"The AI Story Machine." Essential reading today. "Futuristic fiction that imagines the future of fiction."

AI, the ultimate Book Thief, and Art Thief? In this age of instant AI writing and graphic creativity, what lies ahead for tomorrow’s fiction readers and writers? A mystery thriller and historical fiction author provides some intriguing examples of 'flash' fiction. THE AI STORY MACHINE.

5 fiction stories written by mystery thriller and historical writer Roy Lester Pond – with vivid story endings injected by The AI Story Machine... stories about, and with, AI writing and image generation programmes. 1. ‘God Against the AI Gods’. Ancient Egypt meets the Gods of AI. The Return of The Digital Plagues of Egypt. 2. ‘Revenge Of She-Who Must-Be-Obeyed.’ Fiction’s legendary “She” meets her creator and destroyer, Author Rider Haggard in search of revenge. 3. 'The Reed & The Sceptre'. Ancient Egypt historical fiction. Queen Hatshepsut and Senmut. 4. ‘Meet Your Maker’. Spy vs Author Creator. Fiction’s most famous secret agent-spy seeks remorse from the author who put him through torture and misery, book after book… 5. ‘The Cursed Ghost of Akhenaten”. A ‘cursed movie’ production, a damnable murder mystery for the Egyptologist detective Daniel Cane… Available on Amazon Kindle. (OPENING BOOK EXCERPT)

Rows of pod-like golden chairs waited in the dimness like empty ancient Egyptian coffinettes. ‘Cinematic motion chairs’, they called them at the ‘Ramses & the Gold of the Pharaohs’ Exhibition. Museum attendants took us inside a Virtual Reality area. We were here along with fellow visitors who’d been admitted into the VR experience in a stream of groups, fifteen minutes apart. “This should be easier than my long-haul flights to Egypt,” I said to my daughter. A VR museum attendant overheard me. “You’ve been to Egypt, then?” “Many times,” I said. “But I haven’t,” my daughter said. “Even though Dad’s written a stack of novels about the place.” A note of playful complaint entered her voice, but in growing up, my daughter had never fallen captive to ancient Egypt’s mystery. “Never mind,” the female attendant soothed her. “Virtual Reality is the best way to see it.” She fitted us with Virtual Reality goggles and headphones and told us to sit back inside our pod chairs. Were the seats raised high so that our legs wouldn’t drag as we whooshed away on our fly-through across the aeons to ancient Egypt? ‘We’re like sci-fi commuters on a space shuttle craft,’ I said to my daughter in the chair near to mine, my voice bottled by the VR gear. My eye-glasses began fogging up behind it. I fiddled with the VR headpiece. The ancient Egyptian exhibition had been jammed with visitors in those final days of its run in the city. The air had grown humid as we’d shuffled our coiling queue through immortal Egypt, treated to visions of golden antiquity in glass cases and some screened in multi-media panoramas on curved HD projection screens, surrounded by the sounds of a pharaoh’s life - Ramses the Great - believed to be the pharaoh of the Exodus. The VR experience came at the end of a lengthy tour of the exhibition and a mixture of stimulation and humidity had combined to produce a dreamy mist in my vision, even before my fantasy experience began. I wedged the rims of my goggles away with my fingers to create tiny vents of air, relaxed to calm myself down. Breathe deeply. That’s better. I’d never make a fighter pilot, I decided. “All right now, Sir?” the attendant said, noticing my fiddling. “Ready for take-off, thanks.” Then it hit me, even before our launch into a virtual Egypt of deserts, Pharaoh Ramses, Queen Nefertari, stone temples like Abu Simbel and carved statues of gods and goddesses. The idea. I thought: what if AI and VR was more than a gateway to a cyber experience of Egypt? What if it was another kind of gateway? One that let ancient Egypt in. Into our lives. Letting in the eerie deities of ancient Egypt. Anubis, Osiris, Isis, Horus, Hathor, Sobek, Thoth… Deities that fascinated me, even though many found them distasteful, like the poet Goethe who complained about ‘extolling dog-headed gods’ and added: “Oh, if my halls were only rid of Isis and Osiris!’ Today’s world had already witnessed the powers of large-language AI platforms like Chat-GPT composing fluent prose in the place of writers and image-generating AI platforms elbowing artists and photographers aside. AI platforms were threatening creative careers and would intrude further into human activity, replacing nearly all areas of expertise. AI was becoming omniscient, able to answer the problems of humankind. But what if its influence went profoundly further and AI platforms became virtual gods? In esoteric texts like the Kore Masu, the Prophecy of Thoth told how the gods of ancient Egypt would one day depart from the world and return to the stars. “For the gods will return from earth to heaven. Egypt will be forsaken, and the land which was once the home of religion will be left desolate, bereft of the presence of its deities.” I pictured the departed gods of Egypt now using advanced Artificial Intelligence, neural networks and the entire electronic realm as a gateway for their return to power over humankind. And, if this invasion occurred, what response might arise from the God of Moses who abhorred the gods of Egypt. “Against all the Gods of Egypt I will execute judgement” Jehovah thundered in the Book of Exodus before bringing down the Ten Plagues on the pharaoh’s kingdom. But now flashes and sounds in our VR gear told us that our Virtual Reality tour was beginning for real. Take off. Our cinematic motion chairs lurched. Suddenly the pods we sat inside swivelled. We found ourselves juddering as we barrelled into a vista of a howling desert sandstorm. Blinding grains of flying sand shredded our VR landscape, and as I blinked and peered through a brown-out as the Temple of Abu Simbel emerged, I wondered… If God were real, the god of reality, could he have any power here in the realm of virtual reality and artificial intelligence? Could he enter it and strike Egypt’s gods once again in a battle of God against AI Virtual Gods? Unleash a new cycle of destruction, this time against all-powerful AI technology? God versus the AI gods of Egypt? Or would God be powerless here, no more able to influence events and lives inside the realm of AI than he could influence events and characters inside the pages of a novel created by a human author?