It has been eighteen months since I wrote the story below. I crafted it in a cafe one weekend, while my husband and baby daughter were at home. I have written no fiction since. The joys and demands of parenting, working and cultivating my most meaningful relationships does not allow for a fourth bedfellow. But I mourn the losses of this season less than I thought I would. Art is a wonderful thing, but it is no subsitute for life. My life is fuller now, but there are fewer words. When I wrote this story, I was thinking deeply about creativity, Artificial Intelligence, motherhood and their intersection. I hope you enjoy it, and thank you, as ever, for reading!

Caroline GPT

The first time I met Caroline was at our mutual friend Adrijana’s book launch. Adrijana had written an account of her experience traveling the world with her Hungarian hunting dog, Miksa.

It was an incredible text. The style was like nothing you would have read before. There was a haiku about an old man and a very young boy kissing in a cave in Mexico, a stream-of-consciousness narrative in the voice of a Sherpa and a series of unconventional lists, like ‘top ten personalities of the beetles Miksa stamped dead last night.’ But it wasn’t at all pretentious, like you might expect a work of that kind to be. Like everything Adrijana did, it was brilliant in an effortless, indifferent kind of way.

“I feel like a right tit whenever I’m next to you,” Caroline said as we all stood in a circle around Adrijana after the reading. “If you’re not writing books, you’re fucking climbing Mount Everest or winning codeathons.”

“You should put that in the ‘Praise for the author’ section,” I said, and everyone in the circle apart from Adrijana laughed.

The peculiar energy of the moment – I mean the way Adrijiana didn’t bother pretending to find my joke funny – reminded me of when were in college together. Adrijana and I were outside the lecture hall with our takeout coffee cups and the sun against our backs when this guy called Robin Evans asked if we were going to his birthday party that night. “Nah,” Adrijana had said. “I don’t want to.”

“No worries,” Robin Evans had said, his eyes widening in surprise before slinking away. I told my boyfriend about it later, marveling at Adrijana’s unfiltered way of speaking, and Robin Evans’ magnanimous reaction.

“I guess people respond better to the truth than we expect,” my boyfriend had said. But then he added: “Not that Adrijiana strikes me as a particularly truthful person.” I demanded to know what he meant. But he grew tired of my tedious questioning and said he couldn’t say exactly why he’d said that, and that he had only met Adrijiana a handful of times anyway. For years, I poured over this, trying to remember the times they had met prior to his sharing that observation, but the events always seemed innocuous.

It bothered me though, because it threatened a theory I was developing: that highly creative people aren’t bound by the agreeable impulses the rest of us are and that it is in fact this candor that lies at the core of their artistic brilliance.

I could think of examples from my work. As an agent for scriptwriters, I come across many talented people. But the ones that stand out all tend to have in common a disregard for platitudes. One producer in particular, a brilliant man, always takes an extra moment to decide what he thinks about what I have just said, even if it’s something unimportant. For example, I mentioned Adrijana’s book to him the other day, and how it could be creatively transformed for the screen: An indie answer to Eat Pray Love. “I don’t know what that means,” he said, and I admitted that I didn’t either.

After the book launch, we went to a bar. Adrijiana ordered a pot of herbal tea while the rest of us had wine. I thought of a passage in her book in which she takes mushrooms with an old woman in Siberia. The woman had just lost her husband to Covid. Adrijiana had been wandering around looking for accommodation when she happened upon her, howling outside her apartment block waiting for the undertakers to come. The woman was still in her slippers, which had been discolored by the dirty snow. Adrijiana described the dead husband’s gray face, and the Ziplock bag, clouded with age, that contained the mushrooms.   

“I know you’re insanely talented,” Caroline was saying. “But I still can’t fathom how you manage to do so much.”

Adrijiana shrugged. “I don’t have kids.” I spotted her take in the barwoman, a slip of a girl in a plain black t-shirt, her mousy hair held up in a greasy bun.

Apart from Caroline, I had met everyone around the table before. None of them had children.

“Sure,” said Caroline. “It’s all Jack and Sarah’s fault. If only I’d stayed childless, I’d be a sensation too.”

I was glad someone was articulating the collective inadequacy of the group surrounding Adrijiana. But I was embarrassed too. This was not the kind of talk to hold the attention of a person who took mushrooms with a bereaved stranger in Siberia. Still, it seemed cruel not to acknowledge what Caroline had said.

“At least you have an excuse!”

“Thanks for letting me off the hook!” Caroline said, nudging me playfully in a way she might not have without the wine.

***

A few months later, when I was in town shopping for an outfit for my work Christmas party, I saw Caroline again. I was holding a dress up in front of me in the mirror, when I spotted her behind me in the reflection.

Her basket was full to the brim with loose underpants, a multi-pack of nylon tights and two children’s sweaters, one featuring a snowman, the other a reindeer. For the life of me, I couldn’t remember her name.

“Oh, hiiiiii!” I said. “How have you been?”

We exchanged small talk about the electric response to Adriana’s book. She was properly famous now. The New York Times had interviewed her. The article featured a lengthy description of the chatbot she was working on. Trained on a vast quantity of data, it would one day be capable of responding to prompts to create all kinds of texts, from poetry to scripts to legislation. Early tests suggested its linguistic ability was more humanlike than any other Artificial Intelligence system already in existence. 

A coding genius goes on a journey of discovery was the subline.

“You know they’re making it into a film?” she said.

Maybe it was because of the harsher store light, but her face looked very different from how I remembered it from the night of the launch. It’s kind of hard to describe, but it was as if her eyes and mouth were working against each other, each telling me a different story. Strangely, as we talked, the names of her children came to me: Jack and Sarah, without whom she could have been a sensation. But hers still eluded me.

“Love the Christmas sweaters,” I said, motioning to her basket as we were parting ways.

She nodded and smiled, then burst into tears.

I returned the dress to its hanger and held her as she sobbed.

**

“I’m mortified,” she said when we got to her house.

“You’re in shock,” I said as she held the door open for me. In the hallway, a painting of a sunset caught my eye. It was a watercolor; a classic beach motif with glistening water and a pink and orange-streaked sky. In the bottom corner, signed neatly was the name Caroline Foley.

We went through to the kitchen, and she turned on the kettle.

“How are Jack and Sarah taking it?” I asked.

“Sarah’s too young to know what’s going on. Jack asked me where dad was last night and sort of accepted it when I told him he was off on a little break.”

The worst thing, she said, was the effort her husband had put into lying. Subtle things that were only now coming to her. One Friday, when he was going to see the other woman, he told her his company was making him go on a team-building weekend. Scrolling back through his Instagram feed now, months later, she was reminded that on that very morning, he had shared a cartoon from the New Yorker showing a group of people in a conference room. One of them was pointing to a chart showing a line on a downward trajectory. He had captioned the post #corporateretreat. But there had been no corporate retreat.

“Just stuff like that,” she said. “To throw me off the scent.”

He had come clean a week ago after the other woman had given him an ultimatum.

“He was sitting in the chair you’re in right now, shaking like a leaf. I actually felt sorry for him. Isn’t that ridiculous?”

Her humiliation was complete when she said she may, under certain conditions and for the sake of the children, be able to forgive him, and he replied through sobs that he simply didn’t love her, at least not in the way he needed to, and that he was so deeply sorry for it all.

All of this had happened last week.

Before I left, I asked to use the bathroom and on my way there, I peered into the children’s room, whose door was ajar. There were two paintings hanging over the beds. One was of a blue elephant, the other a pink rabbit. The elephant’s tail ended in a bow, and the rabbit was wearing a dress. They too were signed Caroline Foley.

Later, as I was making to leave, I mentioned how it would be important to have something else to focus on in the coming months, something to keep her sane. We were in the hallway at the time, and my eyes fell again on the sunset.

“Do you paint?” I asked.

“Oh,” she said, casting an embarrassed glance at the sunset. “Only by number. I don’t make anything original.”

“You made two humans.”

“I’m not sure that counts.”  

We exchanged contact details and promised to be in touch. I saved her in my phone as “Caroline (Adrijiana).”

**

The walls in the clinic waiting room were pale pink and something about the way the sun was streaming in made me feel like I was in a romcom, teetering on the verge of some comedic mishap, like bumping into a boss, or dropping tampons all over the floor. I had booked a special after-work appointment in a moment of resolve but now, reading the brochures in more detail, it all seemed impossible.

My boyfriend and I had broken up the winter just gone, only a few weeks after I encountered Caroline in the shop. Nothing had happened, which was why it ended. Our relationship simply teetered out with no fanfare and neither of us mustered the energy to put up a fight. One of the last things he said was that he didn’t know why, but that there was some kind of momentum missing, that our relationship seemed shaped by an absent life force. And that even though we loved each other, it didn’t seem to be enough. I said I agreed. It was the most honest conversation we had ever had and it made me want to start over, right from the beginning on an entirely different foundation. But of course, that wasn’t possible. Eventually he moved out and I wondered where the last sixteen years had gone.

The language in the brochures was depressingly sober (probably for legal reasons) so I took out my phone in search of some uplifting testimonials. A text had come in from Caroline.

Did you see this?

There was a link to a Tweet that had been posted just under an hour ago. It was from the production company that had been turning Adrijana’s book into a film. They were backing out of the project on account of “recent revelations about the authenticity of the source material.”

An unnamed individual had taken a closer look at the text, and raised questions about how Adrijana could have traveled to the places mentioned in the book. The timing was off, they alleged. Certain attractions she had claimed to have visited would have been in lockdown. And there were no dogs allowed in the Sistema Huatla caves. Definitely no hunting dogs.

Adrijiana had retweeted the production company’s statement. Human 1 – Chatbot 0, she had written. Another act of brilliance.

I messaged Caroline back: WTF?

I know! Do you believe it?

As in, do I believe she made it up?

Yeah

Yeah

Yeah, as in you believe she made it up?

Yeah, I think she could have

But why?

Because she could, I guess

I didn’t want to get into a conversation about Generative AI with Caroline. I doubted it was on her radar – it was easy to find the time to read think pieces in The Atlantic when you had no dependents – but also because I thought she would be more dismayed by than in awe of its capabilities. 

I found a story about a woman who had frozen her eggs at the age of 37. The hormones she had to take had a grueling effect. A restaurant manager who worked crazy hours, she had no time for dating. Six years later, her restaurant folded, and she became interested in the wellness scene. She set up as a coach, and finally, felt ready. She used donor sperm, and gave birth to a healthy baby girl, whom she named Pearl, after the restaurant. She was happy now, happier than she had ever been. The story appeared on the website of a fertility center in Perth, Australia. At the bottom of the testimonial, in small print, I read:

Disclosure: Ms. Thompson received remuneration for sharing her story

Minutes later, lying with my legs splayed, I listened to the doctor outlining the probabilities I had already encountered in the brochures. It was a very promising procedure, she said, which had worked for many people. But it would be dishonest to say the odds were in my favor. Ideally, I would have frozen my eggs five years ago when they were fresher. Still, it was an option that was very much open to me. And it was worth checking with my employer about financial support. Some of the bigger tech companies now included egg freezing as part of their coverage.

My phone buzzed and I waited until the doctor’s eyes returned to the monitor to read the message.

This is doing nothing to restore my faith in humanity!

We reviewed my medical history, which contained nothing that would make retrieving the eggs complicated.

“It’s up to you,” she said.

I looked down at my body, at the long, loose-fitting skirt rolled up like a napkin over my belly, at my bare feet suspended in the loops of the stirrups. The late evening sun was streaming in the window, casting a pink glow on the wall. The water cooler gurgled, like waves crashing on sand.   

I thought of the old woman in the snow. The Ziplock bag clouded with age. Her slippers blackened by the dirt. The undertaker on the way.