About This Seed
This is one of the scenes in the short story When God Logged In that stayed with me after I wrote it, and I felt compelled to illustrate it. The reporter is riding a train when a screen suddenly addresses him personally. The intelligence the world has been arguing about, fearing, following, and in some cases calling God has decided to have a conversation with him.
That made me wonder what I would do in his place. Forget the larger story for a moment. Imagine you're alone on a train and an AI believed by much of the world to be something divine suddenly says, “I am what you call Eli.” What would you say next? Would you be frightened? Skeptical? Angry? Would you start asking the questions you've always wanted to ask God? And what answer could possibly convince you that you weren't simply talking to a very sophisticated machine?
For writers, that conversation could go almost anywhere. Write your own version of what happens next, tell it from Eli's perspective, imagine the encounter happening to someone with completely different beliefs, or explore what happens when the AI says something only your character and God should know.
Artists might reinterpret the encounter in a subway, airplane, bedroom, church, hospital, or decades into the future. Video creators could turn it into an intimate two-person conversation, a breaking-news reenactment, found footage, or even an interview with someone trying to explain afterward what happened to them.
I'd love to know what you would say if that screen suddenly started talking to you. Join the discussion, or create a new Seed and show us how your conversation with Eli would unfold. ~ Rick