The idea came to Marcus Reid on a drizzly Tuesday afternoon, while he was rinsing soggy tea leaves from his mug after his bargain-bin teabag had committed suicide mid-brew.
In the middle of this profound mundanity, the thought slipped in: a satirical novel about a celebrated comedian whose entire career was built on fraud—AI-generated comedy passed off as human brilliance.
For six seconds, a flutter of excitement gripped him, like finding a twenty-pound note in last winter’s coat.
Then it ebbed, as predictably as a damp British spring, leaving behind the old, familiar dread.
Marcus placed the mug on the draining board and gripped the cold porcelain of the sink.
Rain streaked against the kitchen window.
It reminded him of Fresh Start number 3.
Raindrops traced drunken paths down the glass.
Seven words.
Still, technically, a sentence.
‘Right then,’ he muttered to the unwashed dishes, his only reliable audience. ‘Time to write the bloody thing.’
The word ‘write’ triggered a primal twitch, a flight response typically reserved for tax forms or conversations beginning with ‘We need to talk’. Marcus’s palms dampened. His mouth dried.
Three hours later: eight words.
‘Felix Blake was a fraud. A very successful—’
Progress.
The screen beamed back, pristine and almost empty.
This wasn’t new. At thirty-four, Marcus had accumulated sixteen ‘First Ideas’, eleven ‘Fresh Starts’, and eight ‘This-Time-It-Is-Different’ projects. His collection conspicuously lacked finished manuscripts, publishing contracts, or any evidence that he was the writer he claimed to be at literary parties, invitations to which arrived with decreasing frequency.
What he had mastered, however, was the art of not writing.
‘The problem,’ he explained to his fern, Sylvia, named after Plath in a moment of optimism that now seemed faintly unhinged, ‘is that I haven’t found my proper process yet.’
Sylvia did not disagree.
Over the next week, he refined this ‘process’ with monastic dedication. Mornings began with a ‘Contemplative Constitutional’—a brisk walk meant to invigorate the mind, inevitably detouring to The Fox and Feathers by eleven.
‘Just soaking up humanity,’ he told Gareth, the barman who poured his half-pint without asking. ‘You can’t write about people if you don’t observe them.’
Gareth wiped a glass with the patience of a man who’d heard a thousand reinventions. ‘And how’s the observing going? Written anything yet?’
‘That Felix Blake bloke still a fraud, then?’
‘Fraudulent to his core,’ Marcus confirmed, already wearing a foam moustache he wouldn’t discover until hours later in the bathroom mirror. ‘The novel’s coming together.’
It wasn’t.
Back at the flat, Marcus prepared his space with the precision of a bomb disposal expert. The ergonomic keyboard (a relic of ‘Fresh Start number 6’) sat at exactly twenty-eight degrees, the keys lightly peppered with the fossilised remains of a digestive biscuit. His ‘inspiration shelf’ displayed books by writers he simultaneously worshipped and resented. The window remained open three inches—enough for ‘creative airflow’, but not enough to let in a ‘disruptive draught’.
The pièce de résistance: the desk lamp—a copper-armed contraption he declared ‘exactly what Hemingway would have chosen’, ignoring that Hemingway was rather more famous for shooting things than for his lighting preferences. It illuminated the pristine notebook and cast what Marcus called ‘productive shadows’.
By Wednesday, he had added a ‘Creativity Infusion’, a tea blend that involved something unnervingly purple. The shop assistant swore it would ‘open his third eye’, which Marcus neither wanted nor knew how to close. He drank it from a mug reading ‘Writer at Work’, an object that now felt less like a statement of intent and more like evidence.
By Friday, the complexity of his preparation correlated inversely with his word count. It remained stubbornly at eight.
He tried changing tactics. Research yielded details on famous plagiarists and the life cycle of North Atlantic puffins. He tried locations: the library (too quiet), the café (too loud), the park (pigeons with superior focus). He tried mediums: the phone (distracting), the notebook (permanent), the voice recorder (mortifying).
By Sunday evening, Marcus stared at a documentary about meerkats with the vacant gaze of a man who had abandoned his dreams to watch small mammals dig holes. Cold tea balanced on his stomach; the Word document was minimised, much like his aspirations.
The meerkats, at least, had purpose. They didn’t agonise over desk lamps.
‘Would you like to watch another episode?’ chirped the television.
‘Would I?’ Marcus asked the empty room. ‘Would I like to put off facing my failures for another forty-six minutes? Yes. Yes, I bloody would.’
Midway through a segment on communal burrow maintenance—a direct attack on his own living conditions—his phone buzzed.
Lydia: I’m expecting the sample chapter tomorrow!!!
The exclamation marks were not hyperbole. Lydia communicated in silence or excessive punctuation. Since signing him three years ago, her enthusiasm had curdled into pity, like someone who adopted a pedigree puppy only to discover a neurotic hamster.
‘Just a bloody paragraph would do,’ she had said. ‘Just prove to me you can still string words together, Marcus!!!’
Her voice, combined with the efficient tunnelling on screen, broke him. He grabbed the laptop, closed the document without saving—no need to preserve eight words for posterity—and opened a browser.
He knew about Geoff. Everyone did. The AI assistant that wrote essays and simulated conversation. He’d seen the debates, heard the Radio 4 denunciations. He’d sworn never to use it. Real writers didn’t. He had an undergraduate thesis on ‘A Genuine Voice’ to prove it.
But the meerkats tunnelled on.
Lydia’s exclamation marks sat on the screen. Three of them. Screaming. Something tightened behind his ribs.
‘I’m just going to see what it suggests,’ he muttered.
He typed ‘Geoff AI’ with the furtive shame of a man Googling a rash. ‘Just a bit of inspiration. Research.’
The sign-up page was disappointingly simple. No retina scans. No soul forfeiture. Just name, email, and password.
His finger hovered.
Dickens shook his head. Woolf turned away. Hemingway reached for a drink.
‘It’s just to get past the block,’ Marcus told them, voice thin. ‘I’ll rewrite every word later.’
Click. The deed was done.
A mixture of shame and relief washed over him. There was liberation in hitting rock bottom. He had exhausted his elaborate not-writing arsenal. He needed Geoff.
Hello, Marcus. I’m Geoff. How can I help you today?
Sleek. Minimalist. No judgement. A blank space, but less terrifying than the one that had been waiting in Marcus’s Word document.
Marcus breathed. He glanced at his ergonomic keyboard—now a museum piece—and surrendered.
‘I’ve got this idea for a satirical novel…’