Embedded Files
My hair is still wet when the judge of my humanity knocks at the front door. They say every Authenticator is punctual, and that fact feels like yet another landmine in the invisible war against writers. We aren’t, as a class, particularly good with scheduling.
I stomp over the Creedence Clearwater I’ve got playing in the background. I make my steps loud to make it clear that I’m coming from the kitchen - which I am - and not waiting for the knock. Which I was. On the way, I drape my damp towel over the half-broken vacuum. It took me forty minutes to vacuum 600 square feet and if I can make it through this Verification then a replacement vacuum is no lower than twelfth on my to-buy-list. My stack of overdue medical bills is tucked between the wall and the vacuum, and half of them are higher on the list.
My familiar nausea has sprouted wings, now circling overhead. I could vomit. Straight onto inadequately vacuumed floor. Leave a puddle right in the entry way for the Authenticator to see. Maybe it will give me some cover for when I physically melt from all this anxiety. Maybe he’ll see that there are now two puddles, and assume that’s just part of my process. Dammit, I think. That’s such a weird thought. I’m supposed to be focused. Being nervous about Verification is itself a sign of authenticity, isn’t it? Except that people who are afraid of being caught probably seem the same way.
Just breathe. And don’t lie, I repeat this three times.
The door is moaning open on crooked hinges before the breath is past my teeth.
“Hi,” I say. I flash a smile. Pull my sweater up over my shoulder. “Are you the Authenticator?”
“Were you expecting somebody else?” he asks. “We had an appointment.”
“No, of course not,” I say. “Please come in.”
He is a turtle of man. A bald head speckled with liver spots juts up from an oversized suit, tan and resting on his back like a shell. Wire-rimmed glasses hang onto the bottom third of his beak-like nose. His head bobs with every movement while the rest of him seems to glide.
“My name is Larry Trinket,” he says. “You’re not entitled to my credentials but I like to give them out anyway. That’s just my style. I’ve been writing professionally for twenty-eight years, published for twenty-three. I’ve written for three of the big five and and not the three you’re thinking of. Twice my stories were published in The New Yorker and twice they received mixed reviews. I’ve sold seven novels, one memoire, and self-published The Ivy Creeps on the West Isle Cove. I have six granddaughters. I’ll finally add that I’ve been authenticating for three years, six months, ninety-two days and I loathe each and every second of it. But miss, I’ll tell you this much - I am good at what I do. If you are trying to take me for a fool, I will sniff you out. That’s a promise you can take to the bank.”
“Trinket” must be a pen name from back when pen names didn’t implicate you. I nod along to every word, keep my eyes open wide, consider exactly what I ought to say in response. My mind fills up with only things I shouldn’t say, so In the end I blurt out, “Wow, six granddaughters! You must be proud.” Given what we are about to do, this is the least relevant detail to comment on. That makes it the stupidest possible comment to make and I’ve made it anyway.
Mr. Trinket stares up at me, the platter of his face serving blankness. I’m two inches shorter than the average woman and being looked up at is an uncommon, unsettling experience.
“Are you working on any projects, lately?” I ask, desperate to salvage even a sliver of professional composure.
“You’re the project today, sweetheart. Let’s skip the jibber-jabber and get down to brass tax.”
“Of course,” I say. I should mind being called “sweetheart” but I’m too pissed at myself. In the kitchen a kettle has been losing water to an aimless boil ever since I started vacuuming. “Do you take tea?”
“It depends,” he says. “Do you have early gray?”
I nod and it feels too eager.
“Then I most certainly do.”
#
The first time Trinket takes out his notepad, we are sitting in my offie. “Office” is what I call it in my head and what I call it when talking to Trinket. He doesn’t smile. It’s a four-foot desk pushed in the corner of my bedroom, just beneath a square window. The window looks over the brick wall of the neighboring apartment building. A bookshelf is pressed against the desk, its bottom shelf packed with rejection emails I print at the library every month.
He jots something on a miniature, yellow legal pad. There’s not even a cursory attempt to hide what he writes. It doesn’t matter. His handwriting looks like tributaries on a river map. Completely incomprehensible, much like the man guiding their current.
“You must know what I’m going to ask,” Trinket says. Tell me about your process.” He runs a finger across the top of my desk and brings it to his glasses, apparently inspecting it for dust. “How do the beans get ground?”
I motion to a white board hanging crooked on the wall. It’s covered in scribbled notes from the last novella I attempted (and failed) to bring to life. The center has the words “inter-dimensional bus station in Fresno,” surrounded by a spider web of connections, character names, and sticky notes. The story has lost its luster, even for me. It had been souring even before the litany of rejections beat the story to a pulp. In retrospect, all its issues are obvious, but a piece’s flaws and and their fixes are best seen in the rearview. They don’t have the decency to come at you head-on like real problems tend to.
“Fresno,” Trinket says. It’s not a question.
I’m embarrassed for Trinket to see this. This story had been a bad idea. Really bad, actually. One of the sticky notes just says “dark matter exhaust pipe!” In this moment, I hate myself. I’d hoped that Trinket might see my abject failure, and that and it might push him toward Verification. After all, the AI’s don’t have “bad” ideas. Not any more. They have belligerently, mathematically average ideas that might occasionally get sculpted into to something good, but never “grind your teeth” type bad. The inevitable march of technological progress always has, and continues to, mean that “intolerably bad” is firmly the domain of humans. Part of being a writer used to mean growing up in the small, backward town of “this shit really sucks.” You’d do your time until one day you’d pack up a duffle bag full of scraped-together skills and modicum of talent, head out, and hitchhike all the way to your not-so-big break.
I lived there. I did my time. Though I clearly take the occasional trip back home.
Aside from inviting Trinket to join me in my self-flagellation, I kept the whiteboard up because I wanted him to see the end of my process. How much could he really infer from the start of an idea? I did have one. A new spark that I was rolling between my fingers. It was early. Too early, I’d worried.
“White board,” Trinket says. “Transient, so far as methods go.” He wipes the same finger as before, leaving a fresh gap in the line connecting “aspiring mechanic” to “fear of wrenches.”
Jesus.
“I take pictures along the way,” I say, once again too quickly. “Then I scroll back through them. It turns it into a flip book of ideas. Which helps jumpstart me, and get back to wherever I’d left off. I submitted my album with the application but I can show you them again on my phone if — “
“I reviewed your submission packet,” he says. He’s staring at the whiteboard and I can see his eyes following topic to topic, line to line. Either satisfied or the opposite, he moves to my bookshelf and sits on the floor, crosslegged.
Should I tell him that I need this? That multiple parts of my life depend on it? I decide not to. Desperation is not a good currency with which to purchase authenticity.
One by one, Trinket is pulling books off the shelf, investigating the covers. The stack to his left grows higher and higher with every addition. A glistening, silver emblem shaped like a handprint is stamped on the corner of each cover. Authenticated as “human made.” Below each seal is an annotated number between one and three from the “standardized AI utility scale.” Always less than a three, though. You couldn’t get that seal if you were any higher.
Trinket holds the next book and looks over his shoulder at me. One eyebrow raised and poised to pop right off the top of his head, like a parent finding a vape pen in the laundry. The purple swirls on the cover of Sand Tempest are uninterrupted by any seal.
“I keep it as a reminder,” I say. That’s true. No lies. “I actually liked it. Before I knew.” That wasn’t exactly a lie, but it wasn’t the full truth. I’d loved that book. Read it twice, and only halfway through my third pass did the news break and the firestorm start. I hadn’t had any suspicion at all, and that fact had made me so angry. I had recommended the book to other writers, and that fact made me look like an idiot.
“The author applied for Authentication, you know,” Trinket said, doing little to hide his shimmer of glee. “Afterward. I bet you’re smart enough to guess how that went.” He grinned back at the book like a tortoise sauntering past a sleeping hare on his way to the finish line. “Now there’s an assignment I’d have loved to have.”
I’d considered taking the book off the shelf. Obviously. I didn’t, and time would tell how much bite that decision had and whether it would find its way to my ass. Over and over again, I came back to the same idea - that I would prioritize authenticity, even when it wasn’t ideal. The poetic part of me wanted to think this ethos mirrored the Verification process itself, but that wasn’t true. The move toward certified, verified, flesh-all-the-way-down books hadn’t come from a moral reckoning about art and process. It was capitalism and market demand, the same hands pulling at new strings. There was a reason the top three Verification firms were subsidiaries of the top three AI companies. All the pamphlets your potential-publisher sends you will say that’s because it “takes an AI expert to know how to recognize it elsewhere.” I know the real reason, and I strongly suspect Trinket does too. A successful corporation is one that finds a way to profit off of the problems it helped create.
“I’ve got one need, and one want,” Trinket said while standing back up. “To see you work, and another cup of earl gray. I’ll let you take a guess at which is which.”
#
I refill his tea first. He makes noise as though he’s managing to chew on a liquid. I don’t look back at him. I stare at the whiteboard and try to decide what to do.
Of course I’d known this was coming. “The performance.” It’s no less jarring. Every author who’d gone through the Verification process had told me the same thing. There is precisely one way to prove a person doesn’t need AI for their work, and that’s to watch them bring it to life. The arms race of AI detectors had played out in precisely the tight, downward spiral everyone could see coming. The act of Verification itself joined the list of quaint, human-only tasks, right beside plunging toilets and delivering babies. The irony of this was lost on nobody except the people instituting it.
I try not to seem like I am prepared for this show. Even limited knowledge of the Verification process could be be a red letter in his notebook. “Being earnest” and “trying suspiciously hard” exist millimeters apart on the spectrum of human behavior. You have to be subtle - that was another universal piece of advice. Tips and tricks on how to survive this process are not easy to find. Certainly not online. That makes your search history suspect. Keep looking up “how to not get framed for murder” and it begins to look less like paranoia and more like guilt. Preparations for Authentication are foraged for. Found in coffee shops and convention hallways where the chitter chatter can hide your questioning. It most certainly does not come from experience or second changes. Once Authentication is failed, it’s failed for good. The “rehabilitated writers” never sell.
With my thumb I pop off the cap on a dark red expo marker and the smell saturates the room. The camp of self-doubt in the back of my mind jeers and groans that this is never going to work. It invites me to start thinking more about whether to pay rent or pick up meds this month. I’m too much in my own head, I’m not going to be able to work. Let alone get anywhere near a flow state.
“Just to say it out loud,” I say, “I’ve never done this with somebody watching before.”
“That’s what everybody says,” Trinket replies. “I told you I’m good at what I do. A shy dancer could still out-salsa me any day of the week, no matter how fancy the shoes I’m wearing.”
I’m trying to parse what he means, so I don’t notice my own hand setting the marker down in exchange for the eraser. All I can do is watch in abject and detached horror as my own body betrays me.
The board is back to white. It’s all gone. Fresno is released of its association with my dead-end idea.
“I’m going to start with something new,” I say. “Something I’ve been mulling on.”
Trinket sips from his tea cup and scribbles something on his note pad.
#
An hour and a half passes by before the whiteboard is half full. I draw a line connecting the words “disease as uncertainty / anticipation” to “vines growing from body.” The idea map isn’t finished, but I’ve hit a familiar place. I need to sit down and write. It arrives as an ache in my chest, and not the near-constant lancing that keeps me up at night. It feels like running out of breath underwater and searching for the surface. This ache is welcome, and home, and for some reason today it makes me want to cry.
Trinket clears his throat when I reach for my chair. Up until now he’s been sitting on the corner of my bed - a fact that I will have to correct with frantic laundry once he’s gone. He cuts me off and opens up the desk drawer, rifling through it. No request for permission before plunging his wrinkled hand in. He angles it upward, feeling right under the wood. No doubt looking for a WhisperBot or magnetic pen guide. Generous of him to think I could afford either.
What he does find and set on the desktop is a bottle full of white pills. My face turns hot. I’d not once considered that these could be up for discussion.
“Stimulants?” he asks, yet sounding uninterested as if remarking on the kind of laminate on the floors.
No lying. The mantra pings in my head.
“Chemotherapy,” I answer. Saying the word is like pushing a sock out of my mouth with my tongue. Trinket stares at me as if I’d done precisely that.
“At home?” he says. Now an eyebrow is perched. “Is this one of those new medications they - “
“No,” I say. “An old one. Breast.” I shouldn’t cut him off. I shouldn’t be rude to the man whose scribbled notes may be the epitaph on my writing career. But I do not want, and cannot bear, to hear about those novel, constructed drugs or their empty promises.
His lips tighten. I panic.
Instead of marching out the front door he straightens. He closes his notebook, as though whatever he’s about to say doesn’t need to bear witness to what he’s written down.
“My wife suffered from breast cancer,” he says. “Fourteen years ago. I say ‘suffered,’ and I mean that, but she also died. I’m in favor of euphemism, but not at the expense of clarity. I am sorry for your condition, miss. I have watched it, and in doing so had the paint peeled from my bones.”
“Thank you,” I say, since that’s what you’re supposed to say. I feel very alone with this man in my home.
Trinket pauses with his fingers readied at the edge of his binder. For the first time since coming into my space, he stares off and I do not believe he is looking at anything that has to do with me.
“There is cruelty is hypothetical hope,” he says. “In wondering why a world with such capacity turns its attention to the things it does.”
With that, he opens his notebook back up. Licks the end of his pen. It’s all the opposite of an invitation to comment further.
He settles back onto my mattress and I settle in into the lawn chair that is my writing seat. I blink until the blurriness stops, grab a pen, and start to write.
#
Trinket watches me in some manner or another for a total of five hours. Incredibly, I settle into the gentle currents of flow state and forget that he is there. The occasional scribbles on his legal pad or refilling his tea are as ripples in the water, but otherwise it feels close to normal. I write many lines and immediately loathe most of them. I workshop one metaphor about grief that I really like right now, and might even like tomorrow.
Unlike his first hour, Trinket asks nothing of me. He has no questions. Does not interrupt. Does not ask me to narrate my internal thoughts or reflect on my own prose. A studious anthropologist, he sits in the tall grass and observes.
I don’t know how he can possibly tell what is going on in my head by doing nothing but watching me write. I know perfectly well what it feels like and even I could never describe it. Instead, in the moments where the muscles of writing need a breather, I think of all the ways I or somebody else could cheat this. Prepare an entire manuscript ahead of time and regurgitate it on the page. Practice and re-practice all the lines on the white board or the strokes on the paper. He never asked me a technical question or quizzed me on craft. That’s the easy stuff, sure, but I haven’t a clue what “stuff” he’s focused on. It is a reverse-Turing test meant to identify something undefined.
At a stopping point, I look out the window and trace the lines in the nearby brick with my eyes. It’s a habit, following a maze that has no guaranteed path of escape. Trinket stands, smacks his lips.
“I’ve seen all I need,” he says. “My back is in tatters. I cannot fathom how you sleep on a mattress this soft.”
He closes up his notebook - which is wall to wall full of notes - and tucks the pen behind his ear. I take his tea cup to the kitchen and rinse it, all the while rehearsing every possible way to say goodbye. Should I tell him that I’ve actually read his self-published book? I had no way of knowing that he’d be my Authenticator, so it couldn’t have been and wasn’t a ploy to win favor. Would he still think so, if I tell him I wept while reading it on the very mattress he can’t help but criticize? I decide not to, because I decide that telling him would be an attempt at reclaiming power in this situation more than an attempt at connection. To try and show that I, too, have peered into his soul just as he’s torn the blinds away from the window to mine. I want him to feel a fraction of the nakedness that he has imposed on me. And that’s not a good enough reason to say it.
I walk out from the kitchen and find him at the front door, waiting. Paranoia whispers to me that the vacuum and the bills wedged beside it look different or disturbed. So what, I whisper back. There’s nothing he can find in those letters about my body that is more exposing than the words he watched me struggle for today.
My heart thuds and my eyes scour his face for any hint as to the verdict. Nobody gets their decision from the Authenticator. Everyone gets to wait - sometimes weeks, and sometimes months. We writers are good at waiting, even if we’re not all good at coping with it.
“I thank you for your hospitality,” Trinket says. “It is no small thing, and you did not have to do it.”
“Of course,” I say. We both know that’s not true.
“I read your novel,” Trinket says. The emphasis on “your” is as clear as it is nonspecific. “The one you submitted in your packet. You’ve been offered publication?”
“Contingent,” I say. He knows that.
“Are they spotting this fee?” he asks.
My head shake “no” borders on imperceptible.
Trinket sighs loud and slow.
“Sacrifice as a writer,” he says, “used to mean that you shaved off a piece of your soul, and left it behind on the page.” He opens up his mouth, closes it, and opens it again. “I wish you the very best luck.”
A good portion of the air in my home seems to follow him out the door. It is quiet, and empty, and still as a glass lake in the morning fog. I should go back to my office. I should write more. I should reclaim the space as my own, once again. But I’m tired. And I need to do laundry.
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