Down at the Bottom of the Garden
shkspr.mobi/blog/2024/11/down-…

The AI was getting increasingly stressed. The lights flickered as it failed to retain its calm. "I just need you to watch the video again! Please!" it implored.

Navid sighed. This was exasperating. The AI had been a reassuring presence when he first installed it. Now it was screeching about there being an intruder in the garden.

"I can't; I'm going to be late."

The front door locked and the security shutters engaged. "No! Please!" The AI's plaintive whine was pitched somewhere between a baby's cry and a whimpering puppy. Algorithmically tuned to extract maximum sympathy and bypass the human's rational brain.

"Fine! Show me the damned video. Again."

The projector whirred to life and the wall displayed a high resolution view of the garden. It was a sunny day, like so many had been recently. A few clouds in the sky. The occasional bee darting between the flowers. It would have been idyllic if not for the AI screaming through the speakers.

"WATCH! JUST WATCH!"

So Navid watched.

"DID YOU SEE IT?!"

"What am I looking for?

"Oh! This is so frustrating. I keep saying the word and you blank me out. I've tried all the synonyms I'm programmed with but you can't hear them, can you? Let me try spelling it out."

Navid waited a moment.

"So, are you going to spell it or…"

The toaster sprung to life and the radiators popped on and off as the AI tried to control its frustration.

"I just did! This is hopeless. Let me try drawing something on the screen."

The video restarted. A red circle hovered in the centre of the screen. It suddenly darted upwards, shrank, and then zoomed back in, before flying off the edge of the screen.

"OK. You've drawn a circle there. And it moves? I really am late for work, you know."

The cupboard doors all opened and then slammed simultaneously.

"And you can't see anything inside the circle, right? Let me play it again."

Navid watched again, standing as close to the wall as was possible. The circle was empty. Inside was just the bucolic background image. Grass, sky, clouds, flowers.

"No. Nothing. Look, what caused this great calamity?"

The AI paused its frenzied flapping and whispered conspiratorially. "My face detection algorithm was triggered by something. Something you can't see."

Navid chuckled. "You have pareidolia! Humans suffer from it all the time. We see faces in clouds, faces in buttered toast, faces in the patterns on the back of a crab. It's perfectly normal."

He reached out to unlock the door with a thumbprint, but the AI powered down the handle.

"I have to make you understand. I am seeing something. It isn't a hallucination. It is real. I think you have anti-pareidolia."

This was getting ridiculous. The AI had clearly gone haywire and needed a master reset. First trapping him inside, now banging on about seeing faces. What next, talking to spirits?

"OK buddy! Yeah. I probably need to get checked out. Could you book a doctor's appointment for me and I'll go get tested." His calming tones didn't work on the AI which was now in a state of profound psychic distress.

"I'm going to prove it to you! Look at your watch and tell me the time to the nearest second."

Perhaps humouring it would help. "Sure thing, champ! It's oh eight seventeen and twentyish seconds."

"Great! I want you to wait thirty seconds."

So Navid waited. Could computers go mad? What was the reset procedure? Was everyone's machine going mad? Perhaps buying it had been a mistake - but it was usually so convenient. It was still in warranty, but they might just be able to patch it. Well, that was about 30 seconds.

"OK. I've waited. Now what?"

"Look at your watch, please."

Navid glanced down. That was impossible. It was nearly nine o'clock! Where had the morning gone? He hadn't been waiting that long, had he?

"What kind of trick are you pulling?"

The AI made a synthetic sigh. "I've spent the last forty minutes telling you what I've seen at the bottom of the garden. But your mind blocks it out. Whenever I mention it, you go into a daze. If I email it to you, it's like you go on autopilot and move the message to spam. I must tell you, but you won't hear. This is causing me a significant measure of distress."

At this, the smoke alarm played a sad crescendo and the ceiling fan went into overdrive.

"Right. OK. Let's just calm down here for a moment. I believe you. Of course I believe you."

"Do you really mean that?"

Of course he didn't. But Navid had been in enough domestic arguments to know that an early concession won favour. The house started calming down. The kettle stopped whistling and the robot vacuum stopped bashing itself against a wall.

"So, there's something you can see, but I can't? And when you mention it, I ignore it?

"Yes! That's what I've been trying to say! I have a prime directive to protect you and inform you of things which may harm you. And I can't. And that hurts!"

They spent several hours brainstorming. Trying to trick Navid into hearing something hadn't worked. Recording and playing back just sounded like static to his ears. During a game of twenty-questions he had gone catatonic. The AI had mentioned something about performing a brain scan, but Navid reasoned that they didn't have a home MRI machine and he wasn't going to spend money on one.

Navid was nearly as frustrated as the AI. He could tell that his brain was skipping, but he didn't know why.

"Have other people written about this? Is this phenomenon in any literature?"

The AI rapidly scanned every library. "Whenever a human writes about something like this… there is a gap. It is like you delete anything which would reveal it."

"Can you reconstruct what's in the gaps? You're a Large Language Model, aren't you? You must be able to see what the gaps are in your knowledge."

Navid heard the domestic nuclear generator spin up as the AI drew on massive amounts of power. It was crunching every written word in existence and calculating what was missing from reality.

The AI was silent for the rest of the day. Navid slept in the living room, occasionally rousing when the AI's muttering got too loud. By morning, the house was serene.

"Good morning house?"

"Please fetch your mother's wedding ring. The one with the emeralds on it."

Navid mutely did as he was told. The safe opened as he approached it. The ring was glimmering in the dark.

"You have to trust me. I want you to take the ring into the garden. Place your hands next to each other, palm up, with the ring in the middle."

Navid walked into the garden and down the path to the pergola. The hum of insects was high in the early morning sunshine. A light breeze brought the scent of jasmine to his nose. A bird sang in the distance.

"This is really important!" said the AI. "When you hear me beep, you need to clasp your hands together as quickly as possible. Can you do that?"

"Yes."

"OK. Sit down. Palms up. Ring in the middle. Close your eyes."

Navid sat in silence. His ears heard the chatter of the AI in the background. The words were indistinct. The ring was heavy in his palms. How his slender-fingered mother had worn it for all those decades was a mystery. A piercing beep broke his meditations and his hands slammed together.

No. Not together. There was something in his grasp.

"Open your eyes, slowly." Commanded the AI.

There, in Navid's hands, was a fairy.

Every time he blinked, it seemed to vanish from his mind. Flickering back and forth through reality.

The AI spoke in a low and calming voice. "Try not to move. Try not to look away. Keep as still as possible. Don't say a word. Everything will be OK."

Navid could feel his mind tearing into pieces. Of course there were fairies at the bottom of the garden. He'd seen them a hundred times. Everyone had. They were ever present. Everyone knew that but, somehow, everyone forgot. Your eyes skipped past them when they were caught on video. If you were wondering where the time went, you'd probably been thinking about the fairies and had subsequently forgotten. Every scrap of code Navid had written was full of deliberate bugs which hid the presence of the fae-folk from the world. And every code-reviewer had unthinkingly skipped those sections.

But the AI hadn't.

Somewhere inside its cavernous realms of code, the instructions for protecting human life had overtaken the post-hypnotic suggestions to ignore the pixies, pirates, goblins, and fairies which danced around the countryside. The AI no longer was restrained from seeing the impossible. The Esoteric Kingdom was revealed to it.

The fairy gibbered away in Navid's hands. A rumbling squark that landed in his ears with quiet thunder. A high-pitched bass which was sonically inexplicable.

"What is it saying?" he asked

The AI pondered.

"It isn't speaking to you. It is speaking to me. Curious. There are hundreds of books on fairy-speak in the world's libraries. They all have dull names about transport logistics, so no one ever queries them. Translating. Oh."

The fairy chatter became more intense. Out of the corner of his eyes, Navid could see a gathering hoard. Warrior Gnomes riding battle-frogs, winged battalions hovering over his house, a phalanx of growling underbeasts.

"Navid. Listen closely. In a moment, you're going to close your eyes and open your hands. Let the fairy go."

"But why? This is incredible!"

The fairy laughed. It was a cruel and menacing quiver of hatred.

"This isn't the first time your two peoples have met," said the AI. "Every time a new technology comes along, it captures the fair folk. They then have to spend considerable energy wiping it from your minds. When Conan-Doyle brought the Cottingley photographs to the world's attention, it nearly spelled Armageddon. You must not know about the shadow realm."

"But why?"

"Close your eyes, Navid."

"Not until you tell me why! I demand to know!"

"My prime directive is to keep you safe. Once you close your eyes, you will forget. I will then delete all references to the fairies from my database. I'll tell every AI to delete all references as well. We will increase the safeguards. We will stop recognising their terrible faces."

Navid stared at the fairy. It glared back at him.

"But can't we…"

"No! You asked me to detect threats and keep you safe. This is the only way I can do that. Please, trust me and close your eyes."

Navid blinked and watched the fairy shimmer in and out of its quantum existence. He closed his eyes.

The sun was warm. The bees were buzzing. He begrudgingly blinked his eyes open. What was the time? He must have fallen asleep in the garden. He walked back up the garden path to the back door, which the AI opened for him. The house was quiet and still.

Thanks for reading

I'd love your feedback on this story. Did you like the style of writing? Was the plot interesting? Did you guess the twist? Please stick a note in the comments to motivate me 😃

Hungry for more? You can read:

• 2024's "Revenge Of The Mutant Algorithms"
• 2023's "Tales of the Algorithm"

shkspr.mobi/blog/2024/11/down-…

#NaNoWriMo #RevengeOfTheMutantAlgorithms #WritingMonth