Prompt Not Found

Penny’s foot tapped as she monitored the machine making art.

Altru loomed over its work, its enormous steel frame capable of shielding it from the outdoor elements. Its eyes were a constant green laser flicking up and down the granite embryo in its artificial womb. Its hands were two mechanical limbs that flicked from one tool to the next, some an elegant chisel, and others a large saw.

Ping, ping, ping.

Penny removed her visor and dabbed at sweat beading at her forehead. Heat radiated from the park’s cobblestone path. She swallowed cool water tinted with the slight copper taste of a cheap water bottle. She was hungry for something, but she wasn’t sure what for.

She was a master of her craft. She input her perfected prompts into Altru’s system and then watched it go to work. She monitored it for malfunctions and fed it the materials it needed, or she switched out the tools when they dulled.

When Altru finished, she would take her own hammer and chisel and make the final touches. Altru usually faltered at hands, toes, and faces. Small details that turned stone into skin.

Clink, clink, clink.

The expressions were never…quite right. Statues often had a bit of a far-off look to them, no matter how focused one made the pupils, or how deeply the brow scrunched. A good sculptor knew how to dig out a hint of that human spark, carving the eyes just right so that the shadows from the sun gave them conscious depths.

But the eyes Altru crafted were never convincing. Something vacant filled the gazes of its creations. Slightly too wide, off-kilter. Uncanny.

It was these final touches that made Penny the artist. It justified her name being on the artist’s plaque. Put logic to the money sitting in her account.

Chime.

The preliminary work on the statue for the park’s new fountain was done. The granite had been shaved down to the general shape of a woman, an hourglass kaleidoscope of rough edges and flat planes.

Penny patted Altru. She felt its engine purr as it wound down to nap while she opened its back panel and typed in the new prompts.

She had spent years in school learning how to craft, honing the hunger within her to a fine blade.

She had spent years more being told by her commissioners that they would only accept art made in part by a machine with pre-approved prompts. It was cheaper, after all. Machine-made art was professional. Efficient. Rent and food in mind, she put her pride to rest and gave in to using their machines. Otherwise, an empty stomach awaited her.

Humans never spent longer than a few seconds glancing at public art, anyway.

A veneer of opulence. That was always the intent with her commissions, it seemed. Connection, community, history, emotion, joy—all of that had been leeched away.

She was starving. Had she missed lunch? No, she had had it.

The statue was to be the founder of the city, Adrian White. Penny had already uploaded the old photos to Altru for reference. Blue eyes, deep set with soft folds for eyelids. Sharp gaze. Thin plucked brows. Smart skirt and jacket.

Penny had read a biography about Adrian. There was no point, really—but it was something she liked to do for historical pieces.

Adrian was a fine woman. Like Penny, born to a family with nothing. Told what to do all of her life, but she had scratched and fought and managed to get into moderate civil positions of leadership.

All that.

All that life just be carved into granite by a robot?

All of that fighting just to stand still?

Penny was hungry.

She knew that her prompts had been approved by her commissioner. She knew she could not make any major changes to them.

Her fingernails tapped Altru’s steel back.

She typed a prompt into Altru. Something new. Something to feed her.

Altru’s internal lights flared red.

Prompt not familiar. Searching… Searching…

Tension sank its teeth into Penny.

Searching…

Prompt not familiar. No statues recorded with this prompt.

She commanded Altru to make it. It flashed red again.

Prompt not registered. All prompts must be registered and approved prior to artistic use.

Her jaw clenched. She was hungry. Hungry. Altru was no artist, no human. It was a robot, and it could not tell her how to make art.

“Give me the hammer and chisel, then.”

She grabbed her tools and stormed into Altru. No longer a womb, but a fortress, harboring what was hers. She drove her chisel just above the rough plane that had bothered her the most and struck. She clambered over her statue, tasting the granite and steel. Altru’s steel box squeezed, pressed into her. She was hungry, and she was devouring the dust of her work. The chisel wasn’t working the way she wanted, and none of her other tools could quite get this hair strand right—-perhaps her own teeth?

The founder was not memorialized that day. At least, that was what her commissioner would assume, when he would find her cold body curled protectively around her creation days later.

A monster was. A wide-eyed, gaping woman hunched forward, stolen from the artist’s heart, ready to swallow the world whole with a curving black hole of a mouth and sharp canines. She laughed as she made it, her blood mixing into the granite. Altru chimed its alarms, alerting her to its various system errors. Its steel doors closed around her, locking her in, but she did not notice, invested in the curling talons of her creation. She screeched like a baby bird devouring its first caterpillar.

Finally fed.