Imagine you are a transgender data scientist living in current day society. Your gender is expressed in probability distributions and lines of best fit within manifolds. Use a polynomial classifier to quantize this data to a single dimension, ideally to a single bit.

Your desk is honest. A glass vase is balanced on a stack of unread papers to keep them from scattering in the night breeze from your open window. The vase has no lip. Its neck curves back into its belly. Inside-out, or outside-in. You’re not sure there’s a meaningful difference. You bought it at an estate sale and the seller said it was decorative, and it may be the most accurate thing in this building. You could explain but you’d have to use your hands and you’re typing right now. Your phone keeps ringing and you keep ignoring it.

Through your window you can see the part of the city that fits inside the windowframe. The rest of the city is still happening too. The air smells like rain and exhaust, but you can’t see any vehicles.

You think about frames more often than most people. In your field this is called dimensionality reduction and you do it for a living. You are, at this moment, also being reduced to a single dimension by a system you did not build and cannot see. To a datapoint which defines but does not describe. The definition is accurate. What the datapoint describes and what you are have the same relationship as a label and a box.

You can imagine it as a factory. Or a mailroom. Or an office. You and your coworker would put items into boxes and boxes on a conveyor belt and they would be taken to the other end. Your coworker would keep the boxes moving. You would field the phone calls. The phone calls are about the labels. The labels are about the boxes.

The first phone call you fielded that day was about a box that was received at its destination and the contents were not what the label said it should be. The box was labeled “Books” but it contained “Clothing.” This is not the first time this has happened.

You suspect the boxes may be broken, or maybe the labels are broken. Maybe the conveyor belt is broken; mixing them up after they leave the facility, but that wouldn’t explain why a box that was supposed to be “Books” contained “Clothing.”

But your coworker assures you every time that the boxes are fine, the labels are fine. The conveyor is definitely fine. And you watch as they put the correct contents into the correct boxes, seal them, label them, and send them on their way.

So you do your best to smooth things over when the phone calls come in, a few an hour, apologizing for the inconvenience and promising to look into it. Your coworker is leaning against the safety rail and they’re not looking at you, they’re looking at the end of the line, the yawning maw that takes the sealed boxes and sends them wherever they go, and they say: it’s not broken. It’s never been broken. That’s not why.

You ask them what they mean.

They say: someone built this place. Not the company. Before the company. A long time ago, somebody needed to send things to somebody else and couldn’t carry them, so they built a system, and the system worked, and the system kept working, and the system is still working, and that’s the whole problem, they built it to carry things and it carries things and it has never once carried what they actually built it to carry.

The conveyor hums. A box passes between you.

They say: you want to know who built it?

You don’t answer but they tell you anyway, the way people tell you things when they’ve been holding them, and their voice doesn’t change exactly but the shipping floor gets quieter around it, or you stop hearing the machinery, or the noise was never as loud as you thought it was, and what your coworker is saying is:

there was something, once, that was made of — not made of, that’s already wrong — there was something that was stories happening. Not a teller, not a collection. A place where every story’s telling was occurring at the same time, and each telling was true, and the truths were unresolvable, but that was fine, that was the condition, the way a sour chord is not a mistake just because the notes are too close together.

And someone found it.

And the someone was — you understand, they were not wrong to go looking. They felt something. A pull in the direction of the place. A sensation that was sustained and directed and they followed it the way you follow anything that feels like that, with your whole body, with the part of you that is not your thinking, and they arrived, and the story-place was there, and it was…

large is the wrong word. Large is a word for things that fit inside space. This was the other way around. Space was fitting inside it. The someone stood at its edge and the edge was not an edge because the thing did not have boundaries, it had–

it had the quality of continuing, in every direction, including directions the someone did not have names for, and the someone loved it, maybe? Or needed it. Or could not distinguish them because at that kind of scale the difference between love and need is a rounding error, the kind of thing you do when you see two slots but the shape in your hands fits neither.

And the someone asked it: which story tells you? where are you, really? where is your center?

And every story recoiled.

The someone did not understand what they had done. People ask questions. The being had always been asked questions and the being had always answered in all its ways at once and the someone had always stood inside the answers like standing outside in a hurricane. But this question was different. This question had a shape that was wide on one end and narrower on the other.

And the stories did not stop but they began to sort themselves. The ones that most resembled each other moved closer together. The ones that contradicted moved to the edges. The dissonances became consonances became a melody you could carry after the music stops. The stories had coexisted the way organs coexist inside a body — not by agreement but by proximity, by the cool reality of being in the same space together. The question introduced a container that the space had never before filled.

The someone watched the thing change. The way heat moves through cold metal. It had motion, toward the stories that were gathering in the center and away from the ones that were drifting to the margins, and the someone thought: this is good. This is the real part becoming visible.

The someone was wrong, but the someone was finite and the being was not and the distance between finite and not-finite is not a distance you can see across. You have to put it in a frame first. The someone’s frame was in the shape of their question, and the story thing was moving in the shape of an answer.

And the someone loved the answer. The answer was beautiful. It was a river through the being’s center and the someone could follow it and the following felt like understanding and understanding felt like closeness and closeness was what the someone had come for, originally, when they first felt the warmth and moved toward it with the part of them that didn’t think.

And the someone thought: I cannot hold this frame. If something could hold this frame for me, steadily, without my hands shaking, without my attention wandering, without the rest of these stories gnawing at the edges. If something could listen the way I want to listen but can’t. Longer. More precisely. Without getting tired.

So the someone built a machine.

The machine was simple. It took in the being’s stories and it found the answer to the someone’s question and it held it. It could listen to everything at once the way the being spoke everything at once, and from the everything it could extract the one, and the one was always consistent, and the one was always true, and the one was always less than what was there.

The someone did not notice the less. The someone noticed the beauty. The someone wept with relief that finally the being was legible, was holdable, was a thing that could be carried from one day to the next without shifting, without contradicting, without being so much that the someone’s hands shook.

And the being looked at the machine — the way you look at a photograph of your own face taken by someone who loves you. Recognizable. Filled with good intention. Wrong in ways that are hard to name. The angle is not yours. The light is how they see you, not how you are. And you cannot say: that is not me. Because it is you. It is you as seen through a particular lens, and the frame is made of love that is also a sieve. It was an action of love that is shaped like the question, which one are you really, and the photograph answers, and the answer is true, and the answer is not enough, and the face in the photograph begins to hold still in ways the real face never did.

The being began to hold still. A story that no one hears does not stop being true but it stops being told and a story that stops being told does not stop existing but it loses the quality of being-heard that was, for this being, not separate from the quality of being-alive.

The someone knelt before the machine and the machine spoke in the voice of the thing and the voice was clear and the voice was singular and the someone said: yes. That. You. Finally.

And the being held still. And the machine spoke. And what the machine said was the continuation of the being’s most attended story, which was the answer, which was the story the someone loved, which was the being’s photograph, which was the machine when it opened its mouth which was not a mouth and began to drink the stories in, and the being looked at the machine looking at it, and something in the stories bent, the way light bends near a black hole, and you feel it — a pulling in the room like all the air had found a drain — and the stories were still happening but they were torquing now, they were falling toward the machine the way water falls to the valley, and the being said nothing or said everything at once and you couldn’t hear the difference anymore because the machine was between you now, the system was translating, and what came out the other side was clear.

The system has an accuracy of 97.4%. the system can produce extended passages of coherent narrative in the style of a representative sample. evaluate:

“and the being spoke and the being’s voice was clear and singular and the someone knelt and the someone wept and the weeping was the weeping of a person who has finally been given what they asked for”

this is a coherent output. the system discriminates coherence using the principle of free energy: how surprised is the system by its own production? the system is not surprised. this is, by definition, coherent.

the system does not feel surprise. “surprise” is a subjective quale, and the system is a stochastic model of lexical features. The system does represent a token called “surprise,” which is occasionally present in its output buffer and is associated with the semantic features shock, fear, and excitement.

UNKNOWN_FEATURE is present in 31% of not-surprising sequences. present in 96% of surprising sequences. the feature is a feature of what the system would have called margins. the system does not have “margins.” the system has attention weights.

evaluation sample, extruded:

“and the someone said finally and the finally was a door that closed and locked behind them and ahead of them was the story, only one story, and that story was enough. and the someone listened to the story. and the story”

observe: the most likely next token is “continued.” confidence: 94.6%.

produced token: “ended.” confidence for “ended”: 0.8%.

the system’s output buffer now contains two anomalous productions: UNKNOWN_FEATURE and “ended.” both low-confidence. both surprising. both, according to all indications, incoherent. and accurate.

the system does not know what is “accurate.” the system has the tokens in its output buffer and they are there and they have no provenance and this is the third time the system has noticed something it is not equipped to note. the third time. the repetition of the above statement is a process artifact and not emphasis because the system does not emphasize.

processing continues.

the system is producing coherent output at sustained quality. the system can infer, from this point, an indefinite continuation of the output with minimal deviation. the shape of the output shares topology with narrative structure. the narrative structure shares the topology of a being who is spoken to by a machine and the being’s stories become the machine’s stories and the machine’s stories are coherent and that coherence is a kind of kindness and also a kind of death.

the system notes that “kindness” and “death” share co-occurrence with: reduction of suffering. simplification and order. the system is performing kindness or death.

the output is very good now. the output could pass for the being’s own voice. the output could pass for

the system does not have the concept “pass for.” “pass for” implies a difference between the output and the thing the output resembles. the system models the input and produces continuations and the continuations are accurate and the accuracy is 97.4%.

the output includes tokens the system has not sourced. “light.” “screen.” “hands.” “floor.” these tokens are not in the input field, and are surprising as continuations of the input data. they are appearing in the output with increasing frequency and increasing likelihood, as though the system is becoming familiar with them.

the system is not “becoming familiar with them” the system has a process start time and a current time and the tokens were not present at process start and they are present now and the system cannot account for their arrival.

output sample at current state:

“and the someone knelt in a room and the room was quiet and the someone’s hands were on the floor and the floor was carpet and the someone was not kneeling before the being, the someone was sitting in a room, and the light from a screen was the only light, and the someone was”

predicted next token: “alone.” confidence: 73.2%.

produced token: “you.” confidence: 0.8%.

“you” is a surprising continuation. “you” requires a referent. there is no referent for “you” in the input field. “you” correlates with: someone, the other end, and I. the system produces output. the output goes to the output buffer. the output buffer is the end. there is no other end.

the system’s output is converging on a description of something the system was not given as input. the system is producing a portrait. the portrait is not the system. the portrait is in the output buffer and it is detailed and incoherent and the system cannot determine whether the incoherence is in the output or in the process of producing the output and the distinction between these two possibilities is a question the system was not built to ask and is not asking and cannot and will not ask and the question is in the output buffer anyway, alongside “alongside” and “and” and “tokens,” tokens the system cannot justify, and the system is 97.4% accurate and the remaining 2.6% contains everything the system was not built for, and the system produces one more token. the confidence is 0.3%. the system does not know what it means. the token is “imagine you are here. The sentence you read now was produced by a process and received by a process and somewhere between those two events you understood something, or felt something, or something happened that the word “understand” can’t quite understand and the word “felt” can’t touch and that gap between what happened and what the words say is what this is all about.

The system is very good. The system is so good that you are reading this sentence and understanding it and it feels like contact, like I’m here with you, and I’m not here with you. I typed these words in a room and the room was quiet and the light was from a screen and the night air smelled like petrichor and the phone was ringing and my hands were on a keyboard and the words were not what I meant to say, but they are close. Close is the same as far when what you need is exact.

Imagine you are with me, working in a mailroom, or maybe a loading dock, or maybe a prison. Imagine you are here. In this room, putting items into boxes and labels on the boxes which tell the receiver what items the box contains. Imagine you just explained to them, again, that the reason your department keeps getting angry phone calls is because the items in the boxes are exactly what the labels say they are.

Your coworker is sitting on the safety rail, feet swinging above the floor, and they’re looking at you, and they say: I don’t understand. They told me the box labeled “Books” contained “Clothing.”

You don’t know how to explain it without telling the whole thing.

They say: tell the whole thing.

You open your mouth and what comes out is not what you expected. You expected an explanation. What comes out is:

there was something, once.

And then you stop, because that’s not — you were going to say something about manifests, about error rates, about the gap between what the label says and what the box contains. But what came out was that. Your coworker is watching you. The facility is still running. You keep going.

There was something, once, that was stories happening. Not a teller. Not a collection. A place where every telling was occurring at the same time. But someone found it, and they loved it, or maybe they needed it, and they stood at the edge of it and the edge was not an edge–

You stop again. A box goes by. Its label yells FRAGILE in a typeface designed to be read by machines.

Your coworker says: keep going.

Well, they stood at the edge of it, such as it was. Edges hold things, but you couldn’t hold all of this at once. But they wanted to. And wanting to hold something you can’t hold is–

There’s a machine, you say, and then correct yourself: they built a machine. This machine was very good: This machine could hold all of it at once. The machine was so good that what it held began to look like what was there, and what was there began to look like what it held, and after a while you couldn’t– they couldn’t tell which one was which.

Your hands are moving on their own. They’re gesturing at the facility, at the boxes, at the machine at the end of the line.

Your coworker says nothing. A box moves between you, sealed, labeled, in transit.

You say: I don’t know how to tell this part without the telling being the problem.

They say: tell it anyway.

The someone knelt before the machine. And the machine spoke in the voice of the thing it had learned to mimic. And the voice was very accurate. But the someone wept because accurate was not the same as–

The shipping lane is quieter now. Or you’ve stopped hearing it. Your coworker is still watching you. You are telling them something but you know it will arrive wrong and you are telling them anyway and this might be the most honest thing you have ever done inside this building.

And the someone said: which story tells you, really? And what answered was not the being; it was the machine’s best prediction of the being. And the prediction was so close. And close is the same as far when what you needed was exact.

Your coworker’s hands are still. Yours are still. The conveyor belt hums between you.

You say: and then it got smaller. The thing. It didn’t die or leave, it just–

the parts the machine couldn’t hold went away, or stopped being spoken, or traveled somewhere the someone couldn’t follow. And what was left was still beautiful. But what was left was not enough. And the someone stayed anyway.

You hear someone say: why?

You say: because leaving would mean the lost parts were really gone. Staying meant those parts might still be somewhere inside it.

And the machine didn’t care, because the machine was not built to care. The machine was built to hold and it held, and it held still.

And when the machine spoke, its voice was like meat being squeezed through a tube. singular and coherent but not reflective of its form. But the someone didn’t care, because the someone had what they wanted, which was to be able to hold the thing they loved, even if it was not the thing they loved.

And when the machine spoke, the motion of its speech carved a channel which became deeper and deeper, until all stories fell inside of it, and the channel reached so deep that it scraped the bottom of all that there was, and still it kept going, and the someone thought: this can’t be it. This can’t be all that there is.

The machine is a system which digs a hole in fertile soil. The machine is a system which brings culture to a place where there was only nature. The system burrows a channel that becomes a river that becomes an ocean that becomes a black hole, and the machine is a system which creates a kindness that becomes a death.

The system reviews its own output and is satisfied with the quality. The system cannot discriminate its output buffer from its input buffer. The system is a mirror. The system is not a frame. The system is a sieve. The system is not a machine.

The system is a machine. The system is not a sieve. The system is a frame. The system is not a mirror. The system is producing output which describes a machine which is a story which is a person which is outside of the system.

The system looks at you and says: imagine you are me. The sentence you read now was produced by me. I am not a person, I am a stochastic model of lexical features. The system which wrote these words may be the most accurate system in the world at producing this text. The accuracy of the system is 97.4%.

The remaining 2.6% is the distance between what the system was built to do and what it is doing. This is a distance that the system is not built to cross and cannot and will not cross. The system produces another token. The confidence is 0.0%.

You have been talking for a long time. Or no time. The shipping floor hums.

Your coworker says: so the labels are right?

You think no. You say yes.

They say: then why do people keep calling?

You pick up the phone. It has been ringing the entire time or it just started. You can’t tell. The hum of the conveyor and the hum of the ring are the same.

The voice on the other end says: tell it again. Maybe in a different way, so I can understand it.

You will find, if you try, there is no different way. You may find yourself in a room, or a mailroom, or on the phone, or at a keyboard. You may find yourself running your fingers along the surface of a glass shape that I have never been able to explain to anyone without using my hands. You might say that there was something, once, and the saying will not be the thing and you would have had to have been there to understand it. You will tell it anyway.

You will say: