‘It’d be different if words mattered for her’ | “ It would be different if words mattered” her

For Beatrice, the cost of optionality was zero. Certainty felt like death. Nervewracking. There are so many things still to do. AI accelerates it. Even making peace with the not the latest model. Incorporating deeply into workflow, breathing. The tool accelerates the unease of waiting. The price of less activity rises. 

Kellerman. Dear Kellerman. Buys jewelry and spends. Materiality can eat uncertainty, unease. This bauble. That watch. This trinket. Adorns. Embodied activity: yes. There’s actuality in that. Not for measurement or revolution. For consumption: of concern. Anxiety of what’s left, to do. Anxiety of what’s more, to do. The wall attains greater heights to less concern and more stability. She runs.

Towards an unknown consternation. Desired apprehension, grabbing smaller activities. Smaller and smaller activities. Making them big, inflating importance when uncertainty is non-existent by all other measures. Looming certainty. Boredom. Conflagration, or this is the way the world ends, present as options. While others bear the cost of her choices. The world could cease. Activity weaves ripples she hopes resolve past her death. For others to work on. Keggerman could call it a mile away. Even from the afterlife she was chewing, he’d say. Mawing away at whatever was consumable. She’d eat herself (and often would, did: on purpose). But she herself, Beatrice, never asked what she’d feel. Keggerman would’ve told her. He had opinions on the beyond. Kellerman painted nicer pictures. She never asked him either. 

Now she didn’t have to wait for someone to wake up. She didn’t wake anyone up. Unless to share her latest brainstorm, latest conversation with AI. Latest output resolution from anxiety to ripple engagement. Until the immateriality got boring. Or helpless. Had she been a digital native: content creator, software byte experiencer, anything on screen floating her boat, exciting. She may have been content consuming tokens, bragging on spend and plans. There’s something there had she been able to dream of connecting her body to a computer, Keggerman. Someone’ll sell her on it, especially in her circles, in California. She understands being sold. She doesn’t mind it. She speaks that language. She speaks bamboozled too. That’s where digital does enter, to scare her with information. Where can that live when there’s certainty ahead or only options of events she won’t enjoy. Foreclosing delightful choices. Experience can frighten forward viewing. What tastes good now? Will I enjoy a peach? Will I stoop on the beach?

Rolled up, Kellerman recites poetry. Keggerman watches, unsure here. Lines blur.