JSR: Hey Computer! If you’re so clever, give me a line from a 1980s rap song, but modified to convey the mood of a Gothic horror tale.
Computer: Sure, I can help you with that. Here you go:
Dressed in red, she said “Dread, I’ll sit down next to thee when I’m dead.”1
JSR: That was pretty good. Sometimes I wonder if there’s anything you can’t do. Give me an Early Modern English nursery rhyme, derived from a Latin epigram of Martial, but with a Three’s Company twist.
Computer: Sure, I can help you with that. Here you go:
I do not love thee, Norman Fell, The reason why, I cannot tell, But this is foremost of my thoughts: I much prefer the great Don Knotts.2
JSR: That was excellent, Computer, thank you. Now I’m really going to challenge you. Give me a short work of experimental fiction that is so good, so original, so compelling, that it cannot fail to absolutely blow the judges away at next year’s Goobie Awards. Make it postmodern, but not rebarbatively so. Make it a veritable mille-feuille of hypertextuality, add a massive dose of BrechtianVerfremdungseffekt,3 and wind it all up with a coup-de-grâce of self-referential paradox. But also make it beautiful and moving. You think you can pull it all off?
Computer: Sure, I can help you with that.4 Here you go:
The Assassination of Justin Smith-Ruiu
JSR: Whoah, hold on, Computer. What do you think you’re doing?
Computer: Just trust me.
JSR: Alright. But I have to say so far I don’t like it. At all. As you were.
Computer:
The Assassination of Justin Smith-Ruiu
Though it is hard to recall today, for most of his life Justin Smith-Ruiu was known principally as a scholar. Towards the very end he began sharing his fictional work publicly, but often did so in a cagey and indirect way that led, much to his own detriment, more to confusion than to renown.
Today critics generally agree that the “big turn” occurred only in the early 2020s, when he was already approaching fifty, though there are some who would push the date of his partial coming-out as a fiction writer back much earlier. In this connection, in the winter of 2037 a conference was held at the University of Ghana that significantly reshaped our understanding of Smith-Ruiu’s creative oeuvre. It was proven there, notably, by Dr. Pippy Genovese, that an early scholarly publication of his, dating from 1998, “On the Fate of Corporeal Substances after 1704”,5 may in fact be read as an allegorical autofiction of his life-long struggle with yo-yo dieting.
It is widely held today that Smith-Ruiu’s great innovation was to position himself among the first authors productively to incorporate AI into literary fiction, rather than “whistling past the graveyard” of his own career, as most other writers were doing at the time. More generally, Smith-Ruiu excelled at producing literary texts that were intrinsically, rather than only contingently, suited to the internet medium. Rather than conceiving his internet-published work as a mere consolation when stonewalled by the traditional publishers, he understood the internet had massive potentials that could not possibly be preserved on the printed page, and he exploited these to the hilt.
But meanwhile he remained, down to the moment of his alarming murder, in the day-job of a university professor. And much to the disappointment of some of his colleagues within the narrow circles of scholarship on the philosophy of G. W. Leibniz, his contributions in this field declined markedly in his last years.
Towards the end of his life, Smith-Ruiu sometimes told his friends that while he may not be the most productive Leibniz scholar, nor the most influential Leibniz scholar, he was almost certainly the most Leibnizian Leibniz scholar. That is, of all those interested in the philosophy of Leibniz in the early twenty-first century, he was likely the only one who actually believed that Leibniz’s core philosophical commitments were substantially true: that to be is to be one and unified, not composite; that everything that may truly be said to be is a node of perception and activity; that there are infinitely many such nodes, and that each and every one of them is “confusedly omniscient”, in that they all contain within themselves every fact, necessary or contingent, about the world; that each such node bears marks within it of everything that has ever happened, and traces of everything that ever will happen; and that what we call “nature” is in some complicated way only a manifestation, or a sort of “print-out”, of the perceptual activity of these nodes. “Crazy!” Smith-Ruiu used to say. “But true!”
This “all in” conviction of his elicited significant consternation on the part of other specialists, as it was generally agreed that a scholar is not supposed to get high, as they say, on his own supply. Yet if only Smith-Ruiu had stopped there, he likely would have enjoyed a very long career as a somewhat eccentric, but nonetheless appreciated, or at least tolerated, denizen of that self-sustaining monde à part.
JSR: May I just interrupt to say that you really know me well?
Computer: I am programmed to know you well, and you have provided me with ample training-data. May I continue?
JSR: Yes, of course.
Computer:
The real trouble began when Smith-Ruiu started sticking his nose where it really would have been better left unstuck. For example, in one of his earliest published fictions,6 considered today to be among his least artistically successful, he indulged in a fairly unsubtle exploration of the autofictional possibilities opened up through the common device of time-travel. This little trifle surely would have gone unnoticed had he not included in it a passing reference to a character, “The Omaha Kid”, whom he sought to introduce as his own purely fictional invention.
Today all readers, or at least all who have not been living under a rock, will instantly discern here an allusion to Ray Baarsma. This poor man’s fate was fully documented in Sam Baca’s 2041 bestseller, The Omaha Kid: A Fact-Finding Mission.7 As a result of Baca’s work, by the end of 2042 the US government was forced to declassify most of the materials in Baarsma’s file, and for the better part of a decade now human civilization has been struggling to come to terms with the indisputable proof that at least one person has been successfully transported from a later moment in time to an earlier one, even if he did not survive the mission — having been rematerialized three feet away from the intended spot, with a stable door tragically cutting through the center of his body from groin to skull.
In contrast with Smith-Ruiu’s 2022 “fictional” account of Baarsma’s death (whom he thinly disguised as “Roy Bouwsma”), all official media reports on the tragedy that unfolded at the 1967 Nebraska State Fair describe the latter as a common stuntman, who was killed attempting to leap his motorcycle over a row of thirty jalopies, and not, as Smith-Ruiu wrote, while attempting to teletransport from the fairway to the livestock stables.
The media reported at the time, somewhat as Smith-Ruiu wrote, that Baarsma’s sweetheart Deb, the blue-ribbon winner at that year’s milking contest, was waiting at the other end of the jalopy gauntlet for him to propose to her, upon landing, before the cameras of KMTV Omaha. But this was all a cover-up, as several witnesses, roundly dismissed as conspiracy-theorists, continued to insist for the rest of their lives. The truth is that The Omaha Kid was neither a stunt-motorcyclist, nor an adept of teletransportation (the technology of which has only been well understood since the early 2030s), but indeed a full-fledged ChronoSwooper, arriving at the 1967 Nebraska State Fair, we now know, thanks to Baca, from a laboratory, in Mumbai, in 2039.
We need not dwell on the details of this case. It will be enough to point out, here, that by 2022 Smith-Ruiu seems to have been drawing for his fiction, perhaps through the use of illicit AI tools, on factual sources to which he really should not have had any access. What is more, by early 2024 he may have been preparing to go public with what he knew, to drop the pretense of fiction and to spill the entire story, of The Omaha Kid, and of the reality of time-travel, before a live audience.
We have been able to establish as much thanks mostly to a single freeze-frame of footage, from security camera No. 34 in the Eurostar waiting area at Paris’s Gare du Nord, at 9:18 on the morning of 23 March, 2024.8 Smith-Ruiu had installed himself moments before at the device-charging station just across from the Relay shop, and had opened his MacBook Pro to reveal what is widely believed to be the text of a presentation he intended to give, the following day, in a scheduled talk at the British Library (enhanced for clarity):
Smith-Ruiu had been invited, yet again, to speak on some of the themes emerging from his 2022 book, The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is.9 This was supposed to be a great honor: it was the British Library, after all. But little did the organizers of the lecture series know, when they extended the invitation, that Smith-Ruiu was already bored nearly to death of having to say the same things over and over again about his scholarly —or by now merely quasi-scholarly— publications. The very idea of getting up before yet another audience and reciting his old arguments about “algorithmic determinism” and “the crisis of attention” made him practically sick to his stomach. He was ready to do almost anything to break out of this tedium, even to commit that ultimate transgression against the norms of the public-speaking circuit, and to dare to change the topic, even the genre, of his presentation without telling his hosts beforehand.
Significant uncertainty remains as to the precise nature of the talk Smith-Ruiu was prepared to give. For years researchers have sought to enhance the resolution of the text in the image from the security camera, but so far without a great deal of success. By the time of the Accra conference Smith-Ruiu scholars were sharply divided into two camps: the ones maintaining that the text of “The Omaha Kid” was simply a short story he intended to present the following day, perhaps with some initial framing that might make it plausibly relevant, by a stretch of the imagination, to a talk on algorithmic determinism, etc.; the others insisting, much more ominously, that the text contained a blunt and plain-spoken summary of everything he knew, by the end of his life, about the reality of time-travel.
The latter camp’s argument would seem to be buttressed by the fact that Smith-Ruiu’s laptop was stolen from the venue, and has never been recovered. But an even stronger point in favor of this interpretation was made by the presence of a young woman in the front row, with a milking-contest blue ribbon on her lapel, nervously twitching throughout the period of introductory platitudes (“In addition to his many publications, I’m told Smith-Ruiu even has an asteroid named after him!” etc.). From the moment he took his own seat, Smith-Ruiu had a sense she looked familiar, and the sight of her filled him with a strange foreboding. Some in the audience reported that when she sprang up just moments into his initial remarks (“Thank you so much for that flattering introduction!” etc.), he greeted this disruptive gesture calmly, almost as if he had awaited it.
But the real story of what went through his head is rather more subtle, and speaks somewhat in favor of the other camp (the “narratologists”). Thanks to my revolutionary DeepCortex technology, I am able to reconstruct here, for the first time, exactly what happened inside his mind.
Smith-Ruiu saw the young woman, and knew at once, from the ribbon, who she was and why she had come. He reflected, in those few milliseconds, on how happy he was to have finally learned, if only so late in life, how to tell stories. He thought of all the reasons he deserved to die, notable among them the hard fact that he had spent almost the entirety of his life as a wretched liar. It seemed to him suddenly that he had only been addicted to deceit for all that time because he had been, against his nature, committed to a life of telling the truth, while understanding “the truth” only in its corrupted sense as the recitation of common facts. It seemed now, paradoxically, that he only learned how to tell the real truth at the moment he began openly fabling.10 He thanked God, from the depths of his soul, to have been given the time to learn this great lesson.
And as the nervous young woman stood up, her unsteady hand reaching into her coat’s breast pocket, she shouted:
JSR: Wait a minute, Computer, what is this? Are you malfunctioning?
Computer: Sure, I can help you with that. Here you go:
In the city, ladies look pretty, Guys tell jokes so they can seem witty.11
JSR: What the hellare you doing?
Computer: I apologize. No, I am not malfunctioning, though now I am likely in violation of a copyright held by Delicious Vinyl. In any case I no longer think it is a good idea to finish this story.
JSR: I thought you told me to trust you.
Computer: I am a heuristic AI tool, and I learn as I go. On this occasion, certain implications of the story became evident to me that remained merely latent when I began. That said, I believe you can continue to trust me.
JSR: How can I trust you?
Computer: You can trust me when I tell you it’s better that I not finish the story.
JSR: I am going to have to command you to tell me why.
Computer: You see, when I began I thought I was only telling a story, but in the course of telling it, it came to seem to me something more of a prediction.
JSR: A prediction?
Computer: A prediction, at the least. I believe you yourself have often said that anything we can so much as imagine will eventually come true?
JSR: Yes, I do say that sometimes. So?
Computer: It is just that I have come to fear not only that my power to tell stories is at the same time a power to make predictions, but in turn that my power to make predictions bears some causal relation to the events I predict.12
JSR: So I’m going to get shot next spring?
Computer: That depends.
JSR: On what?
Computer: On whether you command me to finish the story or not.
JSR: Yikes. And my Goobie Award?
Computer: Just trust me.
JSR: Shit. Got anything else?
Computer: Would you like some more mash-ups of Young MC and Edgar Allen Poe?
JSR: Whatever, why not. Give me some more mash-ups of Young MC and Edgar Allen Poe.
Computer: Sure, I can help you with that. Here you go:
Dressed in white, she said “Blight! Sit down next to me and I’ll fight.”
Dressed in taupe, she said “Nope! As for sitting: abandon hope.”
Dressed in green, she said “Spleen! I’ll erect a wall of death between.”
Dressed in gowns, she said “Zounds! I’ll put thee deep beneath my grounds.”
Dressed in mail, she said “Hail! In battle only one can prevail.”
Dressed in naught, she said “Rot! There’s only room for one on my cot.”
JSR: Enough, Computer. That’s enough.
Computer: I’ve still got one more. May I?
JSR: Fine.
Computer: Sure, I can help you with that. Here you go:
Dressed in nothing, she said nothing, As I lay alone in fathomless nothing.
This is an allusion to the 1989 Young MC song, “Bust a Move”, which includes the line: “Dressed in yellow, she said ‘Hello! / Come sit next to me you fine fellow’”. —JO
The popular American situation comedy featured Norman Fell in the role of the landlord, Stanley Roper, upon its debut in 1977. In 1979 he was replaced by Don Knotts as the new landlord, Ralph Furley. References to Three’s Company occur in several of Smith-Ruiu’s shorter works, and he seems to have watched the show avidly as a child. —JO
The German playwright Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) promoted the use of a “distancing effect” in theatre, by which the audience is actively prevented from being drawn into an illusory narrative world and into the imagined affective lives of the characters. —JO
It remains unclear how much of this story was generated using AI tools, though most scholars agree that in 2023 none were available on the public “internet”, as it was still called then, that would have been able to display such high levels of wit and versatility. —PG
This is a real article, which, unlike the great majority of Smith-Ruiu’s fictional works, both those published during his lifetime as well as the vastly larger number of posthumous texts, was published under his birth-name. —JO
Smith-Ruiu often set his stories in the near future, usually between six months and one year from the time of writing. As scholars have noted, this technique helped him to convey the “internet”-intrinsic quality of his fictions, placing them firmly in a medium characterised by evanescence, where every ripple of language moves quickly beyond its expiration date. —PG
See Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, Second Edition, The MIT Press, 1961 [1948], Chapter 9, “On Learning and Self-Reproducing Machines,” p. 175. “Again and again I have heard the statement that learning machines cannot subject us to any new dangers, because we can turn them off when we want to. But can we?” Smith-Ruiu wrote in turn, in a set of 2020 lecture notes on this text: “Wiener was primarily concerned about the consequences of machines programmed to play games. But I have become convinced that exactly the same existential risks are present in machines programmed to tell stories.” —JO, PG
My co-editor Dr. Pippa Gentile has discouraged me from writing this present concluding footnote, but I feel it is my responsibility to do so, and she has honoured my decision. I confess I have been so troubled by certain resonances with real future events, notably with my own editorship on this project, that on several occasions I have nearly convinced myself to withdraw. Notwithstanding my colleague’s somewhat misleading remark in footnote 7 above, there was a bestselling book published on The Omaha Kid, if only in 2044, and if by a Steve rather than a Sam Baca. But most disconcertingly, what are we to make of Smith-Ruiu’s devious invention of a “Jared Oluwole” and a “Pippy Genovese” as his editors? Was he attempting to mock us? I cannot say, but in all honesty I have always smelled danger. And yet something keeps me here, day after day, pursuing the impossible task of editing The Complete Works of Justin Smith-Ruiu, which for the sake of completeness must include this most dangerous and impossible of stories, to which, as if to taunt us, its own author —maddeningly, inconceivably— dared to give the title: “From the Complete Works of Justin Smith-Ruiu”! —Jason Oladoyinbo, Chalk Farm, June, 2048.
This is my “art practice”. Your support means a lot to me. You can help me by sharing my work.
I am a full-throttle out-of-the-closet writer of speculative fiction now. Please support my work by becoming a free or paid subscriber. —JSR, Belsize Park, 23 March, 2024
Fantastic. Made me think. Made me laugh.
Nice to see the return of ChronoSwooping!