I've been playing a bit with AI models lately, which feels a bit like (1) this is a dance with the devil, and (2) I'm extremely late to this party.
Last week I posted a lighthearted story about a fellow installing Linux on his companion robot. This week I prompted the Claude Sonnet model with the premise of an old house used as an AirBnB property, a vacation home that's housing some nefarious nostalgia.
It's not as easy as just asking the AI for a story. You've got to give it a pretty thorough outline, or else it'll go off the rails into nonsense--just spitting out a bunch of scenes that don't make any sense. This is when you realize that it's just a text prediction algorithm at heart. You've also got to give it some pretty stern metadata at the beginning. "You are an expert fiction writer. Write in active voice. Avoid flowery prose, etc..."
That being said, it's not anywhere near as hard as writing the damn story yourself. I'm impressed at just how much text it'll churn out if you give it clear instructions. For this story, I fed it about 1000 words of instruction and outline to get 4500 back. And in the end I spent about four hours working on this thing on one day, where a handwritten story of this length would have taken a week or so.
The Claude models are also helpful in generating "artefacts" in a separate window from the chat interface, so that you can then discuss and revise the work together. You can ask it to write a new introduction, or fine-tune character descriptions, or address some logical inconsistency, and the document will open so invisible hands can delete and rearrange text in front of you. Then, back in the main chat, it'll describe what it's done and tell you how clever you were for suggesting these improvements.
This is perhaps the most science-fictional experience I've ever had in my life.
Is it making me lazy? Is it making parts of my brain atrophy and wither away? Possibly yes.
On the other hand, I haven't exactly been churning out fiction lately, in between all the other jobs and projects I've got going on. Without AI: zero stories in the past few years. With AI, a few. In a few weeks. At the same time, it rekindled a spark of excitement at what's possible, even if I go back to legal pads and typewriters in the end.
In the mean-time it actually produced something I enjoyed reading, with a few genuine spine-tingling moments in the mix.
As always, curious to hear your thoughts. Full story below.
The Tapes
The key turned in the lock with a satisfying click that made Sarah think of her grandmother's house—that same solid, old-fashioned mechanism. Inside, the rental smelled of lemon furniture polish and something underneath it, fainter: decades of Sunday roasts and birthday cakes baked into the walls.
"Dibs on the big bedroom!" Ethan bolted up the stairs, his sister Maya close behind.
"We're taking that one," Sarah called after them. "You two can fight over the others."
Her husband Marcus set down the last of the suitcases and surveyed the living room. Crown moulding. Built-in bookshelves stuffed with yellowing paperbacks. A TV cabinet that had probably been purchased when Reagan was president.
"Authentic," he said.
Sarah ran her finger along a shelf. Photo albums. Board games with sun-faded boxes—Parcheesi, Clue, something called Electric Company. The house had been cleaned meticulously, but no one had emptied the drawers of their past.
"It's like they just got up and left."
"That's the deal with these old family places." Marcus opened a closet. Winter coats from the seventies hung in plastic dry-cleaning bags. "They rent them out but can't bear to actually clear them."
Maya thundered back down the stairs. "There's a VHS player up there. With actual tapes."
"A what?" Ethan appeared behind her.
"Video tapes. Like ancient DVDs." Maya was already pulling her phone out. "I'm looking this up—"
"No phones." Sarah snatched it from her hand.
"Mom!"
"We talked about this. Thanksgiving week, no devices. That was the deal."
"You didn't say—"
"I'm saying it now." She held out her hand to Ethan, who reluctantly surrendered his phone. Then she turned to Marcus, eyebrows raised.
He patted his pocket. "I need it for work emergencies."
"Then it stays in the bedroom. This week, we're going analogue."
The groans were predictable, theatrical. Sarah collected the phones in a wicker basket she found under the kitchen sink and placed them on top of the refrigerator like confiscated contraband.
"Go explore," she said. "There's a whole yard out there. And apparently, ancient technology upstairs."
By evening, the TV in the master bedroom had been dragged down to the living room—a particle-board entertainment center that took both kids and Marcus to navigate down the stairs. The VHS player sat on top, blinking 12:00 in green digital numbers.
"Does it work?" Maya crouched in front of the cabinet, pulling out tapes. Most of the spines were blank. A few had dates written in fading marker: 11/24/88, 11/26/92, 11/23/95.
"Only one way to find out." Ethan grabbed the nearest tape and shoved it into the slot. The machine swallowed it with a mechanical whirr. Static filled the screen, then resolved into the Peanuts Thanksgiving special. Charlie Brown's awkward dinner. Snoopy cooking toast. The animation had that soft, degraded quality of something copied and recopied.
"This is actually kind of cool," Maya admitted.
Commercial break. A woman's voice, impossibly earnest, extolled the virtues of Shake'n Bake. Then a toy advertisement—GI Joe figures staging an arctic assault. Then a car dealership ad with local-access production values and a jingle that wormed immediately into Sarah's brain.
"The tape just kept recording," Marcus said. "Six hours, looks like. Just whatever was on TV that day."
The Peanuts special ended. More commercials. Then the image shifted—home video now, the colors oversaturated, the sound muffled and distorted. A backyard, this backyard, thick with autumn leaves. Children ran through the frame, raking leaves into piles and jumping. A woman's voice behind the camera: "Come on, show Grandma what you can do!"
One of the children, a boy of maybe eight, performed a elaborate running leap into a leaf pile. The camera shook with the filmer's laughter.
"That's weird," Ethan said. "It's like a time capsule from this house."
"People used to record over tapes all the time." Marcus settled into the couch. "Blank ones were expensive."
But Sarah felt something cold trace down her spine. The date on the tape's label: 11/24/88. Thanksgiving. The same day, thirty-seven years ago.
"Just a coincidence," she muttered.
The tape played on. MacGyver. More commercials, these ones for a department store that probably didn't exist anymore. Then more home video—someone's birthday party, the same backyard strung with streamers. A cake shaped like a football.
Maya and Ethan were riveted. Even the primitive special effects of The A-Team drew gasps of appreciation.
"Can we watch another one?" Maya asked when the tape finally ended in static.
Sarah looked out the window. Already dark. "Tomorrow. Help me with dinner."
"But—"
"Tomorrow."
She woke at 3 a.m. with her heart hammering. Marcus breathed steadily beside her. She'd been dreaming about the house—about running down those stairs, knowing exactly where the loose board was on the landing, knowing that the kitchen tap needed to be turned just so or it would drip. Knowing the house.
But she'd never been here before. She was certain of that.
The logical part of her brain offered explanations. The house resembled her childhood home. Some features were universal in houses of this era. She'd seen similar layouts a hundred times.
She got up, wrapped herself in the robe hanging on the bathroom door, and padded downstairs. The VHS player blinked its eternal midnight. The stack of tapes sat beside it.
Sarah picked one at random—not from the neat row Maya had organized, but from a cardboard box shoved in the back of the cabinet. The label read 11/27/97 in the same fading marker.
Thanksgiving week. Twenty-eight years ago.
She pushed it into the machine, kept the volume low. Static. Then Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, the balloons drifting down streets slick with rain. Katie Couric's voice, impossibly young. Then commercials—Furbies, Tickle Me Elmo, a Nissan promotion.
Then home video. But not home video from 1997. This footage looked newer, more vibrant--but just as grainy. A date stamp in the corner read 11/27/03.
Sarah's fingers went cold.
She ejected the tape, grabbed another from a completely different box. The label: 11/25/94.
She pushed it in. Home Shopping Network selling jewellery. Commercials. Then home footage—but the date stamp read 11/25/06.
The labels were wrong. Or they weren't wrong. They were layered, somehow, different recordings from different years all compressed onto the same tape, all from the same day, November 25th, just years apart.
The kettle screamed in the kitchen. She'd left water boiling and forgotten about it.
Sarah ran to turn off the stove, her hands shaking. When she returned to the living room, the tape had continued playing. A sitcom she didn't recognize. Laugh track. Then more home video.
A family dinner. This dining room. Same wallpaper, same light fixture. Parents and children passing dishes. The camera panned slowly—someone filming from the doorway—and caught a child's face in profile.
Sarah's breath stopped.
That was her face. Her eight-year-old face, the one from the photos in her mother's albums. The gap between her front teeth before she got braces. The butterfly clip she'd worn in her hair for months until it broke.
But she'd grown up in Illinois. She'd never been to Vermont until Marcus found this rental.
She ejected the tape. Stood there shaking in the blue glow of the TV.
"Let's keep watching."
Maya bounced into the room at seven, already rummaging through the tapes. Ethan followed, rubbing sleep from his eyes.
"I don't know if that's such a good idea," Sarah said.
"Why not?" Maya had already selected one. "These are great. It's like actual history."
"They're kind of addictive," Ethan admitted. "I had dreams about that MacGyver episode."
Sarah wanted to tell them about what she'd seen. But how could she explain it without sounding unhinged? Instead, she went to the kitchen and focused on turkey preparations. Brining, seasoning, the mechanical tasks that kept her hands busy.
Through the doorway, she could hear the TV. Sesame Street. Big Bird's voice, that specific timbre that belonged to one man who'd been dead for years now. Then commercials. Then home video—children playing freeze tag in the backyard. Their breathless laughter.
"Mom!" Maya called. "Come look at this!"
Sarah dried her hands. In the living room, the TV showed a birthday party. Different year than the one from last night—the furniture was arranged differently, the wallpaper had changed. But the same house. The camera zoomed in on a child opening presents.
A boy. Maybe ten. Ripping paper off a box to reveal—Sarah couldn't tell what. But the boy's face, caught in that moment of surprise and delight—
"That's Dad," Ethan said. "That's actually Dad."
Marcus looked up from his laptop. "What?"
"That kid. That's you."
"Don't be ridiculous." But Marcus stood, walked closer. Froze. "Jesus."
The resemblance wasn't just striking. It was exact. The same cowlick. The same slightly crooked front tooth. The same way of tilting his head when concentrating on something.
"It's a doppelganger." Marcus's voice came out too loud. "People have them. Genetic coincidence."
But Sarah watched his face and saw the same confusion she felt. Recognition without memory. The boy on screen wore a sweater Sarah remembered Marcus wearing in old photos. He moved like Marcus moved.
"What year is that tape from?" she asked quietly.
Maya checked the label. "1992."
The year Marcus turned ten. The year of that sweater.
"Call your mother," Sarah said.
"What?"
"Call her. Ask her to look through your photo albums from 1992. Have her take pictures with her phone and email them to you."
"Sarah—"
"Do it."
The house still had a rotary phone on the kitchen wall, cream-colored plastic with a spiral cord. Marcus lifted it, heard the dial tone, looked at Sarah with something like fear in his eyes.
"Why are laptops allowed?" Maya demanded.
"This is an emergency," Sarah said. "And it's for work."
"This isn't work."
"Just—watch your telly."
The British slang came out unconsciously. Sarah had never used that word before. But her grandmother had. Her grandmother who'd died when Sarah was six, whose house had smelled like this house, felt like this house.
No. That was impossible.
The email came through an hour later. Marcus's phone chimed—he'd retrieved it from the bedroom, rules suspended. He opened the attachment and they all crowded around the small screen.
Photos of a boy. Marcus at ten. Same sweater. Same crooked tooth. Same everything.
But also: photos of that birthday party. The same party on the tape. Marcus standing in front of a cake, surrounded by other children. Behind him, visible through a window: this backyard. These trees.
"I've never been to Vermont," Marcus said. His voice sounded hollow. "My family was in California. We didn't travel."
"Maybe you forgot," Ethan suggested. "Maybe you came here with school or something."
"I would remember." But Marcus stared at the photos, and Sarah watched something shift in his expression. Doubt creeping in. "I mean, I think I would remember."
She left them there and went back to the turkey. Her hands moved automatically—basting, checking temperature, adjusting the oven. Through the kitchen window, she could see the backyard where leaves had piled in the corners of the fence.
She'd raked leaves like that once. Jumped into piles while someone filmed. Felt the crunch and smell of autumn. She remembered it.
No. She remembered seeing it on the tape last night. That was all.
But the memory felt older than that. Felt real in the way childhood memories are real, all texture and emotion and fragmented image.
She heard Maya calling her again and ignored it. Focused on the green beans, the cranberry sauce, the mechanical preparations. When she looked up, Ethan was standing in the doorway.
"You need to see this."
"I'm cooking."
"Mom. Please."
The urgency in his voice pulled her back to the living room. A different tape now—Maya must have changed it. Home video. A birthday party, but not Marcus's. A little girl, maybe six, wearing denim overalls with a lion face stitched on the front pocket.
The girl turned to face the camera and smiled.
Sarah's knees went weak.
That was her face. Not just similar—identical. She'd had those exact overalls. She remembered her mother sewing that lion, remembered the feel of the denim, soft from washing. She'd worn them until they fell apart.
"When was this taken?" The question came out as a whisper.
"1989," Maya said. "But Mom—watch."
The camera panned across the other party guests. Other children playing musical chairs. Pin the tail on the donkey. And there, in the background, just visible: a boy in a striped shirt.
Marcus.
They were at the same party. Playing together. Her at six, him at seven.
"That's impossible." Marcus moved closer to the screen. "That's actually impossible. We met in college. Freshman orientation."
"Maybe you knew each other before and forgot," Maya said.
"You don't forget your childhood sweetheart." But Marcus's voice wavered.
Sarah felt dizzy. The room tilted. She grabbed the arm of the couch.
"Are you okay?" Ethan touched her shoulder.
"I need air."
She pushed past them, out the front door, onto the porch. Cold November wind hit her face. She gripped the railing and tried to breathe.
Behind her, the door opened. Marcus.
"Sarah—"
"How is this happening?"
"I don't know." He stood beside her, not touching. "But it's just tapes. Old footage that happens to look like us. The human brain finds patterns. Sees faces in clouds."
"That was me. That was actually me."
"You're remembering the tape. You watched it last night, didn't you? When you couldn't sleep?"
Had she? She couldn't remember anymore. Couldn't separate what she'd seen on screen from what felt like memory.
"I had those overalls," she said. "With the lion face. I remember my mother sewing it."
"Lots of kids had—"
"I remember you." The words came out before she could stop them. "I remember playing with you. I remember—" What? What did she remember? A boy with a crooked tooth teaching her how to throw a frisbee. Playing freeze tag. Building a fort in this backyard out of fallen branches.
"I remember this house."
Marcus took her hand. His palm was cold.
"Let's go inside," he said. "Let's have a normal Thanksgiving. We'll turn off the TV. Put the tapes away. Tomorrow we'll pack up and leave early. Find a hotel."
But even as he said it, Sarah knew they wouldn't. Something held them here, something that felt like gravity or muscle memory or the pull of home.
Dinner was normal. Aggressively normal. Sarah had cooked enough food for twice their number, and they ate until they were stuffed, and no one mentioned the tapes. They played Parcheesi, the board game from the shelf, and laughed at how primitive it seemed compared to modern games. They told bad jokes and made fun of each other and for a few hours, it felt like any other family holiday.
The kids went upstairs early, claiming exhaustion. Sarah and Marcus cleaned the kitchen in silence, loading the dishwasher, wrapping leftovers. Neither of them mentioned the tapes or what they'd seen.
In bed, Marcus reached for her in the dark.
"We should talk about what we saw," Sarah whispered.
"Or we could just let it go. Chalk it up to a weird coincidence and move on."
"You don't believe that."
Marcus's hand stilled on her waist. "No. I don't."
"So what's happening?"
"The house is showing us something. The tapes are—I don't know. Recording something. Revealing something."
"But it can't be real. We can't have been here as children."
"Why not?" He rolled to face her in the darkness. "Maybe we were. Maybe our parents knew each other. Maybe we played here a few times and then everyone moved away and lost touch. It happens."
"Then why don't we remember?"
"We do remember. That's the problem. We're remembering now."
Sarah felt the truth of it settle in her bones. The house was familiar not because it resembled her childhood home but because it was part of her childhood. The loose board on the landing. The kitchen tap. The hiding spot under the oak tree in the backyard where she'd buried her favourite doll, wrapped in a plastic bag to keep it safe.
"This is insane," she said.
Marcus pulled her close. "Isn't it romantic, though? We were meant for each other. Childhood sweethearts."
"We're not sweethearts. We barely talked in those videos."
"We played together. That counts." He kissed her forehead. "Besides, maybe that's why I was so drawn to you in college. Maybe I recognized you on some level."
"That's not how memory works."
"How do you know? How does anyone know?"
He kissed her properly then, and she let herself fall into it, into him. They made love slowly, quietly, aware of the children sleeping down the hall. After, she grabbed tissues from the box on the nightstand and cleaned herself up. Handed the wad to Marcus.
"Throw them out for me then, mister perfect."
He leaned over the side of the bed, felt along the floorboards, found a loose one and pried it up. Dropped the tissues into the dark space underneath.
Sarah's heart stopped.
"Wait. What did you just do?"
"Just my old hiding spot. Don't worry, I'll clean it out tomorrow."
"How did you know that was there?"
Marcus stared at the floor. At his hand still holding the loose board. "I always used to—" He stopped. "I must have felt it click when I got into bed."
"You said 'old hiding spot'. You said you always used to."
"I misspoke."
But they both knew he hadn't. He'd known. The knowledge had been in his hands, his muscles, the automatic motion of someone returning to a familiar place.
Sarah replaced the board carefully, pressed it down until it clicked into place. "We need to leave."
"In the morning."
"Now."
"Sarah, it's late. The kids are asleep. We'll pack up at dawn and—"
A scream cut through the house.
They ran. Down the hall, down the stairs. The living room was lit by the blue glow of the TV. Ethan and Maya stood in front of it, still in their pyjamas, staring at the screen.
"We just wanted to watch cartoons," Maya said. Her voice shook.
On the TV: a toy commercial. 1987, judging by the production quality. GI Joe action figures. And there, for just a moment, visible in the background of the staged battle scene: a boy. Maybe four years old. Dark curly hair. Ethan's face, exactly.
"He wasn't born yet," Marcus said. "In 1987, he wasn't born. He wasn't—"
The commercial ended. More cartoons. Transformers fighting Decepticons. A cereal advertisement. Then home video again.
The backyard. Newer footage now, early 2000s based on the image quality. Children playing—Sarah and Marcus, teenage versions, raking leaves together. Laughing. A woman's voice from behind the camera: "Smile for Grandma!"
They smiled. Waved. Sarah on screen said something inaudible, and Marcus laughed and pushed her playfully, and she grabbed his arm and they wrestled like siblings, like old friends, like people who'd known each other forever.
"Turn it off," Sarah said.
No one moved.
The footage changed. A birthday party—this year, this month. A cake with candles. Maya leaning forward to blow them out, and there in the background: this living room. This exact room, right down to the entertainment center they were watching now, the image nested within the reality.
But the tape was dated 1994.
"It's not showing the past," Ethan whispered. "It's showing always. All the times at once."
Sarah grabbed the TV plug, yanked it from the wall. The screen went dark.
In the silence, they could hear the VHS player winding down, tape spooling through the machine with a falling whisper.
"Get your things," Sarah said. "Now. We're leaving."
"It's four in the morning," Marcus said.
"I don't care."
They moved through the house gathering belongings, shoving items into suitcases. Sarah went to the kitchen to grab their phones from the basket on top of the refrigerator. The wicker basket she'd found under the sink—
She stopped.
She hadn't found it under the sink. She'd known it was there. Known because she'd hidden it there herself, decades ago, when she'd been the one playing in this house, when she'd needed a place to keep her secret treasures.
The basket was still there, behind the cleaning supplies. Inside: shells collected from a beach trip. A mood ring. A folded note in handwriting she recognized as her own, younger, more careful: "Sarah's special things. Do not touch."
She pulled out her phone. Opened her photo library. Scrolled back through years of images, looking for—what? Evidence? Proof?
And there: a photo her mother had texted her months ago, some nostalgia post about childhood. Sarah as a little girl, standing in front of a house.
This house.
"No," she said out loud. "No no no."
But the evidence was there in her hand, had been there all along. She'd seen the photo and hadn't registered it, hadn't connected it. The human brain is good at overlooking what doesn't fit.
Marcus appeared in the doorway. "Sarah, the kids are packed. We can—" He saw her face. "What is it?"
She turned the phone screen toward him. "We've been here before. Both of us. Look at my photos. Look at yours. The house is in the background of dozens of them. We just never noticed."
"That's impossible."
"Is it? Or did we forget? Or were we made to forget?" She gestured around the kitchen. "The house needed us to leave. Needed us to grow up separately, meet later, have children. So it could—what? Continue? Complete itself?"
"Houses don't need things. Houses don't want."
But he didn't sound convinced.
A sound from upstairs: the VHS player starting up again, even though Sarah had unplugged it. The mechanical whirr of tape moving through the mechanisms.
They ran upstairs. The TV was off, still unplugged, but the VHS player glowed with power. The tape counter spun forward, forward, forward.
"How is it running?" Maya grabbed the plug, held up the dead end.
On the screen—impossible—images formed. Not broadcast, not recorded. Live. The five of them, right now, standing in this room staring at the TV. Watching themselves watch.
And behind them in the screen, just visible in the reflection of the blank TV: other figures. Transparent. Overlapping. Dozens of versions of themselves at different ages, all occupying the same space. Sarah at six, at ten, at sixteen. Marcus growing from boy to teen to man. The kids flickering between ages, between existences.
All of them here. All of them always here.
"The house doesn't record," Ethan said. "It shows. It shows us all our times at once."
"Because they're all happening at once," Maya finished. "We're all always here. We never left."
Sarah looked at her hands. Were they forty-two years old, or eight, or sixteen? All of them. None of them. She was every age she'd ever been in this house, and the house held them all, kept them all, layered them like tape recordings over and over until the past and present and future were inseparable.
"We have to go." But even as she said it, Sarah knew it was too late. They'd come back. They'd always come back. The house had them, had always had them.
Marcus took her hand. His grip was solid, real, warm. "Maybe it's not so bad," he said. "We're together. We've always been together. That's what the house was showing us."
"The house is trapping us."
"Or revealing us. Revealing the truth—that we belong here. That we've always belonged here."
Sarah wanted to argue, wanted to run, wanted to grab her children and flee into the November night. But the exhaustion in her bones felt older than this week, older than her marriage, older than her conscious memory. She'd been tired for so long. Running for so long.
And now the house offered rest. Offered home. Offered the truth that she'd been circling back to this place, this moment, this family, across all the years of her life.
On the screen, the images continued to flicker and overlap. Every Thanksgiving, every November, every autumn of their lives played simultaneously. Birthday parties and dinners and quiet mornings. The children growing and shrinking and growing again. Marcus young and old and young. Sarah in every iteration, every age, every version of herself.
"I want to leave," she said, but she didn't move toward the door.
"We will," Marcus said. "Tomorrow. After breakfast. After one more day."
One more day. One more year. One more lifetime. The house would give them all the time they needed, all the time they'd ever had, layered and looped and playing forever on tapes that recorded nothing and everything, that showed the truth: they had never left, would never leave, were always and forever home.
The VHS player clicked off. The screen went dark. Outside, the sun began to rise on another Thanksgiving in the house that held them.
And somewhere in the wall, in the space between times, another tape began to record.