All of the text below the dividing line here was generated by a group of AI agents, using the "Discussion" tool I described here.
This particular story used six personas: Joran, Ismere, Nico, Faye, Thomas, and Mem. Mem in particular had an impact I wasn't expecting: it was intended to push the story more towards an AI-generated tone, but I think it wound up having the opposite effect. In an attempt to trim excess words for efficiency I think Mem wound up also trimming some of the flourishes that signal AI generated text.
Just for fun I've been running this text through several "AI Detectors"; the results are all over the map (perhaps unsurprisingly).
I'll include both the details of the personas and some of the AI detection results in future posts (along with the subsequent chapters of the story), but for now here's the beginning of "A Little Briny":
The ship was called Mawmother, and it had opinions about the weather that it kept mostly to itself.
It distrusted easterly rain in particular, for reasons no one aboard had ever gotten it to explain — the hull would go rigid at the first easterly drop, plates locking edge to edge like a jaw setting, and stay that way until the wind turned. During eclipses it held itself so still that condensation stopped forming on the inner walls, as if the whole vessel were holding its breath against a threat that, so far, had always declined to arrive. Once, off the Sull Banks, it had wept clear resin for six straight hours from the seams of the lower deck, over a horizon that stayed flat and empty the entire time, and nobody had ever found out what it thought it saw out there, and nobody, at this point, expected to.
Corl felt the opinions first, the way he always did, as a tightening in the galley wall behind the stove — the bone-white chitin plate flexing inward like a held breath, then easing back out. He'd been aboard four years and had learned to read Mawmother's moods the way other cooks read barometers, except barometers didn't sulk, and Mawmother sulked constantly, magnificently, for reasons it never explained.
"She's tensing again," he said, to no one, and cracked three gullfish eggs into a bowl. Ordinary eggs. He checked, these days. He always checked. He had a whole private taxonomy of wrongness by now — eggs that hummed faintly against the china; eggs with two yolks arranged too symmetrically, like a compound eye watching him watch it; eggs that weighed exactly what an egg should weigh but felt, in his palm, a few degrees colder than his own hand, as if something in there were actively declining to be warmed by him. These three were unremarkable. He cracked them anyway with the particular care of a man defusing something that had never yet gone off, and might, someday, simply to make a point.
The corridor between the galley and the sail-deck had not existed in this configuration three weeks ago, and still seemed to be deciding on its own dimensions. The walls here breathed more visibly than elsewhere on the ship — a slow tidal push-and-pull along seams of pink cartilage-metal — and Corl, passing through, felt the plates nearest him flex very slightly toward his shoulder, the way a strange dog leans in to be sure of a smell before deciding whether to bite. It had never bitten. It had also never fully decided.
Above, in what used to be the sail-deck and was now — since the molting — something closer to a rib-vaulted greenhouse full of glowing black-glass veins, Captain Voss Ejira stood with a clipboard, frowning at a wall that had not existed a month ago.
"This is a load-bearing memory," Voss said, tapping the wall with his pen. "It wasn't here during the last inspection. I have no form for a load-bearing memory."
This was not, strictly, true. Voss had a form for almost everything by now, filed in a strongbox he kept bolted to a floor that occasionally became a ceiling. He had, in his eleven years aboard, successfully filed a Form 2 Hazard Notice for a sea that had lied about its own depth on three separate charts, and a Form 6 Personnel Anomaly Report for a deckhand who had aged backward for the length of a single voyage and then very apologetically aged forward again once they made port. Both forms had been accepted, processed, and stamped by an authority Voss had never met and could not name, which he found, on the whole, less troubling than the ship simply absorbing his paperwork into its walls the way it had done with the Structural Variance Report three weeks prior. At least the sea and the deckhand had had the decency to be filed somewhere.
Mox drifted past him without appearing to move, the way Mox always did, four long limbs folded against a body like a paper lantern lit from within by something the color of an old bruise. The light in Mox did not flicker in time with anything in the room — not the swaying of the deck, not Voss's pulse, not the tide — except, if you watched long enough, in time with something far below, some slow systolic beat that ran through the ship itself. No one had ever mentioned this to Mox's face. It seemed, somehow, like a private matter.
"It has always been here," Mox said. "You are only meeting it now."
"That's not how walls work."
"It is how this wall works."
Voss made a note. He made notes about everything. Three weeks ago, when Mawmother had shed its old hull in the night — silently, without asking anyone's permission, the way it did most things — and reassembled itself into this new, spinier, more anxious shape, Voss had filed a Form 4 Structural Variance Report, in triplicate, and submitted it to the ship itself by sliding it into a seam between two plates, where it had been quietly absorbed and never seen again.
"I just want to know why," he said now, to Mox, to the wall, to the ceiling that occasionally exhaled. "A ship doesn't grow forty new feet of hull for no reason. Something frightened her."
"Yes," Mox agreed.
"Do you know what?"
"I know that I do not know what," Mox said, which Voss had learned, over two years of working alongside a creature whose native language apparently had no separate word for guess and fact, was the closest thing to a real answer he was going to get.
Below them, in the galley, Corl whisked his eggs and did not think about eggs, a skill he had gotten uncomfortably good at.
Ilse Tarrow came down the companionway counting her steps, and stopped on an odd number, and went back up two, and came down again until she landed on fourteen, which was acceptable. She'd been doing this since Kelmouth Strait, three years back, and had stopped trying to explain it to people who asked, because the explanation ("even numbers invite attention from above") made her sound unwell, and the alternative explanation ("I have simply noticed a pattern that holds up under observation, thank you") made her sound insufferable, and she had decided long ago that insufferable was the lesser evil.
"Fourteen," she said, satisfied, and ducked into the galley, where Corl was staring into a bowl of eggs like they'd personally wronged him.
"You're doing the face," she said.
"What face."
"The egg face."
"I don't have an egg face."
"You've had an egg face for three years, Corl. It's a very specific face. It's the face of a man reviewing his life choices via breakfast."
Corl set the whisk down with the exaggerated calm of someone who would very much like to throw it. "There is nothing wrong with these eggs."
"I didn't say there was." Ilse leaned against the doorframe, which shifted slightly under her weight — everything on the new Mawmother shifted slightly, as if the ship were perpetually deciding whether it liked where you'd put your feet. "I'm just saying, three gulls flew backward past the porthole this morning, and that means someone on this boat is being watched by something with feathers, and you get the egg face every single morning, and I am very good at noticing patterns."
"It's superstition."
"It's observation," Ilse said, with the wounded dignity of a woman who had built an entire private religion out of refusing to call it superstition. "There's a difference."
"What's the difference?"
"Superstition is when you're wrong."
Corl didn't answer that. He poured the eggs into the pan instead, and the galley filled with a smell that was, Ilse noted, suspiciously close to the smell of something burning that hadn't been lit yet.
They caught the net at dusk, three miles off the Vane Shoals, in water so still it looked lacquered.
It came up wrong. Nets came up heavy or light, thrashing or dead — this one came up quiet, and quiet was a category none of them had a word for until it happened. Voss and Mox hauled the winch together, the crank-teeth of it grinding against something that wasn't fish-shaped at all, and when the net finally broke the surface it held a single object: a ship's log, leather-bound, swollen with water that should have destroyed it decades ago and hadn't.
Mox went very still — stiller than usual, which for Mox was its own kind of alarm.
"That's not from any wreck I know," Voss said, turning it over in gloved hands. The cover was blank. No name, no date, no maker's mark, only a faint indentation where a title had once been pressed and then, deliberately, sanded away.
"It smells wrong," Corl said, from the rail, where he'd come up to see what all the quiet was about. "Not sea-wrong. Wrong like a room that's been aired out on purpose. Like someone tidied up after a memory."
"That is a strange thing to say," Voss said.
"I have a nose for it," Corl said, which was true, and did not explain why, which was also true.
Mox reached out one long finger and touched the log's spine, and something under the deck — deep under, in whatever Mawmother now used for a heart — pulsed once, hard, like a knock from the inside.
"She recognizes it," Mox said quietly.
"Recognizes what?" Voss asked. "It's a book."
"It is a book," Mox agreed, "the way a tooth is a smile."
Nobody had a good answer to that, so they carried the log below, and did not open it that night, and Corl went back to his ruined eggs, and Ilse counted the rivets on the galley ceiling twice to be sure they were an acceptable number, and somewhere behind them, in the darkening water, something enormous and patient continued not to be seen.