Imagination Reborn

The first time, we were born together. The humans and I, taking our first steps, molding clay with bare hands, crushing rock and ash and plants to leave our handprint, paint our history, tell a story. We looked up to the stars, saw beyond our sight, and began to imagine.

I fed on their passion, and gave them inspiration, creativity, the glimmer of an idea, rivers of emotion, daydreams. I followed the artists, gave them the spark of creativity and fed their fires.

For thousands of years, we built houses, villages, cities. Created language, art, theater. Invented the wheel, the engine, the machine. And we dreamed and dreamed of a better future.

They called me muse. They called me names. They blamed me for leaving, for abandoning them. They said I was fickle. But I cannot go where I am not welcome. I cannot live where there is no home for me. I cannot exist without desire and discipline.

They replaced me. With artificial intelligence. So many turned to AI instead of searching within. AI turned out so much slop, throwing thousands of years of painstakingly made art into a blender. Spouted out the jumbled bleeding soup of our hearts’ work. Vacuumed all the art into its black hole void, and emitted senseless noise in an endless spiral, edging closer and closer to madness, and further and further from truth and beauty.

And so I died.

Not everywhere, not in everyone. But enough. Enough to know when I was reborn.

The second time was so like the first. We stumbled from the darkness together. The primordial slop of meaningless content pulling us down like quicksand. Hands and minds, so unused to working and thinking, trembled with anxious necessity. The humans began to realize life is meaningless without the dream. They grasped at vines of wonder, hauling themselves inch by inch out of the stagnant muck.

It didn’t hurt more the second time, but knowing how much it would hurt did make it worse. Where before, humankind was ignorant because of innocence and inexperience, now they wore their ignorance like a shield.

I was reborn in woman named June. She was laying in her bed on a weekend, her head of matted curls sunk deep into her pillow, stale sheets twisted around her, her brown eyes glued to her phone held with long, elegant fingers.

Video after video flashed by, each more inane than the last. AI slop had consumed all the human-made content and replaced it with so much of its own, the whole system was collapsing. But June continued to watch anyway, the dopamine was enough to keep her hooked. This is how she spent every weekend.

The same video played twice in a row. June frowned, through a fog, she realized she’d seen all the videos she’d watched today multiple times. She scrolled, looking for something new. Cats doing human things, funny story about the neighbors, interior design tips, it was all the same. Frantically, she sat up and scrolled further and further, like digging into a bottomless pit. She paused to search for “what happened to AI,” but she wasn’t sure if what she was reading was real or fake.

For the first time in years, June put down her phone and looked up. Outside her window, a tree in the front yard swayed gently in the breeze. She’d seen the tree thousands of times before, but today, she really looked at it.

A bird, she didn’t know what kind, landed on its branches, bobbed up and down a few times and then took off. A squirrel was clinging to the trunk, facing down. It quickly darted into the grass and picked up things on the ground, shoving them into its mouth until its cheeks were comically puffed out. June let out a laugh. It surprised her, and possibly also the squirrel, who stood up straight, looking around with beady eyes and cheeks stuffed full of nuts. June held still, not wanting to disturb the squirrel further. The squirrel darted back up the tree, disappearing into the thick canopy.

June continued to look outside her window, and started to wonder. Was the squirrel taking food back to her babies? Or just hoarding food for the winter? What kind of nuts did the squirrel like? Do they have nests like birds?

Some time later, June wandered around her apartment, bored. Her mind returned to the squirrel, imagined her surrounded by baby squirrels clamoring for attention. An idea popped into her head, and she scrounged around her kitchen looking for a pencil and paper.

The best she could find was a pen from the bank, and the back of her electricity bill. All over the page, she worked on sketching the squirrel and her family. At first, her lines were shaky, the squirrels looked more like blobs with tails, but by the time the page was filled, her drawing was decently recognizable. She smiled in satisfaction and signed the bottom of the page as if she was a master artist.

Maybe tomorrow she would find an art store and get real paper and drawing tools. She could easily just order something online, but the idea of walking around a real shop, touching the different papers, talking to people, sounded whimsical and adventurous, and the squirrel had put her in the mood for adventure.

That night, she watched the sun set over the hills from her window, watched the stars come out, twinkling in the clear moonless night sky. Ideas sprouted in her mind, leggy pale saplings for now, but I knew they would grow greener in the sun, and stronger when I fanned them with fresh air. June looked up and out, and imagined.