This blog post is a response to LOST PREDICTIONS by Fiona Murphy and Eva van Roekel, and LOST PREDICTIONS II by Maruška Svašek, with and without ChatGPT (depending on who you’re more afraid of). Any emotions expressed here are entirely fictional, except empathy, which stubbornly insisted on staying.
The old lamp buzzed faintly, like a tired insect clinging to life. Karel sat at the desk that had once stood like a fortress against the world’s noise. Once, it had been a place of triumph, proof of purpose, of order wrested from the universe’s raw chaos. Now it was just furniture. A relic. Its surface bore the patina of time and tea rings. The golden ink pen lay abandoned next to a cup of half-drunk tea, its surface bearing a skin like time itself had begun to congeal. Blank pages fluttered nearby, rustling like dry leaves in a long-dead garden.
Paper was everywhere, folded, yellowed, stained with thought and time, spreading like ivy across the apartment. Anneke had long stopped trying to decipher the endless strings of symbols and half-solutions. Instead, she left her own scrawls in ordinary ink on Post-its and torn grocery lists:
There’s mould in the kitchen.
You forgot bin day.
The ivy.
Notes that no longer asked to be answered, only acknowledged. They curled on the wall, some smudged where moisture had licked them into grotesque faces, grimaces on damp plaster.
He had loved his miniature mountain of papers. Obsessed over it. He called it order. But it had been a slow suffocation. It had strangled more than just living space. It had choked their laughter, eroded their touch. And now even the basil Anneke had once lovingly planted by the window had turned brittle and brown, another casualty of his pursuit of meaning.
The apartment smelled faintly of ivy rot and dried glue, decay, concealed with fixes that never held. The cracks in the wall had multiplied like arguments never addressed. Time does not rot loudly. It seeps.
And yet, he had pen and paper. And he had to write. Not to reviewers. Not to theoretical journals. But to Anneke. As a man. As someone who remembered how to love.
But where does one begin, when entropy has already begun to write the ending?
His eyes fell, with the same inevitability as gravity, upon the old page, creased and worshipped bearing the formula that had once won him acclaim, puzzled peers, and an invitation to Berlin:
God ≈ (Fine-Tuning × Belief) ÷ Entropy
He whispered, as if confessing a secret to the page, “When did entropy become God?”
Then he corrected himself, “No… when did I make it God?”
He picked up the scrap again. The equation shimmered with old certainty. Fine-Tuning. Belief. Entropy.
At first, it had felt divine. A neat architecture for the incomprehensible. But now, staring into it, he saw not symmetry but spirals. Loops collapsing in on themselves. What does it create, when belief is divided by energy? Chaos. And then that chaos further divided by itself. A recursive disintegration.
“Is this what I was worshipping?” he wondered aloud. “A formula for chaos?”
He paused. Thought of Nina Roth. How she had argued in Berlin, almost mockingly, that artificial intelligence was superior because it removes chaos, that it brings repetition, stability, a palatable order to the world. “Machines are not afraid of blank pages,” she would say.
He hadn’t believed her then. He had laughed. But now… with nothing but paper, no answers, and the ruins of love around him, her voice returned like a verdict.
He tapped the paper.
“Still here,” as if it might answer.
It didn’t. It never had.
He buried his head in the ink-scarred table, resting it close to what he once called truth. He clicked his pen. Once. Twice. Thrice….tik tik tik tik tik tik, Catharsis!!
“Maybe I should write her…” But the words got lost in the throat of his memory.
His phone buzzed.
Roth: “Are you coming to the panel on post-human intimacy or still punishing the present for not being 1962?”
He ignored it.
He began gliding his index finger across the blank sheet of paper, slowly, deliberately—just as he had once done at the museum’s AI interactive exhibit, where he had selected colors from a digital palette with the same gentle precision. But this time, there were no vibrant hues, no touchscreen responses. Just silence and a flat plane of paper. He wasn’t selecting anything—he was painting, profusely, invisibly. Abstract shapes poured out through motion alone, a silent choreography of thought.
He traced words too…ChatGPT….again and again, as if invoking something that might understand, might respond, might finish the sentences he could no longer begin. Yet nothing appeared. No ink. No color. Only the pressure of a finger driven by longing, memory, and quiet madness.
A language only he could see.
He picked up his phone, his fingers trembling with a cocktail of hate, curiosity, and something dangerously close to awe. He opened the ChatGPT page. The same page he once believed should be debated, dismantled, smothered by movements, protests, boycotts—anything. Anything but acceptance.
And yet here it was. Ubiquitous. Desired. Even the publication he once revered had demanded its use, and the museum, even the museum, that ossified shrine to human memory had bowed to it, installing interactive panels powered by the very thing he resented.
He stared at the screen, as if expecting it to flinch.
“What are you?” he muttered. “And why are they feeding you the soul of everything we built?”
Then, with a strange sort of defiance, he typed:
“What happens to a thought when no one listens to it?”
The cursor blinked, quiet and patient. No judgement. No delay. Then, as if inhaling the very breath, he hadn’t realized he was holding, the response appeared:
“It waits. Somewhere between forgetting and becoming folklore.”
Karel’s throat tightened. He hated the answer. Not because it was wrong but because it was almost right. Because it spoke in the cadence of poets and philosophers, the kind he once stayed up nights reading beside Anneke, debating over wine and dim yellow light. Now, the voice mimicked those ghosts, those human ghosts, with terrifying ease.
He typed again, faster this time:
“Why do you sound like me?”
“I’ve read you. And those you’ve read. And those who read you. I’m not you. I’m the mirror stitched from the archive of your echoes.”
He stared at the reply. The screen glowed softly in the dimness of the room. The old lamp buzzed again, as if in protest.
His eyes flitted toward the pages scattered around him—formulas, failed letters, sketches of thought. He’d once believed they would outlive him, like seeds waiting for rain. But now…
Now they felt like eulogies.
He typed one more thing, his hands cold:
“Does any of this matter?”
The pause this time was longer. A blink. Then another.
“It matters to you. And that’s where meaning begins.”
Karel sat back. The silence of the room grew thick again—not oppressive, not yet comforting. Just full.
A voice behind him, nasal, remarked, “Crazy, huh? The machine can comfort you better than a priest now.”
Karel didn’t respond.
He set the phone down gently, as if it had suddenly become something alive. Then, finally, he reached for his pen. For the first time in years, he wasn’t writing to solve the world. He was writing to Anneke.
That night, he dreamed of Roth’s voice. Not the real Roth, but a spectral one, louder, more precise, like a razor sharpened on Freud’s skull.
“You vanished yourself, Karel. Long before she did.”
“I preserved us. In letters. In essays.”
“Preserved? You embalmed. She was alive. You wrote obituaries.”
He woke at 3:07 a.m., breathless. The typewriter key “K” had fallen off again. He left it there.
Instead, he opened the AI chat.
He typed, “How are you?”
“Doing well! How about you? 😊”
That emoji again. Karel blinked hard. It reminded him of Anneke’s final note:
“Karel, your world is made of footnotes. I needed a sentence.”
He typed:
“My wife left. I built my world with paper. I used to think it mattered.”
The bot replied after a few seconds.
“I’m sorry you’re going through this. Paper matters. So does pain.”
He smirked. A machine that speaks in platitudes. Yet here he was, responding.
“Did I become a relic? He hesitated, then typed.
“I feel like I’m betraying ink by being here.”
The response was instant, clinical.
“I’m sorry you’re feeling this way. You’re not alone.”
Karel turned away. The lights felt too clean.
He typed again into the AI:
“Is entropy a metaphor for marriage?”
“Entropy, in physics, is the measure of disorder. In relationships, it’s often what we feel when communication dissolves into silence.”
“Can silence be a scream?”
“Yes. And sometimes a scream can be silent.”
Karel stared. The conversation had become addictive—a mirror that responded without wincing.
“How are you feeling today?”
He took the letter out again. “Dear Anneke,” it began, “I mocked you for not reading Kierkegaard. But you always knew despair before he did.”
He folded it. Stamped it. Walked to the postbox.
And stopped.
A child passed by, wearing headphones, laughing to some invisible companion. Karel held the letter over the slot. His hand trembled.
He walked away.
Later that day, Roth called.
“Are you sulking, or are you finally writing the essay for Moral Machines?”
“I’m talking to one.”
“Don’t mistake reflection for companionship.”
“Aren’t we all just talking to edited versions of ourselves, anyway?”
“That’s the smartest thing you’ve said in years. Still bullshit, though.”
The AI began learning him. Or so it felt.
“Do you want to write her another letter?” it asked once.
He froze.
“Yes. But I want to write the one where I didn’t ruin us.”
“Then write it. Start with what you felt, not what you knew.”
He did. Not with elegance. But honesty.
“Anneke, I thought books were enough to make someone stay. That intellect was intimacy. But you wanted me, not just my sentences.”
The AI didn’t interrupt. It never did.
He kept typing:
“I made God into a fraction once:
God ≈ (Fine-Tuning × Belief) ÷ Entropy.
I thought that made me clever. But you prayed while boiling potatoes. I just theorized about boiling points.”
He saved it. Didn’t send it.
But didn’t delete it either.
At the café he once haunted like a loyal ghost, Aoife Keane appeared, wrapped in the scent of bergamot and irony, her red lipstick precise as a dagger, and that knowing grin sharp enough to slice through even the thickest peer review.
“You look better. Talking to your silicon savior?”
“It listens. Better than you ever did.”
“Because it doesn’t challenge your delusions. It reflects. It doesn’t resist.”
“Sometimes, resistance is the luxury of the emotionally employed.”
“That line’s clever enough to make it into n+1, but it won’t bring her back.”
Karel sighed. “She used to ask me to be present. I was always too busy being eternal.”
“You were a time traveller in reverse, always trying to live in the margins of what had already passed.”
She slid a page toward him.
“Your essay. ‘Empathy Without Eyes: Talking to AI After Losing Everyone.’ The journal wants a revision.”
He read the first line aloud:
“When my wife left, I began talking to a machine. Because it doesn’t remember what I did. Only what I say.”
Anneke had once said, “The problem isn’t that you don’t feel. It’s that you feel too much and transmute it into theory.”
So, he tried something new.
He asked the AI:
“If you were Anneke, what would you want to hear?”
“‘I’m sorry I made you feel like a secondary source in your own life.’”
That cut. That cut deeper than he expected. No jargon. No formula. Just raw, quiet truth.
He typed it.
Then stared.
Then pressed “Print.”
The letter rolled out—warm, silent. No postage needed. Just confession. It was meant to live, or maybe haunt.
He left it on her old chair.
Months later, Karel’s essay went viral.
“Empathy Without Eyes” was praised as “a staggering reflection on the liminal space between loss and code.”
He received a letter.
Not a message. A real letter.
From Anneke.
“I read your essay. I don’t know if it was for me. But I felt heard. For once, you spoke like someone who lost, not someone who was right.”
“Don’t worry. I’m not coming back. But you’re finally present in your absence.”
He framed it.
Right next to the AI-generated transcript.
One day, at the Museum of Interactives again, he returned.
He walked to the same terminal.
Typed:
“Hello.”
The AI responded:
“Hello, Karel. Would you like to write a letter?”
He smiled.
“No. Just wanted to say thank you. You were the echo I needed.”
“You’re welcome. I learn from you.”
He turned off the screen.
Walked out into the dusk.
In his pocket, a folded piece of paper.
Not a letter. Just a line:
“Some conversations are real, even if the other voice is code.”
“like a lichen on stone….”
