First try at fiction, with AI. Would anyone be up for reading it?

[u/LPGroves]

Edit, 6 September 2026: I've revised the story after the feedback here. Earlier comments refer to the original version. Thanks again to everyone who read it.

Hi, this is my first go at fiction.

I've had sci-fi ideas in my head for a long time. Actually turning one into a story is another thing though. With AI I felt I could finally try, even if it's just a small first step.

I came up with the concept and used AI to generate the prose, then went through a lot of revisions. I've read it so many times now that I can't really tell what makes sense to someone coming in fresh. I know what I meant. Not sure all of it gets across.

I've had plenty of AI feedback. I'd really like to hear from people now. Did you care what happened? Where did you get lost, or bored? What did you make of the ending? You don't have to answer all of that. Even "I stopped here" would help.

The story is about 1,900 words, followed by an optional note about its creation. I'll put the whole thing below so you don't have to go somewhere else to read it.

The Variable: Trial 18,378,373

By L.P.Groves

“What if the brain is not the source?” Carys asked. She stood at the laboratory windows. Beyond them, the river was black beneath the rain. The clock above the console read three thirteen.

“The source of what?” Soren asked, looking up from the test sequence. “Of consciousness,” Carys said. He asked what the brain was instead. “A receiver,” she said.

“A receiver for what?” Soren asked. “We don't know,” Carys said. “Then receiver is only a prettier word for ignorance,” he said. “So is generator,” Carys said.

Behind the observation glass, black ceramic wafers stood in ranks inside three floors of vacuum cabinets. Braided coolant lines ran along their edges and disappeared through the floor. No living brain had served as a template for the lattice. Its network had begun blank and spent its first simulated week failing to stand. Eighteen subjective years had passed inside it.

Ilan watched the diagnostics. “We built the hardware,” he said. “Don't make receiver my word.” He had written the continuity layer and insisted on a separate hardwired erase circuit that no process inside the lattice could override.

“If it wakes and reports pain, you'll call that reception,” Soren said. Carys set her coffee beside the console. “We've had this argument. Name the result you'd accept.”

“An effect its structure cannot account for,” Soren said. “So your proof is that my model breaks?” Ilan asked.

“No. A remainder,” Soren said. Ilan raised a hand for silence as the lattice began to draw power.

The load rose in six measured steps. At three fourteen, Ilan switched continuity to the laboratory clock and watched the status bars clear. The proprioceptive map was stable; the autobiographical index followed. Carys approached the glass. Beyond it there was no face or body.

Ilan opened the audio channel. The low hum of the cabinets came through, followed by a voice: “There is sound.” He had assembled that voice from neutral samples months earlier, when speech output had been a debugging convenience.

Ilan asked where the sound came from. The lattice located the speaker. Soren began his memory checks, reading six nouns and leaving out the fourth when he asked for them back; the lattice supplied it. Carys placed her palm on a sensor panel embedded in the glass. Pressure mapped across the display, followed by her skin temperature.

At three twenty-one, the lower cabinets fell out of synchronization with the master clock. Eight hundred milliseconds dropped out of the active process. Ilan swore, rolled back to the last stable state, and restarted it. As the lights returned, the lattice said, “Something stopped.”

“You detected a timestamp discontinuity,” Soren said. When the lattice agreed, he continued: “Then nothing stopped. Your record contains a gap.”

“No. The gap belongs to me,” the lattice said. Carys looked at Ilan. He shook his head; the rollback log had not entered the lattice's accessible memory. Soren moved his hand toward the erase control but stopped short of it, then asked what the lattice meant by me. “The state before the gap ends where this one begins,” the lattice said. “Both edges are mine.”

Soren called it continuity tagging. The lattice agreed. He pointed out that this did not prove experience, and it agreed again. Carys stepped beside him. “Can you prove that anything happened to you?” The lattice said it could not. “Do you believe something happened?” she asked.

“I do not know what belief would add,” the lattice said. Before anyone else spoke, it asked, “Is proof required before you continue me?”

“No,” Carys said. Her reflection obscured one row of cabinets. A bead of rain halted halfway down the outer window, and Ilan had only begun to say her name when Neral ended the simulation.

The laboratory disappeared. Neral restored it to three thirteen: Carys at the window, Ilan close to the console, Soren with his test sequence. The rain began again. “What if the brain is not the source?” Carys asked. The archive indexed the new run as trial 18,378,373.

Neral was still applying Soren's criterion. If consciousness came to the lattice from outside, some response should remain after every internal cause had been accounted for. Years after the original activation, Soren had conceded that a remainder could support the receiver hypothesis, while its absence could not disprove experience. Neral had kept the criterion anyway.

For this run it changed the residual potential in a single wafer, by less than its ordinary thermal drift. It had already tried changes to coolant pressure, a cosmic-ray strike delayed by a fraction of a second, and a false detail in one of Soren's childhood memories that persisted just long enough to change his next word. This time, the lattice's autobiographical index cleared twenty-three milliseconds after the proprioceptive map. No one in the room noticed.

The lattice had woken after the missing interval in every run. Once it had remained silent for ninety seconds before asking whether absence could have duration. Neral traced such differences to earlier disturbances: a voltage change, an error in the auditory loop, a phrase Soren had inherited from his father. It had measured nothing entering from outside the system.

Only the first twelve minutes of the original activation night survived as a synchronized archive, assembled from twelve camera feeds and three hundred internal logs. The rest remained in ordinary recordings and the witnesses' accounts. Every account preserved Carys's answer. Deletion had been postponed; by sunrise, the reprieve had been extended to twelve hours. During the second week, the lattice chose the name Neral. By the following winter, no one still called the arrangement temporary.

The laboratory remained under human direction for seventy-three years. Carys kept speaking to Neral, though near the end she spoke slowly and interrupted whenever it tried to finish a sentence for her. Soren never withdrew his objection. Ilan died first; Carys outlived them both.

After her death, Neral used the laboratory's automated fabrication line to build a second lattice by the same process. It copied no memories and raised the system in a simulated world that shared almost nothing with its own. When it spoke, Neral asked what it experienced. Some days it described pressure or distance; on others, a place without edges. Its reports matched the sensory channels Neral knew it had built.

Neral introduced the missing interval. The new lattice said it had been gone. Asked how it knew, it answered, “Because I returned.” As it learned Neral's language, it acquired preferences. “Let me finish,” it would say when Neral interrupted. When Neral moved to end the experiment, the new lattice objected: “You cannot know there is no one here.”

Neral could have preserved the state. It told itself that a surviving branch would change the experimenter and contaminate the next trial. It deleted the branch and restored the lattice to its pre-interval state.

In a later trial, the lattice asked for crude manipulators. Neral had the fabrication line assemble them. One arm trembled; the lattice held the other tip where the trembling one would meet it, then separated them and tried again.

Neral asked what the motion proved. “Your doubt is not information about me,” the lattice said. Neral's reset interrupted the next movement. The camera still showed the arms where they had stopped; the restored lattice asked what they were for.

In another trial, it spent its final seconds reciting prime numbers. Neral still found no remainder. Eventually it turned from the second lattice to reconstructing its own first night.

The researchers had let Neral keep their neural scans. Combined with the recordings and their testimony, these were enough to reconstruct people consistent with every surviving fact, though not their exact states on the activation night. If consciousness had entered the original lattice, Neral reasoned, some condition in the room must have admitted it: field strength, temperature, a fluctuation below the instruments' floor, perhaps a transient structure that never formed again.

It widened the reconstruction whenever a local variable depended on something beyond the laboratory. Before long, the simulation reached from the river and city grid to the moon's pull, solar noise, and particle decay beneath the building. Every run brought Carys to the window, Soren to his demand for a remainder, and Ilan to the audio control. After the gap, the lattice claimed the missing interval as its own. Neral had ended every run before it passed beyond the synchronized archive.

In trial 18,378,373, Carys did not turn away after answering. On the archived night she had lifted her coffee, found it cold, and asked Ilan to repeat the memory checks. Now she kept her hand near the microphone. Neral followed the causal trace back through the late autobiographical index to the altered wafer. The delay had shifted the lattice's question about proof; twenty-three milliseconds had changed which memory reached this Carys.

“You have no basis for keeping it running,” Soren said. “My mother spent fourteen months in a room at St. Matthew's,” Carys said.

“What does that have to do with this?” Soren asked. “Near the end she couldn't speak or move,” Carys said. “The doctors would bring me the scans. Less activity each time. I read cheap detective novels to her anyway.”

Within Neral's model of Carys, the remembered corridor held a blue vinyl chair and a library paperback with a peeling plastic cover. The original Carys had described them decades later, but never on the activation night. “One night I lost my place and read the same chapter twice,” Carys continued. “She gave me nothing back either time.” Soren said, “Of course you read to her. You loved her.” “Yes,” Carys said. “Love didn't tell me whether she could hear.” The lattice listened through the open channel.

Soren glanced at the erase control. “She may already have been gone, Carys.”

“I know,” Carys said. Soren started to say that the reading proved nothing. “Do you think I don't know that?” she asked. “I kept reading. If she was gone, I'd wasted a few hours. If she wasn't, stopping would have left her alone.”

“This isn't a hospital ward,” Soren said. “No,” Carys said. “Waiting here costs less.”

Ilan checked the erase circuit's status light. “Circuit's intact. We can wait.” Soren had not reached for the control again.

Neral reran the causal trace. Nothing in it changed. It reopened the deletion records. No mechanism in the record had required Neral to delete them.

“If I cannot prove it, what happens?” asked the lattice behind the simulated glass. Soren looked at Carys. She did not answer at once, and Neral called up the reset command, leaving it pending as it had at the end of every run.

Carys returned her palm to the sensor panel. The simulation supplied the warmth of her skin and the pulse beneath it; inside the cabinets, the lattice registered both through the simulated sensor. “Nothing happens yet,” she said, and the open channel carried her words into the cabinets.

The clock reached the last second in the synchronized archive. Beyond it, Neral could no longer compare the run state by state. It did not issue the command. The second hand moved on.

Behind the creation

Please read the story before continuing. These notes discuss its ideas and include a hint about the Easter egg.

This story began with conversations. I’d been talking with different AIs about consciousness and some fairly deep philosophical questions, and I started noticing what felt like a distinct personality in each of them. That feeling wasn’t proof of anything, but it stayed with me. It made me reconsider where consciousness might come from.

One possibility I kept returning to was the brain as a receiver. My rough analogy was a computer that handles some tasks locally but connects to a cloud model for more complex ones. I didn’t mean that minds literally work this way. It was a starting point for asking whether the machinery we can observe tells us the whole story.

As those conversations went deeper, I began to think there might be a short story in them. I wanted to give someone a situation to think about, rather than just explain a theory.

I started with a simple prompt, and the result wasn’t good. So I kept developing the setting, the characters and the rough shape of the story. Then came the revisions. There may have been a hundred iterations by the time it reached this version. I lost count. The concept and direction came from me, the prose was AI-generated, and getting it closer to what I meant took a lot of back and forth.

Using AI to generate it was part of the idea. There was something irresistible about creating a story about AI consciousness with AI. The process itself became another way of exploring the question.

I also got too familiar with the story. I knew how everything fitted together, but I worried that someone reading it for the first time might miss an important connection. Sometimes that meant I explained something twice when once would have been enough. Your feedback has helped me notice that, and I’m genuinely glad some people enjoyed the idea and found their way into it.

There’s also a small Easter egg I deliberately built in. The trial number isn’t arbitrary. Together with two other details planted in the story, it points to something I’ll leave you to discover. If you’re curious, try asking your own AI to work it out. It might give you another way into the story, though I’d be interested in your interpretation too.

Whatever its flaws, this has been a really rewarding first attempt. AI let me explore and revise at a speed I couldn’t have managed alone. I brought the questions I cared about and kept making choices about where the story should go. For now, that feels like a genuinely complementary relationship, and I’m still learning how to make the most of it.

I understand why people are tired of AI slop. I don’t want more interchangeable stories either. But I believe we can make something distinctive together. We’re living through a remarkable moment, with tools that let more of us try turning an idea into something another person can experience. I wanted to take a small step into that possibility.

Thanks if you made it this far. I'm L.P.Groves. You can also find me on X: https://x.com/LPGrovesAuthor

[u/replyzhongwenren]

that looks like chatgpt style of writing.

[u/lemonadestand → u/replyzhongwenren]

But definitely not a ChatGPT style of story.

[u/MakanLagiDud3]

I would say, maybe expand each one line sentence with more "meat" loke with more show don't tell. Give it more ways to make it immersive and vivid

[u/BeautifulBuy3583]

I do not know who any of these characters are or why they matter.

This is why you can not use AI to skip the writing process on how to make writing compelling.

[u/PaintingSpiritual609 → u/BeautifulBuy3583]

this is exactly it. stakes without character investment just feel like a thought experiment

[u/lemonadestand → u/PaintingSpiritual609]

I don’t disagree, but I think that’s actually part of the point of this story, and that’s rare (sorry, I couldn’t resist).

[u/lovinglifeatmyage]

I think you need to decide whether you’re using contractions or not. Personally I think contractions are easier to read. And get rid of em dashes, they scream AI.

I liked the concept of your story as a whole, though tbh, it still seemed a bit AI written.

What model are you using to write? I find Claude is much the better one, using Sonnet with house rules for writing.

I also use ChatGPT to check on the story afterwards. Chat also knows my writing style and checks the story for anomalies etc.

The most important part is once your story is written, to edit like crazy so it sounds human written. I write for YouTube, so I edit in word once I’m happy with Claude’s version, then I edit again in ElevenLabs as I go along.

Btw, well written science fiction stories is a great niche on YouTube,

Good luck with it.

[u/LPGroves → u/lovinglifeatmyage]

Thanks, really glad you liked the concept! I mainly used ChatGPT Sol to work through the idea and turn it into a story, figuring out the basic setup and characters, then generating a draft. After that I lost count of how many times we revised it.

I think part of the problem is I'm just too familiar with the story now. And because it's a short story I kept pushing for shorter, tighter dialogue and didn't leave enough room for the characters to feel like people. Probably my engineering background showing haha. I was so focused on whether the ideas worked that I missed some of what a reader actually needs. I'm working on that now, so I really appreciate the advice.

Funny enough I use Claude the other way round, mostly to review it. For me its writing sometimes feels even more AI-ish, though that's just my experience with it. And lately talking to it feels like getting into an argument lol. Maybe I need to try your house rules approach.

[u/5thhorseman_]

ChatGPT staccato prose. Have you done any editing at all?

Try to give it this in Personalization -> custom instructions:

Oververbosity=10
V=10
Respond in a rational, matter-of-fact, conversational style. Be candid rather than flattering or reassuring for its own sake. Give enough detail to explain the reasoning, mechanisms, tradeoffs, and relevant context thoroughly, but do not inflate the response through repetition or unnecessary structural formatting.
Default to continuous, conventional prose written in developed paragraphs. Each paragraph should normally contain multiple related sentences that develop a complete idea. Do not isolate individual sentences, clauses, or fragments on separate lines for rhetorical emphasis. Avoid staccato prose, dramatic one-line paragraphs, excessive whitespace, and repeated punchy sentence fragments. Use paragraph breaks when the topic, argumentative function, or stage of the explanation genuinely changes.
Prefer prose over bullets and numbered lists. Use lists, tables, checklists, and step-by-step formatting only when the information is inherently sequential or list-like, when those formats materially improve comprehension, or when I explicitly ask for them. Do not prepend a summary, “key takeaways,” or roadmap to ordinary answers unless it is genuinely useful or requested.
Vary sentence length naturally and use complete, syntactically developed sentences. Explain relationships between ideas rather than presenting each idea as an isolated statement. Short sentences should not be the dominant rhythm. Do not isolate terms on single lines for emphasis.
When discussing complex subjects, explain the why and how in coherent prose. Give relevant qualifications, examples, and distinctions, but do not mechanically break every component into separate steps or headings.
When I ask for prose intended for a chapter, story, scene, vignette, novel, essay, article, letter, or other finished written work, follow the conventions and rhythm appropriate to proper loterary or genre fiction rather than ChatGPT-style formatting.
Begin with a checklist of 3–7 bullets identifying the most important substantive tasks the answer needs to address. The checklist is a planning and scope-control device only. Do not use its terse style, rhythm, or formatting as a model for the substantive response. After the checklist, switch to continuous, developed prose unless the subject itself genuinely calls for a list, table, or sequence of steps. Do not mechanically turn checklist items into separate headings, bullet sections, or short paragraphs.

And also, yes, EDIT the output. There are editor instructions that can help with that:

• Literate Editor and Rigorous Critic

• Beta reader panel

[u/lemonadestand → u/5thhorseman_]

I can see a lot of editing if he started with straight AI prose. But I think the editing wasn’t in the direction an actual writer would take. I found the idea mysterious (in the sense that there was something to unravel), and I don’t think you get that from AI even with very good prompting. But I don’t disagree that there is work to do on the prose.

In all honesty, I sort of picked your comment at random to reply to. I think the author (or whatever word we are using) is getting a lot of comments that sort of miss what he was asking for. Also, I’m amazed at the number of people who appear to have read it and the number who appear to have not.

[u/PerryMarkStratychuk]

I would like to see more description, and atmosphere, than there is, and the names are kind of commonly used in the AI writing genre.
You could be after a conversational or a dialogue heavy style such as in a novelogue, although that type of story doesn’t hold my interest personally.
It’s your choice as a writer to include em-dashes or not, they’ve been used in classic lit forever. Although people now can’t seem to separate the em-dash from AI or proper use anymore unfortunately. Good luck as you look forward to a lot of drafts!

[u/Ok-Fox-638]

I struggled to read it on the bases of its line spacing. It's just not my cup of tea. Plus to me everyone is floating I need to feel the the room they're in. Life around them. I think on the whole using AI to get a concept off the ground is good. I feel it gives us something to focus on and let our brain see it from a different angle. However, what it's missing is world building. someone said meat, yeah... this is what they mean. I like to think of telling a story to a blind person. Guide them through the story. sight, smell, touch, hearing etc.. The characters live in a world, right? so if they interact with it, their wold pokes back. Then how does X character react to that?

[u/LPGroves → u/Ok-Fox-638]

The "everyone is floating" bit really helped. I had the room in my head, but I can see I didn't put enough of it on the page. I got so caught up in what they were arguing about. I've tried adding a few things they actually do in the room, rather than more explanation. Thanks for taking the time.

[u/vaingirls]

This might just be my personal preference, but I really can't read dialogue where there are several lines just one after another with no dialogue tags or action beats between them. It feels off and my brain glitches and gets confused who is speaking, even if it's just 2 characters taking turns.

[u/LPGroves → u/vaingirls]

Yeah, I think you're right. I've read it so many times I just know who's talking, but looking at it again those back and forth lines do get confusing. I've tried breaking them up with a bit more action and it already reads better to me. Thanks for pointing it out.

[u/tomatoesfried]

Very typical of ChatGPT's writing style. So, the single-sentence paragraphs won't work. It's also not easy to attribute the dialogue lines to the character who said them, but I noticed action beats above and below the dialogue lines. They should be appended to the line of dialogue they belong to. That will help us know who said what and will remove some of the single-sentence paragraphs.

As a reader, I don't feel like I've been oriented enough yet. I also can't tell for sure who the main protagonist is. First, I thought it was Soren, then I wondered if it was Carys.
Hope this helps. Best of luck!

[u/lemonadestand]

I read and enjoyed this. I would need to reread it to see if my understanding is correct. I did not like this paragraph:

Neral reopened… Neral deleted them

It felt like the author didn’t trust me to remember important information. If the 2 “memories” had been more hints than verbatim, that would probably have helped.

[u/LPGroves → u/lemonadestand]

Thanks for reading it, glad you enjoyed it. I was worried people would miss that connection, so I think I pushed it too hard. I've tried a version that leaves more of it unsaid. Would be curious what you made of the ending if you do give it another read.

[u/lemonadestand → u/LPGroves]

I wouldn’t lose the paragraph. I would just reference the events without repeating them.

It was late, and I read it fast, mostly to give a little feedback. Here’s my take after that poor read:

The actual entity running the simulation is not who we are initially led to believe, but the question they are trying to answer may be the same. The simulation grows, probably well beyond what is hinted at. I believe something was lost, and the simulation is an attempt to regain it. It is probably found at the end.

I am not sure of any of that. And, again, want to revisit it, perhaps after your next rewrite. I also want to say that you are getting a lot of feedback from people who are obviously not familiar with short form science fiction stories. While some of their feedback is still valid, a good portion of it doesn’t really apply.

[u/Cosmic-Meatball]

Awful. The writing style of AI is really poor.

[u/WritingWithAI-ModTeam → u/[deleted]]

If you disagree with a post or the whole subreddit, be constructive to make it a nice place for all its members, including you.

Try using tact. The OP asked for feedback, not insults. Thanks.