conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What could be a title for a book about Often, During, Grossvogel with the genre: Literature & Fiction, Genre Fiction?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A title for this book could be 'The Spectral Link'
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: the first four paragraphs for this book
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The Spectral Link
  During the hours I spent that day in the library, I went from basement to belfry, only to find myself cornered by the walls of one dead end after another. With studious intent I walked into a repository of learning with the light of a beautiful morning shining upon me and my self-appointed mission. But great clouds rolled in, thunder shook the walls, rain tapped louder and louder against the windows and lightning flashed outside them. By degrees, the neat hallways of the library I had entered turned to dank and dripping stonework corridors of a Gothic castle through which I wandered in search of a way out. I trembled as if trapped in one of those dreams of mine where I feel surrounded by unseen horrors. At last, all I wanted was to wake up. But I couldn't awake, not until I had some answers. Abandoning the library in disgust, I returned home and moped about for weeks in a stupor of desperation and nervous suspicion.
  Not long after that inauspicious day of wasted labor, something happened that helped me come back to myself, such as I was, while also advancing my obsession with the swivel-heads. Until then, I was no expert at making friends. How unexpected it was, then, that I should make a friend when I needed one most. I was so surprised because nothing in my life had ever worked out that way. For once, I actually gained an advantage over my circumstances.
  It was after school, after the time between leaving home to go to school in the morning and leaving school in the afternoon to go back home, where I waited for it to be time for dinner, time for doing homework, and then other times until it was time to go to bed before it was time to wake up again and face another round of times to do things. In any case, on the day in question I made friends with this other boy. The reason for this fortuitous bond was that he spoke the following words: "Damn those small people." I asked him why he said that. I also asked if he was afraid of the small people as I was afraid of them. He said he wasn't afraid of the small people, but I didn't believe him because of the way he said this. His eyes looked away from me, and he started to fidget. His voice became very quiet, too, until he stopped talking altogether and just stared at the ground. Then he looked up at me, shaking off the fear that possessed him, and said in a boisterous voice, "I'm not afraid of those dummy-things. I just hate them."
  Immediately we became friends and began spending time together every day after school, that is, until it was time for us to go home for dinner and then go through all the other times there were. We played games the way young people do, or are supposed to do at that stage of development. We wrestled quite a bit, but there wasn't anything mean or crazy about it. We also talked a lot about the small people. One theme of conversation to which we often returned involved catching one of the smalls and what we'd do when we did.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: five more paragraphs
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: They didn't speak a word—neither to us nor among one another. Nothing shocked me about that, but it did add to the disorienting unreality of the situation. For a time, they stayed in place. Paradoxically, they appeared gigantic, that is, gigantic for toys, given their toy-like aspect. For instance, their clothes seemed to be painted on them, not worn by them. And their faces were so smooth, gleaming in the moonlight without any of the characteristic qualities of flesh. Despite their masculine semblance, their faces were beardless. They were also unwrinkled, unworn by time and somehow immortal. This was how they had always been, created somehow but not developed in stages from birth to their present age. There had been no process of coming of age for them, I thought later—no birth or death or all the things in between that trouble our own existence, or at least troubled us when we attended to them. There was only going through the motions, a pretense of life. In a way, they were a mirror of us—of what we wanted for ourselves. They marked time and nothing else. Time to do this. Time to do that. Time to make another town. Time to relocate, having poisoned a new landscape with small country.
  During the standoff between the smalls and my friend and me, an uncanny stillness prevailed. But then their heads swiveled simultaneously. Each turned toward another. They didn't seem to be exchanging glances, though, or even looking directly into one another's glassy, empty eyes—not as my friend and I looked to each other with the same thought in our minds. We couldn't run around them, because they surrounded us. And we didn't want to jump down the steep incline at our backs and land in the small town. So we began to move slowly through their ranks, not knowing what to expect. While we had come there to harm them, our taste for that was now lost. It seemed to us, as we later talked of it, that we could not understand them at all or what malevolence they might harbor toward us.
  Very slowly, then, we sidled our way among them, and they didn't attempt to block our path. However, they did do something, or seemed to do something. This was to lightly press their bodies against ours as we passed. That turned out to be worse than any brute physical encounter we could have had with them—their touch. For they were not stiff and rigid as we expected, not the hard, plastic toys we might have neatly torn apart, bloodlessly dislodging their seemingly prosthetic limbs. Instead, we found that they were soft, very soft. Their shapes felt as if they were giving way as they lightly pressed themselves against us. But they were also swivel-headed dummy-things—freakish unrealities like their town and maybe everything having to do with small country. Did they even exist as our minds conjured existence, both our own and that of all else within our perception? What were these things that seemed to be all appearance and no substance? Fortunately, such questions did not paralyze us.
  Once my friend and I were on the other side of the smalls, we ran without pause to where we commenced our terribly misconceived incursion into small country. The rest of the night we spent shivering with cold and fear in the lavatory hut at the old park on the edge of town. The only time we spoke was in the morning. Just before we parted for our respective homes, my friend looked at me with an abysmal expression on his face and said, "My dad will kill me if he ever finds out what we did."
  Not long after our misadventure, my friend moved away with his family. And before the end of that school year, those signs went up with the simple faces on them. They first appeared at the edge of town and then proceeded for some miles along the open road beyond. I made a point of going around and finding all the signs I could, noting which direction their arrows pointed to indicate small country. I saw that people still went to the old park. They must have been aware that small country wasn't far away, but that made no difference to them, not as it did to me.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Delete the first sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Nothing shocked me about that, but it did add to the disorienting unreality of the situation. For a time, they stayed in place. Paradoxically, they appeared gigantic, that is, gigantic for toys, given their toy-like aspect. For instance, their clothes seemed to be painted on them, not worn by them. And their faces were so smooth, gleaming in the moonlight without any of the characteristic qualities of flesh. Despite their masculine semblance, their faces were beardless. They were also unwrinkled, unworn by time and somehow immortal. This was how they had always been, created somehow but not developed in stages from birth to their present age. There had been no process of coming of age for them, I thought later—no birth or death or all the things in between that trouble our own existence, or at least troubled us when we attended to them. There was only going through the motions, a pretense of life. In a way, they were a mirror of us—of what we wanted for ourselves. They marked time and nothing else. Time to do this. Time to do that. Time to make another town. Time to relocate, having poisoned a new landscape with small country.
  During the standoff between the smalls and my friend and me, an uncanny stillness prevailed. But then their heads swiveled simultaneously. Each turned toward another. They didn't seem to be exchanging glances, though, or even looking directly into one another's glassy, empty eyes—not as my friend and I looked to each other with the same thought in our minds. We couldn't run around them, because they surrounded us. And we didn't want to jump down the steep incline at our backs and land in the small town. So we began to move slowly through their ranks, not knowing what to expect. While we had come there to harm them, our taste for that was now lost. It seemed to us, as we later talked of it, that we could not understand them at all or what malevolence they might harbor toward us.
  Very slowly, then, we sidled our way among them, and they didn't attempt to block our path. However, they did do something, or seemed to do something. This was to lightly press their bodies against ours as we passed. That turned out to be worse than any brute physical encounter we could have had with them—their touch. For they were not stiff and rigid as we expected, not the hard, plastic toys we might have neatly torn apart, bloodlessly dislodging their seemingly prosthetic limbs. Instead, we found that they were soft, very soft. Their shapes felt as if they were giving way as they lightly pressed themselves against us. But they were also swivel-headed dummy-things—freakish unrealities like their town and maybe everything having to do with small country. Did they even exist as our minds conjured existence, both our own and that of all else within our perception? What were these things that seemed to be all appearance and no substance? Fortunately, such questions did not paralyze us.
  Once my friend and I were on the other side of the smalls, we ran without pause to where we commenced our terribly misconceived incursion into small country. The rest of the night we spent shivering with cold and fear in the lavatory hut at the old park on the edge of town. The only time we spoke was in the morning. Just before we parted for our respective homes, my friend looked at me with an abysmal expression on his face and said, "My dad will kill me if he ever finds out what we did."
  Not long after our misadventure, my friend moved away with his family. And before the end of that school year, those signs went up with the simple faces on them. They first appeared at the edge of town and then proceeded for some miles along the open road beyond. I made a point of going around and finding all the signs I could, noting which direction their arrows pointed to indicate small country. I saw that people still went to the old park. They must have been aware that small country wasn't far away, but that made no difference to them, not as it did to me.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: the last four paragraphs
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: It must have been around the middle of the night—I didn't plan a specific time—when I entered my mother and father's bedroom. They were lying on their backs in bed, the moonlight glowing on my father's slightly smiling face and concentrating stare as well as on my mother's smooth face and big eyes, which were open. Both their eyes were open. I don't know why. Maybe they didn't sleep. It wasn't as if I was the sort of person to peek into his parents' bedroom to see what they were doing.
  I wasn't exactly amazed that I never saw the inside of a courtroom, knowing as I did what I knew. I didn't know, however, what would ensue in the aftermath of my deed—that I would be locked up in this place. Whatever it is, it isn't a prison, not with the superlative educational facilities you've provided, allowing my mind and sensibility to flourish. If our positions were reversed, that would be my scheme—cultivate me like a plant, breed me into something that could express its view of the world at its deepest level. You were ready for me from the very first, so I have to assume I'm not the only one to do what I did, and for the reason I did it. That's right, isn't it, Doctor? But I've been here so long. How many more doctors must I see who want to hear my story? Are you in training or something? I'm as sane as your shoes, we both know that, even though I should have gone mad long ago from my dreams alone. Why can't we make a deal, come to an arrangement? I'm practically an old man. My coming of age came and went. I'd kill myself if I thought you'd let me. That's not what you want, though, is it? Could you please give me an answer just once?
  Everything is such a mystery with you people—halfers I used to think, but I don't know anymore. I lost my instinct for that the moment I stepped into this place. Did you do that? And what about the tingling? That hasn't happened in who knows how long. It would be nice to see a clock or a calendar every so often. Don't you care about time, whatever you are? How about space, existence, all the commotion of reality? I've known it was all just a preposterous mess for ages now. I also learned that I should be on the outside, and the rest of this ludicrous world, or most of it, should be in here for study and rehabilitation, adjustment and readjustment, if that's the point. What are you trying to accomplish? Whatever it is, you seem to be doing a terrible job of it. Is everything still as crummy as I remember it? Your world, whichever one it may have been, was an offense to my eyes. And it didn't have to be that way. But maybe that's the way you wanted it—a nightmare from morning stool to bedtime stories.
  Oh, here they come—the big boys. You can tell them to take their hands off me. Big boys with big hands. But are they really big, or only half big? I believe an autopsy could establish the facts, if you'd allow me the pleasure. My parents were half-smalls. The alignment of their bones was human enough, but their organs seemed all of a piece. It could have been they were starting to convert, I don't know. So what's inside of the small people, Doctor? My guess is that they're composed of some doughy substance inside and out—a flabby clay that can be molded into any form, having no identity of its own. Is this really our world, the real world, or is it theirs? Did the right hand of evolution know what the left hand was doing? And what about the spectral link? I have my theories. I've had lots of time to think about that, for what it's worth—thinking. a hint, something to mull over. I just need a speck of hope to keep me from going to pieces—a little truth to hang onto. Answer me, Doctor, before I'm dragged off. Who are you? What are you? Answer me. For the love of all that is real—Who am I? What am I?