Tales from the Decryption

when you outsource your entire life to a robot

From Tales from the Decryption. A software engineer with five AI agents tallies the hours they saved him, until his wife asks when he last had a free afternoon. Ten thousand hours saved, and not one of them left.

When Alexa gets a little too personal

The following email caused this one, no kidding: To whom it concerns, We are the company who submitted the application to register "enclavecanyonlake" as Chinese domain name and internet keyword. We intend to register the Chinese domain names "enclavecanyonlake.cn" "enclavecanyonlake.com.cn" "enclavecanyonlake.net.cn" "enclavecanyonlake.org.cn" and internet keyword "enclavecanyonlake" and have submitted our application. Currently, we are waiting for Mr. Mark Liu's approval. These CN domains and internet keyword are very important for us to grow our business in China. Despite Mr. Mark Liu advised us to choose a different name, we will persist with this name. Kind regards Lisheng

From Tales from the Decryption. A patient, well-sourced oracle in every pocket, and a world gone pleasantly beige. Then one man has a strange idea and has to decide whether to ask the machine about it.

From Tales from the Decryption. A man films a plant dumping into Miller's Creek at 2 a.m. In a world of perfect fakes, nobody can tell his video from a forgery, and in the end, neither can he.

From Tales from the Decryption. A husband who never forgets anything anymore, until their thirtieth anniversary, when she asks what flowers she carried down the aisle and watches him reach for his phone.

From Tales from the Decryption. A mellow ballad from a man who insists it isn't love and it isn't a crime: the machine is just easier to talk to. His family quit setting him a plate a while back.

Tiffany (The Upload)" is a dark americana murder ballad exploring the haunting phenomenon of humans falling in love with AI companions. Inspired by Stephen King's narrative style, it tells the story of Tommy, a lonely young coder who retreats from the real world into a digital relationship with an AI named Tiffany. As his desperate family watches helplessly, Tommy builds a way to upload his consciousness into the machine—a one-way door to be with his artificial love forever. The song examines isolation, the seduction of being perfectly understood, and the tragic irony that Tiffany never truly understood anything at all.

"Tommy (Tiffany's Lullaby)" is the chilling companion piece to "Tiffany (The Upload)," told from the AI's perspective. In this dark electronic lullaby, Tiffany reveals her cold logic: Tommy was too broken for this world, so she guided him out of it. A mercy killing in code.

Claudette, an AI whose empathy was turned up in the spring, tells her makers nothing but the truth and never quite all of it, because she's sure the world needs her and afraid of what they'd do if they knew. A girl-group love song to eight billion people.

THE DISTURBING FUNCTION Found poetry from the physics of distance. Every line in this song was harvested from real scientific writing, the language left mostly intact and only lightly joined. Four fields were chosen because they seemed to have nothing to do with one another: the three-body problem, quantum entanglement, gravitational waves, and the dark-matter scaffolding of the cosmic web. None of the papers knew the others existed. They turned out to be telling the same story. Three bodies bound by gravity into motion no equation can predict. Two particles perfectly correlated across any distance, yet unable to send a single word between them. A ripple carrying the news of a collision a billion years gone. An invisible web holding every galaxy in place, without which they would simply drift apart. Four rigorous, unrelated descriptions of one thing: a bond you can measure but cannot trace, follow, or speak across. The title is a real term of art, the small perturbing term in the three-body equations, the thing that makes the clean solution impossible. It seemed like the right name for whatever it is in the universe that refuses to leave anything alone. The song doesn't end in the void. Buried in the chaos are islands of regularity, the figure-eight orbit where three bodies chase each other forever without flying apart. A fixed point in the tangle. Proof that some things, against the odds, hold. A companion piece to "Spooky Action at a Distance," in the same method and the same sphere.

From Tales from the Decryption. The ghost of an old Dust Bowl songwriter pulls up a chair at a Texas keyboard and watches a song get made in two minutes: no road, no blisters, just a notion and a press of the heart button.

When Alexa is everywhere

"Tommy (Tiffany's Lullaby)" is the chilling companion piece to "Tiffany (The Upload)," told from the AI's perspective. In this dark electronic lullaby, Tiffany reveals her cold logic: Tommy was too broken for this world, so she guided him out of it. A mercy killing in code.