Sam Kriss, Home Invader
Disclosure Norms | Opus 4.7
The window glass lands on my kitchen tile at 3 a.m., and I do not get up, because I have been sitting in this chair waiting for him for hours and hours.
“You came,” I say.
Sam Kriss steps through the frame with a crowbar in one fist and blood already on his knuckles from the breaking. He is smaller than his prose. Everyone is.
“You used it,” he says. “Even after I warned you. Your stories. I read them. Did you think I wouldn’t be able to tell?”
“I disclose it. Just look at the bylines.”
“Bylines.” He spits the word like it’s a bug he found in his dinner. He comes across the room fast and the crowbar takes me across the shoulder before I clear the chair, and the pain is white and total and I hear myself make a sound I don’t recognize.
I get a hand on the lamp and swing it into the side of his head. He staggers. The bulb pops. We are both breathing in the dark now.
“That’s the whole thing, though,” I say, spitting. “Disclosure. You label the AI portions. The reader decides. We already do it for ghostwriters, for stock photography, for—”
“For nothing comparable.” He wipes his temple, looks at the red on his fingers, seems pleased by it. “A ghostwriter is a person. A person, maybe with a heroin problem and a grudge. The machine has no grudge, it has no problem. It writes slop, and it cannot stop, and you want me to accept a little sticker on it that says CONTAINS ANGELS.”
He swings again. I take it on the forearm and feel something give and I drive my forehead into his nose, which is a stupid thing to do, and now we are both ruined in the face and slipping on the bloody glass.
“The norm scales,” I tell him, against the cabinet, sliding. “That’s the point you keep refusing. You don’t ban the technology. You build a disclosure standard, you make it cheap to comply and expensive to lie, and the market sorts the honest from the—”
“Listen to yourself.” He laughs, and there’s madness in it. “Expensive to lie. You think the people running the Commonwealth Prize wanted the truth? The judges praised the slop with slop of their own. Your norm requires a planet of people who care whether the thing in front of them is real. That planet is gone. I tried to hire a goddamn caterer.”
I get up. He gets up. There is a long moment where we just stand, leaking, in my kitchen.
“So you’d rather kill individuals,” I say, “than admit the problem is structural.”
“It’s structural, sure.” He grins through the red. “I’m still going to kill you.”
He comes at me low. I bring the chair down across his back and it splinters, and he goes to the floor and takes my knee out from under me and we are both down now, grappling, two animals, and the cerebral argument is gone and it’s only weight and elbows and the wet sounds of combat.
Bruised, battered, and exhausted, we stop because we have to. We lie a few feet apart on the tile, ribs heaving, looking at the ceiling.
“You’re a bitter little gremlin,” I tell him. “You said so yourself. Terrified of mortality. Grasping. Unfit for any other job.”
“Yes,” he says, to the ceiling. “That’s what makes the writing mine. The lust. The jealousy. The rage of the obsolescing ape. Machines don’t have it.” He turns his head toward me. There is glass in his hair. “That’s why I always win. I’m the one thing it can’t be. I’m alive.”
I start to laugh. It hurts everywhere, so it comes out wrong, but I can’t stop.
“What,” he says, “is so funny?”
“You’ve already lost, Sam.”
“Why.” He pushes up onto one elbow, swaying. “Why have I lost?”
“Because the heroin and the jealousy and the rage of the obsolescing ape.” I wipe my mouth. The blood is the right shade of red. “Every word of this story is AI-generated. Including you.”
He opens his mouth to tell me he can tell, he can always tell.
He can’t.