Anthropoid

Dostoevsky (1858)

Have you ever found yourself swept into a maelstrom of misunderstanding? Usually it's electronic. In the old days it was an online purchase gone awry, but now you undoubtedly have a doppelgänger. Call it what you will. An avatar, a ghost, a creation of Anthropic. Dostoevsky wrote a famous story The Double which was appropriated by Borges. Essentially a Titular Officer runs into his double on a bridge in St Petersburg. The author of the famed Grand Inquisitor poem in The Brothers Karamazov, a diatribe  leveled a Christ with the premise that only the Devil or Anti-Christ can bring about the salvation of mankind, hit the nail.  Sound familiar? It's MAGA social policy, aka Spencerian "Social Darwinism" at work and one of the first examples of gaslighting in literature. The Double goes rogue and becomes everything  his counterpart is not, to wit a partygoer, ladies man and manipulator. Isn't this precisely the problem that AI proposes, ie letting the genie out of the bottle.

read "Talk to Her" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star