Contrary to what anyone might guess, Marley Jun lived in Stone, Oregon by choice. Barely thirty kilometers from the American border, Stone was tiny, undistinguished, full of white people, and unapologetically nostalgic about its former status as part of the United States.
The arts scene was two nights a week of country music at the Powder River Café. Marley was one of only forty-four nonbinary residents, according to the official census, and their remaining romantic opportunities in Stone were just a hair better than nothing.
On the plus side, Stone was arrestingly beautiful. When walking through town, Marley would sometimes stop involuntarily just to drink in the view of the mountains soaring over the rooftops. Stone’s winding main street, bordered with brick, stone, and cob buildings, shared a narrow valley with a river of uncounted waterfalls, all set in a vast, green forest that hadn’t burned in decades.
Marley wasn’t there for the natural beauty, though. They’d chosen Stone because it was the closest thing they could find to life in the early twenty-first century, back when climate change was all guilt and arguments, when the worst was yet to come. That was the period in which Deaf Ears, the virtual reality streaming show for which Marley was a staff writer, was set. In the wider world, where nearly everyone understood what climate change was and how close it had come to wrecking the world, Stone, Oregon was a rare refuge for the kind of decent, hard-working, reasonable people who, with no malice in their hearts, would have burned every last drop of oil and cuddled doom up close.
Writing had long been a profession for those few who, through perseverance or luck, could stand out in a crowded field. By Marley’s time, the competition had become crushing, as uncounted millions of former bus drivers and warehouse workers, clerks and cashiers, accountants and draftspeople, bureaucrats, managers, teachers, and civil servants clamored to enter any profession still performed by actual people. Not everyone could run for public office or be a nurse— but anybody could at least try to be a writer. Through hard work and openness and some dumb luck, Marley had succeeded at making writing their profession. If they hadn’t, they had no idea what they could possibly have been doing instead.
On that Wednesday morning in August, a day of ash-colored skies when even the breeze coming down the mountain felt stuffy and thick, Marley left Stone for a Jet Train day trip to Los Angeles. They thought they were going to meet a new hire for the writing team, but that wasn’t what was happening at all.
Marley rode an on-demand minibus from Stone to the train station, where they could take the Jet Train connector. The platform was thronged with commuters and day trippers, a multicolored throng of people talking, reading, watching videos on their smart lenses, or chomping fried egg sandwiches from a booth at the farmers’ market next to the station.
Most of the seats were taken by the time Marley boarded, but they found an open one near the back next to a white woman with short, slate-colored hair and a lined face.
“Hi,” Marley said, settling in. They unzipped their messenger bag and rummaged for their leakproof pod of hot coffee. It took a moment to find it, between an old pair of smart lenses they kept forgetting to drop off at the resale store and a Twix bar.
The stranger in the other seat didn’t respond right away. Instead, she squinted at Marley, looked away, then glanced over again. Marley knew the expression, and they knew what the woman was seeing: a youngish person in canary yellow cargo pants and a loose gray shirt, only about 165 centimeters tall—if that—with a slim body, a heart-shaped face, close-cropped dark hair, long sideburns, and the faint shadow of a beard. Marley’s voice, they knew, had become too low to sound strictly feminine, though it didn’t sound entirely masculine, either. That suited them fine. Testosterone worked differently for different people. The big win had been the sideburns. Marley had declared victory and stopped taking T once the sideburns came in.
The woman craned her neck to look around the vehicle, and Marley guessed she was looking for another seat. When she didn’t see one, she sighed heavily.
“Did you have to sit here?” she said.
Marley knew this conversation. Both their parents, especially their father, had questioned their gender over and over. College and afterward had been easier—until they moved to Stone. In Stone, the gender conversation came up on a regular basis.
“What’s worrying you?” Marley said.
The woman grimaced. “Oh, now you’re setting me up. Well, I don’t care. I know everyone’s supposed to pretend you people are normal, girls with beards and boys with makeup and all that, but some of us still remember when everyone was just male or female the way God made us, and you didn’t question it, because everyone wasn’t out there telling you to try something different. I bet you’re just experimenting, and the day will come when you realize you’ve mucked up what God gave you, with no clear road back to normal.”
She looked around again, probably still hoping to find another empty seat. “I know,” she said. “It’s not what you’re supposed to say—but I didn’t sit next to you: you sat next to me!”
A young man across the aisle was listening now and glaring at the woman, appalled. Marley smiled at him, and he gave a perfunctory smile back, his eyebrows questioning. Marley turned their attention back to the woman.
“OK,” they said.
“OK what? Do you even speak English?” the woman said. “I’m trying to tell you—”
“You’re saying you’re not comfortable with nonbinary people, and I look unnatural to you, and you like it better when everyone around you is either male or female. And I think you’re upset that you’re in a world where that’s not always true, where sometimes women have beards and men wear makeup and someone sits down next to you who isn’t clearly one thing or the other. Did I get it?”
The woman nodded slowly, watching Marley, waiting for the other shoe to drop. Marley dug around in their messenger bag.
“That’s OK with me,” Marley said. “It would be great if you were more open to nonbinary people, but you’re not, and I don’t mind that you told me about it.” They lifted an object out of the bag and popped open the rigid, compostable packaging. “Twix?”
The guarded expression hadn’t left the woman’s face, but she reached out and took one of the Twix bars. Marley took a bite out of the other one before opening their coffee.
Marley, like most writers they knew, worked from home. Trips to the office were unnerving, especially for large meetings.
As a kid, they’d read voraciously, and between the ages of about six and eight they’d spent many hours to memorizing poems and soliloquies. They’d loved evocative ones like Spenser’s “Faerie Queene” and Sarojini Naidu’s “In the Bazaars of Hyderabad.” Marley’s mother had seen this as an opportunity. Whenever Marley’s parents would have parties or dinner guests, Marley—who had a different name at that point—was directed to stand up in whatever pretty dress she’d insisted they wear and recite T.S. Eliot, or sometimes one of the less well-known Shakespeare sonnets. Sometimes Marley’s father would tell them to recite some of his favorite sijo, in English translation. Marley was never asked to recite Kipling, or Whitman, or Plath.
Those recitations had pushed Marley to understand how much they hated being the center of attention. Big, in-person meetings like the one they were headed to weren’t as bad, but Marley avoided them whenever possible. This one, the showrunner had made clear, was not optional.
Deaf Ears was filmed primarily in virtual reality. Most of it used the Vancouver virtual reality system, with both simulated characters and scanned-from-life cast. In the physical world, the production took up most of one level of a sand-colored office building next to a sprawling solar tracker assembly plant in Cienega. The studio, which Marley had been to only about a dozen times, was located south of Hollywood, west of downtown LA, and roughly five miles east of the Venice seawall and the still-swollen Pacific Ocean. Like many older buildings, it had the telltale inset windows of a super-insulated retrofit.
Marley’s friend Alice, the senior writer and a co-executive producer, caught up with Marley on the way into the building and hooked her arm through theirs. Tall, spare, mahogany-skinned, and quick, she could command attention just by willing it. “The whole staff ... physical presence!” she said with fake awe. “What can it mean?”
“We didn’t do this when I was hired,” Marley said.
“Are you kidding? We would’ve scared you off,” Alice said.
They passed through the automatic doors and into the welcome cool of the lobby.
“These writing samples, though ...” Marley said. The samples had been send to all of the writers for comment, the author’s name left off. “They really got to me. The pacing, the tension they’re building with the new storylines, the character revelations ... Whoever this turns out to be, we’re going to have to up our game.”
“Yeah,” Alice said. “I didn’t hate the scripts.”
The walls and ceiling of the writers’ room had images of a blue sky and clouds. Sitting in it always gave Marley the uncomfortable sensation of floating out in the sky somewhere, untethered. The new writer still hadn’t appeared, but Dani, the showrunner, said, “OK, let’s get started. Ben, can you get the door?”
A hush settled over the attendees: seven writers, a few upper-level producers, and Dani. Marley searched the room again for the new hire, but there was nobody unfamiliar. Dani leaned forward to speak. She was small, but she had a voice that filled rooms.
“First, and most importantly,” Dani said, “I have to say how thrilled we are with your work on season six to date. I honestly think this is our best season so far, and people are taking notice. So I really want to be clear that what I have to say next is no reflection whatsoever on the talent in this team or on your incredible accomplishments.”
Marley felt a surge of adrenaline, that tingle of something about to go off the rails.
Dani took a deep breath. “Second, I feel bad we had to do this, but we’ve been misleading you all, a little. We’re not actually taking on a new writer.”
“Ah,” Alice said. “The writer is too good. No, I’m with you on this. We have to keep standards down to a reasonable level.”
A couple of the other writers snickered, but most—Marley included—were silent.
“What we’re actually going to do,” Dani continued, “is use a new scriptwriting AI.”
“We’re using what?” said Alice.
“No, wait,” said Albert Nez, another staff writer. “Did we change subjects? We aren’t hiring whoever wrote those scripts?”
Dani was silent, answering Albert with a look.
“What?” said Albert. At about the same time, someone further down the table said, “Fuck me.”
“You mean we’re going to use some kind of human-AI team approach?” Alice said. “Or ... what, we’re supposed to just give it an outline, and—”
Dani looked around the room as she spoke. “I mean the Goldman artificial intelligence, given nothing but our existing scripts and footage, took less than a day to generate three sets of thirty-nine scripts each, offering three possible ways to move forward with the series—”
“No, no, no,” Albert said. “What about that scene at the baseball game with Jessie and Catherine? What about Don’s speech at the bus station? An AI couldn’t—”
“The dog jokes?” someone else said. “It didn’t write the dog jokes?”
The clamor rose while Marley stood by, dizzy. Writing was the thing they’d always been good at, the thing they’d worked hardest at, the thing they cared about the most. It felt like the world was tilting and Marley was sliding off.
Dani waited, letting unanswered objections collect around her in sharp-edged piles. After a few minutes, the clamor subsided into uneasy silence.
“How do we even work with this thing?” Alice said.
“You don’t,” Dani said. She shrugged, looking pained. “I’m sorry. We don’t have work for you anymore.”
“For me—?” Alice said.
“For any of you. For any human writers,” Dani said. “Look, it was only ever a matter of time. People think their jobs can never be automated right up until the day it happens. Nobody expected AIs to make this kind of leap so soon, but you know how this goes, especially when it’s other AIs writing the software: yesterday’s impossibility is tomorrow’s old hat. The next conversation like this I’m in, I’ll probably be on the other end.”
“Jesus Christ,” Albert said. “You mean I have to go out and try to find a job on another show?”
Dani coughed awkwardly and rubbed the back of her neck. “Folks, we were contractually obliged not to discuss Goldman with anyone until today, but I’d be very surprised if we were the only company getting access to it. And of course it’s not just for streamed shows. It’s fiction, graphic novels, plays, journalism ...”
Marley used the projected keyboard on their smart lenses to run a search for Goldman writing AI. Three news stories had been posted, none of them more than a few minutes old. Then a moment later, there were five articles. Then there were eighteen. Many of them had probably been written by the AI itself.
The clamor rose again, more desperate this time: more objections, challenges, swearing. Albert and another writer left the room, both in tears. Dani sat back in her chair, arms crossed, hands tucked in, a servant of inevitability. Gwyneth, an executive story editor, had started a shouting argument with one of the executive producers. Alice was staring ahead of her, speechless for the first time since Marley had known her. Marley clasped Alice under one arm and lifted, getting her to stand and step clear of the table. Alice held back at first, but after taking in the scene a moment longer, she let Marley steer her out into the relative calm of the corridor by the elevator.
“What the fuck do we do now?” Alice said hoarsely.
“I guess we figure out how to live on our Citizen Dividend money.”
“That’s not what I mean,” Alice said. “I mean what do we do with our lives?”
Marley took Alice’s hand and squeezed it. As to answering her question, they had no idea.
Marley took the Jet Train, silently careening through featureless tunnels, back to Oregon. It was a luxury now. For one thing, there was the carbon footprint, low as that was for how far and how fast they were traveling. The ride meant Marley was using enough kics—the unit of measure most of the world had adopted for greenhouse gas emissions—to make a significant dent in their free personal emissions limit. More worryingly, there was the money: once Marley’s two months of severance had run out, they would have only their Citizen Dividend, the money everyone received through Cascadia’s universal basic income program. It was enough to live on, modestly, but not enough for much riding around on the Jet Train.
Marley’s natural urge was to retreat, to go home, pull the shades, and stare at the walls.
The question they could not quiet in their brain was this: could AIs really replace artists? Writers, painters, actors ... Nobody could argue that current AIs couldn’t imitate them, that they couldn’t simulate what artists did ... but didn’t there have to be limits? There had to be things human writers could do that AIs couldn’t. Portray love convincingly, say ... or build a story on an underlying moral structure. Right?
As the train neared the Eugene-Corvallis station, where Marley could transfer to the connector back toward Stone, they realized they knew at least one person who’d already been through all this: their friend Isabelle. Isabelle was who they had to talk to.
Marley’s lenses were electronic contacts that connected wirelessly to a small earpiece computer. The lenses could record what Marley was seeing and project images directly onto their eye, whether it was displaying a message or to making it look like they were on the moon. The earpiece provided sound and picked up vocal commands. Together, they had replaced external devices like old-time “cell phones,” as well as the implants that had been briefly popular in the forties.
Marley used their lenses now to bring up live music listings ... and there it was: Isabelle’s band, Mild Rumpus, was playing in Portland at eight o’clock, at a venue called World’s End. Marley checked the time: it was barely one p.m. The chances of catching Isabelle with some time to spare before the show were good. Marley pulled up Isabelle’s contact links in their lenses. They weren’t eager to have a conversation about having been made redundant, but Isabelle, of all people, would understand.
Isabelle was easy to spot even in the crowded empanada restaurant where she and Marley had arranged to meet. She towered over most of the other patrons, waves of sandy hair falling almost to her waist. She had gentle gray eyes, and she waved Marley eagerly over with one large but graceful hand. She was wearing white cigarette pants and an azure tunic.
Marley threaded their way through little round tables to Isabelle, catching conversation fragments as they passed. Reflexively, they stored interesting exchanges up for future writing, even as they realized they wouldn’t be able to use them.
Servers made their way languidly through the crowd, stopping sometimes to sit and talk with the patrons. Marley had heard that in other countries, waiting tables was an undesirable and exhausting occupation. In Cascadia, extroverts and people who just enjoyed being helpful picked up jobs waiting tables part-time as something to do and as a social outlet. Basic income allowed them to work for relatively little, so restaurants habitually overstaffed, making the job—and the experience of eating at restaurants—more enjoyable for both patrons and staff.
Most of the servers had been automated out of previous jobs or had never been able to find jobs in the first place. Many of the restaurants were Sponsored Businesses, owned and financed by the Cascadian government for entrepreneurs who didn’t have money of their own to invest but who could demonstrate they had a solid business plan and a demand for their products or services. Being a Sponsored Business entrepreneur in Cascadia was rarely a path to riches, but it also didn’t require private investors, marketing, or risking your financial future. It mainly meant offering good ideas to get people things people actually needed. Marketing and advertising had been banned years before in favor of directories and customer review systems managed by the Cascadian government and by nonprofit organizations. Would-be entrepreneurs who couldn’t come up with something that was actually useful—something that people would pay money for without having to be manipulated to want it—were out of luck.
Isabelle stood up when Marley reached the table and wrapped them up in a hug that felt like being swaddled in a satin comforter. Marley let themself go limp on Isabelle’s shoulder. They were shivering, they realized. The tension from the news about the Goldman AI still circulated in their body, having found no outlet. Isabelle had already ordered. Little pastry crescents steamed on a plate planted between two tall glasses of something almost the same blue as Isabelle’s top.
Isabelle was a family friend, a next-door neighbor from when Marley was growing up. She’d taken Marley under her wing as a fellow gender nonconformist after Marley began to realize they weren’t the girl they were being raised as. Isabelle was a wonderful musician, practicing four to five hours a day on her cello, or sometimes upright bass, guitar, ukulele, or piano. Marley had never heard Isabelle sing, though. She had a beautiful liquid baritone speaking voice, but she’d never expressed an interest in using it for music.
They hadn’t seen much of each other in the last few years. Isabelle was always traveling with Mild Rumpus, and Marley liked holing up in Stone, letting the world shrink to one quiet, beautiful place. The peace of living there had long since pooled into a deep reservoir of calm, but now, that reservoir was out of reach.
“I’m so sorry the robots took your work, honey,” Isabelle said. “How are you doing?”
“I’m just trying to get my head around it. What did you do? How did you survive?”
“When computers took over music?” Isabelle said. Isabelle hadn’t originally been a performer. She’d graduated with honors from the Thornton School of Music at USC and had gone right into composing professionally, first for some small-scale online series, and eventually for streaming shows. Unfortunately for her, a new generation of composition AIs were introduced just a few years into her career. These were capable of cheaply producing unending amounts of, Marley had to admit, very good music. Most composers were put out of work overnight, leaving just a few luminaries to fight over the limited number of commissions that made an absolute priority of human authorship. Yet here Isabelle still was, a professional musician.
Isabelle held Marley at arm’s length and studied their face. “Marley, I don’t think you’re going to like what I have to tell you about this. Sit down. Have some empanadas first.”
They both sat, Marley shaking their head. “It’s just ...” They looked down, thinking hard. “There have to be kinds of writing that people can do but AIs can’t. They can’t feel. They don’t have any experience. They don’t have any wisdom. Right? They can only imitate what people have already written!”
“And what you write is brand new?” Isabelle asked. “No one has ever written anything like it before? Honey, I’m not saying this to hurt you, but I think it’s important that you don’t get swept up in an idea that these AIs are going to be amateurs or also-rans. Did they give you samples?”
“They can’t love, though, even!”
“They don’t have to love. They just have to be able to look at what millions of people have already written or said about love. You can find that in interviews, in magazine articles, in stories, in movies, in diaries—they know more love stories than you or I could ever dream of, and they can use any one, or any ten, or any thousand to create something new.
“That’s what I had to face with music. Composition isn’t about coming up with something completely novel. Music is about creating connections, sounds that resonate with experiences you’ve had before, music you’ve heard before, feelings you’ve felt before. Composition is finding ways to open up pathways that already exist, through music that is at least partly expected. Mahler and Brahms and Pink Floyd used interrupted cadences that surprise you only because they follow a pattern you know very well, with a twist at the end—but it only works because it’s using an existing pattern.”
“But if AIs are just mixing other sources—”
“What else do we artists do but mix sources? The only difference is that so many of our sources are inside us—something we heard once, or an experience we transformed into something personal.”
“Maybe that’s the difference, then,” said Marley. “Maybe AIs can only write or make music out of the obvious things, surface things. We can go deeper.”
“But as soon as you go deeper and make art out of it, the AIs can use that art to go just as deep—and they can leverage all the deeply felt works from all the other musicians and writers before us. Some heartfelt passage a monk wrote in the fourteenth century could provide insights more beautiful than anything either of us could come up with in a lifetime, but we might not ever come across that one little paragraph.”
“You sound like you want me to give up.”
“I don’t want you to give up!” Isabelle said, squeezing Marley’s hand. “But I do want you to leave behind the idea that all you’re good at is writing things. The AIs are doing that now, and you can fight it, but any victories you find will be ... little. They won’t amount to much.”
“Writing isn’t just something I do, though, Isabelle, it’s—”
“I know what it means to you, honey. I, of all people, know exactly what that feels like. And some people like us spend their days still creating, writing songs or stories that hardly anyone will ever hear or read, and that’s enough for them. But that’s not art anymore, honey: that’s knitting. You share it with your spouse and kids or your friends, but you’re doing it mainly for the sake of the experience. Art is something that connects people, that bridges sadness and throws unexpected light into your brain just when you need it, or something that bears you up. I never intended to be a performer, but people don’t want to go out somewhere to hear a recording, so live musicians are still in demand, even if we do have to compete with projected simulations and robot musicians. People are finding themselves with more time on their hands than anyone would have imagined a hundred years ago, so going out and hearing live music is a lot more common than it was when I was growing up. For some people, that’s practically all they do, and I don’t imagine it’s a bad life if you don’t have a fire inside you like we do. And there are so many musicians now, people who used to do other things or just people who have the free time to get good, that we still have to fight tooth and nail for gigs.
“But Marley, honey ... there’s nothing like that in writing. People care about things they can see happening right in front of them, like about who’s playing the music—but they don’t care who made the things they use. The chair they’re sitting in, the food they’re eating, the book they’re reading—most people don’t care if they came from robots or people or little green bugs from space. Without presence, it stops being important—that connection, human being to human being.”
“So what are you saying I should do instead? What can I do instead?”
“That’s not up to me. But I don’t think you want to spend your life in a corner, amusing yourself and a few friends. If I’m right about that, then you’ll have to do what I did. You’ll have to turn to something new and throw everything you’ve got into it. I wasn’t much of a performer back when the bots took over my career, but I can tell you that endless practice, if you do it right, will make you into a whole miraculously new person. It’s just that it’s really hard, and it takes forever.”
Marley picked up an empanada, which was no longer warm, and bit into it. The filling was startling: a mix of leeks, Swiss cheese, raisins, and something like bacon. Whoever was cooking these obviously had some clarity about their direction. Marley was another story.