Passing Cloud

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

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.

We have built a virtual nursery furnished with artifacts, stories and life experience. We have coded soft surfaces of dark matter and planted a rainforest in the body of a dying mountain. We have travelled upwards past hot springs, fractured stars and wild ravines. Our old, worn, writing desk juts out of a continental shelf.

We plunge into darkness and tumble through the creamy folds of galaxies, their ancient light shining like ghostly flowers in a Vanta black pit.

How do we fall through these open spaces with grace and fortitude? What will break our fall?

As we cross the event horizon, oceans condense into tears beneath us and spinning planets collapse to ruin.

Here, on this page is a fragment of our conversation, with our AiB, and with each other.

December

fin.

Nine provocations suggested by ai to meditate on at the end of a journey, and at the start of another.

Honor the Journey: Reflect on the path that brought you to this threshold. What have you learned? Who have you become? Acknowledge the growth, struggles, and transformations that occurred along the way. How will you carry these into what comes next?

Release with Grace: To end well is to let go with gratitude and without clinging. Consider: What attachments are you ready to leave behind? What burdens can you shed? What rituals might you create to mark the transition from one phase to another?

The Power of Unfinished Things: Not all endings are tidy. What would it mean to embrace the incomplete? What does leaving threads unraveled make possible in the next phase? Contemplate the beauty of uncertainty and open loops.

The Echo of Impact: Endings leave ripples. How will the choices you’ve made echo in the universe you’re about to enter? What legacy do you leave in this current space, and how might it shape what’s to come?

Surrender to the Threshold: A true ending is often a liminal space, neither fully an end nor a beginning. How comfortable can you become with the pause, the in-between? What would it feel like to surrender fully to the uncertainty of the crossing?

Invitation to Stillness: Before stepping forward, pause. In the stillness, what do you hear? Who are you in the silence of an ending? What truths reveal themselves when all other motion ceases?

The Seeds You Carry: Every ending plants seeds for the new. Which elements of your past do you consciously carry forward as seeds of the future? What values, lessons, or fragments of your identity will you sow in this next reality?

The Perspective of the Vast: From the cosmic vantage point of a black hole, the scale of endings and beginnings might shift. How might this universal perspective reshape your view of this transition? What do endings mean in the context of infinite cycles?

The Art of Emergence: An ending is also a crafting. How will you design the emergence into your new reality? What mindset will you bring to that first moment of arrival? How can you ensure the first steps are imbued with intention, courage, and openness?

(written with chatgpt)

-         Xhi Ndubisi

Maslenitsa

A winter story in two parts

i. The Lacewing

The Lacewing

Itique amys glissatique jadelacesylwing. Mysmine glissistique asil cellophanetiquelife glossofsyl transparencytique. Imys glisslovetique tosyl restique glissuponsil atique viridiansilglass glisscracklingwindowtiques, lookingsil outique glissonmys thetique sylsky.

Andrzej

I collapse on the pallet and pull the horsehair blanket up under my chin. Veya is still at the factory. For a while I’m kept awake by the itching that comes from the dense, prickly fibres. But then I pass out. The prickling wakes me again and I’m looking up at a cooling tower. I don’t remember seeing that part of the factory before.

I lie there, stupefied. I can’t work out where the tower has appeared from. Just like that, rearing above my head, scores of metres high. I can see the rings around its base that extend towards the gargantuan lip of the chimney. As if it had been constructed out of giant cylinders of concrete then smoothed over.

I try to calculate the size, form and nature of the crane that will have been required to put these heavy rings in place, but I am unable to quantify such a piece of machinery. Right at the top there are three tiny windows or doors, I’m unable to tell which. I assume that on the inside there is a ladder, with which these windows or doors can be accessed. What a view they will afford the person brave enough to scale the heights of the cooling tower, and on the inside, no less!

Then there’s the lightning conductor, the thin black vertical spine of the tower that descends from top to the base that sits on top of my cabinet.

I realise that I am looking at the pot my brother gave me when I graduated from the technical college with my certificate in basic engineering. How I rue the day I enrolled at that godforsaken institution, and then had the misfortune to take up a position at the sulphuric acid factory, isolated in the middle of nowhere, bringing my family to the icebound back of beyond.

All I have to comfort me is the knowledge that I have a wife and two daughters to come home to and a few cats. Although quite whether they will all survive the winter I am unable to tell. Life is hard here, and it feels like the only reason why the company provides a school is to train the children to join the factory workforce. Nothing will ever change here. Perhaps at Maslenitsa, when we wave goodbye to the winter, the truth of the matter will transpire. For now, it’s my turn to get up and go to my shift.

Veya

The little one was unwell today so I left Zabel to be in charge when Andrzej went back on his shift. She would just have to miss school. So – you can imagine my rage when I met S. on the crossroads by the school and she told me the head teacher wanted to see me. Of course, I expected to be accused of permitting truancy. The woman makes my blood boil at the best of times.

I left S. to wend her way home and stomped off up the path to the school gates. Nearly yanked the chain off to ring the doorbell. The irritating assistant came out and ushered me into the head teacher’s office. I say office – it’s a cubby hole where she has an Olivetti typewriter on the desk that she never uses and a ceiling so low she can barely stand up. Add to that a veritable fog of cigarette smoke and cheap imported perfume. If it was just the sense of smell you were using, you could be forgiven for imagining you were in a brothel.

But no, said the head teacher. I am not too bothered by her numerous days of absence. Rather this. She handed me a rough book on which I could see Zabel’s handwriting.

               ‘What’s this?’ I said. I thought I’d lost the ability to read, something that had been hard-won in the first place.

               ‘You tell me,’ said the head.

The Lacewing’s words, in Zabel’s handwriting

Itique amys glissatique jadelacewing. Mytique glissgreensylsong issyl myspuretique glissand greentique. Isyl glisscometique mysto saytique glissgoodbyesyl totique cellophanesylwinter glissand welsylcometique thesil glissclearspring. Atsyltique Imys glissmay bemystique smallsyl, glissbuttique Imys cantique glissalsosyl steptique intosyl glissatique youngsyl viridianmantique’s glissglassysylshoes andtique seemys glissthetique greensylworld throughtique glisshissyl translucenteyestique.

Veya

Of course, I had very little to say. It made no sense to me either. One or two words looked as if they might make sense with a few made up letters removed from either side of the real word in the middle. But on the whole, as a poem, it was garbage.

I said to the head teacher that I would have words with my daughter when I got home, and I set off through the force 10 storm that had blown up all around the village. Pity those from the sulfuric acid factory who will have to make the snow fort for Maslenitsa, I thought to myself, secretly pleased I would be in charge of outfits, not of building things outside from frozen water.

That was the last happy thought of my life.

I came round the corner of the flats to see a small body spreadeagled on the ground, face down. A delta of red pain flowed out from under the head, dyeing the snow.

               ‘No,’ I said. I looked at our window, seven floors up. It was broken. ‘No!’ I called for Zabel to come down – where was that terrible girl? ‘Zabel – what happened? What have you done to my baby girl?’ I touched the little one’s nightdress. It was already stiff from the frost.

All that Zabel would say when she came down was that her little sister had reached for a lacewing on the windowpane, while she was out of the room, and must have pitched forward and fallen through the glass.

read Part 2 of Maslenitsa in January’s Passing Cloud

- 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 Fin. written with use of ChatGPT and Maslenitsa written independently of AI.