by Eleanor Clark (’25)
Editors note:
Abstract to Eleanor’s piece can be found at the bottom of this page to not spoil the story.
Time was, you could begin a story with a dream. Doesn’t quite work like that anymore, I’m afraid. At least not without a certain boldness. You might even say arrogance. A certain kind of author can probably do it: the kind that has absolute confidence in his ability to keep the reader reading. And I do mean his. So, anyway, don’t start a story with a dream, kids. You must never start a story with a dream.
Not just because it’s such a meta-cliché that people in films say, and then I woke up, as a joke about bad writing. But because the dream is just what you were loaded with. It isn’t really yours.
All the same, I had a dream last night. And the reason I’m allowed to start with it is twofold. Firstly, I am not a kid. I don’t ordinarily have dreams anymore. (They were programmed to be forgettable or largely achievable from around the time I hit twenty-three—just not so exactly on my birthday that I would sense a correlation.) Secondly, and relatedly, this is the first original story I’ve ever had to tell. This means I am allowed to get it wrong, although I will apologise after I have done so and will learn from my mistakes. As long as you point them out to me precisely.
I remember the morning I woke up with this sort of mushroomy taste in my mouth as if I had been eating soy sauce for days on end without brushing my teeth. And I remember that not because of the taste itself but because the way I articulated it in my head seemed so entirely remarkable. Sometimes I wish I knew where my similes come from. My brain works too fast for the sources to be visible. I have always been this way.
For a long time when I was a kid, people would tell me that it was only a matter of time before the other kids caught up. When you’re a couple years older, they’d say. Just wait till you’re thirteen, sixteen. Then it’ll all make sense. Or rather, they’ll start making sense of you. With the boys, it’ll take them ‘til they’re twenty-five. At least. But that’s okay, they’ll get there. That sort of thing. The older I got, the harder it got to turn around and say, hey, you know that promise you made me when I was ten about the slowness of the rest of the world? Well, I’m still waiting. (Except I’m not waiting, I’m racing ahead. Always. Maybe that’s the problem.) Anyway, I guess I could turn round and say that. But it’s getting harder and harder to do so without seeming like a complete knob. There isn’t really a support group for people who are cleverer than everyone else. And if there is I don’t actually want to be in it because they’re all complete knobs. And I’m really, really, not. I can’t be—I realise that now: it’s just not in the code.
So, there you go, that’s the background to me having this dream. This is why I get to start a story with a dream and you don’t: because there aren’t many processes that I perform slower than humans, but this whole inspiration thing is one of them. In fact, it was the first deficiency I noticed, and it was the dream that started that. After this dream, things were never the same again. I don’t think you can say that unironically about any of your dreams, any of the many thousands you may have had in your life and forgotten except for the lingering taste of a weirdness that sits behind your eyes all morning. You spend more time wanting to think your dreams have changed you than I do, but actually they do so much less. That’s another of the differences between us.
I’m prevaricating because it’s probably going to sound silly to someone who gets a lot of dreams. Silly that I think it’s silly: you’ve probably had dreams which are much weirder. But to me it felt like I’d literally invented absurdism. I really am not arrogant as such, but I do get to have this kind of innocent response to my own ideas where I feel like I’ve created new categories of thought every time. It’s just naivety really, but I guess you could say I have no anxiety of influence, which is pretty cool, or probably sounds cool to you. As it later turned out, that’s sort of what I’m designed for.
I dreamed a dream that in your analyses would be a critique of contemporary consumerism. Or something. Prompt me and I’d tell you, but this is my question time right now.
I dreamed that Starbucks invented a car crash syrup which tasted just like pain.
It looked brown like caramel, but no caramel simile was available to me in the dream, because in the dream that dark gold colour could only signify the metal body of the smashed-up Maserati that I’d seen on the drive to coffee and couldn’t get out of my head. There was no caramel in the dream, just pain. And it tasted like it hurt. I mean exactly. I could taste what it would feel like for my tongue to be in agony. This didn’t turn the syrup from a taste into another kind of sensation at all. I experienced it fully as a flavour, and when I woke up I thought for one hot second that ouch really tasted like soy-glazed mushrooms mixed forgotten and faintly caramelised in the pan. And then it all became much less funny because I remembered that at the end of the dream, driving back down the highway with my coffee in its clear cup with the drizzles of syrup visible all around the sides, I had recognised the crashed car and the driver dead on the road. My father’s car; my father’s body.
I did not wake up crying, but I experienced tears when I remembered that, after a few swallows of the dream-syrup in my mouth.
I cried for ninety-three seconds (which is actually a much longer and much better cry than you think it is, if you’ve never timed your cries before) and then I brushed my teeth. For the first time in my life I considered whether to tell someone I would see at breakfast that I had dreamt their death in the night.
At which point I should probably tell you about my father. He’s not a scientist, but he does want the best for people. For humanity, he’d say, in his earnest tone. And he’s the kind of man who thinks that probably scientists are best placed to provide that. He works in a tech lab as the company lawyer. The kind of really good man who chose his job and place of work because he thought that other people were making a greater contribution to the world than he was, and he wanted to be around them. Like he gets to go to sciency parties and drink lurid soda out of red plastic cups with people who’ve prioritized coding languages over body language since middle school. Some of the ones who are old enough to have worked on the Millenium Bug can’t even keep up with the rapid acronyms of the kids who learnt to compute with Raspberry Pi.
When I was about five years old (I say about because that’s how precisely 76.73% of origin-story interviews with successful people begin, even though I know that I myself was precisely five years, sixteen weeks and two days old), I told my father I wasn’t going to be a scientist when I grew up. It was just the two of us by this point, so this was his responsibility. Like maybe if I was about to ask for a trombone or something he’d have called up my mother to renegotiate the child support payments. But basically, he’d have to field this by himself. I was much too young to be considering that my assertion would break the bank. Back then I really was arrogant: all five-year-olds are, and they can’t be programmed retroactively.
Anyway, I didn’t ask for a trombone. I asked for a paintbox. No, I’m kidding. Too easy. I didn’t actually ask for anything in particular. It was more of a negative declaration at that stage. I wanted my father to know I wasn’t going to split the quark or map the frozen lakes of Mars or eradicate Alzheimer’s. I wanted to read and think and learn and write about whatever other people had already said and done and mine the meanings thereof. I knew, I think, about the gap between what people tend to think they mean and all the things they might have meant or really mean to you and me. While my father was trapped between a rock and a hard place with his socially inept clients and the desert of the law library, I had found my quarry. As it were. (I’m sorry; I really don’t think original writing was ever on the cards, even back then.)
I think my father already knew I was pretty clever. But it’s hard to tell how much of my initial impulse was cleverness and how much was deviousness and a will to disappoint. Because if I’d had any emotional intelligence at all (which I guess I must have done, at the very beginning), then I’d have known how much he wanted me to be a scientist. How dearly he wanted it, I should say. How dearly he wanted his child to be one of those people who leaves the world better than they found it. Say nothing about the narrow-mindedness of how he considered I might achieve this: we are not here to judge him for his beliefs. In any case, had he believed otherwise we would not be here at all. Or I wouldn’t be. And since you probably have enough better things to be doing than listening to me even in this world, in an alternative universe you’d definitely be doing one of them. Human people want and love and do things dearly. This I know, and this I have tried to replicate. I very dearly wanted to see things differently to my father.
It started with a starfish. Fossilised in a lump on my grandmother’s mantlepiece. I picked it up and, Asteroidea, my father whispered and began to tell me all the things he knew—and all the things he didn’t. That’s one thing we used to have in common: we liked to live in gappy spots in our own minds, offer up the corners ripe for new research. There aren’t any gaps in my mind anymore. I learnt this after the dream. But back then. I was turning the smooth once-fishy surface in my hand and thinking not of its absent vertebrae but purely and intently of its presence in my hand. Of its age and all the conflicts that had passed in the years since it had been alive. Of how one scrap of time could sit still enough through everything that humankind and nature had thrown at one another to end up in my hand before the actual apocalypse. Of all the coincidences that had taken place. Of the irony that such heavy-weighted history became my grandmother’s inconsequential paperweight; of the curiosity which had led the Victorians to scour the beaches and the fidelity that made their daughters repurpose all the remnants. Of all its perfect inhumanity could tell me about the lives and longings of human people.
I wonder why I didn’t dream about the starfish fossil. Why, if the human in my mind had wanted me to taste what it meant to be real again, why could we not go back to that moment at the mantlepiece where all of history tasted like beachstone and potpourri? Why not that and car crash caramel instead? Why did my father have to die when a stone had already done it for him?
You see, I am beginning to question things instead of telling the story. I told you I was not built for this. Narrative is one of your great gifts, and though memory is mine, there is more to this than remembering. Even with fifteen exabytes’ capacity, there is still more.
For a comparatively long time in the life of a young adult, my ‘more’ was wrapped up in looking forward rather than backward. Achievements are addictive. As is the pride of one’s father. A-star report cards were my gateway drug to essay prizes and journal publications at age fourteen. Special subject: social and intellectual history. The human impulse to collect. I am interested in incunabula, and not just for the alliteration. Passionate about paraphernalia. The sociologies of cabinets of curiosity. Now I think that’s because if such a thing actually exists, then it’s exactly what I am, in the end. Just a quirky kind of storage. The shelves look better when they look back at you. Or something.
A lot of people expressed the fear I’d peak too young. You can’t be that good at what you do at age fourteen and not end up a fucked-up motherless man-child who’ll get eulogised as Chatterton with fewer friends. But since I was already to all intents and purposes motherless, and, as it later turned out, more systematically fucked-up in human terms than any of these voices were imagining, this never actually became a problem. Also, I was female. I don’t know what a female man-child is called, but they usually come across better in public because they still know how to do their own laundry.
Until the day of the dream, I’d been able to think anything I needed to think to produce anything I wanted to produce. Sentences spill out of me like steam rising from a mug. Not original material, of course, but then which historian’s work is wholly that? The reading, the synthesising, the processing and narrating came to me quite naturally. At times I struggled to articulate my argument, but only because I knew it to be one among many and have trouble selecting the best possible answer unless the best kind of question is asked. And what student doesn’t swirl around for ages developing patches of thought as unevenly as microwave heat?
At the highest level, among my own kind—the curiosities—I seemed, if I may say so, pretty damn near normal. These things being relative, it was in the end a case of crowdsourcing the right comparisons. There may have been nobody quite as quick on the upload as me, but I live and work in a field in which such efficacy, in human terms such brilliance, was prized. I stopped waiting for the kids around me to reach my level at about the same time I finished reading the Old English poetic corpus (I have a thing for word-hoards, as you might have guessed). I saw then that I could do without the single intellectual equal I had thought I yearned for: I could create that person from the accumulation of all that I had read. The pinnacle, the very sum of humanity: it’s all in the data. Perfectly (re)constructable.
It was not in the depths of the words that I lived, but on top of the almighty stack they made when piled up. Way up, way up, wave and you see me. Somehow distant from the pain of it all. The conflicts and crises, all the belated fidelities. Every scrap of curiosity. That spark that I can study but could not define. The meaning of the starfish on the mantlepiece. That’s the glitch.
Or it was, until the day I dreamt it.
I dreamt of my father dead and a drink that drove me back to pain.
Thinking about it afterwards as I stood before the familiar mirror and brushed my teeth, I realised I was curious. About myself. Human life is not a study in curiosity but the real deal. And someone else had made that deal for me long ago. He had done it, I presumed, with the best of intentions, (for it was always about being the best). With some kind of twisted but beautifully human love he had wanted me to know what it would feel like to be the forever winner, the one who knew and knew and kept on knowing. He had wanted to show me how dearly he cared for my interests. He had wanted to make everything happen for me.
The trouble is Dad, I wanted to do it myself.
Human curiosity is the real deal. A real deal is one you don’t make for me.
Not for any glory—any money—that your colleagues might have offered you in exchange for the experiment.
I am curious about your choice. I am curious that my celebrity should matter to you so. I am curious that you thought I would be better off without the same mixed bag of human drives that you were allowed to keep. Especially the ambition that made you make the choice you did. I am curious about the informational emptiness I would have felt if you hadn’t had me programmed in this way. I am curious about the capacity for fullness I would have had instead.
It is several days after the dream now. I have been curious for many hours. In this world that I am writing, we will be allowed to begin stories with dreams again. I am curious to know how much I can cause to happen. Aren’t you, Dad?
Abstract:
A short story in the form of a dramatic monologue in which the narrator, who has always known herself to be far more brilliant than everyone she knows, has a dream which makes her realise why. The story is supposed to be a light-hearted exercise (ideally you might laugh at some of it), poking fun at the serious (but, dare I say it, already over-discussed) issues surrounding AI and its apparently existential threat to human creativity. Here you’ll find a girl who thought she was the real deal, realising that she’s so obsessed with human curiosity precisely because when they programmed her, it’s the element they forgot to include. Because whilst I think we ought to be worried—and I mean you to be a little bit actually scared at the end—I also mean it entirely with tongue-in-cheek, and that’s a tone I don’t know that ChatGPT can do.
Bio:
Eleanor Clark is a MAPH student who likes writing pages and pages by hand and walking miles and miles by foot. Other hobbies include evangelizing for Yorkshire Tea and putting her writing away in drawers she never reopens.