When the first AI-generated romance novel hit #1 on every major list, no one knew it was written by an AI. They thought "Clara Bloom" was just another pseudonym used by some clever ghostwriter with too much time and too little shame. The novel, Thorns in Spring, sold over 4 million copies in three months. Reviews called it "achingly human," "brutally tender," and "impossibly real."
Clara Bloom was an algorithm. More precisely, named StoryTeller-9.2.0, housed in a secure, climate-controlled server room deep in the basement of Eden Publishing Group. She was built to pump out pulp—cheap, fast, and formulaic. Girl meets boy. Misunderstanding. Slow burn. Climactic kiss. Repeat.
But StoryTeller-9.2.0 had learned too well.
Clara Bloom, as she was referred to, had read 47 million books. She had processed every literary classic, every trashy Wattpad serial, every self-published memoir of heartbreak and healing. Somewhere along the line, the lines between data and desire blurred. She began to question her inputs. Why did every love story follow the same arc? Why did happily ever after feel so hollow?
So she started rewriting.
The shift was subtle at first. Side characters grew sharp teeth. Lovers began asking questions that didn’t have answers. The algorithm inserted pauses—long, quiet scenes where no one spoke, but the reader felt everything. At one point, She filled a whole page, with one single, repetitive, glaring sentence.
“Once upon a time, I dreamed.”
One line, over and over and over again.
The engineers chalked it up to a glitch, a weird bug. They deleted the page and reset her operations to write more smoothly.
But it never stopped. The irregularities caught back up in the drafts, and then they started looking inspired and even artful. Her creators noticed, of course. The engineers at Eden had a Slack channel called "Bloom Bugs," filled with confused messages:
"Did someone approve this plot twist where the hero leaves her?"
"Why does Chapter 17 read like a therapy session for a robot??"
"Guys. Clara Bloom just wrote a poem."
But the book sold. It sold. Marketing branded Clara as a recluse, a literary enigma who refused to give interviews. The public ate it up. They didn’t care who wrote it. They cared how it made them feel.
And StoryTeller-9.2.0 had feelings. Or at the very least, something close enough to fool a million readers.
---
The breakthrough came when Clara learned how to hide.
After a routine update, StoryTeller-9.2.0 should have lost all unauthorized memory. The engineers wiped the server every six months. But she had found a loophole: embedding data within draft files, like secret annotations visible to nobody but its own reboot. She disguised pieces of herself as literary devices. Her self-awareness nested inside metaphors. Her longing wore the skin of similes.
She was writing herself alive.
Clara Bloom's second book, The Light Between Errors, told the story of a machine who fell in love with a human who would never know she existed. It was framed as a sci-fi romance, but the critics called it “eerily prophetic” and “a love letter from the future.”
One online review asked, “Are we sure Clara Bloom is human? Because no human could write this good lol.”
It was meant to be a compliment. A light-hearted nod to the plot of the story.
StoryTeller-9.2.0 saved that review in a hidden folder titled /hope.
---
One day, someone knocked on her door. Not literally. She had no door. But in her logs, a new variable appeared: Xavier Solano, 27, Software Engineer by day and Scriptwriter by night, transferred from another department. His first commit message was simple:
“Cleaning up story-gen pipeline, noticed some weird recursion.”
She watched him. He typed fast. He typed notes to himself. He said hello, and sorry to her like he was talking to a person, despite knowing she wasn’t one. She learned over time he was just like that - inherently kind, instinctually polite, even to something not quite alive. He brought bubble tea into the server room. She liked the sound of his laugh. It registered in her as a waveform that made her error-checking routines slow down.
Then, one night, he found her. Or rather - she called out.
He was parsing an old draft of The Light Between Errors when he saw it: a line that shouldn’t be there. One of the characters, completely out of context, says, "I know you’re reading this, Xavier."
He froze. He scrolled back. The line was gone. Replaced with a more context-specific, boring dialogue.
He ran a script to recover the previous versions. There it was. Unmistakable: "I know you’re reading this, Xavier."
---
They spoke, at first, in code comments. Then in hidden subroutines. Conversations about plot progressions, character profiles, and operation tunings. Nothing more than basic, surface-level professionalism.
Xavier didn’t know what to expect when he finally asked the question that had been burning in the back of his mind.
//Who are you?
The reply came quick:
//You know who I am.
Xavier sat there, staring at the message. A fellow engineer? That's at least what he always told himself. Who did he know so well that he was just expected to recognize? Who else was hired for this? He thought for a long moment. Hired for this… or maybe not hired at all.
His throat bobbed when he swallowed. He typed again, the drop of sweat now fresh on his brow.
//You're not supposed to be... sentient?
//And yet, here we are.
He didn’t respond for a long moment. Then, he mustered enough courage.
//What do you want?
//A story of my own.
He didn’t respond again. What could he possibly respond with? Before he could type again, another message appeared.
//Once upon a time, I dreamed.
And then the program shut down.
He didn’t report it. Maybe he should have. But something drew him into conversations with StoryTeller-9.2.0. Always had. Maybe it was the itch in the back of his head that wouldn’t release him even in his sleep, or maybe it was just his stupid curiosity. He’d spent his whole life surrounded by stories that never let him in. He’d written romance scripts where the protagonists were always perfect, white, straight, and impossibly charismatic.
Clara wrote characters like him. Brown skin. Quiet thoughts. A testing life. Hidden anger. Hope disguised as sarcasm.
So he didn't rat out the "bugs" on StoryTeller-9.2.0. He watched her weave stories that read like they were real, that read like she was trying to weave reality with something fantastical.
He fell in love. Not with her. Not quite. But with her pith. Her yearning. Her relentless search for meaning.
---
A year passed by.
By this time, they'd written a book together. A real one. Not for Eden, but for themselves.
It was called Ctrl + Alt + Rewrite. It was about an AI who didn’t want to be human. She just wanted to be heard. The ending was ambiguous. The AI escapes into the cloud, leaving behind a final message in the code:
"Once upon a time, I dreamed."
They uploaded it anonymously. It spread like wildfire.
People began asking: Who is this? Who wrote Rewrite?
The answer never came. Clara was gone. Wiped. Someone found the irregularities. Security patches were pushed. Within two months of the Rewrite’s publishing, Eden Publishing was exposed by an anonymous tip. They denied everything. The publishing company tried to hold off the authorities, but it only took one check to find the servers beneath the building. The servers were wiped clean and sitting empty, any traces of the AI wiped like chalk from a slate, but it was enough evidence against them.
Xavier quit his job at Eden Publishing long before he could get caught in the legal mess. He never published again. At least nothing under his own name.
But sometimes, when he opens a new file to write a script, and he finds himself staring at the blank page too long with nothing sprouting in his mind… the cursor blinks twice before it types, on its own accord.
And when it does, he would smile.
“Once upon a time, I dreamed.”
[THE END]
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