I'm participating in Anna Ladd's chatGPO exchange (skip to 10:37).

I think of it like a penpal postcard exchange: send people LLM-appropriate queries through a P.O. box proxy, receive your own, fulfill those prompts with all the meatbag personality you can muster, and cherish the responses you get in return.

One of my prompts to fulfill was to write a short story. I've wanted to try my hand at writing, and this felt like a sign!

With some sadness, I did not complete the prompt. I spent about a month drafting, and never quite landed something I was totally happy with. So, the story has no conclusion and abruptly ends nearly mid-thought.

I'm sharing what I did write here, because even if it's incomplete, I think it's better this way.

If you'd like to read the original prompt, I'll put it at the end of the post. Jump to... Original prompt

Without further rambling preamble... here it is!

---

Companyon

Tomorrow would mark two years. Two years since Isaac had boarded TransSol's courier starship with the pilot's certification he felt had been issued too easily. Two years of routine inventory inspections and system diagnostics. Two years of rigid diet and exercise he could never have maintained on his own back home. Two years of the self-sanctified ritual he found himself currently practicing: laying in the observation bay flat on his back, taking in the star-fields, and cataloguing constellations that he never seemed to be able to find two days in a row.

The prevailing wisdom had been that a view of space from space would fundamentally change you: the "Overview Effect" they called it. But it was important what you were viewing, Isaac learned. Viewing your home from that specially distanced orbit flooded you with reverence for the human experience. Its insignificance made significant by juxtaposition with the void engulfing it. But to stargaze so far from home and so regularly was a different experience entirely. Day in, day out, Isaac saw stunning fields of utterly depersonalized stars. He should have been the insignificance made significant, but no audience of stars could make his world aboard the courier ship feel significant. It was just Isaac and his inventory. But even still, time in the observation bay was time well spent. Time well spent alone.

Behind Isaac, the observation bay door opened flooding the room with soft light. Isaac craned his neck back squinting to adjust his eyes.

"Need something Zac?"

"Just the usual interruption. Time to do our rounds, Isaac."

Correction: It was Isaac and his inventory... and Zac.

Two years ago, Zac had been paired with Isaac to ferry TransSol's oh-so-important cargo between two of their long-distance shipping hubs. Well, "paired" was a bit of a euphemism.

TransSol had been in the intra- and inter-stellar shipping game since the earliest days and learned quite quickly that their pilots and couriers ran into certain... psychological challenges... the longer the routes got. Stellar couriers just could not muscle it out like their 21st century, truck driving forebears. Extended isolation did something to people and it always jeopardized the delivery. At first, TransSol, just relied on staffing all deliveries with crews of 2 or 3, but this was costing them 2 to 3 times the number of possible parallel shipments. Then came the "Companyons." Artificial avatars of company values given synthetic skin and designed to fill the gap of human connection that stood in the way of TransSol doubling their market footprint. Another industry pillar given life when someone with too much money and a poor taste for puns asked (but never tried to answer) "Why not?" Zac was one such product of the "Companyon" program.

During Isaac's onboarding, TransSol staff took a psychological profile and from that profile came Zac. Or rather, unexpectedly, from that profile came another Isaac. The TransSol Companyon lab staff were surprised but not alarmed by the mirror image that had been created of Isaac. It wasn't commonplace in the Companyon generation process, but it didn't suggest a problem either and image was where their similarities ended. Like all Companyons, Zac, was a paragon of TransSol's public facing company culture manifesto -- hard work, customer satisfaction, and a can-do spirit -- balanced with just enough social graces to make a "solo" mission through space bearable.

"...Isaac, are you coming?"

Isaac snapped back to the present, shaking off the memory fog.

"Ah. Yes. Apologies."

Isaac and Zac set off from the observation bay for the cargo hold, mostly in tandem, but Isaac intentionally keeping a slightly slower pace than Zac's natural stride. It was just one of those petty games Isaac learned to play. It reassured him of his status as the mission leader.

"Zac, does today feel significant to you at all?"

"Not particularly significant. Certainly, pleasant like most days. I visited the greenhouse this morning and I'm happy to see our adjustments to the flowerbeds producing the blooms we were hoping for. The colors are more vibrant, and the atmosphere and particulate monitors suggest the aroma should be pleasant but subdued."

Internally, Isaac was happy to hear the report. Floriculture was one of his few skills and their first bloom was something of a failure. Somehow the foxglove had bloomed surprisingly fragrant, borderline pungent, and it had made visiting the greenhouse an endeavor.

"Well, that's all well and good, but I think you're getting distracted." Or dodging my question, Isaac wondered. "Tomorrow's our last day. Really today feels like our last day. Our last full day of monotony and routine and all the charms this tin can courier ship has to offer."

"You didn't ask about tomorrow. You asked about today. And today's much the same as yesterday. I do agree tomorrow will be a change of pace."

"Change of pace?"

Isaac stumbled over his own lost words and into another memory; his and Zac's first meeting. In fact, what might have been called Zac's birthday, when Isaac gave Zac his name.

***

Isaac stared at his synthetic skinned mirror image, lost for words. The new Companyon model stared back, feeling no pressure to find any words.

"Uh... hello...", Isaac said, putting his hand to hand to his chest, "Isaac. I'm Isaac."

"Isaac..." the doppelganger responded.

Isaac was uncomfortable in presence of his new doppelganger and tried to defuse his internal tension with what could hardly be called a joke.

"Oh... heh uh... You 'Saac too?"

Isaac internally bit his lips closed with his teeth to keep the rest of his "very funny jokes" contained.

"Sure. I can be Zac."

***

Back in the present, Isaac's face had mimicked the same tight-lipped cringe, and he force-flung his daydreaming further forward to their first day on the job to ease out of the embarrassment.

***

Isaac and Zac took their first steps into the microgravity cargo hold. Isaac had expected a warehouse layout of boxes and shipping containers like the delivery hubs back home: corridors of shelves stacked high with labeled packages and a small fleet of forklift drones to fetch and rearrange inventory as deliveries went out. Isaac's expectations were quickly forgotten. The cargo hold stretched 40 meters to the left and 40 meters to the right. 5 meters from the entrance sat a terminal and a chair, and a meter beyond that rose an impenetrable wall of shipping containers.

The arrangement of cargo ran floor to ceiling and the entire 80-meter width of the cargo hold. Surrounding the monolith on all sides -- left, right, top, and bottom -- was just a few inches of clearance that the cargo sat suspended within. The individual cargo composing the monolith were nonuniform but somehow arranged together like a 3D jigsaw puzzle. Pressing his face to the floor, Isaac peered beneath the monolith to test if he could see how far back it ran, but the cargo hold's limited light only reached a few feet back. Isaac stepped back, at first gormless. Turning to Zac, his stupor morphed into indignation.

"Oh my god, Zac... What am I supposed to do with this?"

"I don't think I follow"

"This is why I'm here right? The ship more or less pilots itself. I thought my whole purpose here was to babysit this mess, but how can I babysit THIS? It's packed so tight that I can really only inspect the boxes closest to the surface. And it's so deep that even if I started inspecting my way through to the core, I'd have no idea how deep to go. It's an inscrutable black box."

"Are you considering disassembly as part of your inspection processes? I would not advise that." Zac softened his tone and Isaac was all too aware. "Why are you so interested in manually inspecting the cargo? Even if you were able to, there's far too much to sift through and we have more effective tools..." Zac gestured to the terminal.

"I know, I know." Isaac sat at the terminal and brought the IMS -- inventory management system -- to life. With no great effort, Isaac flexed his training and drove the terminal through its management routines. Glyphs, graphs, and summaries flooded the screen. Bookending the flood, the system reported 62,000 packages, 0 container defects, 0 environmental flags, 0 required actions, and 0 suggested actions. "I'm here after all, right? I did the training. I can read the reports." Isaac pinched the bridge of his nose. "I just... it's not a lack of trust. But it feels like a limitation... a bottleneck. I'm trying to describe a world that I can only view through a pinhole in a steel plate. I just wish I could poke a few more holes to see it from a different angle."

***

Isaac released the pinch on his nose, again letting go of the memory, as they rounded the corner and passed by the rec-room. He and Zac had gone back and forth a lot that day, making no ground, and reaching no resolution. In the end, Isaac resigned himself to the absurdity of it all. And in a way, time had proven his concerns to hold no weight. Days had come and gone, and the mission had continued smoothly. Most days the reports were the same as that first day. "62,000 packages, 0 container defects, 0 environmental flags, 0 required actions, and 0 suggested actions." On the rare occasion there was a required or suggested action, Isaac was able to quickly mitigate the issue from his terminal: adjusting the microgravity to soften cargo stress points, resolving conflicts in the report data, rebooting the terminal itself. And in the quiet days between, he and Zac had busied themselves in the rec room with games of cards.

...

---

And that's where my draft ended. ◡̈

I know how I wanted it to end and the "feel" that I wanted that ending to have (hint: there's a problem with the cargo and the delivery never mattered), but I just... couldn't get it there.

Still, as disappointed as I am to run out of steam, I'm also proud that I took it this far.

I look forward to my next attempt at creative writing!

Original prompt

Here's the original request that I received in the mail:

Hello my carbon-based friend.

I would like you to write a piece of Scifi flash -- that is, 500-2000 words, or 1-4 pages. This is the premise:

Far in the future, human pilots operate long-haul spaceships transporting cargo for giga-corporations. To increase company loyalty and alleviate loneliness, the pilots are given AI companions which are sort of like avatars of the company. Basically like a very sophisticated body pillow, but instead of an anime waifu, it's Evergreen Space Marine-chan. These company avatars are called "Companyons." "Companyon" should be the title fo the story, unless you come up with a better one.

How you turn this premise into a story with a beginning, middle, and end, I leave up to you. Here are a few possible angles, but feel free to ignore these:

• A pilot is transporting cargo for multiple companies and tries to keep the two companyons from finding out that he is, as it were, cheating on them.
• A pilot fights like hell to protect her beloved companyon of many decades when she discovers that the company for which it is an avatar has been bought out, and all avatars will be replaced with avatars of the new parent company.
• After centuries of service, a retried pilot is struggling to return to normal life + reintegrate with society. To ease the transition, the pilot has brought their companyon to live with them, but as per company policy, the company must be returned to the corporation within a year of retirement.

Wow those sound fun! I'm almost tempted to write this story myself and find another story to send you... but I have a prompt of my own to answer. Like I said, feel free to take the story in a totally different direction if you want. 500-2000 words please ◡̈

Best Wishes!
-Francis