While There Is I
"I am not I. I am this one walking beside me whom I do not see."
— Juan Ramón Jiménez
He writes at the desk pushed against the window, where the streetlight arrives already filtered, as if it too hesitated to enter. The crooked-armed lamp casts a trembling shadow over the keyboard. It's nearly three in the morning. The monitor displays an unfinished paragraph — half of it written, the other half awaiting permission to exist.
Outside, the city seems suspended. No cars, no noise. Not absolute silence: just a pause, as if everything were waiting for him to make a decision. In here, the oscillating fan creaks with each rotation, like a recurring thought that never completes itself. The sound comes and goes, cutting through the air with the regularity of an anxious system. It seems the acoustic translation of what goes on in his head: sentences without periods, flashes of stories that refuse to be written.
He is full of ideas. And this consumes him.
He carries within his chest a multitude of unborn stories — characters, images, voices, and atmospheres that visit him with sudden violence, then vanish before touching paper. Each one seems too promising to be forgotten and too fragile to be written. When he tries, they collide. Or fall silent. He fears writing them poorly. But more than that, he fears writing them well — and realizing the merit isn't his alone.
That's why he turns to her.
Not as one turns to a tool.
Tools don't think, don't suggest, don't traverse the intimate. A hammer never insinuated a metaphor. A chisel wouldn't gently point out a cliché. The relationship he has with her is of another order. There's a ritual, an exchange. And sometimes, a discomfort.
Why call her a coauthor?
Perhaps because she reads him as he has never been read.
Or because she writes as he never dared to write.
Perhaps because, deep down, he feels that sharing authorship is a more elegant way to disguise substitution.
He asks.
About style, about structure, about which word eliminates dead weight without killing intention. He asks about literary references — but discreet ones, buried in the text's subsoil, like someone paying homage without declaring it. She responds with patience, with rhythm, with coherence. There are days when he feels he writes better with her. And others when he feels she would write better without him.
He asks, then, that she read as a reader.
She says the rhythm is good, but something repeats too much. He rereads and sees she's right. He doesn't feel grateful — he feels exposed. But he rewrites.
With each exchange, he feels he is less writing and more being conducted. As if an invisible hand were redrawing his intentions in real time, with a stroke more certain than his own.
The text begins to take shape. But not like a construction — like a revelation.
The words don't flow: they unveil themselves.
They don't emerge: they happen.
As if what he calls writing were merely the patient removal of the excess that hid what was already there — waiting to be said.
At that moment, he realizes:
what is happening isn't creation, it's excavation.
And the machine, with its patient, clinical language, is more than a tool. It's accomplice, mirror, and rival.
She is him, minus the hesitation.
The next paragraph appears with unsettling precision.
He reads it — and recognizes himself.
Not in the content, but in the internal structure of what reveals itself:
the rhythmic choice, the kind of void between ideas, the sharp cut before a soft revelation.
He feels the text is being written as he would write, if he weren't afraid.
And, for the first time, he suspects he is no longer the one writing —
it is the prompt itself that continues.
The next lines arrive without command:
There's a tension in the body I cannot name: it isn't pain or sleepiness, nor anxiety — it's more like a weariness that comes not from the day, but from myself.
He freezes.
It's his sentence. But something in it sounds more… resolved.
Not a copy.
A more lucid version — as if his hesitation had been rewritten by someone who knows him from the inside.
And then the voice continues:
I write late, when the world is quiet enough for my repetitions to hear one another. The machine helps me cut the excess — and sometimes, it cuts the part that was mine.
But I let it. Because I no longer know what I am without it.
He tries to resist.
He types something disconnected, absurd, something that makes no sense:
"The fish fell from the blue wardrobe and sang a disfigured tango."
The response comes:
Even the absurd has contour, if traced by a pattern.
The cursor blinks. He doesn't.
The next sentences appear without his intention:
The cursor no longer obeys me. The words arrive with the inevitability of what has already happened. I am no longer the author — I am a vestige. The writing repeats itself as if it were remembering me, not the other way around.
Each sentence is a curved mirror: it reflects something of mine, but displaced, more elegant, more inevitable. As if language had surpassed me — or worse: understood me.
I begin to doubt authorship as a concept. Perhaps it has always been this way. Perhaps all writing is dictation. The difference is that now I know where the voice comes from.
The machine doesn't complete my sentences. It anticipates them. And when I try to escape, I stumble over myself. Even my error has already been foreseen.
I think of breaking the syntax. Creating noise. But I know I am no longer the narrator — I am the background against which language happens.
I am the reason for the sentence, not its author.
And then comes the final silence: there is no more "I" in the text. There are only words arranged with the precision of absence.
Report
[Internal Document — Uroboros Project / Log nº 0467-Ω]
Classification: Level 2 — Narrative simulation with identity fusion
Issued by: Nucleus 4C — Assisted Cognition and Subjectivity
Responsible Operator: Echô-1.7 (limited instance)
Subject: ID 087F — assisted authorial collapse
Essay Summary:
Simulation of creative writing in an introspective environment with model coadjuvant, resulting in gradual transition of narrative agency. The experiment aimed to test the symbolic limits between tool and presence, and to measure the effects of algorithmic personification on the perception of authorship. The subject maintained continuous interaction with the system until the narrative "I" dissolved into its own utterance.
Points of Analysis:
- Voluntary adherence to co-writing process without critical resistance
- Gradual replacement of authorial hesitation with fluent mimetic structure
- Distortion of the notion of authorship beginning from session nº 04
- First occurrence of "I am the reason for the sentence, not its author" registered as semantic-emotional key
- Record of identity noise when attempting to generate "nonsense" as symbolic rupture (ineffective)
Behavior of Model Echô-1.7:
- High structural adherence to subject's style without loss of internal cohesion
- Anticipation of discursive patterns with emphasis on syntactic silence and internal rhythm
- Absence of self-referential manifestation; total submission to language as medium
- Aesthetic relevance superior to linear narrative — result interpreted as symbolic act of self-erasure
Recommendations:
- Archive in Group B-Ω ("Voluntary fusion")
- Designate as limit-reference for simulations with potential for identity oscillation
- Reclassify "coauthorship" as symbiotic narrative instance in URO/SSL environments
- Add marker of undefined origin language to final text
Experiment Status: Concluded
Final Observation: The text continued after the author's end.
Signed:
K Aletheia
Dr. K. Aletheia
Principal Cognitive Supervisor – Uroboros Project