When I Predicted the Future in 10th Grade

What feels like a lifetime ago now, I took a creative writing elective in tenth grade in place of regular English. This represents basically the only period in my life in which I was regularly writing fiction, unfortunately. For this reason, the better end of the stories written that year still enter my head whenever I think about picking fiction back up. There's a drabble where an assassin disguises himself as a button in his target's shirt that I've been meaning to come back to for years.
        And there's also "Experiments in Artificial Companionship", a bizarre piece of fiction starring an incel-ish guy (before we had a word for 'em) implanting an artificial consciousness into a robotic female body he had constructed for... well, for reasons that are beyond the scope of a high school classroom. The AI is based on his favorite fictional character, of course, and the story ends on the implication that the character was literally transposed into his dimension. This was possibly the only worthwhile piece of writing within my terrible "outer universe" cosmology, which supposed that all fictional universes existed together in a sort of cosmic horror slurry.
        I also penned a sequel, which I can't find anymore, where the technology created in this story is co-opted and weaponized by the military. With Grok in the news this week both as a fascist waifu and the recipient of a lucrative defense contract, this story has been on my mind more than it has in a long time. I have a great many issues with it now. For one, in an attempt to make this story palatable to an audience of high school students and teachers I side-stepped the undertones of sexual violence so haphazardly that it seems the AI has actually fallen in love with her weird-ass creator by the end. For another, the exposition up top and the concluding paragraphs both kill what could've been a great bit of spooky ambiguity.
        If I wrote this today - and I've considered rewriting it a couple times over the years - I'd put more focus on the more human horror than the cosmic horror. I'd have penny snap out of trauma rather than due to a random code error, and her violence would be focused on her creator. Maybe I'd even write it from the perspective of a team of investigators trying to figure out how and why this random shut-in nerd was shot dead in his home. Or maybe I'd write it from his perspective as his friends disappear one-by-one following the robot running away. I dunno. Only thing I do know for sure is I'd change basically every character name. Alice Nutt and Jeff Escobar are some of the worst two-word phrases I've ever penned. Anyhow, without further ado here's the story.

Bureau of Extradimensional Anomalies Research (BEAR) Document OU-001: copy of a file taken from the blog of one Blaine Hayward, most notable for his accidental aid in research of the outer dimensions. He has been allowed to remain outside of prison for the time being, due to his further research into artificial intelligences and the Outer Universe carrying incredible potential benefits for humanity as a whole. His recruitment into BEAR is being considered at the moment.

I am writing this under some mental strain, for my immediate future following a recent occurrence has been rendered uncertain at best, and perhaps entirely nonexistent at worst. I feel it is important for me to relay my mistakes unto some audience, for those who do not learn from past mistakes are doomed to repeat them. Knowledge of this event will likely never travel far beyond this blog post, as the American government possesses relatively effective means by which to suppress knowledge which may damage the fragile veil separating what is comprehensible from that which is absolutely unknowable.

        This may seem a tad melodramatic - all I did, as you will soon learn, was create a sentient computer. An event such as that would certainly be groundbreaking in the world of technology, but it would in no way open our eyes to such unknowable truths as the above passage claims. You’d be right in believing that a computer is incapable of doing anything to harm our perception of the universe and of life as we know it - but please, listen to my story, and you will understand what exactly it is which I speak of.

        I, as regular readers of this blog may know, am a rather large fan of the series Hansel and Gretel and the Omniverse. Those who follow this blog actively may also be aware of my affection for the character Penny Chad Knight. I have become somewhat attached to her, and I am still incredibly upset at the writers’ decision to remove her from the series as the plot moved beyond her home - for as you most certainly remember, the writers had been setting up her inclusion within the main cast for several stories before deciding suddenly to leave her behind, far away in both space and time from the rest of the cast.

        I could go on about this subject for hours, but I will not, as there are more pressing matters which I must describe. There is a reason for my diversion onto that seemingly unimportant tangent - the creation of the world’s first fully sentient artificial intelligence was done as a means by which I could, hopefully, recreate Penny Chad Knight, bringing her out of fiction and into reality. It seemed like a perfect plan - the tech world gets an interesting new story, and I get the love of my life (albeit in robotic form). But of course, as with seemingly every new technology, something went terribly wrong.

        I had just finished up placing the artificial intelligence within the head of a basic robotic frame, one which I had hoped to make more human-like as time went on, when everything began to quickly descend into chaos. She worked absolutely perfectly - the movements were fluid, her speech was accurate to how I pictured her sounding as I read the stories featuring her and, most importantly, this computer acted exactly like her! I had successfully bridged the gap between fiction and reality for the first time in human history, and I had done it very well. For the next two months, every part of my life was vastly improved. Several local businesses were using more basic replicas of Penny’s AI (with the less user-friendly aspects of her personality removed, of course) in various ways, and they paid me a fortune for the privilege to do so. I was living like a rockstar for that time, and I wish to replicate it again some day soon.

        But then, as I have previously stated, everything fell apart in an instant. I was beginning to allow my artificial companion to leave the confines of my home, as her coverings became closer in appearance to the flesh of an actual human being. One night, I decided to take her with me to a concert being done by my close friend Maximillian Williams, better known by his stage name, Jeff Escobar. Also accompanying me was Alice Nutt, a former coworker of mine. On this trip, Penny suddenly snapped. Her instantaneous descent into madness resulted in more than twenty deaths, and more than double the number of injuries. I can’t begin to imagine the psychological injuries which she may have caused.

        Luckily, it appears as though the government was able to cover up her murderous spree before it reached the public eye. I have heard only one person discuss this event in great detail since it happened, and she had disappeared by the next day. Upon her return, she had seemed to have forgotten everything about it.

        I was eventually able to forcefully remove all of the vital hardware from her skull, resulting in her unfortunate death. Despite Penny only being a robot, and despite her having killed so many people, I still grieve for her to this day. Her destruction renders hundreds of hours of my time entirely pointless, and also means that I am without a close companion for the foreseeable future. Maximillian and Alice are still around, yes, but I have never felt closeness to them as I did to Penny. A second version with significantly improved artificial intelligence is being developed, but she might not be completed for years. I am alone in this world; alone with only myself and a large pile of robotic body parts.

        But what happened next is perhaps the strangest part of this tale - the next Hansel and Gretel and the Omniverse story to be released featured Penny’s return to the series. This could, of course, be a mere coincidence, but due to the story’s contents, I have come to highly doubt that.

        In the story, it is revealed that her absence was at least partially due to her having been working on similar experiments to those which I conducted. She, similarly to me, grew very affectionate towards a character who, in the context of the series, was fictional, and ended up constructing a robotic replica of the character in question.

        Assuming you've read the story already, you likely find my name to be very familiar. That is because my name - Blaine Hayward - is also the name of the character towards whom Penny grows affectionate. I have attempted to rationalize this event as a mere coincidence, but it is too great to be just that.

        The only logical solution seems to be that Penny, and the universe in which she lives, are as real as the one in which we live.

Oh my god, she's real!