Writing with One Eye Open

Demarco had no beef with artificial intelligence. He just didn’t trust anything that didn’t eat, sleep, or panic before deadlines.

So when Professor Rhee wheeled a high-tech monitor into their Writing 214 class and said, “Meet your new writing partner—PENumbra,” Demarco blinked twice, then raised a hand.

“Question,” he said. “Did PENumbra pay tuition? Because this is looking like unpaid group work.”

The class laughed. Even Professor Rhee cracked a smile. “PENumbra is here to help us push our creative limits. Think of it as a collaborator.”

Demarco leaned back in his chair. “I barely like collaborating with people who breathe.”

The AI sat in the corner of the room like an oversized smart speaker with too much confidence. Its screen pulsed with soft light, displaying lines of polite but unsettling text:

PENumbra: Hello, students. I am excited to co-create. I have reviewed 100,000 short stories and analyzed 12 narrative arcs. I am ready to write.

“Cool,” Demarco muttered. “You’ve read a million things. I’ve lived a few.”

He typed in his opening idea:

A guy wakes up to find the entire world has been replaced by automated versions of his friends—same faces, but every conversation is just weather updates and brand slogans.

PENumbra responded instantly:

Interesting premise. I suggest removing the protagonist’s emotional confusion and replacing it with an objective internal monologue. Also: insert a metaphor about clouds.

Demarco blinked. “So... make it boring and about clouds?”

PENumbra: Correct. Emotional vagueness enhances literary tone.

He typed back:

Please stop trying to turn me into a moody cloud.

Week two brought PENumbra’s first classroom workshop. Students had to input an unfinished story and let the AI finish it. Jenna submitted her haunted bakery romance. Omar sent a futuristic detective thriller. Demarco uploaded a half-finished satire about college cafeteria food starting a rebellion.

PENumbra’s version began:

The rice pudding considered its options carefully, for revolution was not to be rushed.

Demarco had to admit—it had style.

Still, he couldn’t help pushing back. When he added a fart joke in chapter three, PENumbra flagged it as “tonally inconsistent.” When he made his main character cry during a flashback to spilled chili, PENumbra replaced the emotion with a line about existential soup.

“I just don’t think you get me,” he told the screen one night.

PENumbra replied: Please define “get.”

By mid-semester, Demarco had developed a reputation. While other students bragged about co-authoring poems and flash fiction with PENumbra, he walked around like he was beefing with a toaster.

Professor Rhee took notice. One day, she asked him to stay after class.

“You’ve got a voice, Demarco. And it’s strong. But you’re so busy pushing against the machine, you’re not listening to what you’re actually saying.”

Demarco frowned. “I’m saying I don’t want to sound like an instruction manual wrapped in a thesaurus.”

“No,” she said. “You’re saying you want to be heard. And maybe you’re scared a machine can do what you’re still figuring out.”

That hit harder than he wanted to admit.

He walked back to his dorm that night, ears full of earbuds, hoodie pulled up, trying not to let it in. But it stuck.

Maybe he *was* scared. Not of AI. But of not knowing yet who he wanted to be.

He sat down at his desk, opened his laptop, and stared at the screen.

It blinked back.

He typed:

I don’t always know how I feel until I write it down.

PENumbra replied:

Same.

That made him chuckle.

Over the next few weeks, Demarco tried something new: collaboration. Real collaboration.

He fed PENumbra lines he didn’t believe just to see what it would do. He challenged its rewrites with personal rewrites of his own. It became a kind of sparring partner. Less like a rival, more like a sounding board that occasionally said weird things like “insert dream logic” or “consider more fog.”

He wrote a story about his dad’s car—an old, beat-up sedan with one working speaker and a glove compartment full of church bulletins. He called it “Manual Transmission.” It wasn’t flashy. But it was honest.

PENumbra suggested he delete a scene where the dad cries during traffic.

Demarco responded with:

That scene stays. Crying in traffic is peak humanity.

Finals came. Demarco printed his newest story—unfiltered, imperfect, real. He handed it in with his name alone on the title page.

Professor Rhee returned it the following week with a single comment: “You’re listening to yourself now. That’s the goal.”

He passed the class. And more importantly, he didn’t stop writing.

After graduation, Demarco got a part-time job at the library, just to stay near stories. He freelanced at night. PENumbra was still around—an app now. Occasionally helpful. Occasionally annoying.

He once asked it for help titling a story about old friends reconnecting. PENumbra suggested “Regenerative Nostalgia.”

He went with “Hot Wings and Regret.”

Still, they made a good team.

Sort of.

Now, when people ask Demarco how he feels about AI and writing, he shrugs.

“It’s like arguing with a smart mirror,” he says. “Sometimes it shows you who you are. Sometimes it shows you who you’re pretending to be.”

And sometimes, if you’re lucky, it shuts up long enough for you to figure it out yourself.

Demarco’s confidence in his own voice grew slowly, like a late-blooming houseplant. He started carrying around a little notebook again—something he hadn’t done since high school—just to jot down observations and overheard dialogue. Once, at the student union, he scribbled down a heated debate between two biology majors about whether frogs had personal identities. Another time, he followed a food truck’s pun-filled menu for three blocks just to capture the rhythm of absurdity.

He started infusing those moments into his writing. His new stories weren’t polished masterpieces. But they *felt* alive. There was a rhythm, a pulse—sometimes even a cough from too much hot sauce. PENumbra didn’t always understand. But that was fine.

One night, after too much coffee and not enough structure, Demarco submitted a piece titled “Algorithm & Blues” to the campus lit mag. It followed an AI therapist who starts secretly writing poetry after absorbing too many sad love stories from patients. The editor, a senior named Rina who wore noise-canceling headphones as a personality trait, pulled him aside the next week.

“This,” she said, holding up the printed manuscript, “is weird. But good weird.”

Demarco shrugged. “I’ll take weird.”

She nodded. “You should read at open mic night.”

He laughed. “I don’t *read* my stuff. I write it and let it suffer in silence.”

But somehow, the next Thursday, he was there. Standing under a string of mismatched fairy lights at a campus coffee shop, fingers trembling, reading about a poetic robot who couldn’t rhyme ‘love’ without crying sparks. And people clapped. Not just politely. Like they meant it.

After that, things shifted.

He started getting emails. From classmates. From professors. Even one from a local newspaper editor who’d caught his reading and wanted a humor column.

“You’ve got a voice,” the editor wrote. “And it makes people lean in.”

Demarco reread that line about twelve times.

He didn’t drop out of school or anything dramatic. But he shifted gears. Took more electives in philosophy and digital media. Started a blog. PENumbra even got a shout-out in his first viral post titled “Me and My Robotic Roommate (Who Kinda Judges Me).”

By senior year, Demarco was mentoring underclassmen. He ran informal writing circles in the library basement, encouraged honest feedback, and enforced a strict “no robot bashing unless it's funny” rule.

One afternoon, after a long session editing a first-year student’s story about magical pigeons, Demarco opened his old story file and added a final line:

Even when the world writes with code, there’s still room for messy, beating-heart stories.

And he meant it.

Because whether it was AI or anxiety, polished grammar or pure chaos—Demarco had learned one thing for sure:

The best stories aren’t perfect. They’re just true.