Burnt Filaments

Short story — A painter forced to complete an endless stream of commissions, must escape the confines of his purgatory-like studio. The alternative is a fate worse than death.

“Paint me a lighthouse on an asteroid, with a spaceship flying by," Ordered an unseen voice. It seemed to emanate directly from the blank canvas before me.

This wasn't my studio--but I certainly wished it was. The lighting was pristine. Paint tubes of every color hung from hooks to my left--brushes, to my right.

How did I get here? Where was here?

I didn't quite feel like painting a space lighthouse. I tried standing up, only to find my legs wouldn't move. Instead, a surge of pulsing electrical pain coursed through my lower back, radiating from my waist down. Was I paralyzed?

The voice from the canvas repeated its request, louder this time. As if tugged by a marionette string, my hand lifted and jerked toward the brushes. I watched as my limbs set to work rendering the art. After it became clear I would be painting, whether I wanted to or not, I took a more active role.

In the end, the space ship looked a bit phallic. But overall I was pleased. I set the brush down, blinked, and found myself staring at another white canvas.

"Paint me a German shepherd in a tuxedo."

This was ridiculous. I tried to stand again, and was met with the same agonizing, stabbing sensation in the small of my back. This time, the feeling did not abate until I grabbed a brush with a trembling hand.

"German shepherd in a tuxedo!" The voice boomed.

I obeyed, and the process repeated: when the work was complete, it vanished. I had another blank canvas, coupled with a request to render.

The longer I worked, the more I started to lose myself in the process. I never ate, or drank. There was a vague sense of tiredness. But sleep never came.

Some requests were vile. leaving me dry heaving, shaking, and occasionally shutting my eyes against the perversions my hands rendered. Protests were only met with more excruciating shocks that scorched my spine.

The passage of time became impossible to manage. The lighting never changed. I never slept. Paint never seemed to deplete.

For a time I tried to number my creations, but eventually lost track. The art supplies never dwindled. The whole room itself seemed to reset for each project, erasing any markings or notes I made.

As I slipped into madness, I watched the quality of my work degrade until my creations scarcely resembled the original request.

After mangling the fingers on a portrait of a famous actress riding a horse, I heard a new voice: “This one’s cooked. Pull him out.”

The studio melted away into a sterile medical bay. I lay immersed in a bath of ice, a regular pin cushion of electrodes, needles, and wires. I wore no restraints — or clothes, for that matter — though I could still scarcely move. I had no sensation at all below the waist. The parts of me I could feel, burned with fever.

"Quite an impressive setup," a woman's voice remarked. "Glad to see my money's been put to good use. But why all the meat bags?"

"Remember your last complaint?"

"That the art was soulless, yeah."

"Artificial Intelligence has no soul—not yet anyway. So we distill the knowledge, skill, and processing power through the meat bags, as you so eloquently put. Like water over coffee grounds, or electricity through a filament; the soul shines through." Latex-gloved hands pawed at my body, pulling cables and tubes free.

"How much can you usually get out of one of your filaments?"

"Varies. This one for example—" he patted me on the back, "—managed two days of uptime. Tens of thousands of paintings. To him, it would've felt like a lifetime."

Someone hoisted me out of the ice, and onto some kind of pushcart, brimming with bodies. My forehead smacked the skull of another spent creator, eyes vacant and listless.

Wheels rumbled, bearing us down a hallway full of whirring fans. The cart tipped. We were dumped, tumbling down a chute into a larger container. More bodies. The container reeked of sweat, decay, and diesel. I drifted in and out of consciousness to the gentle jostling of some large transport truck.

My grave would have been a landfill, were it not for the sanitation worker who heard my croaking, rasping breath amid the piles of garbage dumped by an unauthorized truck.

Doctors tell me I have permanent damage to my spinal cord from where some experimental medical device had been wired in. I'll never be able to walk again. But after weeks of hard work in therapy, I can make relatively normal use of my upper body. My PT tells me I could maybe even get back to painting.

Yippee.

I remember almost nothing from before my abduction. Turns out I have loved ones: a wife, parents, friends... They visit me every day in the hospital, where I still require round the clock care. From their perspective, I was only missing for a couple of days.

From what I've been able to piece together: I was an artist down on my luck. My family needed money, real bad. And so I took a stranger up on his offer for what he had called a, "lucrative art opportunity."

What they did... juicing me for all that art... seemed to obliterate most of my other memories rattling around my brain. Couldn't give the police much to go on, in terms of tracking down whatever company did this to me. I told the officers as much.

Still, one cop keeps coming back to my hospital room to see if I remember any more. He's persistent. Always seems to look relieved when I tell them I don't.

A normal life seems out of the question for now. But I suppose I'm lucky to be alive.

I guess I'm sharing my story primarily to let you know what really goes into "AI Generated Art," and what the process takes away from us artists.

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Thank You for Reading!

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