to recreate the moment I was dodging active gunfire at the intersection of Washington and Earhart. Sure, I may have already lived the moment, but because of that pesky single perspective limitation of “being-human”ness, I didn’t really get to see the experience of being in active gunfire. I saw: a worn firestone fire smoking as it braked on the sun-bleached asphalt; a crumbed receipt paper near the pentagram-like hubcap, my now-bleeding dirty palm, a forearm still streaked in stray eggshell slashes, commuting from a day of dehydrated mansion painting uptown.

I want to see it in the real way. Hollywood production-style: three point lighting, multi-angle and 4K. A crystal clear memory made anew. This time, I won’t just lay on the pavement; my bike mangled in on itself, my hollow plea that this all must be consecutive catastrophic motor failures: how else could it be so deafening? 

Now I’m prompting A.I. to make me the protagonist; yes, I’ll leap and parkour myself from every metal and concrete surface until I can oust the bad-guys, disarming them, and concluding the scene with thunderous applause. Being in the middle of active gunfire on Washington and Earhart before had no meaning; it was a random wrong time and place; it was an aberration of my otherwise alright-day; but, now it really means something: I want it to conclude like a Public Service Announcement in an era before a defunded Public Broadcasting. I want it to pan and zoom like the intro of an early 90s melodrama that reverbs with warmth and belonging. 

See: Richard D. James’ face would be a nightmare; but mine is charming, friendly, and sociable; it’s me, but the exalted version of me: finally a member of a consoling nuclear family. Not like the friend who didn’t answer her phone when I really needed her; “did you shake out the trauma?” she asked weeks later. ChatGPT would have known what to do, and it would have been readily available to aid in my request: my confidant and companion, my healer.

Maybe the time my companion takes to complete a request is akin to my fearful quivering. The machine may not know the touch or the feel, the disquiet of not-knowing, or what it means to lay upon a great oak tree on the neutral ground, and hold my pounding chest as I heave for air. But it does something somehow grander: it puts me outside myself so I can really look within. I get to witness myself like never before. Everything before really was just My-So-Called Life. It’s like what William Dafoe says in eXistenZ when asked if he’s a gas station attendant. And I will have the same answer, when someone asks me my name, my profession, or momentary clinging to identity: “only in the most basic level of reality.”

I ’ M P R O M P T I N G V I D E O A . I .