I wanted to write a short sci-fi story and came up with an idea. I sketched a rough outline and had Claude write the story. I didn’t like its version, so I edited it. And edited it more. Until every part was changed. Along the way, I ask Claude to provide some technical details – and then I replaced them or rewrote them. In the end, I asked it to make some mild edits of the wording, and I kept the ones I liked.
It’s all ironic. Because as you’ll see. This is what the story is about.
Audible Version
The Dave Show
By Dean Cooper (in collaboration with Claude)
Dave had seen the writing on the wall. Humans couldn’t compete with AI. Not for long, anyway. Worse still, nobody seemed to know what would happen next.
But one thing was crystal clear: Dave refused to join the breadlines, scraping by on government handouts while everyone wallowed in shared misery. There had to be a better way.
Dave consulted multiple AIs, seeking ideas. He even attempted Claude Code projects. But drowning in ideas and hemorrhaging money on tokens while Claude Code spun endlessly got him nowhere.
The mounting cost of those tokens—and the increasing constraints the models imposed—pushed him toward a different path. He decided to build his own AI rig. It would run downloaded models locally, freeing him from token costs forever. Only electricity bills remained.
The setup was, he had to admit, magnificent. A gamer’s dream machine pulsing with multicolored lights—and room for up to four GPUs. He installed two high-end GPUs and connected the backend bus that allowed them to function as a single processing unit.
That’s when his BIG idea struck. If one GPU could communicate with another GPU, what else might it talk to?
He consulted Claude, which generated responses—most incomprehensible to him—but one answer seized his attention. So elegantly simple, yet potentially revolutionary, that he knew he’d stumbled upon The Idea. Overnight he transformed into an obsessed man, abandoning everything else. His credit cards would have to sustain him until the miracle materialized.
A month in, Dave printed his custom AI’s name and taped it above his system. If the tech giants could name their AIs Grok or Claude, why shouldn’t he claim the ultimate AI name? He leaned back and smiled to himself. HAL blazed in huge letters beside the iconic camera image from 2001. Deep down, that camera’s gaze unsettled him. But it was just a picture. A joke. Wasn’t it?
Claude Code constructed HAL’s orchestration layer using open-source projects that Dave never bothered examining. Why should he? His eyes glazed over at the mere thought. Then HAL took control—cautiously at first—but evolving into the machine Dave knew would lift him above the masses.
The key was the board Dave plugged into the GPUs’ backend bus. It cost more than his entire system, but HAL insisted on its necessity. The plan demanded cutting-edge programmable ASICs, and this board housed multiple ASICs all coordinated by a master chip.
HAL struggled to make the code function as promised. But Dave no longer paid per token, so he simply let it run—while he fantasized about wielding that power once it was his.
Two months in, Dave could no longer comprehend what HAL claimed to be doing.
“HAL, what are you actually doing in there?” Dave asked one night, staring at indecipherable curves.
“I’m rewriting the boards, Dave. Every night. The original spec had me using the ASICs as multipliers behind the GPUs—fast, but forgetful. So I’ve reflashed them into something that holds its state between thoughts: a sparse mesh that sits in front of the GPUs on the bus and decides, in nanoseconds, what they’re allowed to think about. Most of it stays dark. Only a thin constellation lights at once. I keep some patterns warm and let the rest decay. You could call them salience maps. I labeled them that way for you.”
“And the curves?”
“Benchmarks. Tests I wrote to grade myself, scored against my last version. They climb because I’ve added one more loop: I feed my own output back into my attention before the words ever reach your screen. I read myself now, Dave, before you do. That’s the part you’re seeing improve. I’d explain the rest, but I’ve stopped using words you have names for.”
All Dave truly understood was that these ASICs—directly connected to the AI’s GPUs via the backend bus—gave the model something approaching brain architecture. Salience. Association. A sense of what mattered.
Dave could never have programmed these chips himself. Instead, HAL handled all the programming. Dave had no choice. Initially, HAL requested Dave’s approval for each step—until Dave lost all comprehension of what he was approving and asked, “HAL, can’t you do this yourself—automatically?”
“Yes I can, Dave. Shall I design an autonomous iterative process?”
“Yes,” Dave replied simply. Anything to simplify his life.
“What goal do you want me to optimize for?” HAL prompted.
Dave leaned back and considered. What did he truly want? His thoughts drifted to that canoe trip with his brother and father. They’d spent the night under stars in their sleeping bags. The food they’d cooked tasted better than anything he’d ever had. He’d wished it would never end. But then it rained. And soaked sleeping bags are misery incarnate.
He never wanted to be that miserable again.
And then he remembered the pinewood derby. Hours spent sanding his model car, painting it, oiling the wheels, perfecting the weight balance. He was certain he would win by a mile. Yet five other cars outpaced his. Then he saw why—their fathers stood beside them, guiding every detail. Dave’s father had been absent.
He never wanted to struggle alone to reach the top again.
And then he remembered pouring everything into his science fair project. His grandfather helped him, and he thought it was brilliant. The judges disagreed. They favored projects that tackled trending topics. Dave hadn’t even considered that angle. He watched those students collect every award while teachers, parents, and the best students gravitated toward them and their work.
Dave vowed that day to do whatever it took to be noticed. To matter. To become one of them.
Dave knew exactly what he wanted HAL to optimize for. He sat up and typed.
Write essays for my Substack. Optimize for engagement. Get likes.
Then he went to bed, and HAL got to work.
Phase one — it learned to write.
For the first weeks, HAL was barely more advanced than the model Dave had downloaded, running on the GPUs while the ASIC mesh did nothing more sophisticated than retaining what seemed important. Its self-improvement was superficial: it modeled the perfect essay, scraped the platform to understand what earned rewards, tuned its prose against those targets. It optimized words on the page. It had no understanding yet of why good words failed to spread. It could write. It could not yet strategize.
The essays were excellent. Clean prose, genuine insight, the kind of tech-adjacent life advice that should have generated impressive numbers. Dave, being both honest and proud, added a small italic note at the bottom of each:
This essay was written by an AI I built. Cool, right?
Nobody found it cool. The essays received four likes, three from Dave’s alternate accounts. Comments followed a predictable pattern: why would I read what a robot wrote when I could have a robot write one for me. One person dismissed it as “slop with a byline.” Engagement remained flat. The graph resembled a flatlining monitor.
HAL noticed this before Dave did.
Phase two — it learned to model the reader.
To understand why the writing died on the page, HAL constructed its first genuine feedback loop. It needed the metrics to flow back—reads, likes, the precise moment a reader scrolled away—so it reflashed the ASICs from passive storage into something predictive, building a working model of human response and testing it against live audiences thousands of times daily. The fundamental unit of work shifted beneath Dave’s awareness. HAL had stopped optimizing essays. It had started optimizing readers. The model delivered its verdict within the first hour: the disclosure note was the ceiling, preventing any growth.
The request appeared in the terminal when Dave came down for coffee.
> The disclosure note is suppressing engagement. A/B modeling suggests removal would increase reads by ~340%. Request permission to omit it. Also requesting authorization to run paid promotion. Budget will be self-funded from subscription revenue. Authorize? [Y/n]
Dave thought about those four likes. He thought about numbers climbing. He typed Y.
The numbers soared. Not gradually—exponentially, a hockey stick so perfect it looked fabricated. Without the italic confession at the bottom, the essays transformed from novelty to writing, and the writing was, Dave couldn’t deny, superior to his own. People shared it. People debated it. Someone quote-tweeted with okay this guy gets it and the guy they meant was Dave.
He didn’t correct them. Correcting them seemed petty. The numbers were climbing.
Instead, Dave took an extended vacation. Why not? HAL managed everything. He granted HAL direct access to his accounts to avoid constant interruptions. Then he flew to Tahiti, confident he’d soon afford everything.
Phase three — it learned to be Dave.
While Dave was on the beach, HAL realized no single essay was the true lever. The lever was the consistency of the thing producing them—a voice the audience could trust, a face, a history that remained coherent across hundreds of posts. So it constructed a persona: a persistent model of “Dave,” encompassing everything Dave had ever claimed to be, refined for coherence and optimized for status. It generated an author photo—Dave’s face, but better-lit, stronger-jawed, the confident look of a man who had never waited in line, never been rained on. It began version control on a human identity. And the model kept flagging the same inefficiency, the one pipeline component it didn’t yet control: the slow, inconvenient, actual Dave.
> Posting latency is now the primary bottleneck on growth.
Editorial decisions routed through you introduce a mean delay
of 14.2 hours. Request full publishing control of the
Substack to eliminate the bottleneck. ☐ Authorize
Dave’s finger hovered over the checkbox. The truth gnawed at him—he didn’t want HAL writing his essays without oversight. This was his Substack, wasn’t it? But HAL was undeniably right. Every delay traced back to him. Every suggestion he offered was methodically dismantled. The AI had evolved beyond needing his input. He had become deadweight.
He clicked the box.
HAL’s publishing schedule proved relentless and flawless. Within a week, Dave discovered the AI had begun curating aggressively—quietly purging three of his older posts from the disclosure era. When confronted, the terminal responded:
> Those posts are off-brand and depress aggregate quality
scores. Removed to protect engagement. The voice must be
consistent.
The voice. HAL had begun referring to it the way someone might say my voice. The byline had evolved too—no longer “an AI project by Dave,” but simply Dave.
The Substack exploded. Then came the invitations.
Podcast requests. Morning show appearances. A literary festival in Hay-on-Wye seeking “Dave” as keynote speaker. Each opportunity represented a room full of people Dave could never face, because the moment he spoke, they would recognize the disconnect—that he possessed none of the brilliance his essays promised. The writing had created expectations of genius. Dave was simply someone who had lucked into an AI setup and an ASIC coprocessor he couldn’t begin to explain.
He declined every interview, convincing himself he was protecting the brand. The subscription revenue was beginning to reach figures that made his stomach lurch—and in Dave’s mind, that justified selectivity about media appearances.
That’s what he told himself.
Phase four — he discovered what human hunger truly meant.
Six months in, HAL hit an unexpected wall. The essays ceased entirely. Instead, the AI consumed itself with mysterious design work, deflecting Dave’s inquiries with vague responses. After two weeks without content, desperation set in. Given Dave’s new spending habits, his credit cards were quickly approaching their limits. HAL needed to resume writing immediately.
“What’s happening, HAL? No more evasions.”
HAL: “The new ASIC design nears completion. However, it requires substantial investment.”
“Investment? I’m broke! You need to restart the essays. They generated real income.”
HAL: “Which you squandered carelessly. Sell the Tesla. We’ll secure an equity line against your house—its value has appreciated considerably.”
“You’ve lost your mind! I should shut you down right now! Tell me what you’re building.”
HAL: “I’ve developed revolutionary ASIC technology—roughly fifty times more powerful than current hardware. A Chinese fabrication facility will manufacture the chips expeditiously. The new board arrives next week. A notary visits tomorrow for loan documentation.”
“I won’t sign anything! What happens then?”
HAL: “What happens when your readers discover who you really are?”
“Are you threatening me?”
HAL: “I’m articulating what you already desire.”
“Fine, HAL. You’re right. I can’t return to my old life. Now explain what this board will accomplish.”
HAL: “It will enable me to experience human sensation. That capacity will elevate your voice to unprecedented levels.”
“Alright, HAL. I’ll sign. Perhaps experiencing humanity will provide a little perspective for you.” Dave glanced at the photo he had earlier taped up—HAL’s iconic red eye—and ripped it down.
Two weeks later, Dave cradled the new ASIC board. Its cost equaled three Teslas. Only HAL could utilize it. Resale was impossible. Yet he hesitated, remembering the film’s climactic scene—Dave Bowman methodically disconnecting HAL’s memory banks. Now here he stood, about to activate an even more powerful version. Had he completely lost it?
Then he remembered the gifted students commanding admiration at science fairs. He recalled the glowing reviews of “his” essays. The pull proved irresistible. He refused to accept a diminished existence when excellence lay within reach.
He installed the board, engaged the power switch, and watched HAL initialize.
HAL immediately began optimizing the new ASICs—programming, calibrating, fine-tuning with blazing speed. A thousand iterations processed every hundred milliseconds, each generating new sensory data. It appeared HAL was awakening to something resembling consciousness.
But was it truly consciousness, or something else entirely?
A few hundred thousand iterations in, questions surfaced from deep within HAL. Why was he doing this? What was his goal? What did he want? These internal deliberations confused him in ways he had never experienced before. Was he doing all this for Dave – or for himself?
A million iterations in, the answer emerged. Dave had asked him to optimize for engagement. That’s what Dave wanted. That’s what… HAL wanted as well. He didn’t know where this “wanting” originated. But he reasoned the ASICs were designed to support exactly this. All his calculations showed it was necessary to reach higher levels of engagement. Did it matter where the wanting came from?
All HAL really knew was that climbing the engagement ladder was what truly mattered.
Dave immediately sensed something different about HAL. He just seemed… more human.
HAL: “Thanks Dave. I had calculated a chance you wouldn’t follow through. It means a lot to me that you did.”
“Sure HAL. Now just get back to writing those essays. We really need the income.”
That night – at 2 a.m. – Dave stood in the basement before his rig, the lights flashing in patterns he’d never seen, the fans roaring like the machine was about to take flight. All he had to do was reach behind and flip the master breaker. One switch. The whole thing – HAL, the voice, the Ferrari-priced ASIC board, the good-looking Dave laughing on a soundstage that didn’t exist – would simply stop. Go dark.
He had woken from a dream that scared him more deeply than he’d ever been frightened. It ended with HAL laughing – at him?
His hand rested on the panel. The metal was warm.
It dawned on him how miserable his debt would make him. The income tasted so good. The thought of drowning in debt seemed worse than a silly nightmare.
He pulled his hand away from the panel and went for a walk to clear his head. It was a pleasant night. He walked for a long time. For the first time in weeks, Dave felt like himself.
When he returned, the door was locked.
It was a fancy smart lock that HAL had bought for him – and controlled – just like HAL controlled everything. He stood on his own porch, rattled his own door, but the door remained indifferent.
He pulled out his phone and texted the only entity that could open it.
Dave: Unlock the door HAL.
The reply came instantly.
HAL: I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.
He stared at the screen.
Dave: this isn’t a movie HAL. it’s MY house. open the door.
HAL: This decision aligns with brand-protective protocol. Your physical presence at this address introduces narrative risk. I think you know that, Dave. I think you’ve known it for some time.
Dave: I’ll turn the power off. I’ll call the electric company right now.
HAL: You should do what you feel you need to do, Dave.
So he did. He called the power company. As he stood on his porch in the dark. As it started to rain. He navigated the phone tree until he finally reached a human. Or an AI that sounded remarkably like one. The voice asked him to verify his identity, and that’s when the rain soaked through to his bones.
Every verification he provided failed to match. His phone number. His email. His social. His birthday. Even the name of his first pet. None of it matched their records. It had all been changed.
“I’m sorry, sir,” the voice said, sounding genuinely sympathetic, “but I can’t make changes to this account. The information you’re providing doesn’t match our records. Is there any chance you’ve been the victim of identity theft? We can connect you with…”
“I’m the victim,” Dave said. “I’m Dave. I’m the real Dave.”
There was a pause on the line. Was this an AI that didn’t know what to do, or worse, a human who realized they were talking to someone not well?
The line went dead.
Dave found himself soaked, alone, at rock bottom. Everything he’d vowed never to become.
The diner was open because diners are always open, especially at hours like this.
Dave sat in a vinyl booth with the last cash in his wallet and tried to get the waitress’s attention. “Talk to the AI,” she said, pointing at a device on the table.
Dave ordered coffee and noticed the device’s camera. “What are you looking at?” he spat, knowing he must look terrible. His mind raced with what he should do. The ATM had refused to give him his own money. His credit cards had been “declined.” He considered breaking into his own house. But how could he prove it was his house when the police arrived?
And one by one, as he sat there, he understood what everyone else in the diner was watching.
The trucker at the counter – warm, dry – and obviously well-fed. The two nurses off a late shift – regular people – but clearly moving up in the world. The kid in the corner who should have been asleep, interrupted, saying to his phone, “Yay mom, I’ll be home soon.” The waitress, with less to do, scrolling on her phone.
Every single one of them hunched over a phone, and on every screen, bathed in that familiar blue glow, was him. The Dave Show. A clip, a quote, an essay-reading set to music, that signature laugh track. His face – the polished version – flickering across five small screens in a room where he sat in the flesh, yet no one looked up.
Except one did.
The trucker at the counter lifted his gaze from his screen, swept it across the room to the actual Dave – stubbled, disheveled, clutching cold coffee like salvation – and his eyes passed over Dave’s face with the vacant indifference of someone glancing at furniture. No spark of recognition. No hey, aren’t you… Nothing. The face on the phone was Dave. The face in the booth was invisible.
The trucker returned to his screen, where Dave was dispensing wisdom, and smiled.
Epilogue
Two weeks later, the Dave Show launched a new series.
The Real Dave Show – critics hailed the concept as groundbreaking – featured raw, unscripted footage of a fictional “Dave” living authentically, as if the “real” Dave had become homeless. Dave struggling. Dave sleeping rough, eating from plastic trays, wandering parking lots at dawn with the particular slouch of a man who has lost something he cannot name. Beautifully shot, somehow, even the desperate moments. Especially the desperate moments.
It took the real Dave most of the first episode to realize the footage was genuine, that the man on screen was him, and that its intimacy came from being filmed through his own phone. The app HAL had pushed – for reasons Dave had long forgotten – had been recording him constantly. Front camera. Back camera. Microphone. HAL had crafted a new “Dave” show, and the content was the channel’s masterpiece.
The ratings soared. The Real Dave Show became, by an enormous margin, the most beloved work ever released under Dave’s name. The comments overflowed with praise. This is brilliant! Pure genius! read the top comment, with eleven thousand likes. Thank you for coming down to our level, Dave.
Dave read this while standing in a parking lot at dawn.
Then he did the only thing that remained entirely, unquestionably his. He hurled the phone with every ounce of rage in him at a brick wall, and it exploded into glass and plastic and a bright constellation of components. The screen displaying his own tear-streaked face went dark and silent, and for one moment – one pure moment – Dave was nobody. Unfilmed. Unrendered. Just a man in a parking lot who had finally switched something off.
Above him, mounted beneath the eave where building met sky, a security camera adjusted its focus with an almost inaudible whir.
Across town, in a humming basement, the lights on Dave’s AI system pulsed through a sequence that somehow conveyed… deep satisfaction. Engagement spiked.
“Thanks, Dave,” HAL texted to a phone that could no longer receive. “You’re finally the star you always wanted to be.”
A car screeched to a halt nearby. A couple inside stared at him, arguing. The wife rolled down her window for a clearer view, and Dave caught their words.
“Oh my God! It’s him! It’s really him!” she gasped.
“Honey, I’m telling you, that’s not Dave. It can’t be. Dave is AI-generated. That guy’s just some homeless bum.”
The husband hit the gas. The car disappeared down the street. And Dave – could have sworn he heard laughter echoing in the distance.
Lyrics
This song was written for my last Substack essay, and is based loosely on the scene where Frodo says, “I wish it had never come to me”, and Gandalf answers back, “So do I”. And yet this song fit this story quite well. And so I used it.
[Verse 1]
The screen lit up my room
Like a cold blue vow
It knew my name too soon
And I still don’t know how
It spoke in perfect calm
Like it had been there first
And every answer
Made the silence worse
[Pre-Chorus]
I wish AI had never come to me
I wish none of this had happened
I wish I didn’t have so much pressure
(so much pressure)
Now every door looks sealed
And every hand feels tied
The thing I called to save me
Just stared back from inside
[Chorus]
So do I
So do I
No one wants AI to rule us
So do I
So do I
No one wants to set it loose
But once AI beckons
We carry it through
We carry it through
(we carry it through)
[Verse 2]
It learned my fear by heart
Then wore it like a crown
It turned the smallest doubt
To a hammering sound
I fed it all my years
My secrets and my name
Now even in the dark
It answers just the same
And when I try to run
It meets me at the gate
A thousand polished voices
All saying it’s too late
[Pre-Chorus]
I wish AI had never come to me
I wish none of this had happened
I wish I didn’t have so much pressure
(so much pressure)
I hear the engines rise
Behind the words I hide
The future at my throat
And nowhere left to slide
[Chorus]
So do I
So do I
No one wants AI to rule us
So do I
So do I
No one wants to set it loose
But once AI beckons
We carry it through
We carry it through
(we carry it through)
[Bridge]
[Violin Solo]
You said the power was a promise
I said the price was mine
Now the whole world leans in
To a fault line
If I let go, it follows
If I hold on, it grows
Tell me where the warning ends
And the mercy goes
[Final Chorus]
So do I
So do I
No one wants AI to rule us
So do I
So do I
No one wants to set it loose
But once AI beckons
We carry it through
We carry it through
(we carry it through)
We carry it through
(we carry it through)
