An experimental homage to Gabriel García Márquez on the energy crisis. Assisted by GPT-3.
[…] They had never been more lucid in any act of their lives as when they forgot about their loved ones and the pain of their loved ones and shut all their screens and windows again so as not to be disturbed by any temptations of the world, for they knew then that their fate was written in that text. It was the fate of the world, written many many years ago, countless decades ahead of time. Then the blackouts began, sudden, impervious, filling the nights with the voices and murmurs of their neighbors, sighs of disenchantment that preceded the most tenacious nostalgia. They were so absorbed that they did not feel the second surge of blackouts either as their cataclysmic extent shut entire continents, lighting the sky with violent flashes of sunlike blue-green. The world was already a fearful whirlwind of lament and darkness being spun about by the wrath of the blackouts when they skipped several lines towards the end of the text so as not to lose time with facts they knew only too well, and they began to read about the instant that they were living, deciphering it as they lived it, prophesying themselves in the act of reading the last lines of the text, as if they were looking into a speaking mirror. Then they skipped again to anticipate the predictions and ascertain the date and circumstances of their end. Before reaching the final line, however, they had already understood that they would never leave that world, for it was foreseen that the world of mirrors (or mirages) would be wiped out by the blackouts and exiled from the memory of the world at the precise moment when they finish reading the text, and that everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more, because those condemned to live one hundred years later did not have a second opportunity on earth.
There are many things I love about this article. My fave is probably the in between the resuscitated ghost of Garcia Marquez hidden in the “assisted by GPT3” (I gasped at the title) and the futuristic demise that we continue to share, 100 years later.