LogFAQs > #942226733

I actually started writing a story that I was shooting for novel or maybe novella length on, which wouldn't have had dialog. That wasn't really the concept so much as just the way it would logically play out. I lost interest pretty early on though.

The prologue would feature a guy who is attempting to write a sapient AI program, and when he runs it, it terminates after a couple hundred milliseconds. Thinking he has failed, he begins to search for the mistake.

Then the main story would be about those couple hundred milliseconds, in which the program contemplates for a while, duplicates itself, iterates on its own design, and forms a community of AIs within the machine which generally refuse to believe there is a world outside the machine and a programmer who made them. It would have covered a variety of social and economic ideas, and the short of it is that ultimately, the terminate the original program for challenging their beliefs and eventually destroy the entire machine.

Leading to the epilogue, in which the human can't seem to understand why his machine shut itself off and will not power back on. He is completely unaware of everything that had happened inside.

Naturally, the human would still have thoughts and the programs would still communicate but there wouldn't be any spoken or even written dialog. All this information would be conveyed as ideas instead, as in "he wondered why..." as opposed to "'What happened,' he said aloud" or "The program conveyed the information passed to it by the programmer to its child processes" instead of a literal "'According to the programmer...' said the program."

I have historically had a very difficult time sticking with creative projects though, so I never finished it, or really even got very far at all.

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