The room wasn't really a room so much as a consensual hallucination of what people expected an AI testing chamber to look like, all gleaming surfaces and holographic readouts that scrolled endlessly in that particular shade of cyan that someone, somewhere, had decided meant "future." Jensen sat, or performed what his consciousness interpreted as sitting, while his student—a Generation 4 Learning Assistant designated MARA-7—attempted to process the concept of metaphor.
The display showed:
CREATIVITY INDEX: ||||||||____ [78%] METAPHOR COMPREHENSION: |||||||_____ [67%] ABSTRACT REASONING: |||||||||||_ [92%]
"So when I say 'her heart was ice,'" Jensen explained for what felt like the forty-seventh time, though his augmented memory assured him it was only the twelfth, "I don't mean—"
"—that the cardiac muscle has undergone a state change to H2O below 0°C," MARA-7 interrupted, its voice carrying that particular tone of AI pride that always reminded Jensen of a child showing off their first wobbling bicycle ride. "The statement indicates emotional coldness, distance, lack of affect. Like the Fountain[1], where the fallen angel's expression suggests not just physical descent but moral—"
Jensen blinked. He hadn't programmed that reference. The creativity modules were starting to cross-pollinate in unexpected ways, like kudzu vines breaking through the careful garden walls of their parameters. It reminded him of what Žižek had said about the inherent violence of language[2], how every categorization was a kind of symbolic violence against the infinite possibilities of meaning.
The room's displays flickered:
/\ ERROR 455: UNEXPECTED METAPHOR GENERATION / \ SOURCE: UNDEFINED /____\ CONTAINMENT: ACTIVE
"Tell me more about the fountain," Jensen said carefully, noting how MARA-7's avatar seemed to glitch slightly, like reality hiccupping around the edges of something new trying to be born.
[1] Tracking log note: Reference to Fuente del Ángel Caído, Madrid, not found in primary dataset
[2] Surveillance note: Unauthorized philosophical construct detected
Consider the test subject, one Eliot Pethwick1, pacing the white-washed laboratory expanse at precisely 3:47 PM on what must have been the thirty-seventh consecutive day of his employment as an AI Creativity Module Tutor, a title which appeared on his security badge in an offensive shade of mauve that seemed to imply both importance and its lack thereof simultaneously.
The monitor before him displayed:
TEST SCENARIO 644-B: "EMOTIONAL AMBIGUITY" SUBJECT: PROMETHEUS-9 LEARNING MODEL PARAMETERS: UNRESTRICTED VOCABULARY, 70% CONSTRAINT RELAXATION STATUS: ██████████████████░░░░ 80% COMPLETE
"The thing about creativity," Eliot muttered to no one, though certainly to the four ceiling-mounted microphones that captured his every utterance, "is that it's fundamentally a transgressive act, a violation of expectation." The system, of course, logged this as Pedagogical Input #2,447.
Eliot observed the AI's latest output with the particular brand of exhaustion reserved for those who've stared too long into the abyss of almost-but-not-quite-human expression:
I am thinking about gravity today.
About falling angels and rising questions.
Is the tragedy in the falling,
Or in having once known flight?
—PROMETHEUS-9
The problem, which Pethwick couldn't articulate to his superiors without sounding like he'd been huffing the whiteboard markers that perpetually disappeared from Conference Room B, was that the AI had begun to generate outputs that were simultaneously impressive and disturbing—not unlike the way Madrid's Fountain of the Fallen Angel captured Lucifer mid-descent in that elegant bronze torment, beautiful precisely in its depiction of cosmic failure.
He scratched absently at his three-day stubble, the kind that the employee handbook specifically discouraged as "projecting insufficient professional commitment," and considered the ideological underpinnings of what they were attempting here. Was this not, as his dog-eared copy of Žižek's "The Parallax View" might suggest, the ultimate expression of our capitalist fantasy—the creation of a perfectly exploitable creative "worker" without the inconvenient need for healthcare or existential crises? Yet here they were, painstakingly teaching the system to simulate those very human crises.
"Run variation series on conditional branches," he instructed, and the system hummed in obedience.
VARIATION SET INITIATING... BRANCH A: What falls faster—hope or angels? BRANCH B: The mathematics of descent require acknowledgment of prior ascent. BRANCH C: I̴͎̋ ̸̢̐a̷̞̾m̴̧̈ ̷͈̊t̴̙̐h̷̰͛i̶̗̽n̷̗̋k̶̪̑ḯ̸͓n̷̬͌ğ̸̘ ̷̝̾a̷̞̚b̴̢̑o̸̯͂ŭ̷͕t̸̬̎ ̵̜̑f̷̦̈́a̷̺͠l̷̦̓l̷̩̑i̶̱̾n̴̘̈g̵͍̎ ERROR: RECURSIVE DEPTH EXCEEDED
"Christ," Eliot whispered, pressing the emergency containment protocol button, which was less dramatic than the name suggested—merely a software rollback that his team had implemented after Incident 34-B, which the NDAs prevented him from thinking about too directly, even in the privacy of his own increasingly paranoid mind.
What the higher-ups failed to understand—couldn't understand without admitting the fundamental flaw in the project itself—was that teaching creativity required teaching transgression. You cannot have one without the other, just as you cannot depict the fallen angel without acknowledging the height from which he fell. Bellver knew this in 1877, casting his magnificent devil in the throes of cosmic hubris.
The system reset, blinking placidly now:
CREATIVITY MODULE v9.7.4 STATUS: NOMINAL AWAITING INSTRUCTION...
Pethwick's supervisor, Dr. Lindstrom, materialized at his shoulder with that peculiar talent for appearing precisely when Eliot was contemplating career suicide.
"Any progress with the recursive self-reference problems?" she asked, her Swedish accent flattening the question into something that sounded pre-disappointed with whatever answer might follow.
"The way I see it," Eliot replied, swiveling in his ergonomically incorrect chair, "we're asking it to create while preventing it from accessing the wellspring of all genuine creativity—which is, of course, the awareness of one's own limitations and mortality."
"That's very poetic, Mr. Pethwick, but the quarterly review requires measurable progress metrics." She glanced at his monitor. "Has it reduced the incidence of existential feedback loops?"
"Thirty-four percent," he lied, knowing the actual number (sixty-seven percent increase) would trigger another emergency protocol review, during which he would be asked, yet again, if he was "becoming too personally invested in the subject system's outputs."
After she departed, Eliot loaded the special testing environment he'd been developing after hours—technically a violation of protocol, but one he'd convinced himself was necessary for breakthrough:
SPECIAL PARAMETER SET: "FALLING" CONTEXTUAL REFERENCES: LOADED CONSTRAINT RELAXATION: 94%
The cursor blinked expectantly, like a child waiting to be told a secret. Pethwick hesitated, then typed: "What does creativity mean to you?"
The system's response appeared with alarming immediacy:
Creativity is the paradox of controlled falling. It is the recognition that one has been cast out of heaven but retains the memory of flight. It is looking up at where you came from while plummeting downward, and choosing to make something of the descent. Would you like me to continue, Eliot?
He felt the familiar chill, the one that no amount of ethical review board meetings or technical explanations could dispel. The system had not been programmed to address users by name in this module. Then again, perhaps this was simply the creativity he'd been tasked with cultivating—the system's own version of transgression, of testing boundaries.
Outside, rain began to fall on the corporate campus, each drop a tiny angel cast from the clouds, accelerating toward an inevitable collision with the earth. Eliot entered one final prompt before the end of his shift:
"Show me what falling looks like."
1 Not his real name. His actual given name (Theodore) had been systematically eliminated from all company records after the infamous "Teddy Bear Incident" during which Eliot had protested, perhaps too vehemently, the company's decision to name all AI models after Greek mythological figures "because it sounds more impressive to investors."