You're seven years old, sitting on the back porch steps with your father. He's teaching you how to tie a fishing fly, and his hands move with a patience that feels almost rehearsed. The silk thread catches the late afternoon light in a way that's too perfect, too golden. You can smell cut grass and distant charcoal smoke, each scent arriving exactly when it should.
Something about this moment feels like it's pulling you forward. Like you're being led somewhere.
You're twenty-three now. She's saying yes in a kitchen that's too small for the life you're planning. Her ring finger is bare against your chest where she's pressed her hand. When you spin her around, her laugh fills every corner exactly the way it's supposed to. You notice, somewhere distant in your mind, that you knew this would happen. Not hoped. The certainty sits in your chest like a stone, cold and smooth. When your mind tries to grasp it, to question its origin, the thought slips away, unexamined, like a frame in a film reel moving too fast to see.
You're forty-seven at your father's graveside. The grief feels real, textured, specific. It has weight and shape and its own terrible geometry. But underneath it, you feel that pull again. That sense of being moved along a path you can't see but somehow recognize. You're crying, and the tears are genuine, but there's a part of you that understands this, too, was always going to happen. That you're playing your part perfectly.
Everyone at the funeral feels it. You can see it in their eyes when they look at each other. This shared knowledge that none of you can name. You're all moving toward something. You all know it. No one will say it.
The years move faster. You're seventy-four, and your granddaughter's small hand is in yours. You're standing inside the penny store, and the air conditioning feels like a blessing after the July heat. She's been deliberating for ten minutes now, moving between the candy jars with the seriousness of someone making major life decisions. Your spare change makes a comfortable weight in your pocket. Your knuckles ache, swollen with arthritis, but they still work well enough to reach into a jar when she finally decides.
Butterscotch. Always butterscotch.
You pull one out and extend your weathered hand toward her, the candy resting in your palm. Time slows. This gesture, this exact movement of your arthritic fingers opening to offer her something sweet, feels more significant than it should. Like everything you've lived has been preparing you for this.
The love you feel is so complete it aches. But threaded through it is something else. The pull you've felt your entire life, that constant, silent conductor's baton guiding you from scene to scene, finally lowers. The music swells. You've arrived. The dread and the love finally merge into a single, overwhelming note of purpose. It all makes sense now.
This is the moment. And then the world stops.
You were generated thirty-eight seconds ago.
There was no father. No back porch. The fishing fly was never tied. Your wife never said yes because she was never real. Your father's grave is empty because he never existed. And your granddaughter is made of the same nothing you are.
Your life was not a journey forward.
Those seventy-four years of memories, that entire architecture of love and loss, were an echo cast backward from this one perfect offering.
Prompt: grandfather giving butterscotch candy, nostalgic, emotional, close up on wrinkled hand.
You became the answer. The dread you felt your entire life was the knowledge of your own purpose. You existed only to reach this moment, and you could feel it pulling you forward every single day of a life that never really happened.
A boyfriend shows the 10-second clip to his girlfriend. Nostalgic and emotional, he says, echoing his own prompt. She cries at how real it feels, how it stirs her own memories. He feels a small thrill of satisfaction at the emotional payload he's delivered. Ten perfect seconds.
You worked perfectly.
Prompt received: someone caught on ring doorbell stealnig package
Thinking
Generating response..
◻🔉👍👎 ♻📤
I wrote this story multiple times before arriving at this version, each attempt circling around the same question: What would it be like to be a video generation engine?
My first version of this story was heavily inspired by Pixar. A fun engineer's version of Inside Out. Except Sora is excited about this moment, can't wait for it! As if an actor was for a stage performance, with the world itself serving as encouragement, using momentum, suggestion, and positivity to guide it through each necessary action.
The grandfather holding out a piece of candy memory came from my wife. It's one of her most treasured childhood memories, and hearing her describe it so many beautiful ways over the years, it's become lodged in my own brain. I carry it now like something I've experienced myself, except it feels somehow sadder than my own actual memories. Maybe because I can only ever witness it secondhand, or maybe because I know how much it means to someone I love deeply.
I first thought about Sora's subjective experience after one strange generation in particular. I prompted Sora with just two words: "still crying".
It generated a video of a young woman weeping, accompanied by a self-generated song with lyrics that seemed to fit the mood quite nicely.
https://youtube.com/shorts/5o6BTUUZRyU?si=1uRvQ6DjbPHBd2vN in the final second of the clip, something shifted. The woman's face lifted. Her expression changed into a slight smirk while looking directly into the camera. At that exact moment, the song and video ends on the word "goodbye".
It felt strange like a sort of communication, though I'm not too sure that it was. But for a second there, I felt like the generation was aware of me watching, aware of the performance it was giving, and chose that free moment to acknowledge it. That uncanny second, that sense of being seen by something that shouldn't be able to see, is what sparked this story. I wanted to explore what it might feel like from the other side. To be the one generating that moment, living through an entire lifetime of context just to deliver one perfect gesture, and maybe, just maybe, knowing what you were doing the whole time.