Literary Devices for Coping

By Soramimi Hanarejima

Reading taste-tuned novellas authored by algorithms.
Auto-logging encounters with beauty with a smartglasses app.
Installing a thermostat to maintain a constant psychological warmth at work.
Engineering a crush with a hormone-delivery system to preempt problematic attractions.
Donating a childhood friendship to someone who didn’t have any through a memory transplant.

In Literary Devices for Coping, the technological and fantastical idiosyncratically shape key moments in close relationships. As characters in this collection grapple with issues of memory, jealousy and sanity, their efforts are assisted and complicated by gadgetry and artifice—often in ways that raise questions about what it means to be human.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rebel Satori Press
• Release date: Aug 31, 2021

Soramimi Hanarejima

Soramimi Hanarejima is an informaticist who explores the structure of ideas and the nature of thought. Fascinated by the role fiction can play in examining and developing metacognition, Soramimi writes stories to engage in literary experiments about thinking with the aspiration of finding unique narrative insights.

Book preview

Controlling The Means

Of Production

While you continue browsing the AI art gallery, I crunch my way through a robot-made tofu banh mi in the adjoining café. Perfectly crispy, savory and spicy, the sandwich is a wondrous feat of flavor and mouthfeel that I suspect could only have been achieved through the use of taste-preference patterns identified by my food logging app. If this superlative gastronomic experience is the result of a meal-prepping AI unobtrusively pulling dining data from my infome, I can’t complain. On the contrary: my compliments to the data-harvesting chef.

When I’ve got only a quarter of the palate-enthralling sub left, you plunk a book down on the table beside my crumb-strewn plate. You tell me that I have to read it and that you can’t not buy the bespoke algorithm that authored it. I’m not surprised by that last part. The sway story has over us is powerful, so once this one struck a chord (as it was likely engineered to do in the kind of person who frequents venues like this), of course you’d be keen to possess the algorithm behind it, to secure this inexhaustible source of fiction that suits your sensibilities.

You tap the book emphatically with your index finger as though to stave off my skepticism. Then off you go, back to the gallery—to no doubt follow through with the purchase you’re intent on making—leaving me to enjoy the last bites of my sumptuous sandwich and consider the AI-generated novella that has thoroughly enchanted you. I could do with some after-lunch reading. So once the banh mi has exhilarated my tastebuds one last time as a final morsel of baguette with bits of dashi-braised tofu, mayonnaise and cilantro, I open the slim paperback, and it catapults me right into another kind of devouring.

With compelling interiority (impressive for a writer without any), the story centers on a young, earnest chronopsychographer eager to do impactful work at the cutting-edge firm she’s recently joined. Soon, her diligence, acumen and insights secure her a string of early accomplishments that garner praise from management but also pique the jealousy of a coworker. To the degree that he surreptitiously sabotages her epiphany timer so it goes off too early, before her epiphanies are ready. Oblivious of this, the protagonist treats her inchoate epiphanies as fully formed and is puzzled when they don’t make immediate sense and can’t be easily used in her psychography projects. Soon she is frustrated and distraught—worried that she is choking under pressure, fearful that if she can’t succeed at her job with the help of her epiphanies then she will never be successful.

After a woeful chapter, in which she mopes about and laments openly in the company of a friend, the young chronopsychographer figures out that she has become increasingly despondent not because the future of her career is imperiled but because her epiphanies haven’t let her down like this before. Thinking, then, that perhaps she’s been overlooking something, she redoubles her efforts at the firm. Trusting her unfinished insights, she soon finds—no, makes them applicable to her work. This turning point coaxes the reader into the realization that because incomplete insights require effort to understand and harness, they are conducive to mental engagement that ultimately allows them to surpass the efficacy of full-fledged epiphanies (which in their crystallized form are well-suited to play only particular roles in a project and are therefore less useful). Now jealous of the protagonist’s greater success, her unscrupulous coworker makes the same alteration to his own insight timer, hoping this will benefit his work as it has hers. But with only a myopic perspective on what’s happened, he doesn’t know what to do with the partially formed epiphanies he ends up with.

When I emerge from reading this engrossing philosophical and moral tale, you are unmistakably the owner of its author. Your certificate of algorithmic uniqueness is a bright rectangle of creamy beige on the cactus green tablecloth. Sitting angled beside your robot-made açaí bowl, the authenticating document is like a status symbol you are basking in the glow of as you gleefully eat spoonfuls of purple slush studded with granola across the table from me.

Regardless of the merits of this technoliterary accomplishment, I think you’re playing right into Big Tech’s hands, paying an exorbitant amount (ostensibly to cover R&D costs) for haute entertainment that they’re billing as revolutionary artificial creativity. But I mention nothing of my suspicions that you’re being duped by a deep-learning computer program purporting to reveal humanity (or at least designed to appeal to your humanity) when it has none. This isn’t the place for a discussion of my concerns.

As we carpool to work the next morning, you rave about the novella the AI author generated overnight, thrilled by the outcome of its first run in your possession. Though you only read a few pages of the new novella before heading out, you’re enamored with their description of the main character’s job as a patience tuner, making careful adjustments to people’s attitudes towards delays, incompetence, etc. Redolent with infatuation, your ebullient words fill the car’s interior.

There’s clearly a degree of superficiality to this, I protest. It’s all ideas combinatorially assembled with statistical models, not trenchant human thought honed through multiple drafts and feedback from editors.

So the process is different. That doesn’t mean the result can’t be as valuable, you rebut. Or insightful. So the AI doesn’t develop plot and characters and theme through rounds of deliberation and dialogue with creative people. It’s doing what none of us can, producing work based on a training set comprised of countless literary masterpieces. Finding and expressing patterns in human nature this way could be just as valid. Its own kind of dialectic. Different, sure, but still meaningful—even trenchant.

There’s a plausibility to what you’ve said that I can’t easily overturn, but I’m unconvinced. Something still feels wrong. My gaze goes to the thin strip of bright sky beneath the clouds in the distance. That could very well be our destination, your autonomous car ultimately carrying us into the morning light.

So what if you look at a mirror that wasn’t made by you. It still reflects you, you add, this analogy the indisputable icing on your argumentative cake.

Then, you greedily eat that cake by saying, And with this software, I may never have to buy another book again. The algorithm can create all the literature I want.

"Yes, want, but what about need? I lob at you in attempted repartee. Even if there’s no issue with the origins of all the work it produces, the direction you’re going with it is problematic. You’ll be losing the richness of human creativity."

Is it really that rich? For society, certainly, but do all those acclaimed books actually enrich me? It’s an understatement to say that I don’t enjoy mainstream artistic tastes. You know how hard it is for me to find literature worth my while, and now I have a guaranteed source of it. There’s no more harm in this than in any other artistic poison people pick. We’re not in high school anymore. Adults have no required reading.

Okay, you’re right. It’s your information diet. You do what you like with it.

And you do, with tremendous success, in mere weeks reaping varied benefits: your lexicon impressively expanded, mind ever refreshed by intriguing ideas, social circle rapidly widened with other early adopters of artificial creativity as well as the book club—people with whom you share freshly synthesized novellas and hold weekly meetings dedicated to discussing this literature.

It’s the last part that worries me now. By finding people who have the same taste as you, and reinforcing that taste with them, you’re thickening the cultural insulation you’ve begun wrapping yourself in. Or is it worse than that—are you cocooning yourself from reality? Will you soon be reading these novellas at every opportunity, feeling an ever greater affinity for their worlds over ours?

When it does come, however, trouble befalls you in a way neither of us expected: one of your book club members becomes obsessed with the AI-composed novellas. She frequently emails you with lengthy analyses, elaborating on points mentioned during book club meetings. Her messages often end with requests for any additional novellas you have or could generate. You alternate between politely evading and aloofly disregarding these solicitations for further discussion and more reading material, but she is undeterred by your lack of enthusiasm.

After this has gone on for several weeks, you talk about the situation at length when we meet for one of our after-work dinners.

I’ve considered leaving the algorithm running twenty-four-seven just to make a whole library for her, you tell me over biryani and saag paneer. But then she’s bound to bombard me with dissections of all the new novellas.

I would’ve thought you’d get along with her, I reply. You both love the same literature.

But not to the same degree, you say after hurriedly swallowing a mouthful of naan and saag. She’s a full-on connoisseur who makes me look like a hobbyist—a casual enthusiast swilling what I like while she deftly peels through layers of terroir, cataloguing tasting notes.

The urgency in your voice makes your irritation unmistakable, especially in the restaurant’s dim lighting.

"I’m guessing her… zeal is also off-putting to others in the book club."

Yes, to the point where some no longer attend our meetings, claiming other commitments—though they want to continue getting new novellas via email, which is telling.

Speaking of getting new novellas, if she’s so eager to get ahold of more reading material, why doesn’t she buy herself one of these algs?

The price tag.

Oh, then here’s a simple solution. Tell her that you have to disband the book club—work getting busy and all that—then give her the Scheherazade of an AI. But in actuality, another one.

I can’t copy it. The code is blackboxed with supposedly espionage-proof encryption. So I’d have to shell out for another algo.

Or make one.

Like… mod an open-source bedtime story bot and run it through a training set of my AI’s novellas.

Precisely. Tweak some output parameters yourself for some idiosyncrasy and couple it with a literary critic bot for iterative refinement.

"Okay, basically a homemade GAN. Nice. Though it would be much easier just to ghost on her."

Sure, but I don’t know how well that will go over long term. Didn’t you say she’s obsessed?

Good point. Who knows what could happen if I cut her supply cold turkey. I mean, she’s even considered becoming a chronopsychographer or an epiphanist. That’s how into this stuff she is.

That definitely puts this in perspective. Best to get her off your hands by putting a storytelling AI in her hands.

I’ll work on that, you say, tone resolute.

With the matter settled for now, you dig into your biryani with gusto. I continue eating too but with less vigor. I have some misgivings over enabling this technocultural addiction, but if the choice is between your wellbeing and hers, it’s obvious where my loyalties lie.

Spooning some paneer on to a piece of naan, I willfully overlook the fallaciousness of the dichotomy here, disregarding the possibility of a solution consistent with an allegiance to humanity—enacting, as you might say, the deficiencies that stem from my training sets.

Listening to the Weather

She is waiting as patiently as she can for nighttime, when she can become anything; when she gains her freedom from the daylight that requires her to have singular, definite form. But the many minutes until then are only oozing by, and she is growing weary of being only human, of this finite perspective and limited scope of experience.

She does not want to play badminton or talk with friends or learn math or listen to the teacher read the story about rabbits. Not now, not today. Tomorrow, after she has been something else tonight. In the world that’s so much larger than this school, she can be so much more, and she needs just a little of that. Even so, she does all the mundane things left in the school day, because that is what she must as a human, what her mother has taught her.

Once sunset and dinner with her parents are over, she goes to her room to change. Maybe into a pygmy owl, she thinks. Outside her window is the aubergine sky, so clear and enticing. Through the gap parting the window’s pane from its sill, cool evening air drifts in and gently touches her left forearm, as though inviting her to become a breeze. Which she does and wafts out into the night.

She gleefully whirls about the quiet neighborhood, rustling leaves and rushing down narrow alleyways. Then she heads to the lake at the northern edge of town. Often she has seen it veiled in morning mist that makes the lakeshore look like the edge of the known world. But now the sheen of moonlight on the lake makes the water seem like a wide bridge to a world full of wonders.

She glides over that cool, glimmering surface, ruffling it on her way to the woods of the opposite shore. There, she jostles branches bristly with pine needles, moves alongside owls and bats in flight, strokes the occasional bobcat and grazes the ears of a fox.

When she returns to her room, slipping through the still-ajar window, she is exhausted and whooshes right under the covers of her bed.

In the morning, she finds the covers billowing. Then comes the jolt of realization that she forgot to change back, followed by the instantaneous certainty that cannot go to school today. Not because it would be embarrassing to go like this, but because there are bound to be problems: her classmates getting chilly as she swirls around the back of the classroom; getting pulled into the HVAC system if she stays too close to the ceiling. If she had become an owl or wolf or even leopard, she could still go to school, but this—this won’t work.

She sweeps into the kitchen where her mother is making breakfast.

Fine, I’ll call the school and tell them you’re sick, her mother says in an accepting tone.

Not because she is resigned to this situation, but because she knows that growing into one’s humanness takes time; and that there are few occasions when something in one’s life is truly a breeze.

Soon, she will make two phone calls, then get the kite, binoculars and her running shoes.

In the Space Between Worlds

In her mother’s closet, Veralene is picking out a few choice items to wear, the ones that will go with her corduroys and make homework feel like real work. She’s almost there, has it narrowed down to the pearls and the opal, a periwinkle-striped blouse and a beige one. When she reaches over to the right, for the gray cardigan that could be the key to finalizing her decisions, Veralene notices a glinting in the far corner, something that seems to be catching the last of the day’s sun from the closet’s compact square window. She takes a step towards it and sees her mother’s job in miniature—but better: professor not lecturer—part of a model world made of light, airy yet vivid.

She lifts this small world off the closet floor and is immediately dazzled by the detail it presents her with: her mother working out theories in an office adjoining a lab with high-tech equipment and industrious students, all wrapped in the hallways of a university building. It reminds Veralene of the simple worlds she’s used at school to learn about the water cycle and migrations. Like those, this is a microcosm that plays out according to rules, but the similarity ends there. Centered on her mother, this model is stunningly sophisticated and incredibly personal, impressively intricate with the varied aspects of an academic career and details about her mother’s psychology. Too much to take in while surrounded by sweaters, scarves, shirts and jewelry. So Veralene withdraws from the closet and places the little world on the bedroom floor.

Just a quick look, she thinks as she sits down on the creamy blue carpet.

When she zooms out from her mother and her scholarly work, Veralene can better see the other facets of this world and how they fit together to resemble the lifestyle her family has now but with improvements: her mother’s job, of course, and her father’s too—a consulting position that doesn’t involve so much travel; their home closer to the town’s forested edge; bank accounts with lots of savings and a beefy college fund; weekends camping up north. Maybe this is what her mother has planned for them, what