It’s been a story September so far, because not only did I release that second game of mine, but my first flash fiction story got released as well, named ThrAIve. This blog entry is mostly about the behind-the-scenes of that story, as well as some of my intentions.
Flash Fiction February
Ever since November 2020, I’ve participated in several online courses of the Storytelling Collective. Back then I started with their Write Your First Adventure program, which led to the release of my first DMsGuild publication Final Contact. Last year, when I had my first Deutschlandticket vacation in August 2024 (yes, that’s a thing that I do), I planned to write about the adventures I had during those days. I started out as usual, thinking about story structure and planned it as a book. It was supposed to be a story of someone, travelling through the area, finding out about local sights and traditions he hadn’t seen before, while making an internal transformation to a new person, away from someone stuck in a job, to someone embracing friends, community and living a better life. Obviously, I never came to writing that story, but during that ideation process I saw the „Short Story September“ theme and thought about taking that core of an idea and transfer it to a Fantasy setting, which then became my story Arcanexium, which is something I’m trying to consider releasing as an own setting for short stories in an anthology series. After that I took part in most of the challenges that followed, which eventually led to Flash Fiction February, an entire month of writing Flash Fiction stories. Within a span of 28 days I wrote actually more than 28 flash fiction stories (I think it was 30 stories in total) and the idea was to take a one-word prompt and write an entire story around it. Some stories made me think about putting them in that Arcanexium world, in another TTRPG campaign world that I was thinking about that is about local folklore and legends or corporate horror. By that time, I was transitioning from one position to another within my company, and I used that time to think about the working in a company in general, especially looking at some of the incoming ecstatic enthusiasm of the new AI start-ups that are popping up all over the world.
Rules of Monitoring
Early that month, (on the fourth prompt to be exact), the prompt word was „Rules“. In those days, I would see that prompt early in the morning, just when work day started, so that word sort of ruminated throughout the day until I had time to write the story late at night. I think at that time I had the idea of not writing a standard prose text, but trying out different forms of storytelling. In the last few years, I had been an application owner, who would also have a close look at some of the changes within a software from a vendor, seeing how one update to another introduces new features, while bugfixes and hotfixes are rolled out iteratively over time. Especially, when you’re considering Apple keynotes or the recent rise of updates, patches and new feature roll-outs of ChatGPT, Gemini, grok and other AI systems, you’re mostly following this as a user of those products and systems. But there’s mostly something hidden here, namely what is happening inside the company. Most of the times, you’ll only hear about it after the time, once people leave a company, their NDAs would end, they write books or leaks or hacks would occur… or you can only piece it together like a distributed puzzle. That’s where the idea of writing a story completely in terms of a Change Log came from. In Software Engineering circles, it’s basically summing up changes in release versions from one version to another, like new features that are now in the software, bugs that have been fixed or some other refinements. It’s like the boring brother of the large and fancy keynote presentations that is mostly for managers or customers. This actually contains the nitty gritty thing. For my story, I sort of mixed those two together, so on the one hand, you’ll have that overly-exuberant management talk but on the other hand you’d also get an idea what happens technically in the software and what new features are being implemented. One thing that stuck with me, was the Health aspect of Apple product in recent years that would put more and more connectivity into the Health app in order to gather more and more functionalities and opportunities to gather medical data and health information on your smartphone. That became the core of my flash fiction story that eventually became ThrAIve.
ThrAIve (*Spoilers*)
The main pitch of the story is the story of a company that creates a self-improvement app that combines all health data from connected devices and helps you live a better life. But then again, there’s this recent up-tick about Elon Musk’s company Neuralink that experiments with active implants in human trial runs. In Version 1.0 ThrAIve is just a simple app like many others that collects and processes data, but then, Version 1.2 happens, that activates a connection to implant devices and looking at the immediate following Hotfix 1.2.1, something terribly must have gotten wrong that they had to pull that functionality. Only at the end of the story, you would see what has happened behind the scenes and what internal battles have been fought, that eventually led to the CEO being thrown out of the company and being replaced by someone with nefarious ambitions, that is also supported by a more scrupelous government. After years of feature-creep and more and more intrusion into personal data and connecting into federal government systems, a state-wide revolution eventually ends that government, making it possible for the original CEO to regain control of the company and showing the world what has happened behind the curtains while the app has slowly become a system to enforce rules and punish people that don’t follow the rules strictly. What I also hinted at in the end was to dive into mind control stuff, that would make all users worldwide into obedient followers that could have rolled out with a Version 6.0.
In hindsight, it’s a cautionary tale of a tech-based oligarchy that has government systems connect with a privately-based company, as they pretend to care for user’s privacy and use it for control. I hope it’s just a sci-fi horror story and *NOT* a blueprint for autocratic leaderships and technocrats (looking at you, Elon Musk and Peter Thiel).
So… that’s just my story here. At the end of the day, I played around with other computer science-based storytelling (one of the them was written as a collection of Change Requests, totally not inspired by Atlassian, ServiceNow or similar systems đ ) but eventually decided to use this story for the Flash Fiction story collection „In a Flash Vol. 3“. It’s not only containing my 8-page story, but also dozens of other stories. You can find it here on DriveThruFiction.
