Here’s a few short stories/excerpts that I wrote for a class and wanted to share. As always, I welcome any and all feedback at ankil335@gmail.com.
Do we make prophecies or do prophecies make us? If you’re here, he had the nerve for it after all.
Taken aback, the bloodied noble lowers his sword.
Come! I will show you how we make prophecies!!
With a toothless grin, the old woman flared her nostrils and beckoned him to her cauldron.
Add a smidgeon of ambition, a scoop of hubris, a spoonful of fear, a drop of greed, and finally a pinch of jealousy.
His feet gingerly shuffled towards the cauldron to peer inside and saw the bubbling concoction simmer down until he could see his own reflection. With renewed strength, he turned to leave…
Don’t die on us Fleance, son of Banquo! My sisters and I have staked our reputations on you.
Movies like Ophelia and The Green Knight inspired me to write this story because of how they subvert existing stories, in the same way Margaret Atwood or Salman Rushdie do, to reveal a grander point. This short story is a spin on Macbeth. It’s right after Macbeth kills the king and tries to assassinate Banquo and his children. Fleance escapes and we don’t know what he does until he reappears near the end of the play. I thought it might be interesting to write about what he might’ve been doing in the meantime.
I want the reader to read this short story twice: once in confusion and another time knowing it’s about Fleance and Macbeth. Ultimately, I want readers to walk away asking themselves if Fleance’s inherent ambition surfaces in the same way it spurred Macbeth into his tragic missteps.
Prompt: have an argument b/w two people over something trivial but have it tease a larger issue without explicitly stating it
The flame from the small diya dances in the red clay. Its warmth belies a strangely sharp and offensive glow.
Come, receive the blessings of our pooja.
Why?
What!?
What is the purpose of this? Why does waving my hand over this flame mean anything?
We’re Indian - this is who we are.
Are we in India right now?
That doesn’t mean we’re not still Indian - that doesn’t mean we should forget.
Forget what? I’ve literally spent more time studying for exams than I have physically in India.
So what!
A palpable silence ate up the space between them and choked their words.
I know India as gulab jamuns and Utrayan and Mahabharat and Shakuntal and the Taj Mahal… the same way a tourist sees India! Traditions don’t make sense in vaccuums. And we’re not even adjacent to India - there’s no cultural gradient. I have to make a choice. Who am I?
A silence washes over both of them again.
Your great-great grandfather marched with Gandhi in defiance of the salt tax. Your great-grandmother died from a stray bullet during a demonstration for untouchables. Your grandparents survived countless chaotic Hindu-Muslim riots. Your ancestors shaped India’s story, refined her delicacies, built her temples and fought for her beauty. You are a product of the Indian story, whether you identify by it or not.
I struggled to reconcile my identity as a first-generation immigrant. For the better part of my formative years, there was an atheist/existentialist strain that took hold and it created a rift between me and people I admired but ultimately disagreed with fundamentally. It sadly took me too long to lose the atheist militancy and finally appreciate that perspective. For instance, I didn’t appreciate how poetic and beautifully written the Mahabharat was - for reference, the epic is on the same scale as the Odyssey or the Illiad. I wonder if my western sensibilities colour how I see these stories and suggest values that may be neither inherent nor warranted. I wonder if I made the mistake of confusing storytelling strategies with the value or sophistication of a story.
The perennial wisdom of Thomas King in The Truth about Stories teaches me not to show my mind but rather, to show my imagination.
First Person
I can feel the scorching red sun through my eyelids. My head hurts and I can’t really feel my arms or legs. I try to move my head around but all I feel is pain around my neck. As my eyes adjust to the bright light, I get a good view of what’s around me. I’m in a transparent plastic square box that’s resting midair with tiny holes to let me breathe. Even though it hurts, I look down and see a seemingly unending tunnel beneath the box. I see a glass dome above the transparent box where the sunlight seems to be coming through. On the sides, I see people in lab coats staring at me. Me? I look down at myself and screech in horror. So much fur! My legs feel shorter, my arms longer and my body is completely covered in fur. I try speaking but all I can muster are screams and howls and hoots. The labcoats hold up a mirror and I gasp in terror as I see myself: a chimp! How did this happen? All I remember is a car crash…
Third Person Omnipotent
Sveg was one of the world’s leading neuroscientists, specialising in neural transplants - that is: to transport someone’s brain from one body to another. The technology, named Project Chimaera, was still under development but he was confident that it could one day redefine what it meant to be human. It didn’t deter him when his wife told him that he often mistook his hubris for confidence. When tragedy struck his wife and daughter in a near fatal car crash, his grief pushed him to do the unthinkable. In a last ditch attempt to save his daughter, Anna, he proposed to transfer her brain to Lucy’s body, his prime candidate for a brain transplant. He brought Anna and Lucy to his lab and started on the procedure. Previous trials had created out-of-control chimps, some of whom had tried to attack his colleagues and yet others tried to jump into the void below the box but almost all of them contemplated covering the breathing holes. Once he was done, he set her in the box above the tunnel and instructed his assistants to keep an eye on her.
When she awoke, he could hear her call for him. Dad!
Third Person Limited
I’m sorry little one - this is the best I could do.
Sveg’s research into neural transfers had reached new heights: he had successfully transferred his daughter, Anna’s brain into a chimpanzee. As he stared at her in both astonishment and horror, he contemplated the weight of what he had done. He knew what he’d done was necessary. Surely, no one could deny that from him. He pressed a large red button to extend a ramp towards the box from the edge of the tunnel. He needed to go to her and let her know the world hadn’t ended. He fumbled with a collar as he walked over to her. He would need to collar her if she ever lost control, as is standard practice for animal trials, but Sveg wondered if his paternal instincts would overpower the scientist. He knelt down to meet her eyes. He knew she recognized him by the way her pupils dilated. He opened the box and stepped inside. He took her hand and patted her head. He held her in his arms as he explained what he had done. She snuggled into his chest and cried with heavy sighs. His arms shook as he began to fully process his grief.
I usually try to avoid dystopian sci-fi primarily because I think it’s easy to conflate the moral of the story with a warning about the technology itself. I’m a big fan of Ted Chiang because of how he sees the role of technology in empowering and elevating us rather than just encumbering us with difficult questions. That being said, I thoroughly enjoyed writing this story about a child trapped in a chimp’s body :).
Billie looked across the table at Jean and said “Do you think AI will become better than us?”
Jean thought for a moment. No, of course not - they might get faster and more sophisticated but they’re still incapable of coming up with truly original ideas. That requires an understanding of necessity. That requires hunger. Human experience.
“No, I don’t think so. In a vaccuum lacking human experience, it might create something novel but not immediately useful to us. We have a tendency to assign value to usefullness.”
Billie handed Jean a scalpel and said that human experience created bias which precludes humans from seeing certain solutions to problems. He adjusted the light towards the patient and expanded that thought by asking… IF there was a profound truth that is omnipresent but has somehow evaded human perception, then would AI, because it doesn’t rely on human senses and prejudices, be able to find this imperceivable truth? Maybe we can’t appreciate the CURRENT AI because the insight transcends our understanding.
“How do we know this? The AI is just as likely to be useless. If it found this truth, would it tell us?” Jean said as she lowered the scalpel into the brain stem. “If this truth exists, that could mean that babies could discern it since they have capacity for intelligence and none of our prejudices. Maybe babies have been trying to tell us this profound truth this whole time and we’ve dismissed it as baby talk! I think it’s simpler. I think AI will just have found an insight that’s just some linear combination of existing ideas. In other words, it’s in the span of ideas that we can comprehend but maybe haven’t explored yet.”
“This kind of reminds me of orangutans - they learn by imitation and build variations on those imitations. But that begs the question: who did the first orangutan imitate?” Billie said, placing the brain stem into a tray. “Who’s to say that any of our ideas are truly original?”
Jean nodded and looked back onto the operating table.
I was inspired by the debate between Turing and Lovelace and wanted to add my own spin to a debate that has since seen renewed attention, to put it lightly.
The hut sits on a mound of mysterious origins. My religious friends tell me the mound was created to honour the dead as it forms the highest peak in the immediate area, not counting the mountains in the distance. My geologist friends tell me the mound was created over many years of erosion and through the movement of glaciers. I like the religious version more because when I get buried here, the house and the mound will be both a testament and an honour to my existence. It’s a bit pretentious but I doubt the mound is going to argue either. And why would it - we have ascribed value to places, things, and rituals for as long as we have existed. It keeps the existential dread at bay. Even the mountains must get lonely. You can hear their sad echoes as the wind rushes by, sad because of how they were birthed from the earth and forced to live out an eternity alone. I don’t imagine my self-pity offers any good companionship, but it can be both frustrating yet reassuring to talk to the mountains: they love the same people that I do, hate the same people that I do, and most importantly, laugh at all the right jokes. Today, however, the mountains are quiet.
This is an excerpt from my story about a solitary archaeologist that lives in a futuristic utopia built literally on top of our current world after it’s been buried (presumably because of global warming). An earthquake reveals this society to him and in the process of critiquing us, he reflects on universal truths that transcend time about love and brotherhood. In this excerpt, he contemplates on the significance of the location of his hut.