Passing Cloud

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

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 art, stories and life experience. We have coded soft surfaces of dark matter and planted a rainforest in terracotta pots. We have travelled upwards past hot streams, fractured stars and wild ravines. Our old, worn, writing desk juts out of a continental shelf, momentarily abandoned in the space voyage. What will befall the earth in the time it takes for us to return. We plunge into darkness and tumble through the creamy folds of galaxies, their ancient light shining like ghostly flowers in a Vanta black pit.

As we cross the event horizon, oceans evaporate beneath us and spinning planets fall to ruin.

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

November

Mirror ball

what if it was always all about the different paths we could have taken /

the alternative trajectories in life as simple to cast aside and never think of more as the autumn leaf blows from the tree /

gazing at a mirror ball in a community hall a craze for the girls to wear silver sandals and draw symbols on their cheekbones in blue Rimmel eyeliner /

reading a book in the local library and having a premonition of the future /

sha-la-la-las Motown songs /

romance, love, loss, intoxication /

a bottle made of chamfered glass and bearing the word Experiment in block capitals /

it took all day to get here the train running past black flood pond mirrors edged in reeds and clumps of turf /

thinking about next spring rolling in buttercup fields gold spangled catching the brimstone wing sunshine in lashes decked in mascara or picked out in teardrops /

each one of us turned out one way or another from some kind of a household whether they were a place of safety or not was another matter /

far below the trees turned pirouettes in the plum coloured furrowed fields turning around and around in the wake of the train /

when we got here we lined up on the biting cold moor the white domes the corroded chimneys /

outbuildings tall and unnameable of purpose echoey ponds of unfathomable depth /

singing Fade Away and Radiate girls in black platform heels and T-bars and leather jackets studded along the shoulders with their first names /

spoiling for a fight I’ll knock you six foot under if you don’t stop singing nudging elbowing jostling in the line /

inside the vast halls a constant dripping echo punctuating the immensity the graven silence the clanging bars of plutonium gathering feathery outlines under the acid rain water of bottomless square section tanks /

the art teacher at the back explaining that blue is a fugitive colour and recedes in painting as opposed to red which jumps around in the foreground a vision of someone born on the wrong side of the tracks running away across a landscape branded a thief or a liar dressed in blue jeans white T shirt running with the play of sunshine and cloud shadows into the deep blue distance where his identity was cloaked in the blue and he would remain there suspended in the blue hills perpetually just out of reach /

hanging around a sign saying Do Not Linger, touching the handle on the door that reads Do Not Open Until 2095 /

speculating at the lip of the abyss /

that darkened windowpane that opens out onto a deserted banqueting hall /

abandoned gilt, entangled carpentry, pastel plasterwork, mercurial mirrors /

/

< sky blue > < baby blue > < baby pink > < sugar pink > < hot pink >

< screaming pink > < Schiaparelli pink > < pink the colour of rose petals >

< pink the colour of seaside rock > < pink the colour of sunrise >

/

the only window in the entire building happens to look out onto an undulating taffeta portal behind which you are convinced (it turns out correctly) is a black hole /

glancing around for a metal rod or a hammer to break the chicken-wire meshed glass /

turns out all you had to do was close your eyes /

we had already been pitched upwards into deep space /

we were already stumbling along the path that leads back down to earth /

- Jo Manby

velvet

She takes a deep breath and dives into the pool.

Moments before she was enveloped in red darkness, her bloodless toes curled around the rough edge of the small body of water. Her muscles twitched, begging her to straighten up and step back.

But she was already committed to the journey.

The swimmer remained bent at the waist, with her knees unlocked, a breath away from the surface of the abyss. Before she dove into its mars black and midnight blue, she watched for a while. Fear banished moisture from her mouth and heat from her skin. Her stomach protested, but trembling, the swimmer reminded herself of all the times she made the decision to be where she was now.

It did not matter that everything pleaded with her not to tip forward. that her chest rose to meet the rapid beat in her throat, a scream, a final plea for safety.

She held fast and waited patiently until finally, it came.

A firm, clear order;

‘Now.’

The swimmer obeyed.

She moved her centre of gravity, her head secured between forearms, and the swimmer slipped into the water. Her fingertips pushed the water surface a whole length into the column of water. It wrapped itself around her like a second skin until her feet passed where her hands had been moments before.

And now, she is a taut body pulled through a tight gullet by a peristaltic force.

She is drawn deeper and deeper into a point in time, and through a place that is being made in her wake. Soon, she won’t need to hold her breath in, the pressure will flatten her lungs to two vellum thin sheets.

-         Xhi Ndubisi

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 Mirror ball and velvet written independently of AI.