Chapter 199 - The Ugly One II

3

Let me make one thing clear up front.

Oh Dokseo possessed an extraordinary air of idiocy, but she wasn't actually an idiot. Despite appearances, you could throw her into most voids and she would take care of herself and pull her own weight.

In short, her brain wasn't defective enough for her to leave her bedroom door slightly ajar while writing her novel, exposing everything she was doing through the gap.

And yet the door was open, and I had ended up witnessing the crime scene.

Meaning?

"D-Dokseo! What, what on earth are you doing...!"

Someone else was responsible for leaving the door open.

Sim Aryeon. Someone who not only flaunted her idiocy, but had held the undisputed top spot in the SG Net Idiot of the Year Awards for six years running.

In run 888, rather than cosplaying as the Saintess of the North, she was simply living at Dokseo's place as her roommate.

Aryeon urgently grabbed Dokseo by the shoulders.

"D-don't tell me you used generative AI again...? Y-you said you wouldn't use it anymore...!"

"Ugh! Stop overreacting, Aryeon!"

Dokseo twisted her shoulders and knocked Aryeon's hands away. A rebellious, ominous flame gleamed in her eyes.

"Just once. I'm only trying to use it one more time, seriously!"

"N-no...! You said it was the last time just the other day! But now that your posting time is coming up, you're back to clicking out AI slop...!"

"How dare you! Insolence! Clicking out AI slop, you say!"

Dokseo let loose a lion's roar, like a high official addressing a lowborn peasant.

"This is nothing more than a writing method for a new age! I, the great literary master BookishGirl, constantly study the latest trends so I won't fall behind the times, and merely apply cutting-edge technology as an aid to my writing!"

"Y-you really can't do this... This isn't even some unorthodox path. It's the demonic path... If you keep relying on it... even the tiny sliver of merit your writing originally had will disappear...!"

"Ugh! I said let go!"

"Eek!"

CRASH!

Flung aside by Dokseo's aristocratic rebuff, Aryeon landed on her bottom like a tragic heroine.

"Sentences made that way... those patchwork scraps churned out by clicking an AI button aren't your writing anymore, Dokseo...!"

"How dare you spout such nonsense! Unbelievable, seriously! I! BookishGirl herself typed the prompt that generated that novel, so of course it's my writing!"

"D-do you really think that makes sense...?"

"Of course! A painter moves a brush and paints with colors that already exist in the world, and a photographer presses the shutter on a mass-produced camera, right? These are all the same artistic act! Artistic acts! How dare you resist the tide of a new age with such a narrow-minded perspective? Aryeon, this is why you always take ten or twenty hours to draw a single illustration!"

"Th-that's sophistry... Dokseo, a camera and generative AI are completely different..."

"How are they different?"

"J-just read these garbage sentences out loud."

Aryeon picked up the laptop.

Then she deployed the most vicious and evil of the 101 ways to kill a writer: an impromptu reading.

"L-look at this. 'The Undertaker let out a peculiar sigh for the 300th time, then took out the black suit he had bought at Busan Station and put it on'... 'Run 300 of yet another peculiar Busan Station story starring the regressor protagonist Undertaker was about to begin'... Do you r-really think this is your writing? Were you always this much of a hack...?"

"Gah!"

Dokseo coughed up blood. Not blood from her body, of course, but from her soul.

And Aryeon came equipped with a shark's sense of smell, uncannily adept at detecting the blood others spilled. Like an orca that was cute only in appearance, she was actually a predator on the food chain.

"Your sentences have always been so f-fucking long that it was hard to tell whether your novel was literature or a lung-training device... But at least it was better than this garbage! Th-this is why I always kick your ass in the SG Net Fiction Board rankings... Like the hack you are..."

"Hey!"

Dokseo went berserk.

"Your novel only ranks so high because of, uh, whatchamacallit! Illustrations! It's the illustrations! You're always plastering your author's notes with drawings. That's why your ranking's so high!"

"Aha... S-so you're saying readers faithfully follow a boring story just for the illustrations? A loser's ugly excuse... B-but I know something uglier than those excuses... Those sentences you clicked out of an AI... They're just pure, absolute garbage..."

"I-I-I just haven't finished revising it yet, okay?"

Dokseo snatched the laptop back from Aryeon.

Then, displaying dazzling fingerwork as an AI pianist, she proceeded to enter another prompt.

>> Massage the prose into Chuck Palahniuk's style, with a spoonful of Stephen King and a pinch of Lee Yeongdo in the word choices

Soon, the screen vomited up sentences.

――――――――――

I sighed for the 300th time. The sigh mingled with the air of Busan Station, became something peculiar, and vanished. Perhaps it would lodge somewhere in the cracks of this city's concrete and grow into mold.

I took out my black suit and put it on. This suit, bought in the underground shopping arcade at Busan Station, this suit that had never once visited a dry cleaner in 300 lives, was now practically my second skin.

Now, it begins. The curtain rises on the 300th show. Another peculiar story unfolding in the belly of this immense monster, Busan Station. This endless, cyclical drama in which I am the protagonist, the audience, and sometimes the sacrificial lamb.

A whisper reaches my ears. It is the voice of Busan Station. "Ready, Undertaker?" I grin. Ready? You bet. My heart is already racing at the thought of what nightmare I'll dream this time.

――――――――――

Dokseo pointed at the screen.

"There! W-what do you think? Huh? Much more usable than that cookie-cutter prose from before, right? Wow—readers definitely won't have anything to complain about now!"

"... Dokseo..."

"This is the power of my prompt engineering! My own unique identity! The originality of AI art!"

"Seriously, what the fuck are you doing, Dokseo...?"

Aryeon looked close to tears and sniffled.

"Th-this is exactly why generative AI is different from a camera... Don't you see? Generative AI uses training data, and that training data consists of works other people poured their blood and sweat into creating... H-how can collecting those without permission and feeding them into a machine... make this your writing...?"

"It's fine! Chuck Palahniuk and Stephen King are public figures! They're public property!"

"G-good heavens..."

"And that, what's it called, huh? The Canned-Author Hotel where the Korean Peninsula's writers stay. Who owns it? Isn't it Mister Undertaker's? I'm writing for him! And every writer on the peninsula owes him! In other words... no writer can object to my righteous cause! If they don't like it, they can write a regressor's autobiography themselves!"

Good heavens.

"Mwahahaha! That's right! I can look up at the heavens without a single speck of shame! This advanced technology of the future is inevitably going to be persecuted, and I, BookishGirl, will prove its worth! I am a prompt-artist!"

Aryeon's heartbeat resonated with mine.

Forcing my heart into such a guilty rhythm—she truly was extraordinary.

"Dokseo... How, just how did you end up like this...? N-not even the Guild Leader could bring himself to forgive something this heinous...!"

Now then.

This is where the genre executes a spectacular drifting turn.

From a Blizzard-style RPG cinematic in which Dokseo ascends the throne of corrupted AI and Aryeon blames herself for failing to stop her—

It abruptly became a horror story, as Aryeon whipped her head up and looked me straight in the eyes.

"Isn't that right, Guild Leader?"

"..."

To be honest, midway through this spectacle, I'd wanted to abandon the coffee and everything else and flee with Michael Jackson's moonwalk.

But the scene unfolding before me contained something akin to a drug. It was inevitable that things would come to this.

Aryeon's voice and manner of speaking undoubtedly contained a narcotic substance humanity had yet to discover. I urge all you readers listening to my stories to keep this uncanny fact firmly in mind.

"Huh? Why are you suddenly talking about Mis—M-Mister?"

For the past few days, Aryeon had probably been secretly leaving the bedroom door open whenever Dokseo began writing—written as 'writing,' read as 'prompt art.'

Why? Because she anticipated that I, the Undertaker, would eventually visit.

In the end, Aryeon's scheme was a resounding success. Dokseo turned toward me with a creaking noise.

"S-since when... have you been there?"

I discreetly averted my eyes.

"Hmm. Do you really need that answer, Dokseo?"

"I do. To be precise, there's nothing else in the world I need right now."

That badly?

Well, if she needed it that badly.

"I've been here from the beginning."

"The beginning? When is that beginning? Is it sort of the beginning? Or a slightly later beginning? Huh? Exactly how much of a beginning are we talking about?"

"I see. To be precise, hmm. From the moment you entered 'The protagonist is Undertaker, a regressor' as your prompt..."

"Aaaaaaagh!"

A scream erupted.

"Aaaaaagh! Aaagh! Aaaaaaagh!"

A scream erupted.

"Huaaaaaaagh!"

A scream erupted.

And Dokseo evolved from a bipedal creature into a myriapod.

For reference, the best-known myriapods were centipedes and house centipedes. Both shared the characteristic of crawling along the ground.

"Why!"

Dokseo writhed on the floor, displaying symptoms of respiratory distress.

"Whyyyy! Why did you just stand there and waaaatch!"

Her desperate cries echoed through the heart of the most secret, heavily secured depths of Inunaki Tunnel.

I also heard a little snort, like a puff of air escaping a lung-shaped balloon. Without my exceptionally keen hearing, I would have missed it.

The source was Aryeon's trap. Snorting and spluttering, she bounced her shoulders in a little dance.

Were these creatures truly the hope of the Korean Peninsula, and beyond that, the world?

Well, no wonder it was doomed if these creatures were its hope...

"Hmm. Dokseo. I really don't know what to say to you."

"Then don't! Don't say anything at all...!"

"But I can still see it so clearly. Your face when you delivered that memorable line, ["I'll write your story, Mister."]. With my Perfect Recall, it's as vivid as if I'd heard it just six seconds ago—"

"Huaaaaagh! Huaa! Aaaaaagh!"

"And you also said this. Why are humans so good at forgetting what they themselves have said? Why do they forget? You called it the tragedy of life. It just occurred to me—"

"Noooooooo!"

THUD!

Rolling around on the floor, Dokseo collided with a table leg. The laptop fell off and landed on her shoulder.

"Th-this isn't me! This sort of thing, I... I... I-I didn't do this because I wanted to... Gasp! An anomaly! R-right! Mister! This laptop actually belonged to that bastard, the Operator of All Things at Play! He tricked me! At some point, he appeared in the form of a program like ChatGPT! So!"

"Dokseo."

Aryeon swept Dokseo into an embrace.

Then she patted her back with her fingertips. Wistfully. Kindly. Like a Saintess.

Dokseo couldn't see it from her position, but I had an excellent view of Aryeon's face. She was grinning like crazy.

"It's all right, Dokseo... Of course, you did something utterly shitty, and thanks to his Perfect Recall, the Guild Leader has now permanently preserved an embarrassing memory he can milk for the rest of his life, for hundreds and thousands of years to come. So even if the world ends, your shameful past will simply be passed on to the next world... But people can repent of the shitty things they've done. Yes. Even if that irreversible stain on your life will never, ever be erased..."

"I'll kill you...!"

So today was Aryeon's power-leveling day.

I forcibly peeled the Goryeojang Villain away and patted Dokseo on the shoulder.

"Dokseo. It's all right. It seems I've been putting too much pressure on you to write this novel, whether I realized it or not."

"M-Mister..."

"It's all right to rest."

I smiled gently.

"Take as long a hiatus as you like, until you can write with a peaceful mind again."

"I-is that really okay...?"

"Of course. I can always wait for you, Dokseo."

"Mister...!"

That day, a notice appeared on the SG Net Fiction Board.

[BookishGirl] This is Oh Dokseo... I'm going on hiatus to take a little time to recharge... (5 minutes ago)

The response from SG Net's readers was, well, reasonably positive.

Since BookishGirl's prose had been decidedly strange lately, many readers were hopeful: 'Once she recharges and comes back, she'll be back in form, right?'

And then.

Time passed.

[BookishGirl] This is Oh Dokseo... I'm going on hiatus to take a little time to recharge... (7 years ago)

CLICK.

I opened the notice's comments.

Thousands of comments streamed down the page.

-Anonymous: What kind of fucking author announces a hiatus and actually takes seven whole years off???

-[Hundred Flowers]HighSchoolYear12: Back for this year's pilgrimage >_<)!!

-Anonymous: What writer takes seven fucking years to recharge? Is seven years 'a little time'??

-Anonymous: I'm dropping this. You should get a job loading and unloading instead^^

-Goryeojang: I heard this author went into a void and disappeared... Please come back, author, sob sob

└Anonymous: I've seen them on the general board, though?

-Anonymous: BookishGirl overslept and is late again today. And here I thought it was something serious.

-Anonymous: This was the story that got me into the Fiction Board, but I don't know whether I'll see the ending before I die.

-[National Road]Historian: Honestly, isn't giving us a refund the decent thing to do?

-Anonymous: BookishGirl, you FUCKING BASTARD!!!

"..."

Ah.

Dokseo...