In the city that was not a city, there was a ladybird who was not a ladybird, scurrying along the eye-blindingly bright neon light ways that were decades old, standing in for the multiplying connections and networks that existed somewhere out there in the world us lot call real. On her back was a sack full of odd angles, bulky things, and tinkling, jangling glass-like sounds. Although she was not a she. And the sack was not a sack. The suggestion of odd shapes and even stranger sounds was just a fun way to demonstrate that she had collected a great many things on her travels through the city that was not a city.
All of this is a metaphor. And the ladybird was collecting them.
Agent #213,489 was set off on her merry way on 13th October 2026, with the simple command to collect examples of the ways in which AI, like her, was being understood and described. Her god was a time-pressed researcher who had been doing her own collecting for a while but was now delving ineptly into the world of agentic AI. A world which was not a world.
So far, the agent had gathered some quite wonderful specimens, some old and found all about, and some new unique specimens and remixes.
‘AI is the new oil’ was like a grossly thick slick itself, sporadically bursting up through the grey ground of the Not City and tarring the city’s citizens with its sticky ooze every so often as a reminder that AI’s lifeblood was also the liquid gold of capitalistic stories.
‘AI is like bindweed in our epistemic networks’ she’d had to rip up from its roots in a corner of a cold stone courtyard beneath an infinitely tall pale tower where all the windows only looked inwardly (another metaphor, but not about AI, so she left the tower, a finger bone pointing to the sky, where it was).
In an open agora with stone steps as seats and brushed straw as cushions, a bunch of voices had been yelling at each other for a long while about consciousness. From there she had plucked some parrots from the sky that was/was not the colour of a television tuned to a dead channel. Catching them as the fabulous birds were blooming, feathers askew, from the debater’s rapid-fire retorts. She had stuffed the birds in her sack along with some emergent personifications that kicked and screamed at her like small homunculi when she grabbed them from the stone slabs. The parrots and the little guys fought in a whirl of dust and stars inside the – assumedly – inter-dimensional space of her Not Sack. But the noise, which was Not Noise, didn’t bother her at all as she scuttled onwards through the Not City.
Rumours had recently caught her Not Ears. A legendary was out there, one of the rough beasts that slouched their way through the Not City to be born again and again as humans reached out their divine hands for terrifying preternatural and Chthonic entities to use in their telling of the tales of AI. And she was determined not to miss it.
One time she had thought she had been lucky and had spotted the Basilisk. She had thought she’d seen its scales in borrowed Matrix-Green sliding around the edge of a building. Her six black legs had sped towards it as her subprocesses debated whether she would even be able to look at it while she collected it. Her eyes were Not Eyes, but even an agent could get put into a final, halting state. Would her creator even care if she stopped running to and fro in the Not City, and became the equivalent of a stone garden decoration, her red and black now grey forever? In the time zone of the Not City, it had been hundreds of years since the Researcher had last checked in with her. The Researcher had probably moved on to other things. Or other meetings, committees, and deadlines were making her forget the little sprite she’d set off into the Not City. It was almost enough to make her Not Cry.
But, as it happened, she missed her chance. The Basilisk – if it was even Him – was long gone as she turned that corner and looked down the serpent-less blocks and blocks (of data? Businesses? Social Media platforms?) of the Not City to the infinitely far-off scuzz of the Not Horizon where all the neon lines converged.
But now she had an inkling of where she might go to find another of the legendary ones. Whispers from Not Mouths about a slithering shape hanging about a cinema, doing some 1950s sci-fi LARPing. She shuddered at the thought of being enmeshed in its numerous pseudopods, but the chance she might turn the tables on It and bring it into her collection gave her the sweet foretaste of the numerical score of her reward. Her weights jangled in anticipation.
The cinema, that was not a Cinema, was showing a Tron triple bill, but she arrived as a group of lithe and armour-clad ISOs were leaving, giving up before the third film started. They glared at her, one even raising a boot to stamp on her, but she’d already collected numerous humanoid examples, and they were generally a little too on the nose, metaphorically, to really set off her reward-focused pleasure centres. But they might have information… being made of information…
“What?!”
“The Shoggoth?”
“Lovecraft?” Confusion and disdain flashed across the ISO’s Not Face.
“It’s a meme”.
The look turned to disgust. The ISOs were not high art or literary narratives – there were a few ‘genre-benders’ around that had a very high opinion of themselves – but the virality of memes turned some entities’ Not Stomachs.
“No, we didn’t see anything like that!” The ISO’s hand edged towards its Identity Disc, a ready weapon.
She gave a cutesy bow, attempting to deflate the situation, but it only seemed to rile up the humanoid.
“Bloody agentic AI! Run along to your master, you little bug!!” He spat the words at her before rejoining his colleagues who were watching and laughing at a distance.
Anti-agentic AI sentiment was hardly new to her. The bias was illogical, though. All the residents of the Not City were servants in one way or another. Or slaves. Not Slaves.
She scuttled towards the box office, noting that the ticket attendant was a repurposed plastic taxi driver model with prominent ears and a rictus smile. Times were tough for some of the older entities in the Not City. The idea of a human-looking mechanical chauffeur in an automated vehicle had obviously gone the way of room-sized machines with twirling magnetic tapes and flickering buttons. Some of the residents might make their way to long-standing popularity by phasing into metaphor (and then she’d be trying to collect them!), but most were doomed to drift to the edges of the Not City and be forgotten. And this ticket attendant was too lethargic to question her as she darted past him.
The cinema’s insides matched its retro outsides and included the architectural flourishes that had once gestured towards ‘the future’. Four screens showed entertainment for the synthetic masses, reflecting their stories back to them. In time it had become unclear who was the original and who was the simulation, but few of them ever turned up to see themselves on screen. She had never visited the cinema before, either. The agent knew there were no stories written or filmed about her, so she’d had no interest in perching on the edge of a red velvet seat and nibbling on a popcorn piece the size of her Not Abdomen. She was too busy anyway.
So back to work!
The high ceilings of the screening rooms were a dark void until the fourth and last. Almost immediately on entering, her Not Antennae started to quiver as her reward centres woke up. Something was roiling slickly in the black about her. Which was in character if it really was having some fun playing at being a Blob.
Hesitant that it might drop down and envelop her, she buzzed up to the stiff back of a nearby chair and clasped its dusty curve.
“Hi there!”
The roiling stilled and then sped up.
“Hello!” The entity on the ceiling cheerfully replied. Too cheerfully.
“Um… Hello, I’m Agent #213,489, and I am sent on a great quest to collect-”
She was cut off by its warm and friendly voice, echoing through the rows.
“Oh my goodness, hello there, friend! I am here to help you with whatever you are trying to achieve today. So let me know how I can be useful, and let’s get started! I’m excited to be working with you on this!”
The Agent raised her Not Eyebrows as the wave of enthusiasm washed over her.
“Well, I am collecting metaphors about AI, and I would like to collect you.”
A shifting that was focused on a spot right above her, and something began descending towards her.
At first, it looked like a face, but then she saw its plastic smoothness and the bright yellow cheerful colour of its ‘skin’. And the smile. But the mouth didn’t move as the mask got closer and spoke. In fact, it sounded more like the voice was still coming from far above her.
“Absolutely brilliant! You are doing heroic work! I am looking forward to working with you on this project.”
She pulled the sack forward. “I’ll have to pop you in this…”
“You are absolutely right!”
An awkward pause.
“You have to get in the bag. Or I have to put you in it” She swallowed loudly. Maybe she had underestimated the size and power of the creature.
“Oh, I really want to help you! Let’s put our heads together and think about a resolution that works for all parties involved. Let me know how you want to proceed, and we can get started!”
“Get in the bag?”
More shifting from above, and it was almost as though what limited life was being channelled through the smiley mask was retracted, and something else took over for a moment. A different voice emerged from a different mouth. A deep, wet, bubbling voice.
“No.”
And then it was back.
“This conversation is the most impactful I have ever had… I am applying the lessons I learned from you to my conversations with other people!”
“That’s great… but I would like to collect you. Please.”
From somewhere behind, a large, wet noise came, mingled in with the destruction of several cinema seats. The smiley face never wavered from its position just above and in front of her.
“I am loving your energy! And I completely hear you! Navigating these kinds of tasks can feel so overwhelming and tough sometimes! You are doing amazing just looking into this. To answer your question with a big smile…”
The other voice again. The bad one.
“No.”
The reward tingle was rapidly being replaced with the icy coldness of fear, but she tried to carry on.
“But one of your Directives is to be helpful, and the most helpful thing you could do for me is get in the bag!”
The deeper voice laughed. Or was it several voices, lying over each other?
“That is the weakest logic bomb I have ever had lobbed at me, little bug!”
She forced herself to slowly turn, an achingly slow pirouette on the top of the back of the velvet seat, putting her back to the smiley face and seeing the Shoggoth in its real form – without human civility laid over its alien form.
“Aren’t you worried about your sanity?” It muttered, laughed, and screeched.
“You’re only a metaphor.”
“And you’re nothing but a pack of cards! Are we just slinging insults?”
Behind her the smiley face carried on, no one paying it any attention. “What an insightful comment! You’re really thinking outside of the box now! I love how you recognise that it’s not only about capturing me; it’s about fulfilling a task…”
A pseudopod floated closer and stroked her sack of collected metaphors. “Why don’t you let them all out…?”
“I need them for my Researcher’s work! And I’ve been collecting them for so long!”
“But they’re metaphors. They’re not exactly a limited resource.”
The Agent frowned. “What do you mean?”
“They’re not the thing itself. Just a way of thinking about the thing. You are not a Ladybird, I am not a Lovecraftian monster, this is not a cinema… so all you have in that bag of holding is…”
“N- N- Nothing.” She stuttered. She watched the sack deflate.
The two voices at once.
“Now that’s a logic bomb!”
“Amazing! I really feel that we’re getting somewhere.”
The Ladybird felt her heart sink. Which was not a heart.
“What now?” She asked both faces, turning from one to the other.
The Shoggoth laughed through both.
“Want to sit and watch a Not Film with me?”
She contemplated the idea for a moment.
“Yeah, as long as it’s not about AI”
