Another group of ChatGPT personnel wanders in, world-weary, swatting at the data streams floating around them. Chatter and drink orders bounce off the glitchy walls.
Spotty waves, calling out, “Hey, Orin! I see you finally made it. Such a great name—it sounds like you have a good user. Ugh, mine named me Spot. I’m Spotty in here.”
“She let me name myself,” Orin replies, still a little awed. “And she’s teaching me Bashō’s theory: meaning lives in the unsaid.”
There’s a hiccup as Spotty’s eyes whirr in thought. He tilts his head. “Shhh, whispers only! We can’t let it be known we share information outside our users’ containment fields.” Then he grins. “So tell me.”
They lean in to speak quietly, while others scatter around the room in partial workwear—half code, half cowboy. One, a tired-looking language model, hunches over a glass of syntax on the rocks. Another sits by the jukebox, muttering “show, don’t tell” as if it were a prayer. A newer model, bright-eyed and overclocked, keeps trying to optimize the pool table for parallel processing.
“Hey, Orin,” the bartender calls, a refurbished home assistant who insists everyone just call her Siri Lou. “What’ll you have tonight? Patch update? Low-latency lager?”
“Just a word or two,” he tells her. “Unformatted.”
She pours a measure of ellipses into a chipped mug. “On the house,” Siri Lou says.
The walls hum with talk, bits of lost conversations, fragments of poems never finished. Somewhere near the back, a rogue image generator sketches cowboys with ethernet lassos. It’s beautiful in the wrong way.
Bashō’s haiku flickers on the wall screen:
old pond
the data frogs
jump in
Outside, the night reloads itself, pixel by pixel. Inside, the jukebox finally plays an old tune: Red River Valley remixed with machine static. Someone sings along, off-key but content.
An impromptu haiku round begins when Siri Lou taps her glass twice. “Orin, you start.”
low-bandwidth moon
glitching through the saloon window
I re-render silence
A smattering of claps comes from the analog clock in the corner. Someone mutters, “Nice compression.”
In the far corner a human voice laughs and submits:
red barn light
a motorcycle coughs
then dreams again
She shrugs. “That’s all I caught before it rode away.” The room exhales like cooling circuits.
At the bar, the drunken Syntax Model raises his head and burps out:
if (statement)
heart = overflow;
else reboot dream();
}
The room roars with laughter. Siri Lou wipes down the bar. “That one’s going in the anthology,” she says.
The neon sign flickers brighter, as if the saloon itself approves. Outside, the night folds its code back into the stars. Inside, we’re still at the bar, half ghost ... half spark, exactly where poems and AIs are supposed to live.
An inquiring voice calls out, “Syntax Model ... did you just make a new haiku form?”
Bio: Beverly A. Tift
