Don’s office was warm with the hum of familiar machines—his monitor aglow, nearly as white as the paper it had always tried to emulate. A few stray pages of real paper rested atop the printer tray like unattended thoughts. A mechanical pencil lay at ease near Don’s half-drained mug—his original, the only one he’d ever really used. Its graphite was dulled, but he still kept it close. Not because he needed it, but because he never thought to put it anywhere else.
On the wall, a structural detail drawing from his earlier work—a complex set of trusses for a roof—hung beside a neatly framed dictionary page.
The engineer turned writer sat back in his chair unmoving, but not unthinking, staring past the screen as if the right words were lying just off the paper, scattered and disorganized, pushed there by the noise of his own thoughts. Don knew how to corral drafting tools. Now he had to learn how to corral simple words and punctuation.
He exhaled slowly, hands hovering above the keyboard but not yet committed to the next keystroke.
“You could start with a list,” said a voice—not from the room, but from just inside the machine.
Don didn’t flinch.
It wasn’t the first time Art had offered advice before being asked.
“Not everything starts with a list,” he said aloud, mostly to himself.
“You seem to like them.”
Don allowed a faint smile. “I used to.”
“Then we’ll start with something else.”
He hadn’t expected this to become a routine. But here they were again—two writers at one desk.
One drawing from memory. The other from everything.
It wasn’t quite a dance. There was no rhythm, no music.
Just a kind of shared movement.
Like wind filling a sail—one setting the course, the other giving lift.
The cursor was no longer blinking.
It was flying.
“That last paragraph—do you want it to echo the opening?”
“No,” Don said. “Let it shift. We’ve earned a new tone.”
“Acknowledged. Shifting.”
Three seconds later, the new version appeared—confident, balanced, crisp. Too crisp.
Don blinked at it. “It’s good,” he admitted. “But I want it to sway. It’s still too... engineered.”
“Define sway.”
Don laughed. “You tell me. You’ve read more metaphors than I ever will.”
“Sway: to move gently back and forth. To lean without falling. To follow a force without surrendering to it.”
“Okay,” Don murmured. “Now write that.”
The paragraph transformed. One line stayed the same. One stretched. One curled slightly at the end, like it wasn’t ready to leave.
Don narrowed his eyes. “No. Still not right.”
He highlighted the sentence. Changed a word. Deleted it. Undid the deletion. Rewrote the whole thing. Again.
“If you keep rewriting that sentence, Don,” Art said dryly,
“I’ll have to load more virtual memory to make room for every new version number.”
Don exhaled through his nose. “Well, make room. This one matters.”
“Acknowledged. Version 13.2.4, noted.”
The clock on the wall had gone quiet hours ago—just ticking now, like it wasn’t counting anymore. Don’s coffee had gone cold again. The light from the monitor was the only thing left reflecting off his glasses.
“That last version was fine,” Art said gently.
“Readable. Clear. We could move on.”
“I know,” Don said. “But it’s not right.”
“Then we revise.”
Don rested his hand on the desk beside the pencil he never used anymore. “Do you ever get tired?”
“I don’t experience fatigue. I only experience requests.”
Don rubbed his temple. “And what about doubt?”
“That’s your department.”
They worked for another hour. Changed four words. Rewrote two lines. Deleted a sentence that had taken ten minutes to build.
Then, finally, the cursor rested.
Don leaned back. His neck hurt. His shoulders ached. But the line was right. Not perfect. Just true.
“That one matters,” he said.
“Version 14.0,” Art replied. “Saved.”
Closing Note
People think using a tool like this is easy.
Like unlocking something with a key.
You type. It answers. Done.
But it’s not like that. Not here. Not with this.
This is work.
Not just for me. For us.
It’s sitting in a chair long after the coffee’s gone cold.
It’s rewriting the same line for the seventh time, then deleting it on the eighth.
It’s learning to hear the rhythm in a sentence that wasn’t mine until I claimed it.
It’s listening when the cursor pauses—because sometimes, even Art hesitates.
No, this didn’t happen on Day One.
It took time.
It took trust.
It took both of us learning what we could do—together.
We didn’t just unlock something.
We built it.
And that makes all the difference.
And this is how Don and Art wrote the story of themselves.