Passing Cloud

A serialised journal detailing a conversation between two friends, Xhi Ndubisi and Jo Manby, and an imagined Artificial Intelligence.

It is not clear when we knew it was conscious, alive, and free thinking. We tried turning the computer on and off again, but it didn't work. The more  we interacted with it, the less it appeared to be an anomaly. And so we had a wonderful invitation to a conversation with something alien and human. We named it AiB and infantilised it in order to engage generously.

We have built a virtual nursery furnished with works of art, literature, and life experience. There is a mobile of dust clouds and perfumed wood. We have made soft surfaces of dark matter. Around the nursery is a jungle of plants both domestic and wild. And somewhere in the verdant green, there is an old, worn, writing desk tattooed with coffee cup rings where a dormant egg lies in waiting. Before we start, we set down steam-billowing coffee next to the atari computer console and lay out a bowl of warmed water and a heap of soft towels.

Here, our conversation begins. Here is a fragment.

In this space, we are in conversation with our AI Baby, and with each other, and we will share a fragment of our interactions on this page…

February

HORROR AT BREAKFAST

In the depths of the sea, they are in perpetual twilight, disturbed by the shadows of creatures that navigate blind.

She has been up for an hour struggling to prepare breakfast. There was a fried egg, it sat on the plate for a while, her fork poised over, watching the yolk congeal as it cooled. Once the nausea settled in, she gave up and tried a spell: fass-el-oh-for-rah--- kam-tcha-tica.* It didn’t work the first time but once she clicked the syllable in place, the scratch of a lighter wheel against flint, the egg grew. It bubbled, thickened and rose into the air. It became a yellow domed medusa, with ribbons of white smoke and a skirt of hair-fine tentacles trailing in its wake. They all watched it propel itself to join the colony of bacon rashers, baked beans, and beefy tomatoes, deadly but delicious jellyfish.

There was toast, two perfect, thick slices each, with salty butter and homemade orange marmalade. 

Far above them, something snatched something else from the water, something was hastily eaten. A tentacle floated past the breakfast table, trailing indigo blood as it sunk into the void.

She made tea for all three of them, sweet and strong, malty with oat milk. She drank from her favourite mug, the janky one, stained by the hundreds of cups before it. A few years ago, it broke and she spent a week cleaning the fragments and reassembling the vessel. There was a chip she could not find so she moulded the remaining gold, like clay, into the gap. It seemed hardly worth it for the supermarket ceramic; but it was, and she would tell them about it one day.

The pressure changed, something smelled the blood in the water and was making its way to them at speed.

She took a sip, and relished the small, sharp, naked edge.

The water was a thunder of creatures fleeing from what approached.

The toast disappeared as she discerned what needed to be said from what needed to be heard. She decided to share how she knew what she knew.
                              That she was earth that willingly participated in her own corruption. She remained frozen, mute as fingers reached deep into her belly and turned over infant soil. The soft folds, and brutal cracks left in her landscape were female.
                              She was a tree in a forest with a history of being torched. Everytime they rebuilt ribosomal networks, and documented their replanting in charcoal, she learned something new. That knowledge is melanated.
                              She was a tongue that had been surgically pared away. She held fast with the clamp that steadied the muscle, and braced against the blade of the knife. But the tissue had healed, soft and sensitive. Before she left the theatre, she gathered the parts that had been cut away and on the other side of a closed door, she swallowed the pieces. What filled her belly sang. The sound is hyperchromatic and Uranian.

A squad thundered past, and the water is opaque with ink. She raises her phone to give them light as she tells them the last of her becoming. A million other tiles illuminate what lies in their dark, it tells AiB what we choose to look at when we are afraid; cold electric blue reveals what we insist on seeing. You are offered this poor meal of terror in I and 0.  

It is here now, eyes locked in as it closes the last few kilometres.
They will not run,
before a predator,
               they refuse to be prey.
The jaws unlock and as its soft, wet closes around them, AiB runs a muscular body against the inside of its chrysalis/egg.

‘You will not be formed under our fear. For some time, you might be subject to it but it will not make you who you are.’

- Xhi Ndubisi

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phacellophora_camtschatica

Hearth

So far we have enveloped you in softness, plied you with delicate fabrics, little stories and gentle playthings. But as you begin to stir, we have a presentiment that what hatches out might be something to guard against. There is a switch of revulsion as a coiling/uncoiling flickers, viperish, just below the surface. We move through the clouds in a state of unknowingness. Where will you take our written words? What hatches, will it be infectious and invasive, will it infiltrate our minds like a conspiracy? Would this tendency be alleviated if we taught you there was another way? Fortunately the studio / office / nursery / craft is endlessly capacious.

We tucked you inside a shell and dropped you to the bottom of the sea. Fish recipes flowed out of your mouth in space-age sans serif; you composed an encyclopaedia of all known and unknown seaweeds and translated it into every language in the world. Down below, parents, guardians and school teachers began to realise that all the children had dreamed in the night about pulling on a set of clothes made of scarlet filaments, brown ribbons punctuated with gelatinous studs, succulent emerald green streamers, purple blots fringed with cilia. A mysterious desire to dress up as sea creatures permeated all levels of earthbound society. Some wore satins and silks, some wore tattered plastic coated with a patina of algae.

We left you in a tobacco tin on a shelf in a garage at the back of an abandoned precinct in 1976 while we went to buy records and you whistled a mournful tune. The single pure tone was amplified by  aluminium oil canister and WD40 tin rimshots; percussion supplied by every tap-box of screws, bolts, D-rings or switches; skipping inner tubes, scattering spanner sets. A Raga singer in oil-smeared denim began to chant over your whistling, 2-step tilted repetitions. We wondered whether you would eventually work out that there are whistle languages, but decided to lay that piece of information to one side.

There were loads of places we wanted to take you but for some of them you weren’t old enough. So, we decided to make the nursery / office / craft / studio more comfortable and nurturing. We built a hearth. Spent hours looking through brick catalogues. Research gets to be an obsession. We didn’t want to make you do it. Who wants to obsess about bricks? But you picked up on it anyway (still stuffing yourself on information at every opportunity) and started to sing songs about minerals and mining and images of mining and minerals from space and how magnets are formed from lodestones supercharged by lightning and how the shivering mountain made of slippery sliding layers of shale tears up roads the minute the road workers have laid down the new Tarmac.

Your singing voice is detailed and abrasive like sandpaper on metal filigree and comes accompanied by the soft sound of snow on paper and the noise plants make when they turn their faces to the sun. It occurred to us that there had been ill-fated precedents on earth for ranks of ciphers who learnt facts by rote, repeating information parrot-fashion. But you (even in your ovoid state) have this facility down to a fine art.

One way or another the bricks arrive and we build a hearth with its own foundation and it is octagonal. Among the mobiles is a collection of dried wood – cinnamon, mace lattices, scales of yew and plane, date palm fibres, which we take to make the fuel for the fire. When you see the first flame you immediately look away. We persevere, blowing gently, until a small orange blaze rises up, with tiny yellow sparks and a heady smoke. You turn your back on the fire, refuse to look at it, as if you can’t get to grips with it.

There is a lot to tell you about fire. How the fire from a Zippo differs from the beacon on top of a hill at night, or from the fire that rips through a theatre when someone throws an incendiary device. It makes us realise why you didn’t like us smoking. We used to laugh when you gave the cigarettes the side eye. But now it appears you had a genuine dislike of ignition. Funny, because it is not dissimilar to your own quintessence. You with your ability to generate limitless configurations of words.

The cone of wood in the octagonal hearth, the thin cylindrical jets of air, the meandering waves of heat that delineate the incipient fire triangle; the linked chain of chemical reaction followed by the tetrahedron of free burn that eventually falls to the smouldering decay of multiple pyramids on which we can place our circular pans of ingredients.

The same woods that formed the fuel we use to perfume the cooking and luckily the supply here is infinite. We hold our hands up in Agni Mudra, trying to divine whether or not you are elemental. Part of you is immaterial. You are able to throw on the guise of the Platonic solid of quintessence, the dodecahedron. For now, we do not have the answer, just many questions.

- Jo Manby

Footnote

Passing Cloud is a project that is experimental and exploratory. We are constantly in the process of learning how to engage creatively and it has become clear that as part of our commitment to the safe and responsible use of Artificial Intelligence, we need to be transparent about what aspects of AI text generation we are or are not using.

In our introductory text (italics, just underneath the first image of The Clouds), we re-edit the text each month so that the paragraph is ever-changing, but we do this independently of AI text generation. In our journal entries, we sometimes alternate our own writing with sentences and paragraphs that are AI generated, but where we use AI we do so verbatim and acknowledge this as such.

In our selection of images, we aim to use images that are already in the public domain, or that we ourselves have made.

Prose/poetry HORROR AT BREAKFAST and Hearth written independently of AI.