Chapter 11
Third Grade
Every girl in the class was allowed to join in with Am and Kelli’s games, as long as they weren’t mean to Kelli. But Matthis Hahn and his group of boys were expressly forbidden. They tried, at times. But boys ruined everything.
“I’m a bigger pirate than you!” Matthis insisted, puffing himself up tall, when the group of girls got too close to him. “Girls can’t be pirates. I’m gonna make all of you walk the plank!”
“NO,” said Am, and then the whole group of girls chased the whole group of boys away.
“Boys can’t play with us,” Am said decisively, flopping down on the springy floor next to Kelli, when that was done and recess was almost over. “I don’t like boys.”
“I don’t like Matthis Hahn,” Kelli agreed. “But what about other boys? Like, what if they agreed to be nice?”
“Boys will never be nice,” said Am. “As soon as you let boys play, they’ll just shoot everybody or drag them all off to eat them. Girls rule, boys drool. No boys allowed in my group.”
“But you do that too,” said Kelli, with a funny crease between her eyebrows.
“You get characters shot so the story will be more dramatic. And last week you put a bunch of cannibal aliens on an island when the pirates were just supposed to have a picnic. You do all those things boys do, except that you’re not mean like they are and usually the story ends up funnier anyway.
So, what if there was a boy who wasn’t mean? ”
“I’ll believe that when I see it,” said Am, with her nose in the air.
It bothered her that Kelli thought that way about the cannibal aliens. Did Kelli really not see the difference between her and a boy like Matthis? Am was ten times the person Matthis was. And Matthis had never hacked a robot, so there.
“It’s just,” said Kelli, flopping on her back to look at the blue-painted ceiling, “whenever we spend time chasing boys away, everybody gets tired from running around and then we don’t get to finish the story.
I hate when we can’t finish the story, because I always want to tell more stories, that’s all. ”
Elaine, who’d flopped on the ground near both of them, leaned over. “I heard we’re having a special lesson today,” she said. “After recess. About stories. If you want more stories.”
“Oh?” said Kelli, perking up. And then the bell rang, and she clapped her hands over her ears. Which saved Am from having to explain what she’d heard from her older siblings—that the big third-grade lesson about stories wasn’t a good one at all.
Copyright and Trademark, said the big screen at the front of the room when all the third-grade students filed back in.
Mrs. O’Neill stood in front of it with her hands clasped.
She was still ugly and her nose had a pimple.
Although, Am had heard from her cousin Bruno that she shouldn’t even blame teachers for half of what went on at school, because the teachers didn’t make their own lesson plans.
Inspiration told them a list of what topics to talk about, and the same language model that powered Kelli’s robot filled in all the details.
That’s stupid, Am had said. What’s the point of having a teacher, then?
To keep an eye on the students, mostly, Bruno had said with a shrug.
This did not improve Am’s opinion of Mrs. O’Neill at all.
“Now that you’re all reading and writing simple sentences,” said Mrs. O’Neill, “it’s time to try your hand at writing stories.
I know some of you are very excited to learn to write stories.
” She gave what she probably thought was a fond smile to Kelli, even though Kelli had already been making up stories for years now.
“But before we write a story, we’ve got to ask ourselves: Who does a story belong to? ”
She looked around at the class to see if anyone knew. Nobody answered her, not even Kelli. So she told them.
Every idea belonged to someone. In the old days, it belonged to whoever had the idea first. And it was very important not to take things that weren’t yours.
You wouldn’t steal your classmate’s pencil case; you wouldn’t take the homework your classmate had done and pretend it was yours.
(Am would do both of those things if she needed, but she held her tongue.) In the same way, it was important not to tell a story based on someone else’s idea. That was stealing.
There were two different laws, in the old days, that stopped people from stealing ideas.
First there was trademark, which was for the name of an idea, the essence of it.
For example, Inspiration’s name was trademarked.
Nobody else could make a robot or a space colony and say it was Inspiration when it wasn’t.
Second, there was copyright, which was for the actual story or robot or television show, the thing you’d deliberately made.
Nobody could make a copy of that without asking you, either.
In the old days, people tried to use trademark and copyright, but there were some problems. For starters, there were some stories so old that nobody remembered who told them first. And then, sometimes two people would both have an idea, and they’d argue over who had it first. There were ridiculous lawsuits.
All of that changed when Inspiration created the first version of its language model.
The language model contained all of the language in the world.
It was made to help humanity; it had to have that much language so that it could learn to speak for itself.
But because it contained all the language in the world, that meant it contained every story anyone had ever written, or would write, or could.
Some of those stories already belonged to the people who wrote them, but Inspiration couldn’t take them back out, not without losing its ability to speak in the first place.
That made the people who wrote the stories very angry, and it made Inspiration sad.
How were they going to help people without being able to use the world’s language?
Inspiration thought about that, and then they got an idea. They saved up money, very carefully—hundreds of millions of lemonade stands’ worth of money.
Then they went out and bought all the stories.
Even in those days, it was not so difficult to buy an idea.
All they had to do was pay enough money to the people who had the idea first. Inspiration tweaked the laws a little, while they were at it, to make sure they covered everything that the language model needed them to. But mostly, they bought things.
A lot of things.
They bought all the stories of pirates, for starters.
They bought dragons and mermaids and mountains and oceans and forests.
They bought stories that belonged to someone specific, and they bought stories—negotiating with governments, and with any other entity that had a claim—whose origin nobody remembered.
They bought all the story structures: misunderstandings and redemptions, comedies and tragedies, romances and victories over impossible odds.
They bought and trademarked the names of states and nations and famous people, living and dead.
They bought gods—like Athena, who showed up sometimes in the AdventureVerse to scold people or redirect their travels.
They had saved up so much money that they bought everything.
That was why anything could happen in the AdventureVerse—because every single story that could ever be told belonged to Inspiration now.
Inspiration had the trademarks and the copyrights.
And you wouldn’t take a story, or a pencil case, or homework, that belonged to someone else.
At this disturbing juncture, Am’s hand shot up.
“They can’t have bought everything,” she said. “Every story idea in the world? That’s silly. What if someone had an idea tomorrow and nobody had ever thought of it before?”
“Then that person,” said Mrs. O’Neill, smiling thinly, “would become very rich.”
It was better, Mrs. O’Neill explained, for Inspiration to own the stories now.
In the old days, sometimes humans had written terrible stories that only encouraged other humans to hate and hurt each other.
Sometimes humans had written good stories that everyone liked, and then puffed up with pride and wanted to be treated like kings, and that led to them hurting each other even more.
The burden of being responsible for a story was really too much for any one human.
But Inspiration knew how to tell the stories fairly, based on its unbiased algorithm, in a way that would benefit the whole community and not harm them.
“Of course,” said Mrs. O’Neill, “Inspiration is kind to us, and Inspiration lets us share. Just like how it shares its wealth to give us Basic Income and Basic Housing. You can share its stories, too. You can tell a story in a room with your friends, or even on the playground at recess, and that’s fine, as long as you don’t ask for money.
Even writing a story down is all right sometimes, as long as you don’t pretend it belongs to you.
In fact, there are special programs that exist to help us write.
So that’s what we’re going to do now.” She beamed at the class, who variously smiled, or rolled their eyes, or frowned nervously.
Kelli’s expression, next to Am, was frozen in a look that Am couldn’t interpret.
“Who would like to help Inspiration generate a whole new story, just for them?”
They opened their workstations. Mrs. O’Neill had loaded an app that said StoryGen—Kids’ Edition! in bright, bubbly letters.