Futures is pleased to welcome back J. W. Armstrong with his latest story The sixth circle. He has previously written a couple of stories for Futures: Reversal of misfortune and A final problem. Here he explains what gave rise to his latest tale. As ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing The sixth circle

I have had two stories previously published in Futures. The ideas for those stories came from illness-induced dreams. The sixth circle, however, arose from a chance conversation.

I was in a social situation and the topic, improbably, turned to artificial intelligence. I know little about machine intelligence and I hope I thus disclaimed. But I ended up restating some classical science-fiction AI ideas, including some standard speculations about the Singularity.

At some point in the conversation, an artist-friend wondered: what would motivate an AI? Her comment catalysed The sixth circle.

I wrote the initial draft in a white heat. It included a tangent about why post-Singularity humans would surely be irrelevant and a brief backstory about Ishmael: why his age mattered and more about his connection with the population of wild humans. (In that first draft Ishmael is a more interesting and nuanced character than the cynical drug dealer presenting in the final version.)

Usually anything I write is too short. That initial draft was, however, too long.

I put it aside for a couple of days. When I returned to it, I did a brutal down-selection of words. My goal was to get it to 900 words by deleting anything not essential to the main idea. Some hints at Ishmael’s background survived this edit, but otherwise I tried to be ruthless. I submitted the revised version to Futures and was delighted at its acceptance!

Finally, a comment on the title. The working title was ‘Addicted AIs’ — an awful choice. I wanted a title that did not give away the plot but would be retrospectively predictive of the story’s content. I consulted with my brother and several alternate titles — some making obscure references to classical literature or contemporary urban slang — were considered and rejected. The final title was the simplest, intended to presage the ‘heresy’ involved in the protagonist’s choices.