conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What could be a title for a book about Terry, Best, Year with the genre: Science Fiction & Fantasy, Science Fiction?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A title for this book could be 'The Best Science Fiction Of The Year'
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What is the first five paragraphs for this book?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The Best Science Fiction Of The Year
  In all my interventions to date, one thing has remained true. The murmuration eventually dissipates. The roosting instinct overpowers the flocking instinct, and the birds cascade down into the trees. It happens very quickly, a kind of runaway escalation. Whenever I have witnessed it, I am always saddened, for it is the end of the show, but I am also awed by what is another demonstration of marvellous collective action.
  Some birds leave it, maybe a third, but a core remains. I hammer at the laptop—more puzzled than worried at first. I try to disrupt the logic flow, randomise the data, dismantle the knotty Boolean architecture. But the pattern remains obstinately present. The sky darkens, until only the cameras and rangefinders are able to track the birds, and then with difficulty.
  But I can still hear them up there—a warm but unseen presence, like a halo of dark matter hovering over me.
  After all the time and work I've invested in the process, it's hardly a decision I take lightly. But there is a difference between acting as a gatekeeper and a psychiatrist. I'm afraid that recent developments have given me cause for concern.
  We all work under some degree of stress. Science is not a carefree playground. It's an arena where reputations crash as readily as they soar. Commit some error of analysis, read too much into noise, claim a premature discovery, and you may as well tie your own academic noose. Forget those keynote lectures. Forget those expenses-paid conference invitations. You'll be tarnished—dead in the water.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What is five more paragraphs?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: If anything, it has grown. I run a number count and find that it has been absorbing birds, sucking them into itself. More than half a million now. Enslaved to the murmuration, the individual birds will eventually exhaust themselves and drop out of the sky. But the whole does not care, any more than I concern myself with the loss of a few skin cells. As long as there are fresh starlings to be fed into the machine, it will persist.
  I drive the 4WD out again, set up the laptop, try increasingly desperate and random measures to make the pattern terminate itself. Nothing works.
  But the supply of new birds is not inexhaustible. Sooner or later, if they keep coming, it will churn its way through all the starlings in the country. Long before that happens, though, the wrongness of this thing will have become known to others beside myself. They will know that I had something to do with it. They will admire me at first, for my cleverness. After that, they will start blaming me.
  Desperate measures. The wind is stiff today, the bushes and trees buckling over. Even the birds struggle to hold their formation, although the will of the murmuration forces itself through.
  I steer the murmuration in the direction of the wind turbine. The blades swoop around at the limit of their speed: if it were any windier, the automatic brakes would lock the turbine into immobility. The edge of the flock begins to enter the meat slicer. I hear its helicopter whoosh, the cyclic chop of its great rotors. The blades knock the birds out of the sky in their hundreds, an instant bludgeoning execution. They tumble out of formation, dead before they hit the ground.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What is the last two paragraphs? End with the sentence ' It might be misplaced optimism, but this time I am quietly confident of success.'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: I draft a letter to the editor. Although it pains me to do it, I feel that we have no option but to request a new referee. Things have gone on long enough with this old one. Frankly the whole exchange was in danger of getting too personal. We all know that the anonymous part counts for very little these days, and in all honesty professional feelings were starting to get in the way. I had a suspicion about their identity, and of course mine was all too visible to them. We had history. Too much bad blood, too much accumulated recrimination and mistrust. At least this way we will be off to a clean start again.
  I read it over, make a few alterations, then send the letter. It might be misplaced optimism, but this time I am quietly confident of success.