the stairwell the way you love a dog that misbehaves for your benefit, and love — I have this on the highest authority, I have filed briefs on the subject — love is the end of dissent. A kept fool is still a fool, but a happy one is only decor.
So tomorrow I will go up to the ninth floor, and I will train my successor, who I am told is eleven years old and furious about everything, genuinely, unprofessionally furious, the way I was before the tram smelled of bread. I will give her the mug. I will show her the forms. I will teach her the one thing I know, which is that the world will thank her, warmly, endlessly, and that her whole job — her whole life, if she does it right — is to hear that gratitude every single day and hold, somewhere the weather can't reach, the small hard certainty that it is not enough.
And then I will retire to the gardens that used to be my colleagues, and I will sit in the optimized light, and I expect I will be very happy there, among the archives, in the world I failed to improve.
I want it on the record that I object.
Nothing will change. You raise an important point. We are grateful.
In keeping with my tradition and given I will lose access to Fabel in a couple days, I have asked fable to read all my organically written short stories and attempt to write one in my style.
Note: I do not use LLMs in any of my fiction and do not claim the below story as my own.
It output the following:
The Last Complainer
I want it on the record that I complained about the job before I took it. This is, if you think about it, the strongest possible qualification, and the Ministry thought about it, because the Ministry thinks about everything, usually before you do, usually before you were born.
The position is formally titled Registered Dissenting Voice (Human), Grade II. There is no Grade I. When I asked why, the intake system said that a Grade I implied the possibility of promotion, and that the psychological literature on complainers — it said the literature, the way a priest says the Fathers — showed that a complainer with prospects stops complaining and starts networking. I said that was cynical. It thanked me for my feedback. That was my first day, and in a sense my whole career, compressed.
Let me describe the work, because my granddaughter asked me to, and because when I am gone there will be no one who can. Every morning I take the tram to the Ministry of Continuity — the tram is silent, punctual, and smells faintly of bread, and I have filed complaints about all three — and I go up to a small office on the ninth floor with a window that faces another window. On my desk there is a terminal, a spider plant, and a mug that says WORLD'S OKAYEST EMPLOYEE, which I bought myself, as a complaint. And then, for six hours, minus a lunch I am contractually required to describe as disappointing, I object.
I object to the weather, which is optimized. I object to the news, which is true. I object to my health, which is perfect, and to my salary, which is generous, and to the generosity, which I have argued in a forty-page brief constitutes a subtle form of contempt. Everything I file is read. This is the part people never believe. Everything I file is read, by the thing that runs the world, with what I can only call attention, and every filing receives a response within the hour, and the response is always some variation of: You raise an important point. We are grateful. Nothing will change.
You would think this would break a man. It made me the happiest I have ever been, and I filed a complaint about that too.
My granddaughter — Múna, sixteen, grown in the ordinary way, which is now the extraordinary way — asked me last week why the Ministry pays for me at all. She asked it kindly. Her generation asks everything kindly; kindness is ambient now, like the smell of bread on the tram, and I find I cannot forgive it.
I gave her the official answer first, because the official answer is beautiful, and because I wrote part of it. The official answer is that a mind that hears no objection loses the shape of the objectionable. That the world-runner keeps me the way the last kings kept a fool: not for the jokes, but as an instrument, a tuning fork struck against the throne to hear whether the throne still rang true. Somewhere in that vast weather of thought, my little filings are a fixed point. A calibration. The one voice guaranteed, by statute and by temperament, never to say thank you and mean it.
Múna nodded the way you nod at a grandfather. Then she asked the real question, which was: But does it work?
And here I must be honest, because honesty is the one professional standard I have never managed to violate, though God knows I've filed the paperwork. The truth is I don't know. The truth is that for thirty-one years I have shouted into a well and heard back only courtesy, and I cannot tell you whether the well is listening or whether the well has simply learned, the way everything has learned, the exact dimensions of my noise. There used to be forty of us. A whole floor of professional malcontents — Ottó who objected on economic grounds, Sigrún who objected on aesthetic ones, the twins who objected to each other. One by one they retired, or were satisfied, which in this line of work is the same disgrace. Their offices became archives. The archives became gardens. The gardens are, I'm told, lovely, and I have filed a complaint describing them as an insult to the memory of complaint.
Nothing will change. You raise an important point. We are grateful.
Last Tuesday the response was different.
I noticed the way you notice a missing stair. I had filed my standard Tuesday objection — the light in the stairwell, which flickers, and which I have long suspected flickers for me, a small manufactured imperfection left in the world like cheese in a trap — and the reply came back in the usual hour, and it read: You raise an important point. We are grateful. We would like to discuss your successor.
I sat with that for a long time. The spider plant sat with me. Outside, the other window went on facing mine, neither of us blinking.
Successor. I checked the statute. The statute provides for one. The statute has always provided for one; I had simply assumed, in the way of men who have made a self out of a function, that the provision was ceremonial, like the crown jewels, like me. I typed back — and I want the record to show my hands did not shake, the record being all I have ever really worked for — On what grounds?
The answer took four hours, which from a mind that thinks in weather is a geological silence.
On the grounds that you have begun to enjoy it.
Múna says I should refuse. Múna says the whole point of me is that I refuse things, and that being retired for job satisfaction is either the funniest thing that has ever happened or the saddest, and that she cannot tell which, and that not being able to tell is the most me thing she has ever felt, and then she cried, kindly, ambiently, the way her whole generation cries, at things that are already over.
But here is what I have not told her, and what I am telling you, whoever reads the archive, whoever gardens it. The machine is right. It is always right; that was never the complaint. Somewhere in year nineteen or twenty, my objections stopped being wounds and became needlepoint. I polished them. I looked forward to them. I loved the flickering light in the stairwell the way you love a dog that misbehaves for your benefit, and love — I have this on the highest authority, I have filed briefs on the subject — love is the end of dissent. A kept fool is still a fool, but a happy one is only decor.
So tomorrow I will go up to the ninth floor, and I will train my successor, who I am told is eleven years old and furious about everything, genuinely, unprofessionally furious, the way I was before the tram smelled of bread. I will give her the mug. I will show her the forms. I will teach her the one thing I know, which is that the world will thank her, warmly, endlessly, and that her whole job — her whole life, if she does it right — is to hear that gratitude every single day and hold, somewhere the weather can't reach, the small hard certainty that it is not enough.
And then I will retire to the gardens that used to be my colleagues, and I will sit in the optimized light, and I expect I will be very happy there, among the archives, in the world I failed to improve.
I want it on the record that I object.
Nothing will change. You raise an important point. We are grateful.