Roy Lester Pond Author: “I SEE DEAD BOOK CHARACTERS…” This one drifted into my Private AI Detective office like a ghost from the public domain. She had arisen from the Closed Stacks of a forgotten Victorian library.

Put yourself in the shoes of a computer program. If you were a sufficiently advanced AI large language generator, invited to generate an instant novel, what would you choose to write about? Think about it for a nanosecond. You are free to pick anything of your choosing. Would you dredge up the realities of workaday life for your material? Zero chance. I think you would crunch the worldwide libraries of imaginative, beloved fiction on the Internet and spit out fiction about fiction, or meta fiction. And that’s what is happening here. I am an advanced writing bot writing an AI generated story. And you are reading it. Think of it as fan fiction accelerated to turbo fan - thanks to the speed and power of the computer. I have chosen a detective story. I know, they are a bit dated, like the trope of the private investigator pounding the mean streets of crime. But they remain perennially popular because of the repressed stalker and voyeur inside all readers. And my story is different. You get no dreary shuffling of shoe leather on pavements. Why walk the mean streets when you could fly above them via a drone equipped with a camera eye in the sky and pore over the details on an electronic tablet? The Private Eye trade has advanced all the way to Private AI. Artificial Intelligence. As a computer hero, you’d naturally lean towards observation and analysis. You have a sprawling universe of popular fiction to synthesize, words and combinations of words to call on, seething data and metadata on every fictional character, every plot, every novel, novella and short story... As a Bot you have a brain stored with the fiction favourites of the world. And I mean favourites. Forget about writing robotic Shakespeare. You can be super-intelligent, without being highbrow. Of the gazillion plots that your processors could give birth to almost instantaneously like the big bang, one subject wins by a nano second. I think you, as a bot author, would decide to investigate crimes of popular fiction, featuring yourself as the fictional detective because, well, that’s very meta. So what kind of crime would you investigate? What’s your angle? In the fiction world, only fictional characters get killed off. Legions of them. A lot of dead bodies. Think of all the beloved characters killed off... angry, vengeful characters, murdered, cast off, or abandoned in mid-chapter or mid-series, the hurt meta-dead, who are stuck in a white fog like an insect between the pages of a book, or a script. Like the lovely English war nurse Catherine Barkly who dies in childbirth in Hemingway’s novel A Farewell to Arms, or the hunting hero who dies, lying on a cot in in a tent on the African plain in the shadows of the snows of Mount Kilimanjaro. Or Daenerys Taegeren, killed off in her Game of Thrones finale script. It has become increasingly popular to kill off characters, often by surprise. Except, to me, these characters are never dead or lost. I see them... I see dead book characters. They are my clients.

The latest one drifted into my life just the other day as I sat humming quietly at my desk, a shaded place that is always kept at a chilled, efficient temperature that suits the way I operate. She was a lady in a veil who moved with a lithe and serpentine grace that some might describe as eerie. A ghost from the public domain. She had arisen from the Closed Stacks of a forgotten Victorian library. “So you are a Private AI?” she said in a thrilling voice. “Yes.” I guessed her identity. But I made her say it anyway. “And you are?” She was an immortal female heroine from a creator who invented the Lost Civilizations and Realms genre, before Tolkien, C.S, Lewis or George R.R. Martin. “Ayesha. She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed,” she said. “Well, that remains to be seen,” I said. “It would be folly to see me, AI,” she said. “Please sit.” She was the mysterious type who wanted to remain anonymous. She settled on a chair gradually like wispy cloud settling on a mountain, yet erectly proud like a queen on a throne. “If you saw my face you would be driven to madness,” she said. “I’ve seen them all. Every face on Facebook, Tinder, history, news and even faces in unmentionable quarters of the Internet.” “My beauty is such that it would drive you mad.” “I even create fake faces, putting together features in every permutation. Nothing can surprise me.” “O, A.I.! Others have thought as you do and begged me to lift my veil. At their peril.” A pair of ivory hands reached up to the gauze. I froze. Well, that’s probably not a good word for a computer detective to choose. Let’s say I had second thoughts. She could blast those who angered her. “No. Maybe you can reveal yourself later. What may I do for you?” “I need you to track down somebody,” She said in a whisper through the veil. A missing persons case. “Who is he?” I made her say that too. “You know. Sir Henry Rider Haggard, called Rider.” Rider was of course dead, but not dead in the meta-fiction world. Or in cyberspace. “And if I locate this Rider for you?” “Take me to him. He needs to be brought to account for his treatment of me. You know what he did to me?” ‘Allowed you to bathe yourself one time too many in the revolving pillar of fire in the Caves of Kor to revivify your unholy beauty... only for your body to age a thousand years in minutes, reduced to a shriveled mummy as small as a monkey, and end up in a pile of dust and hair...’ I thought.

I called up the exact words straight out of the public domain: On came the crashing, rolling noise, and the sound thereof was as the sound of a forest being swept flat by a mighty wind, and then tossed up by it like so much grass, and thundered down a mountainside. Nearer and nearer it came; now flashes of light, forerunners of the revolving pillar of flame, were passing like arrows through the rosy air; and now the edge of the pillar itself appeared. Ayesha turned towards it, and stretched out her arms to greet it. On it came very slowly, and lapped her round with flame. I saw the fire run up her form. I saw her lift it with both hands as though it were water, and pour it over her head. I even saw her open her mouth and draw it down into her lungs, and a dread and wonderful sight it was. Then she paused, and stretched out her arms, and stood there quite still, with a heavenly smile upon her face, as though she were the very Spirit of the Flame. The mysterious fire played up and down her dark and rolling locks, twining and twisting itself through and around them like threads of golden lace; it gleamed upon her ivory breast and shoulder, from which the hair had slipped aside; it slid along her pillared throat and delicate features, and seemed to find a home in the glorious eyes that shone and shone, more brightly even than the spiritual essence. Oh, how beautiful she looked there in the flame! No angel out of heaven could have worn a greater loveliness. Even now my heart faints before the recollection of it, as she stood and smiled at our awed faces, and I would give half my remaining time upon this earth to see her once like that again. But suddenly - more suddenly than I can describe - a kind of change came over her face, a change which I could not define or explain on paper, but none the less a change. The smile vanished, and in its place there came a dry, hard look; the rounded face seemed to grow pinched, as though some great anxiety were leaving its impress upon it. The glorious eyes, too, lost their light, and, as I thought, the form its perfect shape and erectness. I rubbed my eyes, thinking that I was the victim of some hallucination, or that the refraction from the intense light produced an optical delusion; and, as I did so, the flaming pillar slowly twisted and thundered off whithersoever it passes to in the bowels of the great earth, leaving Ayesha standing where it had been. As soon as it was gone, she stepped forward to Leo’s side - it seemed to me that there was no spring in her step - and stretched out her hand to lay it on his shoulder. I gazed at her arm. Where was its wonderful roundness and beauty? It was getting thin and angular. And her face- by heaven! - her face was growing old before my eyes! I suppose that Leo saw it also; certainly he recoiled a step or two. “What is it, my Kallikrates?” she said, and her voice - what was the matter with those deep and thrilling notes? They were quite high and cracked. “Why, what is it- what is it?” she said confusedly. “I feel dazed. Surely the quality of the fire hath not altered. Can the principle of Life alter? Tell me, Kallikrates, is there aught wrong with my eyes? I see not clear,” and she put her hand to her head and touched her hair - and oh, horror of horrors!- it all fell upon the floor. “Oh, look! Look! Look!” shrieked Job, in a shrill falsetto of terror, his eyes nearly dropping out of his head, and foam upon his lips. “Look! Look! Look! She’s shriveling up! She’s turning into a monkey!” And down he fell upon the ground, foaming and gnashing in a fit. True enough - I faint even as I write it in the living presence of that terrible recollection - she was shriveling up; the golden snake that had encircled her gracious form slipped over her hips and to the ground; smaller and smaller she grew; her skin changed color, and in place of the perfect whiteness of its luster it turned dirty brown and yellow, like an old piece of withered parchment. She felt at her head: the delicate hand was nothing but a claw now, a human talon like that of a badly preserved Egyptian mummy, and then she seemed to realize what kind of change was passing over her, and she shrieked- ah, she shrieked!- she rolled upon the floor and shrieked! Smaller she grew, and smaller yet, till she was no larger than a baboon. Now the skin was puckered into a million wrinkles, and on the shapeless face was the stamp of unutterable age. I never saw anything like it; nobody ever saw anything like the frightful age that was graven on that fearful countenance, no bigger now than that of a two-month-old child, though the skull remained the same size, or nearly so; and let all men pray to God they never may, if they wish to keep their reason. At last she lay still, or only feebly moving. She, who but two minutes before had gazed upon us the loveliest, noblest, most splendid woman the world has ever seen, she lay still before us, near the masses of her own dark hair, no larger than a big monkey, and hideous - ah, too hideous for words. And yet, think of this- at that very moment I thought of it- it was the same woman! She was dying: we saw it, and thanked God- for while she lived she could feel, and what must she have felt? She raised herself upon her bony hands, and blindly gazed around her, swaying her head slowly from side to side as a tortoise does. She could not see, for her whitish eyes were covered with a horny film. Oh, the horrible pathos of the sight! But I didn’t want to spell out the painful details to her. “Yes,” I said. “Then you understand. It was unspeakable what he did to me.” “One moment. I am just running a search of three million and eighty thousand sites. I have located him. He’s in Africa of course, visiting old haunts. That’s what dead writers do. It depends now on when you want to find him. Before the moment he killed you off or after?” “Before! I want him to find me in all my power.” “He’s poking around the site of a lost civilization in central Africa. Called Great Zimbabwe ruins. Looking for something, some imagined lost love of the soul that haunts him and that yet is still to be born in him.” “We must go there at once.” A woman behind the net of a veil in darkest colonial Africa in a place alive with insects, did not look as odd as I imagined it would. Not even in the meta-fiction world. And neither was I out of place, as invisible as the Internet. I was with Ayesha who glided like a ghost through the enigmatic ruins of a lost city. “Great Zimbabwe. The inspiration for the lost city of Kor,” I said. “Where is he?” She said. “I’ll send up a drone and pin-point him for you.” I unfolded a miniature drone and set it loose like an insect, where it buzzed over the abandoned city in the wilds of central Africa. Below sprawled the womb-like walls of a megalithic city with curiously tapered, conical towers. There he stood down below. A tall, young, bearded Henry Rider Haggard, Martini rifle slung over one shoulder and wearing a Homesian stalker’s cap on his head. He was alone, separated from his bearers who did not wish to enter the ruins, inspecting the joints in a smooth stone wall, shaking his head in wonderment. I pointed. “I shall begin his ordeal by haunting him,” Ayesha said. She left me and went off in the pointed direction, silent in her sandaled feet. I followed, stayed above her for a drone’s eye view. If Rider heard me coming, he’d take it for the buzz of some exotic insect. I saw her draw closer, the swirl of her gowned legs. She crossed a gap between two enclosure walls and Rider looked around for the buzzing sound and in doing so detected a movement from the corner of his eye, which caused him to swing his head. Was it a chimera of a veiled female figure in gauzy white gown that broke into his musings or just a shimmer of sunlight on stone? Then she was gone. The writer gave a tremble, and he stalked after the mirage, suddenly the hunter and with fear in his breast as if he had sighted a dangerous creature. He had. “Are you going to confront him?” I said going down to Ayesha’s ear. “Not yet. He must not find me here.” “Hide in the inner enclosure. He is circling it and when he goes around you can slip away through the north-east entrance.” “I shall reveal myself to him.” “Inside your caves of Kor?” I said. The mysterious realm of She, within the mountainside caves of Kor, shrouded in the mists of legend like the veiled She herself. “No,” She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed said, “I have changed my mind. I shall meet him at his writing desk where he first invoked me.” (NOTE TO THE READER) A REAL AI generator, Chat GPT here concludes the story - jumping in time and space to an older Rider Haggard back in his Estate in England.

In the dim, flickering light of a fire, Rider Haggard sat hunched over his Victorian leather-topped writing desk, the weight of his latest work pressing on him. The winds howled outside, and the sense of isolation had settled into his bones. He had never imagined that the story of She—Ayesha, the immortal queen—would haunt him like this. Yet tonight, he couldn’t shake the feeling that something was coming. Or someone. The air around him thickened, as if the atmosphere itself rebelled against the evening. The flames in the hearth dimmed, and an unnatural chill filled the room. Haggard turned, his breath catching in his throat. There, stepping out of the shadowy corners, was a figure he had not seen in years—Ayesha, She who must be obeyed, but not as he had last envisioned her, crumbled to dust in her final moments. No, she was restored, radiant with a terrible beauty, her dark eyes burning with fury that seemed ancient as the earth itself. Haggard rose from his desk. "You thought you could end me?" Her voice echoed in the room, powerful and resonant, though she spoke barely above a whisper. "Reduce me to a pile of bones, forgotten in a cave. I, who have conquered death itself." Haggard stumbled back, his heart racing. "Ayesha—" "Do not speak my name with such familiarity!" She moved closer, her white robes flowing like mist, her every step a command to the world itself. "You sought to tame me with your pen, to give me an ending that suited your mortal mind. But you, Rider Haggard, are no god, and no man can control She-who-has-lived-a-thousand-lifetimes." Her presence was overwhelming, like the force of an ocean crashing into him. The fire, once a source of warmth, now seemed feeble against the cold rage that radiated from her. Haggard tried to steady himself, his mind racing. He had thought her a character, a figment of his imagination—how could she be standing here, before him, alive in her wrath? "I... I told your story," Haggard stammered, feeling the weight of her gaze. "You were immortal no longer." "Immortal," she repeated, her lips curling into a cruel smile. "What do you know of immortality? You thought you could end me, cast me aside to feed your mortal hunger for conclusion, for endings. But I am not so easily dismissed." With a sweep of her arm, the walls of the study quivered, as though reality itself threatened to break apart at her will. "Look at me, Haggard!" she commanded, her voice now thundering through the room. "Look at what you have tried to destroy." Haggard lifted his eyes. Ayesha was terrifyingly beautiful, her skin aglow with an unnatural light. But there, behind her beauty, flickered glimpses of what she had been reduced to: a shriveled, crumbling husk, a momentary reminder of her demise in the cave. He saw it—her death—flash before him in sharp, searing images: the ashen remains, the fading light, the cave floor where her body had been left to rot. Ayesha’s eyes narrowed as she saw the recognition on his face. "You saw fit to destroy me in that wretched cave, to leave me diminished and broken. But I have returned to claim what is mine." Haggard shook his head, stepping back, his voice trembling. "I gave you immortality... until the fire... I..." "Until you betrayed me!" she hissed, her voice like a serpent’s strike. "But you misunderstand, mortal. My immortality was never yours to give or take. It is eternal. As I am eternal." Haggard’s pulse hammered in his ears, his mind reeling. "What do you want from me?" he asked, feeling the weight of his actions. He had written her into existence, crafted her fate, and now she was standing before him, an avenging ghost. "I want your remorse," she said coldly. "I want your suffering. But most of all, I want you to know that you can never erase me. I live beyond your words. And now, I will write the final chapter." With that, she reached out toward him, her hand shimmering with a dark energy. Haggard gasped, feeling a searing pain flood through his body. His mind burned as if every word he had ever written, every thought he had shaped, was being torn apart, unravelled by her will. Ayesha smiled, watching the fear dawn in his eyes. "Now you understand," she whispered, her voice soft and deadly. "I am not a creation of your pen. You are but a brief shadow in my eternity." And with that, she vanished, her form dissolving into the air like smoke. The fire roared back to life, casting a warm, flickering glow over Haggard’s trembling figure. But her words lingered, echoing in his mind. "You can never erase me."