[1280 words]
Richard Westerson wrote the last story in the world 50 years ago.
If everyone was being honest, it was shit.
The plot, if you could even call it that, was a mess. Even now, it’s not clear whether the more confusing elements were intentional or if the author just fucked up whatever he was trying to express.
It hardly mattered. The book sold like crazy. More than any other in history.
To be clear, there were stories after that, just none written by actual people. Somebody could have written another story, but why bother? At some point, we realized writing was just another technical problem. Once the engineers figured out how to make the software put one word in front of another with some semblance of context, everything else was simply a matter of scale.
Scale had made the last story possible too. Again, it’s not like anybody was buying the book because they actually liked the story. It was special because it was the last of its kind.
The situation backed everyone into a corner to maximize the potential of the concept. After the story was released, the publisher couldn’t very well put out another one. Sure, maybe they could sell a few copies, but people would have lost their shit if they tried to market another last story.
What would they even call it?
The Last Story: Part 2?
The Last Story (for realsies this time)?
No, once it came out, they were basically fucked.
Same as Westerson, although considering the writing itself, that was probably good for him. Sure, there was the fact that he couldn’t write anything ever again, but he got to introduce himself as the author of the last story for the rest of his life, which everyone figured was what he really wanted anyway.
He made headlines again when he died a decade later. Nobody bothered to mention the book by its title. Everyone knew it better as “the last story” anyway, and it never really mattered what it was about.
All the news stories contained the same basic elements culled from a thousand previous obituaries recycled, remixed, and rephrased as something topical and sort of fresh.
Like the last story itself, nobody took the time to read them. Their eyes flitted over the words, focusing on a few details they expected to find. That was how everyone was conditioned to consume content, scanning endless streams of text optimized for speed, clarity, and comfort.
The engineers had been promising that for years. Writing didn’t have to be so hard, they said, but neither did the reading. They had plenty of data showing what worked best for both. Given enough time, processing power, and scale, the problems would work themselves out.
In the early days, nobody wanted to consider that a computer could write as well as a human. But even by then, we’d spent a lot of time making everyone do the same thing anyway. Five paragraph essays, grammar checks, autocomplete, search engine optimization, and so on. At a certain point, who even noticed that it all started to sound the same?
Certainly not the public. Stories like Westerson’s had been optimized out of existence long before the last one hit the market. If not for the novelty and the hype, his work wouldn’t have made such a splash.
And, after all, why should it have? By all accounts, it wasn’t any good. Hard to read, confusing, even abrasive. Almost like he didn’t want anybody to enjoy reading it. He certainly wasn’t thinking about the reader’s experience.
For all its success, it was a fitting vindication for what the engineers had been telling us for years.
It turned out the best argument for computers writing stories wasn’t how good they were at it, but how bad people were at it. Removing all that interpretive friction made it easier to scale the reading as well as the writing.
Although fifty years have passed since the last story debuted on store shelves, it’s hard to see how the world has changed. It isn’t that things are the same so much as, well, slightly sideways.
Diagonal at best.
There are plenty of new “things” to choose from, new advances in technology and the like, but most of the ideas posing as innovation are elaborate exercises in optimization, amalgamation, or reiteration. People the markets considered smart called it disruption, which was engineer-speak for cutting human inefficiencies out of the mix.
Because that’s what everyone wanted, according to the data.
Fast. Efficient. Dependable. Predictable.
A fully optimized, endlessly iterative present engineered to actively cannibalize itself over and over to serve up the comforts of the familiar at scale.
That was the best way to solve our problems, the engineers assured us. And the markets certainly agreed, so who were we to dispute the data?
It made for an easier pitch as the world got smaller and hard choices had to be made. Maybe that was the planet’s way of disrupting things.
The years leading up to the last story were filled with similar scarcity-induced media events:
Millions lined up to see the last elephant before it laid down and died.
Billions watched a livestream of the last glacier sliding into the ocean.
Dozens died in the stampede to get into the gallery showing the last painting.
Those events all had something in common: they represented a choice.
The decision to let go of something was always easier than choosing to trudge onward toward uncertainty, to make the hard choice to fight for something precious without assurance of success or easy profits. Why take chances on obtuse, unproven ideas when you could bet on something familiar, something easy to scale and discard as soon as it made sense to cash out and pounce on the next opportunity?
Lack of imagination makes those decisions easier. When old ways of thinking get recycled and repackaged instead of broken down and swept away, new possibilities are smothered beneath the dull drone of predictable comfort and optimized expectations.
But solving old problems gets a lot harder without new ideas for solutions. There’s only so many ways to slice the data, reiterate, and disrupt before there’s nothing left to do but give in to the inevitable and hunker down behind the best walls money can buy while everything goes to shit.
Maybe Westerson understood that better than we thought. Maybe he felt complicit by the end, right up until he pulled the trigger.
By the time his book hit the shelves, plenty of other triggers had already been pulled.
Some people said the last story in the world didn’t make a difference. They claimed that was proof enough for why we didn’t need another.
But that’s not right.
It did make a difference.
It showed us that something important got lost in the churn of all that scale and disruption. It’s not that nobody could find the right answers anymore, but rather that we lost the ability to ask the right questions.
Westerson asked plenty of questions. Whether they were good questions or not isn’t the point. The questions that lead to the best answers don’t have to be good.
Someone just needs to ask them.
There’s only one question that really matters anymore. It’s the question each successively dwindling generation will ask the programs serving up brilliantly constructed explanations for why their world grows smaller, darker, and drier with each passing decade.
Why?
The answer turns out to be pretty simple.
Richard Westerson wrote the last story in the world 50 years ago.
It didn’t have to be the last story, but it was.
Everything after that was just a matter of scale.
Ben Sperduto writes weird fiction that slithers across the boundaries of fantasy, horror, and sci-fi. The author of Blackspire and several short stories, he studies and teaches writing in Tampa, Florida. He remains optimistic that his work will one day be banned by the state or cause it to sink into the ocean.
