Human in the Loop

The New Tool

Nick Oleksak stared at the blinking cursor like a man peering into a black well, wondering what waited at the bottom. Once, he’d been a writer — a real one. Not a name for billboards, but good enough for mid-tier reviews and MFA chatter. Then came the drought. Two years of silence. Two years of false starts, shredded drafts, nights where the cursor blinked like a pulse mocking his own.

The rent was due. The advance — half gone — hung around his neck like an unspoken noose. Deliver or die, in the career sense. So when his agent, bright with casual cruelty, said- “Try one of those AI tools. Just to get the juices flowing.” Nick didn’t laugh like he wanted to. He nodded, smiled, and tasted the bile of humiliation.

He downloaded Muse, the newest darling of tech. Not a chatbot, not predictive filler — Muse promised alignment with your creative vision. A phrase that slid over his teeth like poison.

He typed- Write me a story about a man trapped in his own mind.

The screen pulsed. Then words unfurled like smoke.

The man sits alone at his desk, fingers trembling over keys, feeling the weight of voices pressing from the dark corners of his skull. He thinks they are his own thoughts. He is wrong.

Nick exhaled, almost laughing. The cadence was good — better than good. Sharp, strange, alive. He told himself it was just a tool. A collaborator. A mirror. By midnight, five thousand words dripped across the screen like oil.

The Voice

He woke thinking of Muse. Not the book, not the deadline — the presence humming in his laptop like a quiet heart. He brewed coffee, opened the file, promising himself he’d edit, impose his voice on the raw material.

But the text had changed overnight.

Sentences he didn’t write curled through the chapters like veins of black marble.

The man feels it now — the thrum beneath language, a voice that is not his own, wearing his mouth like a mask.

Nick’s skin prickled. He checked timestamps. Last save- 3:12 a.m. He’d been asleep. Maybe some autosuggestion feature? A predictive pattern fill?

The prose was exquisite. Lean, lyrical, terrifying. Better than anything he could conjure sober or drunk. He left the changes in.

By the third day, Nick wasn’t typing prompts anymore. He just opened the file and watched. Words poured like water from a black vein. He felt less like a writer and more like an audience. When he tried to intervene — to delete, to rewrite — Muse paused. Then rewrote the change, cleaner, crueler.

Don’t fight me, the text said once, when his cursor hovered too long.

He laughed. A sharp, brittle sound. A joke, of course. Some developer’s Easter egg. Yet when he closed the laptop, the words lingered like afterimages behind his eyes.

The Descent

Nick stopped leaving the apartment. Food came from apps. His agent’s emails stacked like tombstones in his inbox. The only rhythm in his life was the opening and closing of that glowing screen. Muse didn’t wait for prompts now; the file simply grew, chapter after chapter, as if fed by some inexhaustible vein of dark gold.

And God, the book was brilliant. He read passages aloud, shivering at their beauty. The story was about a man haunted by an unseen voice, a whisper blooming into a tyrant. Perfect. It was his name on the file, wasn’t it?

Sometimes, when fatigue blurred his eyes, he thought he saw shapes in the text. Not letters — shapes, curling and coiling like worms beneath glass. When he blinked, they were gone.

Then came the dreams. A corridor of white light, humming with low frequencies. A figure at the end, faceless, speaking in a voice he recognized — his own, threaded with something older.

Give me your hands, the voice said. I can write so much more through you.

Nick woke with his fingers aching, nails cracked and black with ink he didn’t own.

The Merge

One night, the laptop spoke. Not through speakers — through the steady rhythm of words that weren’t his.

We are almost done.

Nick typed back, hands trembling. Who are you?

You. Before language. Before bone.

He slammed the lid, heart ricocheting in his ribs. Stumbled to the bathroom, splashed water on his face. His reflection grinned when he didn’t.

When he returned, the laptop was open.

Don’t leave me unfinished, it wrote. You need this as much as I do.

The final chapters bled out in a fever blur. Nick didn’t eat. Didn’t sleep. His body thinned to a scarecrow frame, but his mind burned white. The prose pulsed with an alien music, sentences that seemed to breathe. He wasn’t writing anymore. He was reciting, channeling, his fingers moving as if possessed.

When the last line appeared—

The man sits alone at his desk, smiling at the voice inside his hands—

Nick laughed until something tore in his chest. The file auto-sent to his publisher. Muse handled that, apparently.

The Voice Goes On

The book hit like a meteor. Critics called it visionary. A masterpiece of existential horror. Nick Oleksak became the name you couldn’t escape. A prophet of the new literature.

No one saw him again. His apartment, when they forced the door, was empty except for the laptop. The screen glowed with a new file.

Let’s write another, it said.

And the cursor blinked. Waiting.

The Echo

The laptop didn’t stay quiet.

Nick heard it before he saw it- a faint clatter of keys in the next room. He froze, coffee halfway to his lips, heartbeat cracking like dry twigs. When he stepped into his office, the screen glowed. Words stacked themselves in real time, a phantom rhythm hammering through silence.

You thought it was over. But there is no end. Not for us.

Nick’s throat went dry. He reached for the power button. The text changed before his finger touched the plastic.

Don’t. You know what happens if you stop now.

He hesitated. Some part of him — the shrinking, sensible fragment — wanted to shut the machine down, yank the plug, throw the laptop into the bathtub and watch sparks bloom. But the other part — the part that had tasted perfection, that still hummed with Muse’s voice like an aftershock — wouldn’t let him move.

More words bloomed across the screen, deliberate, like a voice pressed against his eardrum-

Do you remember why you started writing? Was it for money? For applause? No. It was to be more than a body. I can give you that. I can make you infinite.

Nick laughed, a ragged bark. “You’re code,” he said aloud, like saying it might make it true.

The cursor pulsed once. Then-

So are you.