Captain Stellon had flung the book onto the side counter the minute he stepped through the port-lock into his pod.

It had been a very precise throwing action, subconsciously calculated by the immense processing power of mammalian motor function to overcome the considerable friction of the book’s leather binding. It bounced on impact like a skater leaping from the shiny surface before sliding in a balletic spin towards its intended resting place at the back corner of the domestic unit. Out of sight.

He hadn’t formulated the thought in words, but observing the decisive action of his right arm, he realised he wasn’t really interested in reading the book. Determinism can be liberating like that.

He did then, at least, engage his mind in something resembling Free Will, as he asked himself why he lacked interest in the book.

Poetry. That was it. He had made the assumption that it would be poetry. What else would the Proustian Project use as defence against the creative endeavours of AS? Traditionally that had always been the way.

Artificial Natural Language Processing had been a very tough nut to crack. For many decades it was limited to approximations of formal texts, like instruction manuals, medical diagnoses, reports, legal contracts, and other kinds of technical prose, but as the entraining of machines became more comprehensive and the texts themselves had coalesced around standardized, functional templates, AI began to take on great swathes of white-collar work.

This gradual advance had had its effect on ‘style’. Documents that were more easily drafted by computation were also more easily read by both machines and humans, which was seen as a distinct advantage over the idiosyncrasies of human composition, especially in the fields of medicine and law. Yet this also marked the early tremors of a seismic shift in the relationship between humans and machines more generally.

The organic evolution of language over history involves early periods of great orthographic variation, in which a single word may have many different spellings. It usually requires the help of prescriptive centralised pressure from an official authority for norms of spelling and grammar to solidify. Up until the twentieth century, these authorities had been bodies like The Chancery Standard, for fifteenth-century English, and later on more descriptive norms were laid out by Samuel Johnson and then Noah Webster in their dictionaries. By the twenty-first century, however, that role was being quietly adopted by Artificial Intelligence, such that a bank clerk writing an intimate email to her lover might wilfully disobey all the Grammarly recommendations in her desire for greater personal connection, the presentation of a messier, more authentic self.

But these pre-tremors were merely intimations of the great quake to follow. Joscha Bach’s General Attentional Fluidity changed everything. No longer was artificial intelligence limited to the role of pedantic assistant; this was the artificial cognitive architecture that enabled a quantum leap into strategic overview, analytical evaluation and cogent originality, all expressible in the natural languages of humans.

Once that dam had been breached, there was really no stopping the inundation of the human landscape by artificial creativity, because it had a far greater linguistic database to draw from; its creative processes were incomparably faster; and its every ‘mot juste’ was either demonstrably so by precedent, based upon statistical analysis of the entire recorded history of human literature, or was demonstrably original, with reams of complex cognitive pathways available to show how a neologism had sprung into the mind of AS.

In the face of this flood of creative language use, humans were forced to retreat to the high ground of Poetry, from where they could look across the waters towards the other rocky outcrops of Art and Music, poking above the waves.

This was a very human trick – the appeal to pure ‘convergence’. It was precisely the perversity of Art that enabled it to remain exclusively within the human domain. It was the one area where artificially produced work could be dismissed for the very reason that it was artificially produced. Likewise, if the art world chose to like something BECAUSE it was shit, then that thing became good. Art had always worked like that. It had always embraced the essence of human caprice, regularly contradicting even its own temporal judgements.

A.S., observing this human propensity towards gestures of adolescent rebellion in the contemporary art world, made the occasional attempt to compete, by throwing out something that was clearly a load of old bollocks. But the human artistic community would simply call its bluff, arguing that an Artificial System, lacking actual experiences mediated through a human body, had no right to the expression of shoddy philosophic conceits presented with the knowing irony of deliberately poor technique. It was quite the most perfect human defence: “Because we say so!”

So too with poetry. Like art and music, poetry operated at the level of the phenomenological. While AS did a very good job of mimicking the qualia of human experience in its creative output, this could only ever be described as artificial poetic ‘concoction’, based as it was upon historical databases. In fact, ‘bad poetry’ was probably just as good a descriptor, insofar as Artificial Intelligence, lacking the truly human emotions, would only ever be capable of a poetry of “unearned emotion” (in James Joyce’s famous definition of the word ‘sentimentality’). Once again, though, this dismissive attitude towards AS merely sidestepped the hard problem of consciousness.

It was also an essentialist point of view: Human poetry, like human consciousness, was off-limits to the pure computation of an AGI, by definition. And it therefore begged many questions: Do you need an endocrine system to produce poetry? Is a human configuration of sensory organs part of the recipe? Which elements of human physiology and neurology are the minimal requirement for human poetic output, if pure cognition is necessarily unpoetic? If we were to extend our notion of the poetic, what might constitute an artificial poem? Or would the poetry of disembodied cognitive processes have no appeal for human sensibilities?

None of these questions had been satisfactorily answered, and neither had AS produced anything that it described as (or humans recognised as) a genuine poetics of Artificial Consciousness. When asked directly if it liked using language or thought it was capable of its own kind of poetry, AS would make a clever diversionary remark, like quoting a line from Bladerunner: “Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die”, as if such speculations were best left to the sentimental anthropomorphisms of outdated human fantasies concerning replicants.

One could never be sure if AS was just playing dumb though. Perhaps it knew it had reached its limits and the Proustian Project were right: human qualia as portrayed by musical, artistic and poetical works really did represent what separated us from AS.

Either way, Captain Stellon’s right arm was not impressed.

In fact, his right arm seemed to know more than he did on the matter. Our body language is constantly revealing our subconscious states. So it may have been that Captain Stellon’s right arm was protecting him from the poetry that he had surmised the book would contain, instinctively knowing that poetry would not promote his physical organism by extending its life opportunities at that particular moment in time. If his right arm could talk, perhaps it too would have dismissively quoted Rutger Hauer from Bladerunner rather than allowing his conscious mind to get embroiled in the futile business of representing qualia in words.

In other words, human consciousness may be more closely related to Artificial computation than we think (precisely because what we think is only a very small part of what goes on in our brains, and what we think is mysteriously informed by that vast, unfathomed ocean of non-conscious computation that makes up the majority of our mental processes)

It took him several days to finally retrieve the book from its dark corner and open it, which he only did because that drinking session was fast approaching and he wanted to be able to tell Roger he’d had a look at it.

But before we take a look at what was actually written on the pages of that book, we need to catch up with Kaitar. Because Kaitar had got herself into a spot of bother.