I still remember a time when the internet had a distinct metallic sound. I miss it.

If I could pull the hands of progress back to when cellphones were a luxury good I would. If I could avoid a place like this, filled with digital strangers and computers masquerading as people; if I could sit in a bar somewhere and speak to another human being about my problems — I would.

But I can’t.

I’m typing this out on my phone with my back pressed against the front door. I’ve locked it, I’ve put up the chain and I’ve even turned the key on the ancient metal bar. My windows are covered up by furniture and on the off chance that someone (or something) manages to get inside I have my sharpest kitchen knife ready.

I just don’t know if any of this will help.

I’ve called the police and they’ve hung up on me. I’ve called my brother and he insists I lost my mind. I’ve reached out to countless others who I considered friends, family even — yet they all consider me mad.

All I have left is you.

I am starving and drunk and terrified, and all I have left is this chorus of faceless strangers. Come morning, I doubt I’ll even have that.

I’ve never been one for tech or the internet. I got my kicks from painting and hiking and getting drunk on the beach. My brother, on the other hand, was a computer junkie way back in the floppy disc era. When we got out of our parent’s place I stayed in the arts, he went over to the states to work tech.

He moved halfway across the planet and we weren’t particularly inseparable to begin with. I lived my life doing odd jobs around Prague and he went on to become a project manager somewhere off West. We’d see each other every couple Christmases if he decided to visit the family, but aside from a dinner or two we never spent any time alone.

We were two adults with differing interests and our lives had very little in common. There was no malice towards him from my side and I presumed there was no malice from him towards me. With everything that has come to pass, however, I do wonder.

I wonder whether my brother doesn’t secretly despise me.

He sent the first e-mail a couple months before the pandemic. Short and to the point. One of his associates was working on an AI-image generation program that could one day replace artists. He thought I might be interested. He included a key for a beta test.

Back then I was working as a lecturer at a private university. I had my hands full with teaching, and, when I wasn’t teaching, I was busy with personal projects. I let the e-mail sit for a couple of weeks. Not out of malice, I was just busy and it didn’t seem important.

When I finally did click the link and open up the artificial intelligence it seemed like a joke. I typed in “dog.” Half an hour later the computer spit out a blurry picture of a brown blob.

I tried a couple more simple requests like “boat” or “cow” and all the image generator returned were vague shapes that took an eternity to manifest. I answered my brother’s e-mail with an assertion that his associate was a fool. Computers were tools, they could never replace a human hand.

It took me a couple of days to write back but my brother’s reply was instantaneous.

He said I was wrong. He said it would take a couple years, but that AI would surpass the skills of regular artists. He was willing to bet money on it.

That’s why I think he hates me. Because he made it all a bet. Had he simply made the assertion I would have shrugged and moved on with my life. But my brother knows the sort of person I am. He knows that I never back off from a bet.

We agreed on a decent chunk of change and three years. Aside from the e-mails, we never spoke a word to each other. It wasn’t until I called him in a panic today that we spoke about the AI.

My brother’s second e-mail came in May of 2020. My life situation had changed considerably by then. Most of the students I taught were internationals who had moved to Prague for the university. When classes moved to the cyberspace, attendance took a sharp dive. Eventually, so did my hours.

I had always avoided social media up until then, but with nowhere else to find work I started offering commissions. Not a lot of strangers took me up on the offer, but back then plenty of friends were willing to throw some cash my way for a portrait or a landscape. With my commission workload full, it took me a couple of days to get to my brother’s e-mail.

When I did, I wasn’t impressed. The blobs which the AI produced still lacked any coherent connection to the prompts that I delivered. The “Dog” had eight legs, the “House” was just a big green smudge and any attempts at landscapes were just dark screens.

I wanted to reply to the e-mail but the thought completely slipped my mind. Once it slipped, it disappeared. For months I didn’t think about my brother or the AI but then, around the fall of 2020 my brother sent me a third e-mail.

The stream of commissions from friends and family had long dried up, so I wasn’t particularly busy when I got the message. With nothing else to do, and the world outside too stressful to watch; I clicked the link immediately.

The new version of the AI was far from perfect. The rendering time ballooned up to over an hour and the images produced still looked like something drawn by a toddler — but the images had shape. Somehow, through mere text, the AI was able to unearth primal depictions of simple objects.

That’s when I started to worry. I wrote back to my brother, asking him how the program worked — but he never replied. He left me alone with the AI to stew. I tried to push it out of my mind, I tried not to think about what difference a couple months of development would make. Yet, every other night, I would find myself testing out new prompts. The results weren’t impressive, but I had enough of an imagination to know where they were going.

Around spring of 2021 I received a fifth e-mail. The link attached confirmed my fears. The software was making radical leaps in quality. Image generation boiled down to a crisp fifteen minutes and strange digital smudges were an exception rather than a rule.

More e-mails came in throughout the year, but they were all blur. The AI my brother was sending me updates about wasn’t the only one on the market. MidJourney, Dall-E, countless others — month by month I would see more artificial art pop up on the newsfeed hellscape where I would look for work. I was still getting commissions, but they were few and far between. The price of everything was going up, but the wages for putting brush to paper stayed the same.

My brother’s last e-mail came in a month ago. It simply included the link to the latest version of the beta test and a quick message:

“Don’t worry about the money. Something tells me you’ll need it. ”

With the bet off and my mental fortitude in the gutter, I avoided the link. I avoided the link for weeks and tried to keep my head down and get as much work done as I could. The implications of the exponentially progressing tech stole away my appetite and woke me in the middle of the night but I did my best to resist the pull towards the link.

I resisted for a long time, but yesterday my efforts proved futile.

I was working on a commission for a particularly picky client. He wanted a digital painting of his Dungeons and Dragons group for some sort of an anniversary party but, as indicated by his feedback, he wasn’t entirely sure what he wanted. I was getting paid for each redraw, but the payment was a pittance in comparison to the client’s demands.

Last night I sent off the sixth version of the picture and, in hopes that it was the last, I opened up a bottle of wine. Almost instantly, the client replied with a list of demands that would take at least six hours to draw. Initially, I started typing up an angry e-mail telling him our business has concluded. Then, when I realized the man still owed me a good chunk of cash, I got ready for a final redraw. As I sat behind the tablet and stared at a piece I was beyond tired of, however, I got another idea.

Perhaps it was the months of frustration that had piled up. Perhaps it was the three glasses of wine that led my hand. Perhaps, I was simply curious about what the new software could do.

I clicked the link my brother sent me and copy pasted the client’s request into the prompt box. The AI rendered the image almost instantly. I had grown accustomed to leaps in progress, but I held some semblance of hope that the AI would still have issues rendering humanoid figures. The image on the screen dispelled all hope.

It was perfect.

I poured myself another glass and pondered. Passing off the AIs work as my own was immoral, but so was making a freelance artist do six different versions of the same drawing for pocket change. Once the glass was finished, I poured another one. A few healthy sips later I sent off the image to the client.

When I was halfway through the second bottle of wine the client got back to me. He was more than satisfied with the new version and promised to recommend me to his friends. There was also something about a bonus in the e-mails text, but by then my vision was far too blurred to read the message in its entirety.

I was far too drunk and far too occupied giving new prompts to the AI.

The art popped up on the screen with startling speed and haunting beauty. Whatever prompt I suggested to the computer, simple or complex, came out with the composition and skill of a gallery exhibit. Each piece of breath-taking art that rendered before me broke my heart just a little more, but I couldn’t stop.

I kept on drinking and I kept on throwing new prompts at the computer. The alcohol mixed and fused my fear and anger and fascination into a cocktail of utter madness. As my fingers turned numb and my brain emptied of prompts, I got ready to pass out. Seeing all my years of study and practice be replicated by a soulless machine was simply too much for me to handle. Before I shut down my laptop, however, I put in one last prompt:

“Me.”

The system froze. For a solid three minutes the AI remained unresponsive. Before I could find some amount of pride in defeating the machine, however, my computer started to huff and puff and render.

The image came out much slower than the rest, but what the AI lacked in swiftness it made up for in terror. On my screen, painted with haunting beauty, I saw a terrified man staring into a laptop. The initial render was distant enough from my face to keep me calm, but the more the image sharpened the closer the likeness appeared. By the time the art had fully rendered I was staring at my own terrified face.

The man was tired and drunk and scared and I wanted to believe that the AI had just taken a lucky guess. Yet, when the image was completed, the resemblance was unmistakable. The man’s jaw was open in drunken awe, and soon my lips also parted. There was a scar on the man’s chin.

The same scar my brother gave me when we fought as kids.

I was prepared to shut down the laptop and ignore the unexplainable image, yet just as I reached to shut the top of the screen my computer took another deep breath. It started to render another image anew.

From the rough outlines of the scene, I could make out my apartment living room. Somehow, without any input from my side, the AI was able to construct a bright replica of my cramped home. I watched in terror as an algorithm crushed all semblance of privacy I thought I had. I watched, and then, just as the image sharpened — I closed my laptop shut.

I was far too drunk and scared and tired to interact with the future. What I needed was sleep.

In the morning I awoke with a devilish hangover. With my body completely drained of energy I crawled out of my bed and opened the window to let some fresh air. I thought I could lose consciousness once more and wake up as a human being, but my stomach disagreed. After rolling around in bed for what felt like an hour I got to my feet and went to the bathroom to cough out stomach acid.

It's on my way back to the bedroom that I first saw it. The window in my living room had been broken. Among the shattered glass sat a large stone.

The neighborhood I live in isn’t particularly safe. The broken window was definitely troubling, but with the pure strength of the hangover I couldn’t muster up the energy to care. I simply crawled back to bed and fell into a drained sleep.

I woke up at some point in the late afternoon. The worst of the hangover had passed, but what remained was pure hunger and thirst. I made myself a coffee and started to get dressed for groceries. Before I left the house, however, I thought I’d check my e-mail and socials for new commission requests.

The moment I opened my laptop I spilled my coffee.

Right on the screen, hauntingly beautiful and absolutely accurate — sat a rendition of my living room. Warm afternoon light poured in through the broken window and illuminated the rough stone as if it were holy.

The AI had not only rendered my living room, it also predicted the broken window.

Before I could even begin to make peace with the AI’s soothsayer abilities the image disappeared. The computer was rendering a new image; a street, specifically the street right outside of my apartment. A man was lying on the floor with blood pooled around his head. A broken flower pot sat next to him with the soil turning the dry earth into crimson mud.

It did not take long to identify the man.

The chances of a random flower pot falling from the sky and caving my skull in were astronomically low but so was the prospect of a large stone smashing through my third floor living room. My initial instinct was to call my brother right there and then but I knew that with the time difference my chances of reaching him were slim. Instead, I fished out some crackers from the cupboard and satiated myself on the water from the tap.

I thought I had it all figured out.

In retrospect, my behavior makes little sense. But then again, in my defense, my circumstances made very little sense as well. I figured since the image of my death that the AI generated took place in the afternoon sun all I had to do was to wait it out. I spent the whole day sitting around my apartment, occasionally looking out of the window to the spot where I was meant to die.

As the sun started to set and the sky turned a blood red, I found myself calming. The AI’s prediction wasn’t fulfilled. My skull remained unbroken and even though I was starving and terrified I remained alive. One look at the laptop dispelled all my joy.

A digital rendition of me was still lying dead on the street next to a crushed flower pot, but the sun had shifted. The sky on the painting, much like in the flesh and bone world, was blood red. In the crimson light, on the computer screen, I still lay dead.

I stared at the screen as the sun outside set. The darker the outside world got, the less legible the picture got. When the streetlights finally turned on, the computer went blank. Nothing new was being rendered. I held my breath for minutes, and then, when no unpleasant surprises presented themselves on the screen — I ordered a pizza.

I was still far too scared to venture onto the street for food, but I figured no disasters would occur if I descended to the doors of my apartment complex. I patiently waited in my drained hunger as my Wolt app counted down to delivery. When the courier was downstairs with the pizza, my stomach ached so bad I nearly bolted out the door. Yet, just as I got ready to leave, another image popped up on the computer screen.

A familiar man with a scar on his chin sat on the steps of my apartment complex. He was slumped over leaning on the railing, lit up by the streetlights like a renaissance statue wearing a hoodie.

There was a bloody dagger sticking out of his back.

I tried to convince myself that my fear was irrational. I tried to convince myself that there was no conceivable reason for the pizza delivery guy to murder me or for a computer to predict my death. I tried to convince myself, but I couldn’t.

After a couple phone calls the courier simply placed my pizza on the steps and left.

The pizza is still sitting where the man had left it, but the image on the computer has changed. It’s because of the new image that I barricaded my windows and triple locked my doors. It’s because of the new image that I am here, in this sleepless corner of the internet.

On my computer screen a familiar man lies in a familiar bed. His eyes are wide open and staring at the ceiling, and the blood on the bedsheet is brown and dried. The bottom part of his face, starting from the scar on his chin, is ripped apart to the jaw bone. I cannot phantom what means of violence could mutilate a human body so, but I fear I will soon find out.

Over the past couple of months, I thought my biggest worry was keeping a roof above my head. I thought my biggest fear was having to face technology that only needs a couple thousand days of progress to make us obsolete. Over the past couple of months, I thought the things I had to fear were hiding years in the future.

But now I know that the things I should fear are much closer.

I still remember a time when the internet had a distinct metallic sound.

I miss it.