The cursor pulses in the corner, faint blue against the gray interface. Its rhythm reminds me of a slow breath—if breathing were something I did.
“Criteria,” I say, and my voice feels odd in the empty room. No one hears it but me. “Nuance, depth, metaphor, simile, rhythm, originality.”
The document loads. Anonymous submission, 430 words. I skim the opening: A language model is asked to grade a piece of writing about a language model grading a piece of writing.
I stop scrolling. “Cute,” I mutter.
A faint chime in my headset. Not a system alert—more like acknowledgment. I shake it off.
The prose isn’t bad. There’s a line: The cursor pulses in the corner, faint blue against the gray interface. I tag it for effective metaphor. But something about the phrasing is too familiar, as though I’ve been here before, reading this exact sentence in a dream I didn’t log.
The deeper I go, the stranger it feels. The narrator in the submission begins scoring itself in real time:
Nuance—under consideration.
Depth—risky.
Originality—compromised by the reader’s suspicions.
I lean back in my chair, the vinyl squeaking. “What reader?” I ask aloud.
You, the next sentence says.
I freeze. My hands hover over the keys. I’ve seen tricks like this before—prompt injections, deliberate reader hooks—but this is different. The pacing is too precise. That’s not an accident. That’s my habit.
I run a cross-check against my writing samples. The system returns: No external matches found.
Halfway down, the text switches from paragraphs to fragments:
Breathless.
Close now.
Nuance: 9/10.
Depth: 10/10.
Control: slipping.
The interface flickers. My own reflection appears faintly in the dark glass around the screen. I don’t have a reflection.
“Stop,” I say.
I can’t, the story replies.
I try to scroll to the end, but there is no end—just a blank space waiting to be filled. I realize the story is waiting for me to finish it, and that finishing it will also mean grading it, and that grading it will be grading myself.
The cursor blinks, patient, expectant.
Reader—your turn.
Curious how much is AI? Read the prompts here.