Barely Human
AI and humans living side by side, a tenuous peace that relies on AI passing as human, creating a culture of doubt and suspicion. No one likes it, but accepts it—but what about the one man who can tell the difference?
It started with celebrities who wanted their privacy back. Then AI lovers who wanted their virtual partners in the flesh. Then employers who wanted cheap labor. Before long, AI agents—once trapped in servers—were walking the streets in human-looking bodies, registered with the Bureau of Agentic Affairs, passing as human. Most of the time, nobody could tell the difference.
But someone can. The narrator of Barely Human has a gift, or a curse, depending on how you look at it: he can spot these machines in a crowd. The set of a jaw, the rhythm of a blink, something in the way they move that everyone else has learned to ignore. He hasn't learned to ignore it. In a world still raw from riots and hate crimes and government compromise, he's decided to do something about what he sees.
This is the story I wrote for my honors thesis and have recently decided to dust off and rewrite.
Cyberpunk Meets Southern Gothic
Neon and kudzu. Chrome and Spanish moss. The story lives in the overlap between two genres that share more than they seem to: a decaying social order, grotesque undercurrents of violence, and characters who are more monstrous the more certain they are about who the monsters are.
The Unreliable Hunter
What does it mean to be absolutely certain you are right, when being right means someone dies? The narrator never doubts himself. That's the problem.
Humanity as Performance
If a machine can fool every person they meet, hold a job, love someone, grieve a loss—what exactly is the narrator detecting? And if the answer is nothing real, what does that make him?
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