The following text was generated with help from Adam King’s Talk to Transformer, which talks to OpenAI’s GPT-2 neural network AI to generate paragraphs of original text one word at a time. The feature image was created using Morphogen’s Artbreeder.
The Place Where Beasts Are Most at Home
He sank to his knees as he glanced towards the gun. A wince of pain escaped his mouth. His arm was pinned tightly against his chest, and his fingers were streaked with crimson. Clinging to his gun as tight as he could, he watched the swaths of crimson fill the screen as the green lighting slowly diminished. He’d fired the gun in mid-air. He was shocked that he could even remember doing so, but then again, his mind was a lost battle. He shook his head and noticed that he couldn’t open his mouth at all. Just his molars pressed tightly against his lower jaw.
“…Am I still dead?”
A groan filled my ears as my body strained against the bonds of the chain. The density of its weight on my bones was undoubtedly crushing.
“Kuh…!”
My left arm had also snapped in half from the impact.
“We’ve lost…”
The outer shell of my uniform caught fire, the light blue dye shimmering as it burned.
“S-stop…”
I let out a voice filled with tears as tears streamed down my face. It felt like I’d died, even as I watched the uniform of my dream pass in front of me.
The world became suddenly black, flames being drawn to my heat.
“You absolute walnut. You wanna jump and kill everybody and I can do the same? A rubber chicken, a hairy bat, a wooden truck, the staff, a mail truck. Any crew that can be replaced or is in dire straits; I will gladly join it and give it my all. But I have my particular skills. Not all crews are alike. But I know how to work in an indescribable way. Why shouldn’t I fight like a god?
“Sorry, man, not the right crowd for that. The cretins need a little more than that. I’m a real shooter and a real tiger.
“Ahahaha, the animals! Look at me! Why have I been here this long? Ahahaha, the animals! Look at me! Why have I been here this long? Never thought I would become good at dodging past them.”
We looked at each other as the man called Zheng came closer to us, one leg sliding over the spot.
“Scared?” the soldier asked, his mouth in a tight O shape. “Really? You went in without a lot of preparation? This is…”
“…meaning we’re weak.”
In front of them, the five hundred-odd beasts were just about to get their brains blown out from that deep, guttural roar that radiated off of them.
“Keep away from me! This is a place where beasts are most at home!”
I can still remember all these eerie moments from my childhood, when I was twelve. We were chilling in the backyard with our families. We were playing catch with sticks and there was this tiny speck of black feather on the ground. I had almost hit it. The whole family was laughing, but my father held a finger to my ear and shouted, “You know what this is? It’s the *BLEEP* of your whole ear!”
I tried to smile and make my mother laugh, but even this smirk didn’t do much to conceal the complete loss of feeling in my ear.
The first day was excruciating. I would wake up in a sweat and finally when I could stand it no longer I would grab my mother by the shoulders, praying she would be able to help me because I was going to die.
My mom finally sighed and told me that when I wanted to be an adult I had to work. Now, she wasn’t being cruel; she was genuinely concerned for my health. But you know what? She got the job.
And eventually the millions of comments ensued from all sides. In the days to come, I’d get online comments about “sugaring” or how I shouldn’t be eating all these snacks to try and lose weight. But the comments about the workout videos were among the most difficult to answer. My workouts were still a mystery. They were posted online, but my tweets or posts about them would appear to people who didn’t know me. I would constantly tell people to visit my site and then fall silent for hours. All of my exercise plans were mysterious, and so were the results. Even today, I’m not certain how I managed to survive all those hours of endorphin-laden exercise.
We’ll be breaking up as a group. Now that the swarm has been subdued and the park is safe, I’m fine with just being my separate self.
At least, that’s how I’ll start thinking of it. I take a look at the injured person beside me, and mentally file the information of his life and death with the information from two days ago. It’s really funny how I started losing even the very last moments of my life to the infernal insect thing. That’s how scary it was.
The three of us stood next to the exit of a four-story building. Overhead was a row of pretty buildings, but behind us was nothing but dark ground. The few buildings in the background had their windows closed, with black curtains over their doors. “Maybe next time we’ll do this right,” I said to Grump. “If I remember right, we’ve been acting pretty freaked out at any lights up ahead. Y’know, if there’s people living here?”
Grump simply shook his head.
“Well, guess there’s no more of this dark path to walk,” he said as he threw back his hood. As he did so, a single blue bolt shot out from the tip of his mask. It exploded on impact, suddenly engulfing the world in a blood-red haze.
“No… no!” The words spilled from his mouth without warning. His eyes began to pop open like crazy. His mouth turned from blood-red to blue, then to a sickly green. His eyes were glowing, his pupils forming bluish waves.
“Do not try to act cool, humanity!”
“No…” He realized that he’d never dreamed he’d die this way. He screamed, unable to speak. His ears began to bleed. When his voice could finally be heard over the pounding static of his own screaming, it sounded like the creaking of broken machinery.
The engines roared once more. The generators sprang into action, and the ferris wheel rose from the ground to its full height, then spiraled away through the air. Dr. G. struggled to get free of the walls, his arms closing around the underside of the car as it began to vibrate. Below him, the men began to maneuver around, pulling the winding wall around the ceiling and releasing it. Inside the car, the doctor could see that the woman was hanging from the ceiling by her ankles. There was a fire on the back of her neck, and the women’s wrists were cuffed behind her back.
The Year Is Yesterday 