Amelia (Horror Stories Reading 10/30)
It began when the dating was new and they still looked at each other with uncertainty. Whatever was happening between them might not be as deep, or could be much deeper, than it looked, like a deceptive body of water. Back then they still worried that if the moment slipped out from between them, they might fall instantly back to strangers.
“I’ve started using this generative AI technology, I kind of want to show you, it’s kind of cool” he said.
“Let me see” and she moved in, taking the opportunity to let her body touch his.
“It generates images from text prompts, there’s definitely something a bit unnerving about it, but it’s fun. Sometimes it comes up with something where, I just really wonder where it got that from. It like makes assumptions that I didn’t even type into the prompt, but that were kind of secretly on my mind.”
Thinking of the AI filters that were going viral on tiktok, she said: “can it show you what your children might look like?”
He blushed because her question, though she meant it to sound tossed off, edged on the intimate. “I guess it could do something like that, but I’d need to give it a photo of myself to work with, and then the results might be a bit weird, not like the faceapp, or celebrity child generator websites or anything. This one is a bit more… I don’t know. Let me just try and show you.”
He took a photo of himself and uploaded it. She watched him do this and saw how intense he became. How his breathing changed, and it made her heart beat faster like something scary was about to happen. She had no idea why. She played around with this kind of stuff with her friends all the time, so why was her heart beating and the blood leaving her face as if she had just discovered a stranger living inside the walls of her house?
He made a sound like he had just been asked a difficult question and knitted his brows.
“That’s funny, it kind of looks like you” he said, and turned his phone so she could see. The child did, in a way, or at least it had black hair like hers, which was strange because his hair was sandy blond. “Ew!!! Why does it have only one arm”
She writhed, being silly and pushing his arm but also feeling overwhelmed by what she had seen.
“Sometimes that happens, I don’t know, it seems like no matter how advanced the technology gets, you still get stuff like that sometimes, and… I guess you could argue… that real natural people also sometimes have just one arm…” he trailed off.
“Yeah, and fingers fused together like frog feet?” She laughed, pointing at the deformed hand resting on the child’s knee in the image.
“Well, yeah. Sometimes.”
Her fear from earlier turned quickly into anxiety as she felt she had said the wrong thing. She was confused, this wasn’t a real child they were talking about, why did it feel so serious. She wanted him to like her so much, and this activity, which was certainly interesting, had suddenly generated squirming, disquieting thoughts. She looked at the park around them, trying to survive the moment. She stared at a bright red glove someone had left in the dirt by the chain link fence.
“Look at the setting though, this is what I mean when I say this program is weird. Isn’t it kind of odd and beautiful that this little girl, or I guess I’m assuming she’s a girl because of the hair and her resemblance to you, is just sitting in this random field? I didn’t put any of that in the prompt. It’s like that painting, Christina’s world or something. But you know what,” he paused. “it really looks so much like the land behind my grandparents’ house.”
She looked back at the image and then up at him. He seemed so moved. She swallowed her disgust and self-consciousness and said softly“Wow, that’s crazy.”
Close to a year and a half later they were married, and had moved to the suburbs to be closer to his family. They often visited his grandparents’ house, for his grandmother was still alive for the first few years of their marriage. She hadn’t thought about that image of the speculative child when she stood in the field behind the house for the first time. She didn’t remember it in that moment. She was only thinking of the smell of the grass, and of her husband and his life that had made him who he was, and delivered him to her at the tender age of 23. Now at 25 she felt an enormous peace spreading in her stomach like a warm, comforting meal, and it was just a week later that she discovered she was pregnant.
When their daughter Amelia was born, their lives were changed forever. To look at her face was like staring into the sun, her brown eyes and black hair caught the light like a wild horse and when they held her it was like holding a piece of the intense, magic clay that all the world is made from. As she grew her parents were in a state of continuous awe at her boldness, cleverness, dexterity. As she ran, explored, apprehended the world, and talked back, she never seemed to miss the arm she was born without, or to be hindered by her only hand which was more like a little mitten, the fingers fused together by a condition the doctors called “syndactyly.” In the hospital they had talked of surgeries which might make her hand look more normal, but her parents worried about the risk of complications, of damaging her nerves and ligaments. “Just look at her,” they thought privately, and see how every particle of the little creature seems to scream “I am just exactly the way I am meant to be.”
Amelia’s father used the image generator for graphic design, and for a youtube channel where he used generated photos to illustrate video essays. One day the little girl asked him to make a picture of her as a grownup. If you can believe that until that very moment the man had forgotten about the image his new girlfriend had asked him to generate of his future child almost 10 years ago, please do believe that, I’m telling you. AI technology was ubiquitous and pedestrian for most of his adult life. But now he was seized with a deep dread and, trying not to disturb the child, ushered her out of the room. I don’t know if he followed through with her request, if he let his curiosity overtake him, but he certainly never showed anyone the image if he did. And all that summer the wind blew soft and warm through the empty fields behind his grandparents’ house.