Day 3

Her body was a string of processors snaked together within a giant heat sink, each whirring and clicking in unison to create what Owen described to me as a sort of semi-consciousness. She wasn’t aware of anything but herself, and the series of specific and limited tasks he’d programmed into her. Owen told me she was a marvel of modern computing. Maybe I believed it. Maybe I still thought it was just a bunch of metal and plastic sitting in a bin in the basement.

Sally was built for the idea - which was, ultimately, to write the greatest novel anyone had ever read. To do it in a way that wouldn’t leave anything up to chance. Wouldn’t leave me, for example, writing something that may or may not have been anything good (or anything at all). She had two tasks in this regard, two main functions. First, as Owen had explained to me several times, she’d compile, from a database, the titles of every book ever written - so long as those titles could be translated into English. And from those, she’d spit out a single title. That, my friends, was to be the title of the greatest book ever written. I could cope with that. That seemed feasible, forgetting for a moment all the millions of books that had been written with titles, and their varying qualities (we kept them all in the mix so as not to disqualify bad titles for great books and the opposite...Owen said this would give us a much more empirical answer than if we’d culled any). We had just, he told me, to hook Sally to the internet and wait maybe a day for her answer.

The second task was the one I wasn’t sure could be done. What Owen proposed was that he could, based on various rating systems and user reviews around the world, program Sally to collect full texts for a hundred thousand of the best books in the world - more, even, or less. We controlled the limit. Of course, she’d then be asked to compile, from all those, a novel that would have all the best attributes of each and none of the filler. It would, essentially, be the best book ever written. By anyone. By me.

Yes, I’ll admit it. The only reason I even listened to Owen for a second after he started telling me his idea was because I was the sole beneficiary if his plan worked.

"This book, Steven,” he said, “can only be written once. And it has to look like it was written by a regular guy. The world wouldn’t tolerate the news that a machine wrote it. You’d get it all - the advance, the royalties, the fame that follows. All you have to do is let me live with you, so we can work on it together. So you know just what’s at stake.”

I was sucked in. I couldn’t think of a reason to say no - if it didn’t work out, I’d still be in the same place I’d always been. Working at the bookstore, planning to be a novelist. So that’s what brings us here - a year later. To the day of the title test.