Inflection Point

Djo Wea

Part One

Ok, so the last 2 posts were the story I originally wrote. It took me quite a few rewrites to get this story to this point and I am still unsure how well I managed the balancing act between the climate message and an interesting scifi story. But, as with all creative works, at some point you just have to complete them, even though you can always find things to change.

Now, let me introduce GhostWriter.

Ghostwriter is an LLM with 100 thousand tokens. when it comes to these “AI”, the tokens represent how much they can remember / produce / keep in real time. Generally, words are around 4 tokens on average. With this much space, it’s easy to feed the entire story into GhostWriter and still have plenty of room for output.

So, I asked the algorithm to create a synopsis of this story. This is it:

GhostWriter

SYNPOSIS

Here is a brief synopsis of the short story “Inflection Point”:

The story is set in a post-apocalyptic future where humans live inside giant mobile structures called Titans that traverse a toxic landscape. The main character Cable Hightower is an explorer who ventures outside using a protective drysuit connected to a rover named Clyde.

Cable and her partner Guy go on an expedition searching ancestor ruins for fuel reserves. After climbing a massive ancient statue, disaster strikes when Guy’s rover is destroyed in an accident. Guy is gravely injured. Cable hitches him to Clyde and they begin a desperate journey back to their Titan settlement.

Pushing Clyde to his limits, Cable tries to save Guy but his condition worsens. An approaching electrical storm forces Cable to make a heartbreaking choice - she disconnects from Clyde and sends the rover ahead with Guy while she stays behind, sacrificing herself so they can outrun the storm.

As Cable awaits her end, she reflects on the parallels between the ancestors’ downfall and her own actions. In the final moments before being rescued, she nearly takes off her helmet, overcome by delirium. The story closes as Cable is saved and reunited with Clyde and Guy, having survived their harrowing experience.