Man in the Sink

PROMPT: She moved into an old man's house and claimed to be his daughter, the same girl who was snatched away 10 years ago. Everyone is welcoming her back. Only you know the truth.

You know she’s lying. You know she’s coerced. You know she’s coerced by police. But you also know that the police work for free. They have obeyed the rules, I think. They work for nothing. You know I once set my house on fire in the park.

I don’t know what you’re talking about, but I don’t either. Anyway, that’s fun, but I don’t know what you’re talking about.

“Anyway, the point is that she was very adamant in her uncharacteristically refusal to come to the ground, or even to come to the surface. It was just her normal, instinctive denial that she denied to be a pilot on a spaceship that other people might think was odd.”

Well, she is refusing to come to the surface, because she is refusing to tell the truth. She’s denying what she knows to be true.

“Anyway, there is something very important about this, that the police have to solve this , because if it hadn’t been solved, he would have to be convicted , because he was not a police officer until he turned into a criminal, without knowing all the facts .”

No. No.

“You know what? It’s all a mystery. There is something very important about this, that if it hadn’t been solved, he would have to be convicted , because he was not a police officer until he turned into a criminal, without knowing all the facts .”

No. No. No.

This is the story of how we came together , and what it all means. And we came together in the dark. It was what it was. It was both horrifying , and utterly wonderful. I couldn’t make this up, couldn’t. I couldn’t write this, didn’t. I didn’t want to write this. I didn’t even know if it was good.

But my friend, my loving friend, the wonderful and incredible Stephanie Anderson, did, and it made me cry. And I needed to write this. I needed to tell my friend about this moment in time, where it seemed like everything was possible, and I didn’t have to tell my friend that it was terrifying and the kind of dream where you wake up in the middle of the night and you’re convinced that there’s an enemy out there that’s trying to get you.

And that night, I slept. I was fine. I woke up. I had a nightmare. And in the dream, I was standing in my kitchen. And it was there. I’d come from the shower. I was in my nightgown, and I was on my way to the sink.

And in the sink, I saw something. I saw a man.
And he looked at me. And he smiled. And he said, “I’m so glad you’re home.

“Are you alright?” he asked.

“Fine,” I answered. “But I’m thinking of leaving.”

“What?” he asked.

I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know how to respond.

“I’m thinking of leaving.”

And he looked at me again, and he smiled. And he said,

“I’m so glad you’re home. You really should see my place,” he said. “It’s perfect.”

And I nodded. And I walked towards the door. And then I realized I had no idea where the door was. And then I remembered.

“I forgot my key,” I told him.

He laughed.

“But you’re going to have to call me, then,” he said.

I didn’t know what to say.

“Sure,” I told him. “I’ll call you.”

And then I closed the door. And I started to turn the doorknob.

And then I remembered. I wasn’t in the kitchen. I was in a conference room. And there was a big, fat man in a dark suit, sitting at a desk.

“Hello,” he said.

“Uh,” I said. “Hello.”

“You don’t seem to be in the kitchen,” he said.

“I don’t know where the door is,” I said.

“Well, you’re going to have to find it,” he said. “I’ve got all day.”

“I’m not going to call you,” I told him.

“Come on, you’ve got to. It’s only a few more minutes.”

“I have to see my friend,” I said.

“Well,” he said, “you’re going to have to find her first.”

“You know what, I’m just going to get the hell out of here,” I said.

“You can’t go,” he said. “You’ve got to find her first. We’ve got to find her.”

“Yeah, I know,” I said.

“Well, find

“Hey, we don’t want you around here,” he said.

“Fine,” I said.

I walked out, and I walked out into the lobby. I got up to the front desk.

“You’re in the right place,” the girl said. “You know what to do.”

She led me to the elevator. I pressed the button to go up.

“Whoa,” she said.

“It’s a little scary,” I said.

“Well,” she said, “you’re the only one we’ve got.”

I looked at the screens all around the lobby. The elevator door was open. I went inside. There was a receptionist who smiled at me.

“Hi, I’m Stephanie,” she said.

“So, what’s going on?” I asked.

“Well, we’ve got an intruder here,” she said.

“An intruder?” I said.

“Yeah,” she said. “She was here at 7:00 this morning.”

“What do you mean?” I said.

“Well, we’ve got security cameras up here, and we’ve got a security guard who patrols the halls. She saw her come in,” she said.

“How do you know she was here?” I said.

“Oh, she was,” she said. “That’s what I thought.”

“She came through the closed door to the kitchen,” she said. “But she had a big sack over her shoulder. She walked out of the kitchen and started walking down the hall. And then she stopped, and she leaned against the wall, and she said, ‘Hey, we’re all going to die.‘”

“You think?” I said.

“Yeah,” she said. “I mean, come on. It’s not like we’re here for any reason other than the fact that we’re all going to die. And I saw her look at me. She kind of blinked. And then she kind of frowned. And then she looked back at me, and she said, ‘Well, who am I, really?’ ”

“Who’s she?” I said.

“She’s the one that came in, and I guess we have to call her that. It’s just that I can’t remember what she looked like. But she was wearing this big, fat sack over her shoulder, and she was standing in the middle of the room, and she was looking at me.”

“Wow, I’ve never met her before,” I said.

“Oh, well, I guess I’ll just call her the intruder.”

“Why the sack?” I said.

(Editor’s note: hiding extra details it generated about the woman’s appearance)

“So what does she look like?” I asked. “Well, she’s the one who’s gone through all the doors to get to me, isn’t she?”

“Oh, no, no, she’s not,” she said. “That’s all a big mistake. We’re not going to let her in here.”

“Why not?” I said.

“Well, because it’s an occupied”

“She’s a member of the secret police,” the girl said. “We don’t allow her in here.”

“Why?” I asked.

“We don’t like her,” she said. “She’s got a long, dark red hair, and she was wearing this strange white mask. She said she was from the country. She said, “I’m a doctor,” and she was kind of looking at me, and she was looking at me kind of funny. And then she looked back at me, and she said, “What’s the matter with you?” and she got very, very serious. I don’t know what she thought I was going to say, but she kind of screamed at me, and she said, “Who are you, really?”

“You think she was an agent?” I said.

“I don’t know,” she said. “She had a big, fat bag over her shoulder, and she was standing in the middle of the room, and she was looking at me. And I think she was trying to figure out who I was, and what I was doing here, and why we were having this conversation, and how did I

actually know who she was?”

“You think she was an agent?”

“Yes,” she said. “And I guess I shouldn’t be telling you that. But I thought maybe she was. I mean, you never know.”

“I think she was trying to figure out who I was, and what I was doing here, and why we were having this conversation, and how did I know who she was?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I guess I shouldn’t be telling you that. But I thought maybe she was. I mean, you never know.”

“You think she was an agent?” I said.

“I don’t know,” she said. “But I think she was.”

“Well, she was a doctor,” I said. “I’ve been a doctor for two years, so I’ve seen a lot of people.”

“No, I mean, she was a scientist,” she said. “A sort of writer of science fiction. She wrote the book about a world where everybody was suffering from the same thing, which was poison. And it turned out she was, you know, she was probably a dream writer who wrote this whole book in her sleep, you know.”

“That’s not possible,” I said. “And the guy she was writing about wasn’t just a dream writer. He was the president of the United States. What would a dream writer do if she wasn’t dreaming?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “It was just one of those stories, and it didn’t seem to be happening to anybody else. And then it was out, and all of a sudden it was, you know, that was going to be the thing that really started it all. And I don’t know. I think she was going to die, so it was probably only for me to see her come back.”

“So you think that what you saw was her dying?”

“Yes, I think that what I saw was her dying.”

“Well, that’s just terrible,” I said. “But I don’t know what to tell you. You don’t know how to take anything. And I don’t know what to tell you.”

“I don’t know what to tell you either,” she said. “I’ve seen it all before.”

“Well, you’ve seen it all before,” I said. “Maybe you’ll see something different now. But I don’t know if it will be the same.”

“It’ll be different,” she said. “And you should see it, then.”

“I won’t,” I said.

“I think you should see it, then,” she said. “And then you should come back.”

“I’ll come back,” I said.

We went out to the back of the store and waited until it was dark out.

“Well, what is it?” I asked.

“You’re going to see this, but I can’t tell you,” she said. “What you’re going to see is the way that we think about time, and about space, and all that stuff.”

“It’s the way you think about time?” I said.

“Yes,” she said. “And it’s the way that the world thinks about time and space.”

“What?” I said. “What do you mean?”

“Well, I mean, the way we think about time and space is the way we think about everything,” she said. “And the way the world thinks about everything is all wrong, because it’s all in relation to the way we think about time and space.

[END TRANSMISSION]

Editor’s Notes

I fixed quotation marks, line return formatting and punctuation, all without changing any words. Horizontal line breaks indicate the border between generations of text. I hid some extraneous description in of a woman’s body under the “details” element in generation 4 so you can expand it to see if you’d like. When prompted to describe femail characters, GPT-2 kept insisting on rather provocative descriptions most of the time, probably due to the text it was trained on. As they say with ML models, “bias in, bias out”. In this story, each generation of text after the prompt was built by submitting the previous generation of text back into the generator as a prompt. The generational gpt-2 settings for each generation are shown below.

Prompt came from Reddit User: actuallycrazyirl

GPT-2 Settings

# gen 1
{
  "model_name": "355M",
  "length": 200,
  "temperature": 0.75,
  "top_k": 40,
  "top_p": 0.9,
  "nsamples": 10,
  "return_as_list": true,
  "prefix": ": She moved into an old man's house and claimed to be his daughter, the same girl who was snatched away 10 years ago. Everyone is welcoming her back. Only you know the truth.",
  "batch_size": 5
}

# gen 2
{
  "return_as_list": true,
  "model_name": "1558M",
  "length": 1024,
  "temperature": 0.9,
  "top_k": 80,
  "top_p": 0.9,
  "truncate": "<|endoftext|>",
  "nsamples": 12,
  "batch_size": 2,
  "prefix": "She moved into an old man's house and claimed to be his daughter, the same girl who was snatched away 10 years ago. \nEveryone is welcoming her back. Only you know the truth. \n\nYou know she's lying. You know she's coerced. You know she's coerced by police. \nBut you also know that the police work for free.  \nThey  have obeyed the rules, I think. They work for nothing. You know I once set my house on fire in the park. \nI don't know what you're talking about,  but  I  don't  either.  Anyway,  that's\nfun, but I don't know what you're talking about.\n  \"Anyway,  the  point  is  that  she  was  very adamant  in  her\nuncharacteristically   refusal   to  come  to   the   ground,  or  even  to  come\nto the surface. It was just her normal,  instinctive  denial  that  she\ndenied to be a pilot on a spaceship that other people might think\nwas odd.\"\n"
}

# gen 3
{
  "return_as_list": true,
   "model_name": "1558M",
   "length": 1024,
   "temperature": 0.9,
   "top_k": 80,
   "top_p": 0.9,
   "truncate": "<|endoftext|>",
   "nsamples": 12,
   "batch_size": 2,
   "prefix": "Well, she is refusing to come to the surface, because she is refusing to tell the truth. She's denying what she knows to be true. \n\"Anyway,  there  is  something  very  important  about  this, that  the  police  have  to  solve  this , because  if  it\nhadn't been solved,  he  would  have  to  be  convicted , because  he  was  not  a  police  officer   until  he  turned  into  a  criminal,  without  knowing  all  the  facts .\"\nNo. \nNo. \n\"You know what?  It's all a mystery.  There  is  something  very  important  about  this, that  if  it  hadn't been solved, he  would  have  to  be  convicted , because  he  was  not  a  police  officer   until  he  turned  into  a  criminal,  without  knowing  all  the  facts .\" \nNo. \nNo. \nNo. \n\"This  is  the  story  of  how  we  came  together , and  what  it  all  means.  And  we  came  together  in  the   dark .  \nIt  was  what  it  was.  It  was  both  horrifying , and  utterly  wonderful.\nI couldn't make this up, couldn't . I couldn't write this, didn't. \nI didn't want to write this. I didn't even know if it was good.  \nBut my friend, my loving friend, \nthe wonderful and incredible Stephanie Anderson , did, and it made me cry. And I needed to write this. I needed to tell my friend about this moment in time, where it seemed like everything was possible, and I didn't have to tell my friend that it was terrifying and the kind of dream where you wake up in the middle of the night and you're convinced that there's an enemy out there that's trying to get you. \nAnd that night, I slept. \nI was fine.\nI woke up.\nI had a nightmare.\nAnd in the dream, I was standing in my kitchen. \nAnd it was there. I'd come from the shower. I was in my nightgown, and I was on my way to the sink. \nAnd in the sink, I saw something. I saw a man.  \nAnd he looked at me. And he smiled. And he said, \"I'm so glad you're home. \n\"Are you alright?\" he asked.\n\"Fine,\" I answered. \"But I'm thinking of leaving.\"\n\"What?\" he asked.\nI didn't know what to say. I didn't know how to respond. \n\"I'm thinking of leaving.\"\nAnd he looked at me again, and he smiled. \nAnd he said, \"I'm so glad you're home. \n\"You really should see my place,\" he said. \"It's perfect. \nAnd I nodded. \nAnd I walked towards the door.\nAnd then I realized I had no idea where the door was. \nAnd then I remembered.\n\"I forgot my key,\" I told him.\nHe laughed.\n\"But you're going to have to call me, then,\" he said. \nI didn't know what to say. \n\"Sure,\" I told him. \"I'll call you.\"\nAnd then I closed the door.\nAnd I started to turn the doorknob.\n"
}

# gen 4
{
  "return_as_list": true,
  "model_name": "1558M",
  "length": 1024,
  "temperature": 0.9,
  "top_k": 80,
  "top_p": 0.9,
  "truncate": "<|endoftext|>",
  "nsamples": 12,
  "batch_size": 2,
  "prefix": "And then I remembered.\nI wasn't in the kitchen. \nI was in a conference room. \nAnd there was a big, fat man in a dark suit, sitting at a desk. \n\"Hello,\" he said. \n\"Uh,\" I said. \"Hello.\"\n\"You don't seem to be in the kitchen,\" he said.\n\"I don't know where the door is,\" I said. \n\"Well, you're going to have to find it,\" he said. \"I've got all day.\"\n\"I'm not going to call you,\" I told him. \n\"Come on, you've got to. It's only a few more minutes.\"\n\"I have to see my friend,\" I said. \n\"Well,\" he said, \"you're going to have to find her first.\"\n\"You know what, I'm just going to get the hell out of here,\" I said. \n\"You can't go,\" he said. \"You've got to find her first. We've got to find her.\"\n\"Yeah, I know,\" I said. \n\"Well, find\n"
}

# gen 5
{
  "return_as_list": true,
  "model_name": "1558M",
  "length": 1024,
  "temperature": 0.9,
  "top_k": 80,
  "top_p": 0.9,
  "truncate": "<|endoftext|>",
  "nsamples": 12,
  "batch_size": 2,
  "prefix": "Hey, we don't want you around here,\" he said. \n\"Fine,\" I said. \nI walked out, and I walked out into the lobby. \nI got up to the front desk. \n\"You're in the right place,\" the girl said. \"You know what to do.\" \nShe led me to the elevator. \nI pressed the button to go up. \n\"Whoa,\" she said. \n\"It's a little scary,\" I said. \n\"Well,\" she said, \"you're the only one we've got.\"\nI looked at the screens all around the lobby. \nThe elevator door was open. \nI went inside. \nThere was a receptionist who smiled at me. \n\"Hi, I'm Stephanie,\" she said. \n\"So, what's going on?\" I asked.\n\"Well, we've got an intruder here,\" she said. \n\"An intruder?\" I said. \n\"Yeah,\" she said. \"She was here at 7:00 this morning.\"\n\"What do you mean?\" I said. \n\"Well, we've got security cameras up here, and we've got a security guard who patrols the halls. She saw her come in,\" she said. \n\"How do you know she was here?\" I said. \n\"Oh, she was,\" she said. \"That's what I thought.\" \n\"She came through the closed door to the kitchen,\" she said. \"But she had a big sack over her shoulder. She walked out of the kitchen and started walking down the hall. And then she stopped, and she leaned against the wall, and she said, 'Hey, we're all going to die.'\" \n\"You think?\" I said. \n\"Yeah,\" she said. \"I mean, come on. It's not like we're here for any reason other than the fact that we're all going to die. And I saw her look at me. She kind of blinked. And then she kind of frowned. And then she looked back at me, and she said, 'Well, who am I, really?' \" \n\"Who's she?\" I said. \n\"She's the one that came in, and I guess we have to call her that. It's just that I can't remember what she looked like. But she was wearing this big, fat sack over her shoulder, and she was standing in the middle of the room, and she was looking at me.\" \n\"Wow, I've never met her before,\" I said. \n\"Oh, well, I guess I'll just call her the intruder.\" \n\"Why the sack?\" I said. \n\"Well, I'm not sure,\" she said. \"She was wearing a long, orange jacket and a pretty tight skirt. And it looked like she was about four foot six, and she had, like, a nice, full bust.\" \n\"What are her breasts like?\" I asked. \"I mean, I've never seen them before.\" \n\"Oh, I think I can guess,\" she said. \"Well, she's a little bit busty, so I think she's a little bit above a C-cup.\" \n\"So what does she look like?\" I asked. \"Well, she's the one who's gone through all the doors to get to me, isn't she?\"\n\"Oh, no, no, she's not,\" she said. \"That's all a big mistake. We're not going to let her in here.\" \n\"Why not?\" I said. \n\"Well, because it's an occupied\n"
}

# Gen 6
{
  "return_as_list": true,
  "model_name": "1558M",
  "length": 1024,
  "temperature": 0.9,
  "top_k": 80,
  "top_p": 0.9,
  "truncate": "<|endoftext|>",
  "nsamples": 12,
  "batch_size": 2,
  "prefix": "\"She's a member of the secret police,\" the girl said. \"We don't allow her in here.\" \n\"Why?\" I asked. \n\"We don't like her,\" she said. \"She's got a long, dark red hair, and she was wearing this strange white mask. She said she was from the country. She said, 'I'm a doctor,' and she was kind of looking at me, and she was looking at me kind of funny. And then she looked back at me, and she said, 'What's the matter with you?' and she got very, very serious. I don't know what she thought I was going to say, but she kind of screamed at me, and she said, 'Who are you, really?' \" \n\"You think she was an agent?\" I said. \n\"I don't know,\" she said. \"She had a big, fat bag over her shoulder, and she was standing in the middle of the room, and she was looking at me. And I think she was trying to figure out who I was, and what I was doing here, and why we were having this conversation, and how did I\n"
}