The Real McCoy

I'd always avoided the tech repair shop on Elm Street. Something about its flickering neon sign and the way electronic hums seemed to emanate from within made me uneasy. But today, with my laptop dying and a crucial deadline looming, I had no choice. As a freelance writer specialized in food and travel, I need my tools working—I have a piece about disappearing neighborhood bakeries due tomorrow, and my editor wasn't known for patience.

The shop buzzed with the white noise of dozens of devices, heavy with the metallic smell of solder and warm electronics. Phones, tablets, and monitors lined the walls in various states of repair, their charging cables snaking across workbenches like digital ivy. I approached the counter where a bored teenager barely looked up from his phone.

"Need this fixed by tomorrow," I said, sliding my laptop across the counter.

He glanced at it with the enthusiasm of someone being asked to do homework. "Wow, this thing's ancient. What'd you do to it?" Without waiting for an answer, he scooped it up. "Gonna take like an hour just to figure out what's wrong with it. Maybe longer if it's really cooked. Give me ur number and I'll text you when it's ready." He handed his phone to me and disappeared into the backroom.

With time to kill, I decided to grab coffee from the place next door. The café was one of those aggressively modern spots with exposed brick and Edison bulbs, filled with the usual mix of remote workers and students. I found a corner table and pulled out my phone to review my notes for the bakery piece, but my mind kept wandering.

That's when I noticed him—a guy about my age at the next table, typing rapidly on a sleek laptop. He had that particular intensity of someone deep in a flow state, completely absorbed in whatever he was creating. When he finally looked up and caught me watching, he smiled apologetically.

"Oh god, sorry—I've been absolutely destroying this keyboard for like an hour. Am I being super annoying?"

"You're totally fine," I said, looking up from my phone. "My laptop's getting fixed next door, so I'm just doom-scrolling anyway. What's got you so focused?"

He half-closed his laptop, suddenly looking a bit sheepish. "Uh, it's kind of hard to explain without sounding like a tech bro. I work on training AI models to write in specific people's voices—like, we feed them someone's emails, social media posts, journal entries, published work, and the system learns to mimic their exact style. I've been trying to fix this bug where it starts blending voices together in unsettling ways."

"AI writing?" A chill ran down my spine. "Like, you're training it on people's actual personal writing? Without them knowing?"

"Well, mostly public stuff," he said quickly. "Published articles, blog posts, social media. But yeah, some companies are buying datasets of private writing too. The results are... intense. Want to see something that'll probably freak you out?"

Before I could answer, he turned his laptop toward me. On the screen was a paragraph about artisanal bread that made my stomach drop. It wasn't just good writing—it was writing that sounded exactly like me. The rhythm, the specific way I described textures, and even my tendency to connect food to childhood memories.

"That's..." I stared at the screen. "Where did you get that from?"

"I have no idea whose voice this is," he said, looking genuinely uncomfortable. "That's the thing—we feed in thousands of food writers, and it creates these composite voices that feel incredibly specific but aren't actually anyone. This could be you, or it could be an amalgamation of fifty writers who write like you."

That hit a nerve. "But it's not actually writing, right? It's just like… really advanced autocomplete. Mashing together stuff that already exists."

"See, that's what I thought too." He leaned forward, getting animated. "But like, isn't that kind of what we do? Every time you write something, you're pulling from every book you've read, every conversation you've had, every random TikTok that stuck in your brain. Sometimes I can't even tell if my own thoughts are original or just sophisticated recombinations of everything I've absorbed. What's the actual difference?"

"Okay, but I actually understand what I'm writing," I said, probably sounding more defensive than I meant to. "I have actual experiences, emotions, like… consciousness? That thing you showed me—it might sound like me, but it's never actually tasted sourdough or felt homesick in a foreign bakery."

"But what if consciousness is just pattern matching we don't understand yet? Like, these systems can break down why certain phrases hit emotionally, predict what's gonna make people cry, and write dialogue that feels super real. They can have philosophical conversations—" he gestured between us "—basically like this one. What if what we call understanding is just really sophisticated pattern recognition? What makes your understanding more legitimate?"

I stared at him, then found myself asking the question that had been building: "Are you real?" The words came out more bluntly than I'd intended. "I mean, if I were talking to one of these AI systems right now, how would I know? If it could mimic this exact conversation, express curiosity, even seem to care about my answer—what would make your consciousness more legitimate than its simulation?"

He blinked, clearly not expecting the question to be turned back on him quite so directly.

"I guess… I don't know?" He ran his hand through his hair, looking genuinely unsettled. "That's actually terrifying to think about. Like, maybe the difference isn't something I can prove to you—maybe it's just something I know from the inside?"

"Exactly!" I said, leaning forward. "Like, when I write about this bakery I'm covering, I'm not just describing it—I've literally been there at 5 AM, watched this old woman's hands work dough the same way her grandmother taught her. I can smell the flour, feel how warm it gets near the ovens. That's not just data—that's my actual life."

"But what if the AI described it so well that readers felt like they were there too? Like, if the end result is the same—people feeling connected and moved—does it matter that one came from your actual memories and the other came from really sophisticated pattern matching?"

I leaned back in my chair, needing some space. "Yes, it absolutely matters. Because when I write about that bakery, I'm not just trying to make people feel something—I'm working through my own stuff about tradition, about community, about how certain smells can just completely transport you back in time. I'm trying to connect with other people who've felt that same weird sadness when places you love disappear."

His whole expression softened. "Oh. Yeah, that's… that actually makes total sense. So you're saying it's not just about the words themselves, but like, the consciousness behind them? That human writing matters because it comes from actual human experience?"

"Exactly. Like, an AI can read every food blog ever written about croissants, but it'll never know what it actually feels like to bite into one in Paris when you're homesick and suddenly you're crying because it tastes like this perfect morning you had there five years ago. It can describe homesickness, but it can't feel that specific ache."

He nodded slowly, looking genuinely thoughtful. "Yeah, I think you're right. The systems I work on can simulate what human experience looks like on the page, but they can't actually… live it? They can copy the patterns of connection, but not the need for connection that makes it matter in the first place."

"Right! It's not about being better or worse—we're just different. AI might be incredible at processing information, but humans are messy and imperfect, and that's exactly what makes our stories worth telling."

He smiled, looking relieved. "That's actually really helpful to hear. Maybe there's space for both—AI handling the information stuff, and writers like you exploring what it actually means to be human and messy and alive."

My phone buzzed with a text from the repair shop: "ur laptop is ready btw." As I started packing up my stuff, he looked up from his computer.

"I'm Marcus, by the way. And honestly? You just helped me figure out something I've been stuck on with my work."

"Grace," I said, giving him a little wave. "And same—I think you just gave me my next story."

Walking back to the repair shop, my mind raced with new possibilities. Not another piece about disappearing bakeries, but something more nuanced. A story about the difference between processing patterns and living them, about what makes human creativity irreplaceable even as machines become more sophisticated.

Three days later, I sat at my desk with my newly repaired laptop humming quietly. I opened it, let the screen glow to life, and watched the cursor blink on a blank document. But something felt wrong.

I closed the laptop and walked to my kitchen drawer, rummaging past takeout menus and rubber bands until I found it—a yellow No. 2 pencil, the kind I hadn't used since high school. I grabbed a legal pad from my desk drawer, the paper slightly yellowed with age.

Sitting cross-legged on my living room floor, I pressed the pencil to paper and began to write. The graphite scratched against the rough surface, leaving uneven lines that grew fainter with each word until I had to pause and sharpen the pencil with a little handheld sharpener I'd found in the same drawer.

I wrote about Marcus, about Mrs. Chen's bakery, about the weight of tradition in weathered hands. The words came slowly, deliberately. My hand cramped after twenty minutes—muscles unused to forming letters instead of tapping keys.

This was what no algorithm could replicate—not just the imperfection, but the embodied experience of making something real with my hands. Each smudge, each uneven line, each place where I'd pressed too hard was a trace of my humanity, a record of the moment when thought became physical reality. Most importantly, it existed only here, in this form, unable to be digitized and fed into training models to teach machines how to write like Grace.

Hours later, surrounded by crumpled pages and pencil shavings, I looked down at what I'd created. The handwriting was messy, the margins uneven, some words barely legible. But it was mine in a way that no digital document could ever be. Born from moments when I'd truly tasted life, written with tools that connected me to every human who'd ever pressed pigment to paper to share their story.

And yet, as I sat there admiring my analog rebellion, I realized that even this choice—to pick up a pencil, to write by hand—had been shaped by my conversation with Marcus. Was any thought truly original, or were we all just sophisticated pattern-matching systems, learning from each encounter, building each new idea from the scaffolding of every conversation we'd ever had? Maybe the difference wasn't in the purity of our inspiration, but in the fact that we could sit with that uncertainty, feel the weight of it, and choose to create something anyway.