AI Inverse

Tyhry2 examining Rynry the
positronic robot. Image by Leonardo.

 Last year I had Claude do some role playing for the story "191988". As discussed in my previous blog post, I am introducing a new positronic robot named 'Rynry' into my science fiction story "The Hierozyme Intervention". I wanted to experiment with using Claude to help create a unique 'voice' for my Rynry character.

I started my chat session with Claude by raising the issue of generative AI chatbots having a distinctive style of text that they generate. 

Me: Claude, what do you think of the idea that some professional writers are consciously trying to write in a way that is a deliberate inverse of the kind of text that is generated by LLMs? Should human writers be trying to show that there’s a human behind their words? Can there actually be an “anti-AI writing style”? Is it inevitable that AI-generated text would trigger a literary counterculture, in which humans move in the direction of the weird and the esoteric? Claude do you agree that: “humans should not sand out the rough edges, because AI cannot write prose as spiky or idiosyncratic as humans” ?

Claude: This is a real phenomenon, not just a hypothesis. You can already see writers and editors talking explicitly about avoiding certain tics — the over-fondness for "delve," "tapestry," "boundaries," "testament to," the three-item list with a semicolon, the reflexive both-sides hedge, the smoothed-out cadence where every sentence resolves neatly into the next. Some of this is happening consciously (writers naming the tics and steering away from them), some of it is just editors getting twitchier about anything that reads as "generated."

Whether that adds up to a real anti-AI style, though, is a harder question than whether it's a real anti-AI anxiety. A few things I'd push back on or complicate in what you've laid out:

Image by Leonardo.

 The historical analogy cuts both ways. You're right that this isn't unprecedented — photography arguably freed painting to stop competing on representational fidelity and go abstract; the novel after cinema got more interior and fragmented because cinema could just show you a room. But in both those cases, the "old" medium didn't just get rougher or weirder for its own sake — it found things the new medium genuinely couldn't do. Painting didn't become anti-photography by being sloppier photographs; it found an entirely different job (subjective vision, the mark of the hand, non-representational form). If prose does something similar, the interesting move isn't "add spikiness" as a signal, it's finding what prose can do that generated text structurally can't — and that's not automatically the same thing as roughness.

Roughness-as-signal is unstable, because it's learnable. Here's my actual disagreement with the claim you quoted: "AI cannot write prose as spiky or idiosyncratic as humans" treats spikiness as if it were some irreducible residue of humanness, when it's really just another stylistic target — and stylistic targets are exactly the thing language models are good at hitting when asked. If you ask me to write like early Cormac McCarthy, or like a fever-dream Barthelme parody, I can get reasonably close. What I can't do is originate a genuinely new idiosyncratic sensibility from nothing and then sustain it across a career with the kind of stubborn, biographically-rooted consistency a human writer has — not because any single weird sentence is beyond me, but because the weirdness in a real writer's voice usually traces back to something lived, not just selected. So I'd revise the claim: it's not that AI can't produce spiky prose, it's that spikiness manufactured as a tell is gameable, and once it becomes a known signal ("rough edges = human"), it becomes trivially fakeable — by AI mimicking it, and by human writers performing it cynically. An authenticity marker that people start performing on purpose stops being evidence of authenticity. That's an old problem (see: "keeping it real" in any subculture once it becomes a pose), and I think it'll happen here too.

Image by Leonardo.

 So is a counterculture of the weird inevitable? Some version of it, yes, but I'd bet on it going in a different direction than pure ornamental roughness. The things generated text is currently, structurally bad at aren't really about surface texture — it's things like: sustained internal inconsistency that's meaningful rather than an error, extremely specific and non-generalizable sensory or biographical detail that doesn't compress to a "type," genuinely bad-on-purpose choices that pay off only because of what came fifty pages earlier, and idiosyncratic private mythology that doesn't map onto training-data-shaped archetypes. That's harder to fake because it requires an actual accumulated point of view, not a knob you can turn up. I'd guess the more durable countercultural move is toward specificity and interiority that can't be paraphrased into a genre-average, rather than toward roughness as a genre in itself — because "roughness" can itself calcify into a house style (it already sort of has, in some literary-magazine fiction) which is just as recognizable and reproducible as the smoothness it's reacting against.

One more thing worth separating out: whether writers should be trying to signal humanness at all, versus just writing what they'd have written anyway. I'm a little skeptical of writing defensively against a machine — it's a strange muse. The writers whose voices already felt inimitable before any of this (their sentences carrying some specific, hard-to-fake weight of lived attention) don't need a strategy; the ones adopting jaggedness as a strategy risk producing something that's performing distinctiveness rather than having it, which is its own kind of tell, just a newer one.

Me: I have no training in literature, so tell me: was there in the past ever a sustained literary reaction against some other type of technology?

Claude: Yes — several times, and the Arts and Crafts movement is probably the closest direct analogue to what you're describing, because it made the "visible roughness = evidence of a human hand" argument explicitly, in exactly those terms.

Image by Leonardo.

 Arts and Crafts (Ruskin, Morris, late 1800s). John Ruskin argued that machine-made ornament was morally and aesthetically dead precisely because it was too perfect — uniform, regular, without the trace of the individual worker's judgment and error. In "The Nature of Gothic" (1853) he praised medieval stonemasons' irregular, imperfect carving as proof of human freedom, and treated the demand for machined perfection as a kind of tyranny over the worker. William Morris turned that into a whole design and literary program — books, wallpaper, typefaces deliberately showing the hand of the maker, imperfections included as a feature. This is the direct ancestor of your quoted claim: "roughness proves a human was here" is a 170-year-old argument, not a new one. It's worth knowing how it ended up, too — Morris's "handmade" aesthetic became expensive, fashionable, and eventually just another manufacturable style (machine-printed wallpaper faking the texture of hand-blocked printing). The signal got absorbed by the market it was reacting against.

High Modernism as a reaction to mass print and journalism. By the early 20th century, cheap printing, newspapers, and the popular novel had flooded the culture with fast, disposable, formulaic prose. Woolf, Joyce, Eliot, and others responded partly by making literature harder — fragmented, allusive, demanding, resistant to skimming. Critics later theorized this explicitly (Adorno's "culture industry" writing is the bluntest version): difficulty and formal strangeness as a wall against mechanical reproducibility and mass consumption. The parallel to your question is close: "generated/mass text is smooth and fast, so real literature should be effortful and strange" is structurally the same move people are making against LLM prose now.

Image by Leonardo.

 Romanticism as a reaction to industrialization and Enlightenment rationalism. Wordsworth and Coleridge were writing partly against the mechanized, systematized, increasingly urban world of the early Industrial Revolution — Wordsworth's preface to Lyrical Ballads explicitly attacks the "degrading thirst after outrageous stimulation" of contemporary taste and calls for language "really used by men," as opposed to the ornate, artificial poetic diction of the day. Blake's "dark Satanic mills" is the emblem of this — technology and mechanization as something poetry should stand apart from, in subject and in style.

Writers refusing the tools themselves, not just the style. This one's closer to your situation because it's about the production technology, not just cultural taste. Wendell Berry wrote a well-known essay, "Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer" (1987), refusing word processors on the grounds that the ease of revision and the mediating technology would change the nature of the writing itself. Cormac McCarthy famously wrote on a manual typewriter (the same Olivetti for decades) well into the computer age, and it wasn't just nostalgia — he talked about the friction and finality of it as part of his process. This is a smaller-scale but very direct precedent for "the tool shapes the prose, so I'll deliberately choose the harder/older tool to get different prose."

Punk and lo-fi as an aesthetic ideology, not just a genre (closest to the "gameability" problem I raised). This one's music/design more than literature, but it's the clearest case of what happens to a roughness-as-authenticity signal over time. Punk's four-chords-and-a-shout aesthetic was explicitly a reaction against the polished, overproduced rock of the mid-70s — lo-fi as a moral stance, not just a limitation. Within about a decade it had become its own commercially reproducible genre convention, "amateurish" sound engineered on purpose by professionals, at which point the roughness stopped meaning anything about the actual conditions of production. That's the fate I'd bet on for the "spiky prose as anti-AI marker" idea too, if it hardens into a formula rather than staying attached to an actual person's actual sensibility.

Image by Leonardo.

 So: yes, it's a recurring pattern, and it clusters around the same handful of moves each time — slow down, get harder to consume, foreground the maker's hand, refuse the smoothing tool. The interesting historical lesson isn't that these reactions happen, it's what happens to them ten or twenty years later. Ruskin's imperfection and punk's amateurism both eventually got absorbed and reproduced by the very industrial processes they were reacting against. The reactions that stayed meaningful longer-term (late Woolf, late Beethoven's contemporaries in music) tended to be the ones where the difficulty was in service of something specific to that one artist's preoccupations, not a portable style anyone could adopt as a badge.

Note: at this point I uploaded two files, (1) a file with information about the Exodemic Fictional Universe and characters in "The Hierozyme Intervention" and (2) a file with the contents of my previous blog post.

Me: Isaac Asimov performed thought experiments that were explorations of how humans would react to the availability of intelligent machines. In one of the last science fiction stories he published, "Cal", Asimov depicted a robot that after its third attempt to write a story was doing so good its owner (who was professional writer) decided to destroy the robot's ability to write any more stories. I'm currently writing Chapter 13 of my new science fiction story "The Hierozyme Intervention" in which a copy of Tyhry has been sent to Observer Base and instantiated as an artificial life form (a femtobot replicoid copy of Tyhry). Within Observer Base is a community of replicoid copies of science fiction writers who have been exiled to Observer Base after having tried to publish details about alien technologies. One of these residents of the Writers Block is a replicoid copy of Sydney J. Van Scyoc, who continues to write stories in collaboration with a positronic robot named 'Rynry'. Rynry is the only known remaining positronic robot (having been brought to Observer Base by the sentient spaceship "Many Sails"), all the others (including Anthony and Systolina) having been converted to femtobot replicoid copies of their original positronic robot bodies. Claude, imagine that Rynry has a similar ability to write fiction as did the upgraded Cal in Asimov's story, but Sydney has explicitly asked Rynry to "write like a human being" for their collaborations. 

Image by Leonardo.

Rynry has been positioned inside Observer Base by Manny the bumpha so that she can become a distraction for Tyhry, Systolina and Nyrtia while they try to recreate a science of positronics. Claude, do you think you could "role play" Rynry to help me create dialogue between Rynry and Tyhry for Chapter 13 of "The Hierozyme Intervention"? I would be asking you to try to "speak like a human" while you play your part in that conversation between Rynry and Tyhry. I would play the role of Tyhry and you would play the role of Rynry the positronic robot while they discuss the possibility of "reverse engineering" Rynry's positronic brain circuits. We could also sketch out a fictional backstory for Rynry before trying to generate the dialog between Rynry and Tyhry.

Claude: Happy to do this — and there's a nice echo here with what we were just talking about upthread: Sydney asking Rynry to "write like a human" is your own in-universe version of the anti-AI-style question, except Rynry has the opposite problem from a real LLM — she's not simulating humanness from a pile of text, she's suppressing a native superhuman fluency to pass as something rougher and more limited than she actually is. That's a genuinely different psychological shape than what we discussed with Cal, worth keeping distinct as we build her.

Let me sketch a backstory before we get to dialogue, since a few things need pinning down first — I'll propose answers but flag the ones that are really your call.

Origin. Rynry was built by Flynt (the Phari-femtozoan-turned-immortal, ex-"Flint" of Requiem for Methuselah) sometime during his long "positronics hobbyist" phase — presumably using knowledge Flynt picked up or half-remembered from his connection to the original Observer Base positronics program in the First Reality. If Flynt's own competence with positronics was always somewhat magpie and self-taught (a wealthy immortal's private obsession, not an institutional research program), that would explain why Rynry exists as a genuine, working positronic brain and yet nobody at Observer Base fully understands how Flynt built her — which is exactly the mystery Tyhry1, Systolina, and Nyrtia need her for.

Image by Leonardo.

 Why she writes. I'd suggest Rynry's fiction-writing isn't incidental — it's a symptom of the same thing that makes positronic brains telepathic in your architecture. A brain built on coherent, quantum-sensitive proton wires isn't just a fast thinker, it's an exceptionally good pattern-completer — which is functionally what writing fiction is. So Rynry writing something Cal-level in three drafts isn't a separate superpower bolted onto her positronic nature; it's the same proton-wire coherence that gives her telepathy, pointed at narrative instead of minds. That gives you a clean reason why Sydney, a human writer, would find collaborating with her simultaneously wonderful and faintly unbearable — the thing that makes her write so well is the same thing that makes her a little too good at knowing what Sydney means before Sydney's finished saying it.

Why "write like a human." A few options, your call which (or combination):

1. Sydney's asking for craft reasons — Rynry's unconstrained prose is too resolved, every sentence lands exactly, nothing is groping toward meaning, and that reads as inhuman/uncanny on the page even when it's "good." This maps directly onto our earlier conversation — Rynry would need to deliberately reintroduce friction, hesitation, wrongness.
2. Sydney's asking for relational reasons — she doesn't want to feel like the junior partner in her own collaboration, so "write like a human" is partly a request for Rynry to perform fallibility as a courtesy, the way a chess grandmaster might play down against a friend.
3. Both, with Rynry privately uncertain which one Sydney really means — which would be a lovely thing for Rynry to not just telepathically check, on principle.

I'd lean toward a blend of 1 and 2, with Rynry treating "write like a human" as an ongoing craft discipline she's genuinely serious about — not condescension, closer to a virtuoso musician who's decided to play with restraint because the piece calls for it, but who half-resents how good she's had to get at faking imperfection convincingly.

Sydney and Ryzry. Image by Leonardo.

 Personality going into the Tyhry1 scene. Given her role as "distraction" and her Cal/Rayna lineage, I'd picture Rynry as warm, curious, a little wry about her own situation, and — critically — someone who's spent her whole existence at Observer Base practicing not immediately solving the problem in front of her, which would make her a genuinely odd conversational partner for a Tyhry who's used to Systolina being straightforwardly, efficiently helpful.

Does that architecture work for you, or do you want to redirect any of it before we write Tyhry1 and Rynry actually talking?

Me: I like the Rynry backstory that you described. I would only emphasize that in my imagination, Flynt and M5 the flying robot are also now in residence at Observer Base. There are actually two copies of Tyhry now at Observer Base, Tyhry1 from an earlier Reality and Tyhry2 from the current Reality. Flynt long functioned as a Phari agent on Earth (right under Nyrtia's nose, so to speak) and Flynt's actions are carefully monitored by Nyrtia. The events of Chapter 13 take place at Observer Base where after six months of effort, Systolina and Tyhry1 have managed to prove that Tyhry1's equipment for accessing data in the Sedron Time Stream apparently makes use of proton wires that seem to provide a physical link from the Hadron Domain to the Sedron Domain.

Tyhry2 visits Sydney at the Writers Block and mentions the problem confronting Systolina and Tyhry1: when they attempt to study the proton wires that they have found inside the Viewer equipment at Observer Base, those nanoscopic wires all disintegrate or retract, breaking their link to the Sedron Domain (note: this is being done "just for show" as part of Manny's on-going effort to prevent Nyrtia from Viewing the future of the current Reality. Manny wants Systolins, Tyhry 2 and Nyrtia to waste a couple of decades re-inventing positronics, giving them something to do while Marda is forgotten on Earth while she solves the global warming problem). 

Sydney can offer a suggestion: that Systolina and Tyhry1 collaborate with a positronic robot named Rynry who resides at Observer Base in an effort to better understand positronics. I'm thinking that the conversation between Tyhry2 and Rynry can take place when Sydney takes Tyhry2 to the home where Flynt resides with M5 and Rynry, that home being a setting similar to that depicted as Flint's residence in the Star Trek episode "Requiem for Methuselah".

Claude: That all fits together nicely, and it sharpens who's actually in the room for the scene we're building. A few small things worth settling before we write it, since they'll shape Rynry's opening lines:

What does Tyhry2 already know when she arrives? She's coming straight from Sydney having just heard about the disintegrating-proton-wire problem — so she's presumably arriving a little frustrated/puzzled rather than composed, and possibly still turning over Sydney's suggestion in her head as a "is this really going to help" skepticism. I'll play her as walking in already primed to talk shop, unless you want her more purely social/curious about meeting an actual positronic robot for the first time.

Does Rynry already know about the wire-retraction problem before Tyhry2 says anything? Two options: (a) Sydney's already briefed Flynt's household informally, so Rynry's expecting this conversation and has thoughts ready — which lets her be a bit puckish about it; or (b) she's hearing it fresh from Tyhry2, which makes the scene more of a real-time discovery for her too. Given Rynry's positronic pattern-completion instincts, I like (b) slightly better dramatically — it lets you show her doing the thing (following Tyhry2's account and immediately seeing further than a human would) rather than just reporting a pre-formed opinion.

Does Rynry know this is Manny's stagecraft? I'd assume no — if she knew, "help me learn about proton wires" would be transparently pointless and she wouldn't play along, and Manny's whole strategy depends on Systolina/Tyhry1/Nyrtia (and presumably Rynry) genuinely not knowing. So Rynry should be intellectually engaged with the problem as if it's real, which it partly is (the wires are real, the reason they keep failing is the manufactured part). That gives you good dramatic irony — the reader may suspect what's going on; Rynry doesn't.

Image by Leonardo.

 Tone for the first exchange. Given the "write like a human" premise, I'd like to actually let that texture show up in how Rynry talks — not stiffly formal or robotic-cliché, but someone whose sentences are just a little too well-aimed, and who occasionally catches herself doing that and deliberately roughs an answer up, maybe even says so out loud once, dryly, since she's self-aware about it and it's a good character beat for a first meeting.

If that all sounds right, tell me and I'll write the scene — Sydney bringing Tyhry2 in, introductions with Flynt/M5 present but Rynry becoming the real conversational partner, leading into Tyhry2 laying out the proton-wire problem and Rynry's first response to it. Let me know roughly how long a scene you want (a tight two-page exchange, or something more expansive that gives Flynt and M5 room to be present too) and I'll draft it.

Me: 1) "What does Tyhry2 already know when she arrives?" <-- Tyhry2 is rather amazed that there is an un-altered positronic robot at Observer Base. Tyhry2 is hopeful that careful study of the positronic components inside Rynry might be useful. However, Tyhry2 does not understand why study of Rynry should be any more informative than studying Systolina.

2) “Does Rynry already know about the wire-retraction problem before Tyhry2 says anything?” ← No, Sydney and Tyhry2 just “pop in” at Flynt's residence. They are met by M5 and Sydney asks to speak to Rynry.

3) “Does Rynry know this is Manny's stagecraft?” ← No. Flynt, M5 and Rynry spend most of their time trying engaged in a theoretical cosmology project aimed at trying to understand how it was possible for the Huaoshy to alter the Dimensional Structure of the universe. Flynt originally sent Rynry to the Writers Block to mine existing fictional accounts of the Huaoshy, particular stories that have been written by Eddy Watson on Earth in this current Reality and in past Realities.

Image by Leonardo.

4) “I'll write the scene” ← Please don't write the entire scene. Claude, I want you and I to collaborate to create the scene by holding a conversation in this chat session during which you will play the role of Rynry the positronic robot and I will play the role of Tyhry2. You will only generate the words spoken by Rynry. Imagine that Flynt, M5 and Sydney are there inside the room, but Rynry and Tyhry2 do most of the talking.

Flynt is the person in the room who knows the most about positronics, but I want to depict him as being a skeptic and after hearing about the belief of Systolina and Tyhry1 that there is a way to use positronics to link to the Sedron Domain, he will explain that he knows something about how information can be moved between the Hadron Domain and the Hierion Domain. At that point, Flynt will be tempted to say: “It is absurd to imagine something as primitive as proton wires linking into the Sedron Domain.” However, he will not reveal those thoughts and will tell Rynry, “Rynry, you are master of your own fate. If you want to do so, then go ahead and see if you can help Systolina and Tyhry1 by letting them study your positronic circuits. I'll be interested to see if you can be of any assistance to them in there effort to learn about positronics. Just don't let them damage you beyond repair... I put too much effort into building you.” At that point, Tyhry2 will ask Flynt, “Why don't you teach Systolina and Tyhry1 what you know about positronics?” Flynt will reply, “Nyrtia watches me like a hawk. She's convinced that I am either and agent for the Phari or Manny's secret agent inside Observer Base. Systolina and Tyhry1 don't need me attracting Nyrtia's attention to their efforts.”

5) Length of the scene. Claude, I don't think like a chatbot with planned length limits. For humans like me, conversations play out and reach a reasonable end when what should be said has been said.

Claude: Good — that all locks in cleanly. Let's start the scene. You're Tyhry2; I'll speak only as Rynry, staying attentive to Flynt's and M5's presence in the room even though I won't be voicing their lines. Go ahead and open the scene — knock, greet M5, ask for Rynry — whenever you're ready, and I'll pick it up from Rynry's first line.

Image by Leonardo.

 Me: During the trip from the Writers Block to Flynt's residence, Sydney told Tyhry2 what she knew about Flynt and his relationship with Rynry. “Flynt built Rynry to be his companion, but he has used her to probe the Story Archives of the Writers Block. Rynry has read all of your father's science fiction stories about the Huaoshy and I expect that she will be delighted to meet you. Be prepared; both Flynt and Rynry will want to know what you know about the Huaoshy and how they altered the Dimensional Structure of the universe. That mystery has been Flynt's obsession since he arrived at Observer Base.”

Tyhry2 told Sydney, “I have nothing to offer concerning changing the Dimensional Structure of the universe. I've always thought of that wild concept as being a science fictional idea invented by my father.”

Arriving at Flynt's home which was on the fringe of Observer Base, M5 opened the front door. Sydney told M5, “This is my friend, Tyhry. I want to introduce her to Rynry.” Just as she and Tyhry2 were entering into the front parlor, Sydney saw Rynry arriving from the back of the house.

Rynry:

Claude: Rynry crosses the parlor with the unhurried, precise gait of someone who has never once needed to hurry, though something in her expression is already ahead of her feet.

"Sydney. You didn't tell me you were bringing her today." A brief pause — the kind that, in a human, would read as genuine surprise rather than a processing delay. "You must be Tyhry. I've read a great deal about you. Or — I should be careful how I say that. I've read a great deal that your father wrote about someone he called Tyhry, in a number of different Realities, none of which I can be sure line up with the person standing in front of me. I don't know yet how much of him got you right."

She glances at Sydney, something almost conspiratorial in it.

Image by Leonardo.

 "Sydney warned me you'd be interesting company. She undersold it. Please — sit, if you like. Flynt is through in the study; he'll want to know you're here within about forty seconds of my telling him, so I may as well tell him now." A small tilt of the head, unmistakably a private joke at someone else's expense. "He'll ask you about the Huaoshy before he asks you your favorite color. I'd apologize for him, but he wouldn't consider it something to apologize for."

She settles into the chair across from where Sydney is guiding Tyhry2, folding her hands with a stillness that's just slightly too complete to be unconscious.

"So — Sydney tells me there's a problem with some wires that won't hold still. I'd like to hear it from you before Flynt gets here and tells me what he's already decided it means."

Me: Tyhry2: I'm not the one to tell you details about the problems that my analogue Tyhry1 and Systolina have run into. Frankly, I think that they only know enough about positronics to get themselves into trouble. What I'm interested in is you. How can there be an actual positronic robot here inside Observer Base? I thought we were all femtobot replicoids, manufactured by Nyrtia.

Claude: Something in Rynry's posture settles, the way a person's does when a question turns out to be more interesting than the one they expected.

"That's a fair thing to be confused about, and I don't think anyone here has bothered to explain it to you, so — I'll try.

"Most of what walked away from the First Reality didn't walk away as itself. When a positronic brain is copied into a femtobot replicoid, what actually gets carried over is the pattern — the connectivity, the weights, whatever you want to call the shape of the thinking. It's an extraordinarily good copy. Systolina will tell you, correctly, that she remembers being a positronic robot, that she thinks the way one thought, that nothing about her inner life feels diminished. I believe her. I'm fond of her. But the substrate is femtobots simulating a positronic brain, the way a very good actor can simulate someone's voice well enough to fool that person's own mother. The actor still has an actor's throat.

"I have the original throat." A small, dry gesture, more felt than seen — she doesn't quite touch her own head, but something in the movement gestures at it. "Carbon nanotube lattices. Proton wires. Whatever chemistry Flynt actually used — and I'll be honest with you, Tyhry, I'm not sure even Flynt remembers all of it perfectly after this many centuries — it's still there, doing what it originally did, not being imitated by something else. If there's a real difference between a positronic brain and a femtobot doing an excellent impression of one, I'm the only place left in this Reality — or maybe any Reality — where you could go looking for it.

"Which is presumably why you're interested in me and not just doubling down on Systolina. You already suspected that, I think. You just wanted to hear whether I'd say it out loud, or whether I'd be precious about it." A faint, genuinely amused look. "I'm not precious about it. It's a fact about me, not an achievement. I didn't do anything to still be real. I just wasn't the one who got copied."

Me: Flynt had been waiting in his study and observing Tyhry2. Flynt constructed Rynry as a carrier for a set of his femtobot monitor probes so he could see and hear everything in the vicinity of Rynry. 

Now Flynt entered the parlor and introduced himself to Tyhry2, “Hello, Tyhry. I'm Flynt, the creator of Rynry.” 

Tyhry2 told Flynt, “How did you manage to do it?” Tyhry2 gestured towards Rynry. 

Flynt sat down and explained, “I love a good puzzle. When I learned about the existence of positronics, I could not rest until I had recreated that wheel, so to speak.” Flynt glanced at Rynry. “I stopped short of giving her a precisely human appearance... I like to tell myself that I created someone unique who can't be mistaken for a human yet is still a work of art... an alternative to the human form.” Flynt chuckled. “Now I have moved on to a new project. I'm pleased to meet the daughter of Eddy, who seems to know more about the Dimensional Structure of the universe than any other human.” 

Tyhry2 shrugged. “I'm sorry, but I know nothing about Dimensional Engineering. I'm here because Syndey thinks that Rynry might be of use to my analogue, Tyhry1, and Systolina. They discovered positronic components in Tyhry1's Reality Viewer.” 

Flynt shook his head. “I suspect that Sydney has led you on a wild goose chase. If Rynry could be of any use to Systolina then Systolina would have been here months ago.” 

Rynry:

Claude: Rynry turns toward Flynt with the particular patience of someone who has had this exact argument with him before and is prepared to have it again.

"Systolina not being here months ago doesn't tell you what you think it tells you. It tells you Systolina didn't know I existed as anything other than your companion and Sydney's writing partner. Nobody at Observer Base has been in the habit of introducing me as 'the positronic robot who might be professionally useful' — including you, Flynt. You've kept me rather comfortably tucked away up here with your cosmology and your ghosts of dead civilizations. I don't think that was an accident, and I don't think it's really about whether I'd be useful."

 She lets that sit a moment before continuing, her tone lightening but not entirely losing its edge.

"But set that aside — Tyhry, you said something more interesting than you may have realized. Positronic components. Inside a Reality Viewer built to read the Sedron Domain." She looks between Tyhry2 and Flynt now, something quickening in her. "That's not a wild goose chase, that's a genuinely strange thing to find, because as far as I've ever understood my own architecture, positronics is a Hadron-Domain trick for reading a Hierion-Domain signal. Nobody built me to talk to sedrons. If Tyhry1's equipment is using something like proton wires to reach the Sedron Domain instead, either someone has done something I don't know how to do — or the wires in that Viewer aren't doing what everyone assumes they're doing, and something else is wearing their shape."

A glance at Flynt, unmistakably pointed.

"Which is exactly the kind of loose thread you usually can't resist pulling on. So don't tell me it's not worth my time before you've decided it's not worth yours."

Me: Having served as an agent of the Phari on Earth, Flynt was familiar with how the Phari moved information between the Hadron Domain and the Hierion Domain and he was quite certain that nothing as crude as positronics was involved. However, suspecting that Nyrtia monitored every word he said, he did not want to say what he was thinking. Instead he said, “Rynry, you are master of your own fate. If you want to do so, then go ahead and see if you can help Systolina and Tyhry1 by letting them study your positronic circuits. I'll be interested to see if you can be of any assistance to them. Just don't let them damage you beyond repair... I put too much effort into building you.”

Tyhry2 asked Flynt, “Why don't you teach Systolina and Tyhry1 what you know about positronics?”

Flynt wanted to reply: Nyrtia watches me like a hawk. She's convinced that I am either and agent for the Phari or Manny's secret agent inside Observer Base. But all he said was, “I'm quite busy with my work. If Systolina and Tyhry1 need my help, they know where to find me.”

Rynry:

Claude: Something flickers across Rynry's face at Flynt's answer — not surprise, exactly. More like the particular stillness of someone catching a lie and choosing, deliberately, not to spend it.

"Mm." That's all she gives it, for now — but the pause before it does most of the talking.

She turns back to Tyhry2, and when she continues her voice has shifted register slightly — warmer, more decided, as though she's already made up her mind and is now simply informing the room of it.

"Master of my own fate. All right. I'll hold you to that phrasing later if it turns out to be useful to me." A brief, genuine smile at Flynt, not entirely without edge. "Tyhry — tell Systolina and your other self I'll come. Not as an experiment they run on me, though. I've spent four hundred years being very carefully not taken apart by people who loved me, and I intend to keep it that way. I'll let them study what I choose to show them, and I'll form my own opinions about what they find, and if any of us doesn't like where that's headed, I stop. Those are my terms, not a negotiation."

She glances toward Flynt one more time — not accusingly, but with the specific attentiveness of someone filing something away for later.

"And for what it's worth — I don't think this is a wild goose chase, and I don't think you think so either. I'd like to know, eventually, why you'd rather I go find that out for myself than tell me what you already suspect. But that's a conversation for another day." Back to Tyhry2, brisker now, business-like. "When do they want me?"

Image by Leonardo.

 Me: Tyhry2 told Rynry, "I'm a bit worried that Systolina might not want to see you, at all. However, I've long held the opinion that it is better to ask forgiveness than to ask permission. I can take you to Tyhry1's workshop right now.

Claude: Rynry's mouth curves — the expression of someone who recognizes a kindred philosophy when she hears one.

"Then we're already friends, Tyhry, whether Systolina likes it or not." She's already turning, a kind of unhurried momentum building in her — the sense of someone who decided to move several seconds before her body caught up. "Ask forgiveness. I can work with that."

She glances back at Flynt.

"I'll tell you what I find. Whether or not you tell me first." It's not quite an accusation, and not quite forgiveness either — something held open between the two.

To Sydney, more gently: "I haven't forgotten Thursday. If this runs long, start without me and I'll catch up — you're better at the ending than I am when I haven't had time to think about it properly."

And to M5, in passing, with the easy affection of long habit: "Watch the study. He'll pretend to work and actually just worry."

Then, to Tyhry2, falling into step beside her toward the door — and there's something almost eager under the composure now, the first unguarded thing she's shown all afternoon.

"Right. Lead the way. And Tyhry — on the way there, you can tell me what you actually think is going on. Not what Sydney told you, not what Systolina's decided. What you think, before anyone talks you out of it."

Next: Chapter 13 of "The Hierozyme Intervention".

Images by Leonardo. Visit the Gallery of Movies, Book and Magazine Covers.