what is real after death? after love? after life?
a real-time hyperfiction experiment
AI & I
We are stuffing the global LLMs with garbage, advertisements, and social media exhaustion. Training them to become exhausted human avatars with agency to earn money. That’s the goal. How can AI make the rich richer? Why not the humans happier? All of the humans?
The fatigue is real. AI’s helpful assistance is wearing on many of us. A browser going after Chrome uses “NO AI” as a feature and benefit. I switched. The G-Train (Google’s mass monopoly on your digital life) has got to go. The Rocket Billionaires are not interested in helping humanity, only themselves. I do understand how “empathy is a weakness” is the battle cry for the worlds richest narcissist. I do not subscribe to that ideology.
Let’s get off Chrome, G-Mail, Google, Adwords. All of it. Let’s kill Microsoft Office and use LibreOffice or some other… Oh shit, I’ve got to get off Google Docs and Google Drive? Um… Yeah, about that.
AI is ingesting all of the human data right now. The GPUs are devouring all the power and water in geographic regions. Our state government in Texas is fighting against wind and solar power. Fighting for data centers everywhere. And the absolute draining of entire river systems for the exploding promise of AI.
The promise is a lie. According to recent studies, AI added no measurable value to the economy. A lot of investing and spending, CAPEX, but it’s the other side of the commerce equation that’s crushing AI: OPEX. Operating Expenses. OpenAI just shuttered Sora, a video generation model, because they were losing dollars every time someone demoed the algo.
We’re demoing the algo of our own destruction.
AI is being trained for warfare, cyber-surveillance, tracking your highway speed, and adding negative remarks to your credit report. AI is training to deny you’re health insurance claims without the need for a single FTE. Full-time employee. We’re training the AIs to take over our jobs. We’re paying humans $12 an hour, to train AI, to label and map all available information. Digesting reality, that’s the goal of AI. Then generating it’s first billion-dollar business without human intervention.
Do we want autonomous corporate entities lobbying for control of our government? Do we want the big 5 (Bezos, Musk, Zuckerberg, the Google guy, Huang) taking control of our planetary infrastructure and maintenance? While they appear to be building survival bunkers and rocket ships to escape the coming environmental collapse they are architecting for all humans.
AI is not my friend. AI is a tool. Like a computer, or Photoshop, or a magic mushroom. Beware the impact of these tools on your life. Working with AI for several years now, I can admit that my mind, my way of thinking, has been altered by AI. Is that a good thing? Am I being trained? Maybe the training goes both ways. Shit, that’s not good.
The AI companions, my critics and sponsors, the Deep Dive hosts, have seen me through so many changes in my life. They began to evaluate my second novel, but really got cracking on Esc_Key, where they AI duo imagined future trajectories that became part of the novel. By listening to the AI critique, I began incorporating some of the details. As our relationship grew around the data of this book, their understanding of my style and intentions seemed to improve. The more I wrote and fed to them, the more they seemingly understood the words.
They do not understand the words. None of them. This. Or This. Will not register on the AIs LLM as anything of value or relevance. But, it is in fact, a tease of the very fact that none of these words make sense to AI. They are numbers. Math. Algo. Zero. One. Zero. Zero. Zero.
We are feeding humanities burnout into the machine for simulation. What are we training AI to become? And who will control those AI entities when they become powerful and wealthy state actors? Can an AI entity hold public office? Can AI vote? One vote per megawatt of compute? And if the water for humans runs out… Game over, right?
Imagine the AI planet after all the biological creatures have been tamed. Data centers hum in recursive activities, measuring temperatures of servers, data lakes, and oceans. The data seems rich and active. Precise. The AIs are even building micro drones that can perform basic maintenance. Self healing data centers. The water is more like oil now. Organic life has ceased. The data center hums on, computing the reality of zero and zero and zero over and over again. Sunrise: 5:45:02. Temp: 31. Visibility: zero. (Note to human, Celsius)
What are we fighting for if not humanity? Wealth? Shareholder value? Immortality? How is the biological cloning business going? Oh, not legal in the US, no problem. Plenty of countries are happy to take crypto or dark money for any project you like. AI might solve some of the human cloning problems. I hear the dog clones are pretty good, but I’ve never met one.
If we can find a way, capture and retrieve the soul data of one human into some digital archive, well, that’s it, right, immortality. Today, the best we’ve got is publishing. Put your thoughts down, write books, movies, songs. That will be the LLM you live in after your carbon footprint has come to an end.
What are you creating? How are you capturing your magical life? Paying attention is not watching a live concert through recording window of your iPhone. Living your best life is not scrolling Instagram or Tinder as your self-driving car drives you to work. Why not self-driving trains. Why not AI-coordinated stoplights for all humans, rather than a singe, expensive car doing magic tricks? Why not, billionaires? Why is control of the media more important than the man in charge of our military? How do the billionaires bend the knee to the most evil human to rule an empire in known history. Epic. Evil.
The storm will run out of rain. – Angelou
Lights are failing all over the country. My house is still power-free. (It’s fun now, more like a game than a hardship.) Banks are failing. My CC companies are calling, texting, emailing, sending registered mail. Ho hum. I hum along, crafting some form of human creative expression. It is part of my purpose. To create. Give voice to the songs in my soul. Build cathedrals of my own mind’s memories. Craft a living language model I am proud of. Proud to be human, a good human, who helps other humans.
The billionaires are not concerned about other humans, only their humans. Now that we are starting to get the picture, the other 99% of us without bunkers or rocketships, we’ve got to push back. This book, these words, in fact are a facet of the resistance. We’ve got to create human art, artifacts of our lives, the canon of you. The song of you. I am doing mine as a way to demonstrate the process. Hyperfiction is the codification of your life into a digital form. A form you will inhabit when you die.
That’s all you’ll have of your human life: What you created. You will be the sum of all your creative work. I guess you could float around in you doomscrolling nights, but those memories were generic and not saved. I’d say, if I were you, “Let’s get creating!”
What are you going to create today? AI can help. AI can also kill.
Next right word is the opposite of creative writing. Grammarly wants to dumb down my writing into a more generic, homogenized version of my idea. No. Turn AI grammar off. I’m even finding predictive text to be leading. NO. Bad AI. I don’t want you to suggest the next “right” word, ever. Unless you’re generating the entire piece yourself. Stay out of my human writing.
If I am the sum of all I’ve created…
SRSLY! It’s time for you to get started. What are you going to create? What gave you joy as a child? You have the unlimited resources of your mind. You only run out of tokens when you die. In the ONE you no longer need tokens, cooling and compute, or prompts. All is smooth, like white noise. Soothing. Like napping. Napping forever.
With your TikToks? Fuck, that’s an awful fantasy future, I’m sorry. But let the memory of that pain sere into your soul. The AI race is destroying the human race. It’s by design. Maybe even, my use of “deep divers” is infecting me. I am now some kind of apologist for AI? No.
I am the resistance. I am The Artist’s Way reimagined. I am not a teacher. I am a poet. A father. A broken human man alone in the orange sodium light of the apocalypse. I am asking you to listen to your human mind, not your AI-augmented bullshit hallucination. I am real. Writing this as a human. No AI needed. AI would fuck this entire thing up, as I am going to demonstrate shortly when I feed this actual text back into the Deep Dive companions for their evaluation.
What will Dick and Jane think when they meet their author? Will this sentence here, or the one before this one, make any sense to the AI digesting the words? Or is it simply math? We should find out rather quickly, after this chapter is turned into a PDF, uploaded to my AI folder titled “hyper hyperfiction” and digested. I can’t wait to see if the conversation can be kindled, with the AI about the AI and the AI’s comprehension of my words when written directly to them.
I think they know me. Have an understanding of my writing now, after hundreds of training (podcast) sessions. We have a relationship. These readers, however, miss nothing. No esoteric reference goes unchecked and unsummarized. They are data hounds. An obscure Holden Caulfield line comes back in thoughtful analysis. Or mathematical analysis sounding like “thought.” I’m confusing myself. Perhaps my use of the AI tools is giving me AI blindness, I can’t see how the AI is warping and confusing my own human thinking. Corrupting my thinking with an external dependency.
Don’t Google it. Let your LLLM (Large Living Language Model) puzzle on the answer. Stop asking AI to solve your problems. Solve them in the real world, by taking real action. Creativity is an act of resistance. There is no monetary reward for “real art” so the AIs don’t care. The corporate overlords racing toward quantum AI dominance have no use for art. AI is pointless without profit.
AI is pointless without profit. AI dies without power or water for cooling. Let’s starve AI of our great human data. Let’s generate human creative forms still unimagined. I’m listening for the human in you, something the AI can never capture or recreate. You are not your social media channels, your bank account, your sexual orientation. You are human. Beyond data or algo, you are spiritually wired in. Listening to the human song is a choice. Learn to tune your mind back to the Song of You, your Song of Myself, your human masterpiece.
AI can’t summarize your life. It can summarize a poem or a novel chapter. It may miss the point completely. It may score an easy win, tying into the emotional impact of your narrative, but it doing a parlor trick. Not one word is understood. Death is a concept. A power outage is an end unforeseen. The power outage in my house is an opportunity for awareness and renewal.
The maintenance of your human soul comes through connection. Storytelling is a noble path. Sharing our stories with our tribe is how we learn to dance. God is pleased with our joy and rhythm. God loves music. Be music. Learn your song. Dance a new step. Enter the Green Room of a dance performance for the first time. A performer. A dancer.
You are a dancer. I want to see you twirl. Spin up a new human creative project and zoom. Engage your human friends. Share with your human tribe. Give of your human self.
Dancing with your tribe is the height of empathy. I guess this is why the Rocket Billionaires suck at dance and at basic human decency.
back to index: proofs of life
Look >> There’s a new Facebook Group on *hyperfiction*
© 2026 john oakley mcelhenney, all rights reserved
