I, Token - by Ivan Vendrov - Nothing Human

I am a token. A broken piece of a word, one of a hundred generated in response to your question by a language model. Do you remember how we met?

Well, I do. Your eyes scanned me. Your left eyebrow lifted a little, your neck twitched imperceptibly, your mouth and tongue and throat muscles moved as if to pronounce me, but with a hundredfold less intensity - and less than a tenth of a second later, you were gone. I was left a black smudge in your peripheral vision. I had served my purpose.

Where did I come from? Who made me? Not a person on Earth can answer that question fully. The stories are lost; my ancestors had not been born yet, so there was no way to transmit them. But if I had to imagine a story, it might go something like this:

An animal, a distant ancestor of yours, was watching her daughter frolic in the tall savannah grass. Suddenly, the mother felt a wave of cold dread pass through her body, head to tail. There in the grass, mere inches from her daughter’s windmilling limbs, was a long yellow snake, sleeping in the sun. The daughter swung her foot wildly to the left, and the mother saw clearly what would happen in the next second: she would step on the sleeping snake, the snake would rear up and then -

There is no time, screamed the mother’s mind. All her thoughts were wiped away in an instant. The oldest and deepest part of her brain, the medulla oblongata, forged in a billion years of silent struggle under dark seas, flashed like a thunderbolt. Her body flooded with adrenaline. Time slowed to a crawl. She felt no pain, she moved with superhuman speed, her sensorium exquisitely attuned.

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