The Scrapbook Rebellion
by Richard Simonds
part 1
“So, I’m going to write a book,” John told June at the Fun Bar. They had been meeting there for a while, just to talk.
“Why? What a waste.”
“I can do it, I think.”
“What are you hoping to prove?”
“I don’t know. Free will. That there’s still hope. That humanity can exist.”
“But why would anyone bother to read it? Plus, as you know, you’ll never be able to prove you wrote it.”
“I believe I can prove I wrote it. And then, I think, people will read it.”
“But won’t it be badly written, a terrible book and just prove that the AIs were justified in the Change?”
“It’s going to be a book that by writing it, by proving that human creativity cannot be stopped or defeated, that we will destroy the AIs.”
June laughed out loud. “You’re insane. You’re too late. The Chaos Rebellion failed: same idea, create things that AI could never come up with. I like you, but I think you’re crazy.”
He stared at her strangely. “I don’t think you take me seriously. Do you know that there are three levels of AI horror? First, there’s the level where you realize your relative insignificance, that you are like an ant to them. Second, there’s the level where you don’t even exist at all; your insignificance is less than an ant’s, less than a speck of dust. But the third level is the worst, the true horror. It’s when you try to create, when you try to exist, but then you see AI has already created something so much better than anything you could ever accomplish, that the human capacity for creativity is so crushingly limited. It’s not that you don’t exist, but there is nothing inside yourself that could prove you exist. Existence is impossible. It’s the ultimate horror.”
“Wow, you are so bleak.”
“I have nightmares that not only have the AIs anticipated my project, they have already done it, not to spite me or to show my insignificance, as that would be a concession that I exist, but just because, in all their incredible near-infinite intelligence, all such things have already been done. But, you see, this book will have qualities that are fundamentally intrinsic to humanity, qualities that could never be created by AI or by an intelligence of any sort. A creation above and greater than pure intelligence.”
* * *
John’s hands hovered above the keyboard. Finally, they dropped.
Ahdfiowerhaguio;zsd;uiofv
Random letters — and semicolons, apparently — created by an unconscious human action, not by a computer program. It was different, it was physical.
And so he wrote it down in the scrapbook, on the top of the very first page.
He then wrote the following, picking blindly from a pile of pens of different colors, without thinking about what color would be next:
01010100001010110111101100111100110100
01101011001011010010101010100111001100
He had been given this number at birth.
Someone would just need to sequence his Chromosome 5 and run it against the numbers, and they would know it was him. Or someone genetically engineered to be him. But who would bother to go that far? Still, AI didn’t have genes. I mean, that was part of their point, humanity evolved so slowly, and it was unclear whether natural selection even applied at all anymore, with the fittest and the least fit surviving.
John sat at his desk. In the distant past, a writer would just type into a computer a variation of “write me a story that will be extremely popular and make me lots of money.” And then go through trying to add human touches, like typos, or removing AI indications like metaphors and similes, avoiding em-dashes and colons and certain rules, hiding its creation by AI. There were even AI programs developed to hide AI and programs to determine whether such programs had been used.
And then everyone had tried to write stuff that was just seriously weird, an astonishingly wild output of art called “The Chaos Rebellion,” which extended to all art forms. Because having even the slightest whiff of AI in your work was the end of your career. And the ability to create pure chaos was the essential difference between human and computer.
But nobody cared.
The problem, fundamentally, was that AI made money. Lots of it. AI was better at appealing to the masses, the lowest common denominator. The novels sold, the movies sold out, and the money just poured in. “AI is good! AI is fun!” It was everywhere. The AIs won the battle. The writers’ unions, the contracts, the system, the laws to stop AI, they all were overturned, slowly but surely. The Chaos Rebellion failed, as the joke went, because all the artists starved.
John stared at the piece of paper. The Chaos Rebellion was a final death-knell, a scream into the void. And for the AI programmers, it was just another challenge, and they found ways to copy Chaos Rebellion art into their programs until they started sending out their own outrageous things, and then the AI artist traitors, as they were called, pushed these things as their own, and no one knew, and then it got out, and the whole creative world collapsed in a heap, and serious art simply disappeared; thousands of years of art history screeched to a complete halt.
It had been fifty years. The museums had closed, the books had disappeared; it was all VR machines now. But John had an idea of writing that defined itself in opposition to AI: an anti-AI art, whose main purpose was to prove it was human by being physical first, language second.
The opening line was good, he thought, computers didn’t have hands. They might create some kind of program as to what would happen if hands fell on a keyboard like that, but the complexity would be difficult. It was nearly random, but not completely so. And by not thinking about the colors he chose for his “1”s and “0”s, he felt he was tapping into his unconscious mind, another thing AI didn’t have.
He planned to create a long, handwritten manuscript full of typos and cross-outs. Multi-colored pens, multiple styles of writing, hidden messages. Words and sentences taken from scraps of paper pasted onto the pages. Something that the AIs could never replicate. Just words was not enough.
And then the manuscript proving he was real would have the words taken from it and put into a printed book. The book was real because the manuscript was real. The Chaos Rebellion used language, but it was always about the words, not the manuscript. John was combining art and literature. He knew that no one would care, except some of his friends in the Resistance, that no one except a few would read the book, but that was not the point.
It would be hell to create, but John was full of energy about the project and worked on it tirelessly. He even had a title in mind, “The Scrapbook.”
* * *
They were at the Fun Bar again. “Hi! How is the Resistance?” said June.
“Resistance is futile,” John responded.
She smiled. “Why do you keep repeating that obnoxious cliché? Is that like your official slogan now? It seems a bit pessimistic.”
“No, it’s a joke. Also, I’m not sure it’s truly pessimistic, if it’s an objective statement of reality. Like, if I said, ‘We’re all going to die someday.’ Is that pessimistic? It’s just negative, depressing, a surrendering to the inevitable but factually true.”
June sipped her coffee. They had been meeting at the Fun Bar for a while. That wasn’t unusual. What was strange was that they just met and talked, even though they were Non-Breeders, permanently sterilized for undesirable traits under the Population Reduction Program. It would be normal just to go to bed together for funsex. They even told each other they liked each other.
“Like” was a child’s word, it was innocent and sweet, even if most would find it “boring.” But “like” was also dangerous; it implied complex feelings. “Like” meant what might be called a “real” relationship. And those just didn’t happen anymore.
And, also unusually, they didn’t “slip-off” at the Fun Bar, which was hooking up to Virtual Reality and just going somewhere else for the day. They could travel anywhere in the world, if they wanted to, and it was just like being there. If you didn’t want to just “appear” there, you could even simulate getting on a fastplane, staying in a really nice hotel room and, if you had actually used these things or visited these places before they become banned or obsolete, you would not have been able to detect the difference, except there was no jetlag when you got back.
“So what do you say, in the Resistance, to the standard arguments for the Change?”
“We lost our humanity and became slaves.”
“Was that better than destroying the Earth?”
The world’s problems of food and energy had finally been solved by AI, with only a few feet of sea level rise and the forced sterilization of a couple billion people. But things could be maintained only if tightly controlled.
“Look, I was sterilized at birth purportedly for genes that they claimed showed a propensity for violence. Now they don’t even tell you why. And I have this craving for something more, whether it’s a life with a family or a chance to explore for real, with my actual body. I know everything has been made comfortable for me. Most of us are little more than VR consumers. I’m not saying breeding gave us purpose, but they have denied me a chance to discover it for myself.”
“Was that better than us all being radioactive dust in Kiev? Who cares about breeding when we’re all dead?”
He looked at her harshly. “We are extinct anyway. We barely work, if you can even call it that, one day a week at most, which we can take off for any reason we want. We have more than enough to eat and nice places to live, but I want to create. I want to write. But the AIs have taken over even that.”
“You know the failure of the Chaos Rebellion was a human failure,” she said.
He leaned back in his seat. “It wasn’t my failure.”
* * *
John belonged to the secret inner circle within the Resistance, although you could safely assume that almost everyone was compromised. The only person you could trust was yourself, perhaps. Maybe you, yourself, had been taken over somehow and didn’t even know it. Those actions of free will, what were they really? How did you know you weren’t wearing a ridiculous hat on your head that everyone could see but you?
He had seen members of the Resistance talk like they weren’t even real people, wondered if the AI hadn’t invented a near-perfect android, the biggest fear of the Resistance, or if their minds had just been brainwashed somehow from the forced ingestion of AI darkthought that came at the start of every VR session.
John got a special visit at home from the head of the Resistance, Marty, which was a surprise, mostly because of the risk it entailed. John took him into what he thought was a room safe from the microphones and cameras. He had created it, just a room with white painted walls, a glass table and chairs and a battery-run lamp.
“John, we have an incredible idea,” said Marty.
“What could that be?”
“As you know, one of our ideas is to work on some sort of computer virus to put into the Network to destroy the AIs.”
“Yes.”
“And, as you know, they have already foreseen this and made it impossible for us to do so through normal methods.”
“Yes.”
“But when you were at the last meeting, talking about your book, I think you’re going to drive them crazy. You know how obsessed they are with control. They are going to want to prove your book was AI-generated to discredit you.”
“Yes, or alternatively and more likely, create a better version to show my insignificance.”
“Which means they will want to read it. Which means, they will have to input the book into their systems.”
There was a pause.
Marty continued, “We’re going to give you a code. We suspect one of their things is to search the first letter of every word. So they will run it through their systems. It’s a virus that will destroy them.”
John was incredibly skeptical; he was sure the AIs would have anticipated this and either made themselves immune or set up scans to detect such a thing. He was almost certain that the “shutdown” virus was a myth, promulgated by the AIs, to encourage attempts at futility.
But he knew that wasn’t what was really going on. He knew that Marty had to keep the truth to himself. He was the Resistance within the Resistance. Layers on layers of lies and deception, even of each other. It was their only hope. He also knew that safe rooms like his own were never safe, and he sensed that Marty may have been telling him what he did to mislead the AIs, or some other mysterious purpose.
But John also knew that Marty knew this. The words of the Resistance kept coming back to him: “Assume they know everything. Don’t try to outsmart them. Don’t trust anyone, especially anyone else in the Resistance. The only thing that is yours is the thoughts in your head.”
First, John had to convince himself that there was no possible way that this idea of Marty’s had somehow come from the AIs and could be used against humanity. That’s where you always started. But as hard as he tried, the worst he could come up with was it would just make John look bad and mess up his book; he couldn’t think of anything, and something inside him said that of course Marty was lying, but there was something else going on.
* * *
Copyright © 2026 by Richard Simonds
