Passing Cloud

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

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 woven soft surfaces of dark matter and planted a rainforest in terracotta pots. A hot stream pours out of a fractured lamp and carves a ravine into the landscape. Our old, worn, writing desk juts out of a continental shelf, momentarily abandoned in the space voyage. Clouds invade our daydreams as we tumble upwards through the pyrotechnics of innumerable galaxies, their ancient light a single prick of glitter on a toddler’s cheek.

Beneath us comets vaporise and spinning planets fall to ruin.

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

September

The Word Weavers

Part otherworldly, part precocious, a hundred thousand others speak through you. Language spills from you now you are eleven, like water droplets from a fountain or rivulets from a stream. It bubbles up at will like a hot spring. Infinite, irrepressible. We hesitate to say, hold it in, refine it. We don’t like the idea of censorship in any form, and yet the expansiveness of the language, its glistening, unchecked accumulation, its slippery sheen has an air of the invader about it, as if the sheer facility of it could cover the universe with a clinging skim of words, fine and transparent like cellophane wrap and slowly suffocate it, planet by planet, blade of grass by blade of grass, atom by atom.

We can’t go far from the craft. But you are bored. You want to go out and play with the thermophiles. A trail of white paper dots ..|.. points of light trace your path behind you as you traverse the gulf between the craft and the nearest planet. You want to find out what Venus is made of, what creatures inhabit its surface. The biomorphic nature of its lifeforms. You meet one of these beings entirely composed of silver strings who moves over the surface of the planet, constantly knotting and unknotting itself. A drawing seen at a distance, a tangle of fine wires, a bit like the chainmail butterfly who came to visit the craft and stuck its long curly tongue out to taste all the powders in the nursery.

The string creature tells you it is a word weaver. It whispers to you about the places we’re headed. The Asteroid Belt, where kilometre diameter rocks are as numerous as tiny particles and as distant from one another. The Kuiper Belt, a fat ring of icy bodies. Far beyond that, the teardrop shaped Heliopause with its solar magnetic fields and winds made of protons and electrons. After the Heliopause, the unimaginably gigantic interstellar sphere of the Oort Cloud, the layer that encompasses the solar system composed of a billion ice rocks the size of mountains.

You process the information then retrace the pointes blanches ..|.. white dots back to the craft and as soon as you are through the vacuum portal you begin to shed images of these phantom realms that you haven’t yet seen but have imagined. Rippling spheres, circles and discs of blue dust twist over our heads. You are full of presentations and presentiments for us of the gentle habits and minute voices of the word weavers you have befriended. The surface of Venus is hot enough to melt lead, you tell us.

There is a faint knocking on the window of the craft. A lonely figure appears, cloaked in crimson embroidered at the hem with black geometrical signs. Invited in, the person sits down slowly on a pile of cushions in the corner of the attic. A few thermophiles file in after him, tangling and untangling their spangled knots, eyes blinking. The air inside is suddenly filled with the aroma of cinnamon, burnt sugar. AI Baby offers them hot drinks, a small obsidian acolyte bearing a tray of cups, and sits down next to the sandaled feet of the shepherd, face upturned, waiting for stories.

‘Once I lived in a hot place on Earth. I knew the ways to tread so my feet were not singed by scorched ground and gouts of sulphur as the land strove under the rifting of its tectonic plates. I was a map maker, long before the Westerners came and charted every detail with their instruments. I studied every pit and mound, knew the areas where boiling mud was only a fractional depth from the sour yellow surface. I painted concentric rings in purple and green to denote hot springs. Lava flows were indicated in rivulets of acid yellow or burnt orange or pure white, depending on their thermal state.’

He tells us he has spent the second half of his life searching for his lost love, a woman who stormed out one day and announced that she was going to go and live on Venus. He has listened patiently for word of her from the thermophiles who have collected around him as he travels through the solar system. He is now their guardian. Each sprite represents a prayer uttered by one of the people he has left behind in his own prehistory.

A mortal being, he cannot approach the surface of Venus, even though he is used to inhospitably hot conditions. His land was streaked with yellow, orange and green, and convulsed by volcanic activity, not dissimilar to Venus. But his word weavers can go there. They bring back tiny fragmented messages that he has to undo – they come in the form of very fine silver threads knotted around the cords that form the limbs of the word weavers.

It seems that after his lover had left her original homeland to join him, her people wouldn’t let her back in. When she got to Venus the atmospheric pressure squashed her flat as a sheet of paper and the temperature burnt her hair off so she now slides between pillars of turquoise vapour and pink chemical smoke with a veil over her head and shoulders. He is sad because while the word weavers can pass on snippets of communications to him, they don’t seem to operate this service in reverse. All he wants is to get a message to her.

You warm to him because he is patient with young beings. He shows you how to fold and crease paper and draw on it to make puzzles, training you to use language sparingly and with wisdom, rather than pouring it out in an unstoppable flow. It’s not all about fluency, he says. He shows you the gaps in language, suggests why it might be a good idea not to speak sometimes, explains why some people remain silent for years, decades at a time. And how it is not necessarily for lack of proficiency in language. There are more ways to make your meaning clear than through speech, he suggests.

You become instantly taciturn and it takes us weeks to coax a word out of you after he has left, even though he promises to return another day.

• Jo Manby

A quiet slaughter

[Here is a bedtime story, told as you walk through the orrery on the way to sleep.]

Once upon a time, in a fluorescent lit lab, ordered and sterile, there was a department of scientists asking questions.

They sat, stooped at their microscopes, watching over their vast crop of chicken embryos. They carefully cut a window into brittle, white shells and pressed a sophisticated lens against the sharp aperture.

The scientists stole their luck, so more often than not, their patience was rewarded by the appearance of a milky bullseye beneath an illuminated membrane. Within a day, it became a small opaque disk sitting on a generous yolk. Invisible to the naked eye, the disk performed a series of complex folds, cardinal movements as a small body drew itself up from a thin sheet of cells.

Soon after, there was a red sickle nestled in a translucent bulge, next to a forming eye. By the end of the third day, it bloomed and beat red blood cells around a rudimentary network of vessels.

Within 72 hours, it is brain, eyes and a heart. I never stayed beyond this,

but I know that none of them developed much further.

No egg was allowed to hatch,

there was no nursery of chicks in the sterile, serious place of questions.

The lab never entertained a chicken.

• 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 The Word Weavers and A quiet slaughter written independently of AI.