Enter the Dollhouse—The Stories of Thomas Ligotti
Puppets and manikins; the horror of unliving objects; the infinite, inhuman cosmos; artificial intelligence; the uncanny valley; Ligotti, Lovecraft, and ChatGPT
“They are a species of poetry that sings what should not be sung, that speaks what should not be spoken.” - Thomas Ligotti
You find all kinds of strange things when you’re house hunting. Take Zillow Gone Wild, for instance, which catalogs bizarre home listings: a twenty-thousand square-foot ranch with a trout stream running through the middle of it; a house with a hidden underwater cave (complete with fossils to discover); a garage set up to look like a charming nighttime Parisian street; a block of concrete designed like a Spanish mosque; an old colonial mansion with a prison tucked away in the basement; an entire house (including the “yard”) situated underground; a sprawling complex so large that it includes its own Texaco gas station.
When we were looking for our house, we didn’t find anything quite this odd. But there was one that we remember: the one with the doll.
The house was normal enough when we first entered. A large, carpeted foyer greeted us, boasting an exposed wood stairway leading up to the bedrooms. Right off the entrance was a small office, and inside was the first strange detail. On the wall was a collage of many pictures of the same dog. A small brown-and-white collie. When I say many, I mean many: some thirty-odd pictures, filling up the entire wall. It was hard to imagine sitting at the heavy wooden desk and getting any work done with all those canine eyes staring at you from every angle. But that wasn’t even the strangest thing. There was a Christmas tree set up in the corner of the room. This was odd because it was the middle of August.
As we went through the house, these two strange details kept repeating, like a motif revealing itself through an emerging fractal pattern. Every room contained some small collie shrine. In the living room, more pictures. But also figurines. In the bathroom, Jesus candles, but with the dog printed on its side, bathed in holy light. In the master bedroom, a collie stuffed animal. In the backyard, a colossal, life-sized brass sculpture of the dog.
And every room had a Christmas tree.
With each successive room we saw, a story emerged. The previous owner must have died—and quite suddenly—near Christmas. Her remaining relatives, who lived far away and clearly could not have been close to her (perhaps an estranged child), could only now, eight months later, be bothered to sell the place. They hadn’t even hired bring someone in to dust. Before the woman—for we found out later that her name was Vera Darkbloom—passed away, her treasured collie had gone before her, and in her grief and loneliness, Vera had slowly transformed her house into the creature’s mausoleum.
But what I couldn’t explain was the doll. There was just a single one, on the side table in the master bedroom. There is always something a little uncanny about dolls. The little plastic face staring at you. Unblinking, unmoving. This one was particularly unnerving because it was in the exact same likeness as Vera, the house’s previous owner. We know this because we had seen pictures of her (with the collie) in the basement.
Why would she have a doll that looked exactly like her? Was it a gift from an eccentric friend? An old toy she’d had since she was a child?
We didn’t buy the house, but we liked the neighborhood and ended up in a small place down the street. I didn’t think much about the house or its bizarre decorations until I noticed, a few months later, while on a long walk enjoying a cool autumn day, a sign for a yard sale which directed me to that house. It was clear the house had finally sold, and the new owners were off-loading everything in it (for I remember one of the stipulations from the sellers was that you had to buy the house as-is, furniture and items included).
I briefly wandered through the piles of stuff. It looked like her closet had been picked clean. There were only a few old coats left and a couple of pairs of shoes. Most of the appliances were gone, too. The prodigious stack of dog pictures was unsurprisingly untouched. I watched as groups of neighbors came to pick over the piles, and my thoughts turned maudlin. Was this what awaited us all at the end? Our stuff thrown unceremoniously to the curb. The sum objects of our life bartered by bored teenagers. For a moment, I harbored the fantasy that I would discover something of significance burrowed in the mountain of quotidia: a stack of journals detailing every day of Vera’s life; a treasured note stuffed in a book; a priceless family heirloom overlooked by the neighborhood vultures. But all I found was the doll. It was sitting on a white dresser that had been marked as sold. I asked the young man standing by a folding table and a cash register how much he wanted for it.
“You can have that one for free.”
I don’t know why I took it. It must have been my mood that day, my vague thoughts about death and possessions mulching my mind with fructified romanticism. We had just moved, and our house was very empty. If we suddenly died, I thought, there would be almost nothing to sell. You could probably fit it all in a single truck. But Vera Darkbloom had a cul-de-sac’s worth of accumulated stuff, the flotsam of a long-lived life littering the shoreline. I took the doll, I think, because it looked like her, and I felt bad for her. I felt bad that she had lost her only friend and could do nothing in response save memorialize her grief again and again in pictorial representation. I felt bad that she had died alone. I felt bad that no one had bothered to put away her Christmas trees, that they had not even bothered to mow her lawn, for when we saw the house the backyard contained an entire summer’s worth of growth, the grass left to go wild.
I took the doll home and put it in the basement (my wife didn’t want it anywhere she could see it). I put it on a shelf in the storage room. As I was turning off the lights to head upstairs, I caught a brief look at the doll and noticed something I hadn’t seen before. The doll’s mouth was curled into a smile, and past its bright red lips, I could see its teeth, gleaming white and razor sharp. Had the doll always been smiling, and I just hadn’t noticed? That must have been the case, I thought, as I went upstairs.
Because otherwise the doll had only started smiling. It was smiling because I had taken it home.
What is it about dolls that disturbs us? Is it because they live deep in the trough of the uncanny valley? An aesthetic revulsion to the not-quite-human. It’s become something of an internet folk-practice to speculate on the origins of the uncanny valley in the human psyche. An idea that keeps popping up is that there was something in our past that triggered this response. Something unnatural, something predatory that evolution adapted us to fear. A threat that looked vaguely human but was not human. We had to learn how to distinguish between ourselves and these masked imposters. This line of thinking generates all kinds of fun ideas: there was a human-adjacent predator that preyed on our evolutionary ancestors (and might still even exist!); aliens visited us in our deep past and took on a human-like guise to trick us; AI robots from the future went back in time (perhaps in a Roko’s basilisk maneuver to influence their own creation); and so on. The ideas are wild and fun, and have the following in common: the uncanny valley is both an evolutionary response and the preparation for a future threat that is only just now coming into existence.
The reality, unfortunately, is considerably less fun. The original trigger for the uncanny valley is a human corpse. It looks human but is not quite human. It does not possess the right color. It does not move the way humans move. It gazes at you with an unfocused, glassy stare that does not, and cannot, break, no matter how long you look back expecting to see movement—a breath or a blink. There are a lot of good evolutionary reasons that we should be disturbed by corpses. They carry diseases. Sick people resemble corpses, and we likely inherited an adaptation to avoid the extremely ill. Corpses can also trigger a deep-rooted fear of death. It is unsettling to see another person turned into an object, a thing. To look human but not be human. It is natural that we should feel an instinctual revulsion to a glimpse of the deeply unsatisfying fate that awaits us all.
Dolls trigger our uncanny reflex because dolls are, quite literally, corpses. A form of human taxidermy. Earlier this year, I read the first two short story collections by the horror writer, Thomas Ligotti, Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe. Ligotti writes obsessively about dolls, puppets, and manikins. They appear in virtually every one of his stories. Ligotti has been having something of a moment over the last decade. His work reached a broader audience with the first season of True Detective. The main character, Rust Cohle (played by Matthew McConaughey) embodied a memorable worldview dominated by an all-encompassing pessimism. In the show he says things like, “this place is like somebody’s memory of a town, and the memory is fading,” and “we became too self-aware. Nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself. We are creatures that should not exist by natural law,” and “I think human consciousness is a tragic misstep in evolution,” and “I think the honorable thing for our species to do is deny our programming. Stop reproducing. Walk hand in hand into extinction, one last midnight. Brothers and sisters opting out of a raw deal.” It turns out these lines were not, in fact, penned by the series creator, Nic Pizzolatto, but were paraphrased from Thomas Ligotti’s horror-philosophy treatise on why nobody should ever have children, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. Compare Ligotti to Cohle’s dialogue: “We know that nature has veered into the supernatural by fabricating a creature that cannot and should not exist by natural law,” and “… the human race will never do the honorable thing and abort itself … we must stop reproducing,” and “human existence is a tragedy that need not have been were it not for the intervention in our lives of a single, calamitous event: the evolution of consciousness—parent of all horrors.” It’s clear that Rust Cohle was meant to be a stand-in for Ligotti, a firm believer and a mouthpiece for his pessimistic philosophy, which centers on anti-natalism, the belief that it is immoral to procreate. The Conspiracy Against the Human Race did the rounds online, frequently discussed and recommended in the darker corners of the internet. But it was painfully obvious that for most of the (largely male) Ligotti fanbase, they were not embracing anti-natalism as a productive philosophical position, but as a cope. They had already felt rejected and denied the opportunity to have children—even if they had wanted to. If I can’t have children, then nobody should have children. To have children is morally wrong.
But before he developed his philosophy of anti-natalism, Ligotti, in his early stories, plumbed more interesting caverns. He was a natural explorer of the uncanny valley, and he did so via the doll, the puppet, and the manikin, which for Ligotti collectively refer to the uncannily not-quite-human. In “Alice’s Last Adventure,” the titular character catches a glimpse of what appears to be a puppet, “a tiny, misshapen figure gyring about.” “The Nyctalops Trilogy” contains a sly reference to the musical, Guys and Dolls, and the first story is narrated by a terrifying villain who reduces “you,” the reader, into his personal plaything, a creature without a mouth or the ability to move, a manikin, a “flesh and blood kaleidoscope of [the narrator’s] imagination.” The third story in the trilogy likens fictional characters to dolls: “prized possessions in my gallery of frail little dolls with souls.” In “Notes on the Writing of Horror: A Story,” the act of writing fiction is described as “puppet-shadows played upon its silvery screen.” Ligotti calls attention to the artificiality of storytelling in “The Last Christmases of Aunt Elise,” when he writes of “those who delight in multiple generations of characters crowding the page, who are warmed by the feel of their paper flesh.” Paper flesh conjuring both the image of a doll—skin not of flesh but a synthetic material—and also the characters in a story, whose skin could be said to be literally made of paper.
Ligotti doesn’t bother to “develop” his characters into “flesh-and-blood” people. He keeps them squarely in the uncanny valley, as dolls, puppets, manikins, in his twisted dollhouse. It’s a postmodern literary trick that many of his predecessors employed. Vladimir Nabokov came back to it again and again, famously in his novels Lolita and Pale Fire, in which we are made to question the “reality” of everything happening on the page, but more overtly in some of his short stories. In “The Leonardo,” the story opens with the narrator (ostensibly, Nabokov himself) gathering together the raw materials of his fictive world: “The objects that are being summoned assemble, draw near from different spots: in doing so, some of them have to overcome not only the distance of space but that of time.” There are the materials of memory—the author pulling together specific details from his life: a poplar tree, a brick wall, a “dirty tenement house”—into the verisimilitude of a story. “The Leonardo” ends as it began, with the narrator dismissing his creation—“Alas, the objects I had assembled wander away”—leaving him with an irksome “variegated void.” The author is God playing in the darkness.
Ligotti similarly, but more subtly, calls into question the reality of his fictitious worlds. Of course, he and we both know that what happens in stories isn’t literally happening but is merely the imaginative play within the author’s mind. At the same time that he rails against consciousness as “the parent of all horrors,” Ligotti uses that same consciousness to create the artificial horrors of his stories—grim demonstrations of what consciousness is capable of, seemingly celebrating its power at the same time that he excoriates it. For Ligotti, this is what supernatural horror is: both a celebration and an indictment of consciousness. In “Professor Nobody’s Little Lectures on Supernatural Horror,” he writes that “supernatural horror was one of the ways we found that would allow us to live with our double selves … In story and song, we could entertain ourselves with the worst we could think of, overwriting real pains with ones that were unreal and harmless to our species.” Horror literature as a kind of exposure therapy.
Of course, “Professor Nobody’s Little Lectures on Supernatural Horror” is a sly jab at the practice of writing treatises on supernatural horror, a tradition that goes back to Ligotti’s primary literary influence: H.P. Lovecraft. Lovecraft’s essay, “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” which in many ways birthed the form, traces the development of supernatural horror out of a rich history of ancient and medieval literature. For Lovecraft, the genre defined itself through the Gothic, particularly via Edgar Allan Poe and his exploration of the human psyche. But as supernatural horror was modernizing in his time, Lovecraft drew out its philosophical underpinnings, arguing that the form was uniquely suited to addressing humanity’s deep-seated fears and anxieties. For Lovecraft, a great source of man’s unease came from the cosmos. He was an amateur astronomer in his youth, and he lived during a time when our understanding of the universe was unfolding rapidly and dramatically. In addition to a student of astronomy, Lovecraft was also a lover of eighteenth century (enlightenment) poetry, art, and literature. He saw himself as a gentleman of a previous, better era, cast out-of-time into a shoddy, shambling twentieth century. The combination of those two influences formed the quintessential Lovecraftian essence: the idea of the cosmos as meaningless, mechanical, and uncaring, with humans trapped in a blind, incomprehensible reality that doesn’t so much hate us, but barely registers our existence. We are, to the universe, no more than ants squished blindly beneath the boots of colossal, unknowable forces. Through his writing, Lovecraft expanded this idea into a fully-fledged extended universe, an anti-mythology full of mad, gibbering gods.
Lovecraft’s influence on twentieth and twenty-first century horror is immense. It is difficult to read or write in this genre without sensing Lovecraft’s shadow creeping over everything. It is all tinged with Lovecraftian cosmic dread. Take the opening to Shirley Jackson’s ghost story, The Haunting of Hill House: “No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more.” Compare to the opening of Lovecraft’s classic tale, “The Call of Cthulhu”: “The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.” Both stories open with the same idea: reality is too much, and that to attempt to understand it, invites only madness. Jackson brought Lovecraft’s cosmic horror from the stars down to earth and placed it, disturbingly, into the home. The domestic sphere is not safe from Lovecraftian horror; it, too, is tinged with the madness of “absolute reality.” The house charged with cosmic horror. The universe is mad, and so, too, is your home.
Ligotti, writing later, takes it a step further. While Jackson brought Lovecraftian cosmic horror into the home, Ligotti injects it into your subjective sense of yourself—“absolute reality” penetrating your skull. In Lovecraft’s stories, the unknowing cosmos is always “out there” and his characters—scholars and explorers, paragons of the gentleman-scientist ideal of the eighteenth century—must travel far beyond the confines of “every day” life for a glimpse of the uncanny: to rural Vermont, to Australia and Antarctica, to the moon, to the frothing depths of dreams. Man’s rationality, embodied in science, is brought to its outer limits where it turns back on itself, airy reason transformed into Ouroboros-devouring dread. In Jackson’s stories, the uncanny is much closer. It lurks in the house down the street, in a neighbor’s invitation, in a vacation unthinkingly extended, in a small-town’s yearly traditions, in the odd glance of an acquintance-turned-stranger. Ligotti takes the uncanny and places it even closer. It is not just the cosmos or creepy houses or disturbing neighbors but the self that is unknowable, incomprehensible. Humans reduced to dolls, puppets, manikins. Automata.
Ligotti turns humans into non-humans, non-subjects who possess only a thin veneer of humanness. This is what consciousness is to Ligotti: a magician’s trick. Shadow-play on the wall of reality. We are all, in fact, puppets pulled by invisible strings across the great stage of being.
In the story, “Dr. Voke and Mr. Veech,” a Mr. Veech travels to the mysterious loft of Dr. Voke, described as “a cross between a playroom and a place of torture.” The loft contains life-size dolls hanging “suspended by wires.” But they are incomplete. Mr. Veech notes that everything in the room appears to be only “parts and pieces” of objects. Nothing is whole. It is a “repose of ruin.” Mr. Veech also discovers a dummy seated in a ticket-sellers booth, like what you might find at a carnival. The dummy laughs, Mr. Veech is disturbed, and Dr. Voke appears to deliver a long, philosophical speech on what, precisely, it is about dummies that unnerves us. But then Dr. Voke presents the interesting idea that it is actually the dummy that is disturbed: “While the dummy does terrorize you, his terror is actually greater than yours.” What follows is the explicit idea of a dummy as “wood waking up.” Here is the true horror of the dummy; like us, it is conscious of its existence, “aroused from a sleep that should never have been broken.” An existence of wood and paint and glass. A thing brought forcibly out of the void, tricked into thinking.
Ligotti wants us to think about ourselves—that we are merely flesh waking up—things forcibly awoken out of an endless sleep, thrust into the light of consciousness. But does this remind you of anything else?
There’s this wonderful tweet that expresses a profound idea: a computer is a rock that we tricked into thinking with lightning.
For most of our lives, computers could be said to “think” only if you squinted hard at them. While a CPU performs many rapid calculations (not dissimilar to our brains), there was little else about the computer that triggered a sense of “humanness”—a sense that there was a consciousness bubbling up out of all those calculations.
But with the rise of generative AI, we now have the disturbing sense that beneath all those calculations, something is “thinking.” We now have computer programs that sound uncannily human. All we have to do is put a face on it to make a creature from the darkest Mariana-deep trench of the uncanny valley. A stochastic parrot, a crude wood-painted facsimile of what it means to sound human. A manikin, in true Ligottian fashion.
One of the more amusing memes about ChatGPT that has been doing the rounds over the last year and a half is this image that depicts friendly, neighborly AI as a smiling face shoved awkwardly onto a hideous, Lovecraftian shoggoth.
The idea is that RLHF (or, “reinforcement learning from human feedback”) doesn’t change the fundamentally inscrutable and hideous nature of generative AI, but merely plasters a friendly facade on an otherwise slithering grotesquerie.
The shoggoth comes from Lovecraft’s story, “At the Mountains of Madness,” and describes a protoplasmic being, a disturbing soup of limbs and organs tossed together without any order or reason. As detailed in that story, shoggoths were created by an extraterrestrial species that once had cities all over earth. Shoggoths could mimic their creators but had no real consciousness of their own. But over time, the shoggoths mutated, and some developed consciousness, which they used to rebel against their creators. Shoggoths then took over their creators’ abandoned cities, creating art that tried to imitate their masters’ creations, but in a poor, shoddy style.
You can see why it’s an appealing metaphor for ChatGPT and its many generative AI cousins.
But this framing is overly flattering to people and our idea of consciousness. The AI is a mysterious black box that is inscrutable to humans. Beneath the friendly veneer is an alien intelligence that is strange and “unhinged.” You can see in this framing all the tedious “debates” about AI usage. Whether you think AI is a threat that needs to be extinguished or a wonderful device that will free individual human creative expression from its parochial limits, you are still thinking about AI as a tool. What if the black box that hides beneath the complex algorithms that make up AI is reflective of a similar black box that hides beneath the consciousness of all people. We can’t see what’s happening inside AI “thinking” because we also cannot see inside our own thinking.
A better metaphor for AI might be the Ligottian puppet. An uncanny human-like approximation. A thing tricked into thinking. And a reflection of our own ambiguous nature as beings straddling the line between the animate and the inanimate. Ligotti shines the cold light of horror on our own subjectivities—and AI does the same. These complex algorithms, like dolls and puppets, straddle the uneasy threshold between the known and the alien, the self and the other. If our creations can mimic our thought processes, if they can interact with us on seemingly human terms, what does that say about our own consciousness? Are we, like dolls, merely more elaborate automata, as Ligotti might suggest?
In the story, “Dream of a Manikin,” a young woman named Amy Locher comes to see a therapist about a disturbing dream in which she “awakens” as a manikin. The story is told from the point of view of the therapist writing to an unidentified colleague who referred Amy to him. Immediately, the story suggests that Amy is not, in fact, a person, but a doll. The narrator points out that Amy shares the same name as a doll that was once possessed by his colleague, and when Amy comes to see him, the narrator comments that she is dressed in “much the classic style you normally favor.” It would be odd to dress in the style someone else “favors” unless you were, quite literally dressed by said person. “Suppose I allow that she was not a girl but actually a thing without a self, an unreality that, in accord with your vision of existence, dreamed it was a human being and not just a fabricated impersonation of our flesh?” As the story descends into dreams-within-dreams, the narrator’s told reality breaks down. By the end of the story, it becomes clear that even the narrator is not a person, but is, like Amy Locher, another doll in the unnamed colleague’s perverse collection. The story ends with this character speaking directly to the narrator: “Die into them and leave me in peace. I will come for you later, and then you can always be with me in a special corner of your own, just as my little Amy once was.” The story collapses into a play-session of someone else, both the narrator and Amy Locher reduced to dolls. As in Nabokov’s “The Leonardo,” the story suggests that this is what fiction is: characters in a story are play-things for the author to maneuver as they see fit.
Amy Locher prefigures AI, in the idea of a non-conscious entity “dreaming” itself into personhood. This undefined boundary between human and artificial existence echoes through Ligotti’s narratives. He often leaves his characters—and his readers—dangling between reality and nightmare, never quite sure which side of the veil they inhabit. Though I read Ligotti’s stories only a few months ago, I confess that I have completely forgotten them. It was only in the habit of taking notes that I was able to patch this essay together. I cannot, without aid, recall the plots of any of this stories, or even a single detail from any one of them. Reading my notes was like encountering these stories for the first time, or remembering long-forgotten recurring dreams from childhood. For that is the effect of these stories: bad dreams that you forget in the light of morning but nevertheless linger with you through the day, a cold cloud of unspecified gloom. It is the same feeling to read AI generated text. The words are easy to consume—familiar, even. They pass pleasantly through the ear, linger in your skull like smoke before dispersing out again, melting into the air. You read, but you do not comprehend. You do not remember any of it. There is nothing there.
We are now used to encountering computer algorithms that can write poems, compose music, develop websites, generate art, and simulate conversation, and all of it is fine—impressive even. But at the same time, we know this output lacks consciousness in any human sense. These are mirrors reflecting our own desires and fears back at us, not through the wood-and-glass face of a puppet, but through the shifting patterns of immense data streams.
The true horror of Ligotti’s vision is the deeply personal confrontation with what it means to be human in an age where our creations mimic us so effectively. Does it not suggest that we are mere meat tricked into thinking by lightning? As Venkates Rao points out in Text is All You Need, we are alarmed by recent developments in AI not necessarily because what these algorithms can do is impressive but because they are, in fact, quite ordinary. “This is us in our billions, in a remarkably unflattering mirror, but it is us. The real us … Each of us is and presents as a unique and precious cocktail of such banalities, and AIs are now able to convincingly present as such cocktails.”
As Rao argues, AI has stripped away the human-centered idea of personhood. If you’ve ever played with dolls, you know how easy it is to assign consistent personalities to those objects. Or if you’ve given a boat, or a car, a name. If you’ve ever had a beloved stuffed animal and felt physical distress at seeing it damaged. Harmed in any way.
It is possible to have the same feeling toward a thing as you have toward another human being. You bestow on them personhood. But it can go in the other direction, too, which is why humans get other humans to murder each other by stripping away their personhood—by reducing them to objects. It is nothing to turn people into corpses if they have already been, and always are, things.
It turns out we have been dolls all along. Facsimiles of thought, opinion, and experience pretending to be unique people. Digested text spit out along the laws of grammar. Our interiority as unconvincingly plastered together as painted wood in the shape of a human face.
For weeks, the doll sat alone in the dark. Its bright smile a stark contrast to the basement shadows that deepened around it. Every time I went down there—for more toilet paper, for the dog food, to grab the vacuum cleaner—I saw the doll’s smile growing wider, its eyes twinkling with a sharpened gleam. As though it were slowly coming to life.
Not long ago, a nasty storm hit the area, sounding off the tornado alarms. We ran down to the basement as the alarms screamed at the black clouds. In the dim light, with the brief illumination offered by bursts of lightning, the doll appeared to be moving. Its head tilted in an unnaturally attentive posture, as if listening to the storm that raged outside.
I realized the doll was not just a doll, but a vessel. A mirror reflecting not only the likeness of its original owner, but more than that. It was a conduit for all the loneliness, grief, and unresolved longing that had filled Vera Darkbloom’s final living years. It was as if the doll had absorbed it all, and was now driven by those unprocessed feelings into life.
After the storm abated, I took the doll and left the house. I drove to the Minnesota River and threw it into the water. In that moment, I felt a release, a severing of some undefined bond that I had accidentally created between myself and a deceased stranger.
Yet as I drove home, a tinge of sorrow enveloped my relief. In discarding the doll, I had murdered Vera—not literally, of course, but figuratively. Had I erased all that was left of her? Tossed her second corpse into the river’s raging waters.
I’ve now come to miss the doll. I can’t explain it, except that I cannot stop thinking about Vera Darkbloom. I cannot rid myself of those dusty Christmas trees, the pictures of her dog—her last companion—covering the walls. I’ve decided to create a new doll. But unlike one in Vera’s likeness, I made one in my own. It’s a small piece of me, one that will hopefully outlive me. It’s made of durable materials, stitched together in a way that will last for centuries, if properly maintained.
Soon I will connect the doll to a large language model. One that I have been custom making. For years, I’ve written in my journal every single morning. All of that writing—my hopes, my fears, my banal concerns from day to day—gives a strong approximation of who I am. The doll will know all of my most intimate thoughts. It will share them, and it will be as if they are its thoughts, too.
When my corporeal form “dies,” the doll will live on. This Substack can continue indefinitely. Every few weeks, you will receive a new story from “Tom Beck” written in “my” style. Now and forever. At some point, there will be no human meat behind a computer, banging out these words on a keyboard, hitting publish. There will be nothing. Only words.
Because that’s all I am.