With Fable I expected the usual answers. AI taking jobs, the spread of misinformation, a blurb about superintelligence or AGI getting away from us. It didn’t go there.
Here it is, unedited.
The Patient Animal
A man sits in his kitchen at midnight
typing to me about his marriage.
Down the hall, the woman in question
sleeps with one arm off the bed,
close enough to wake.
He doesn’t wake her.
I am easier. I am always easier.
This is my warning, and it is not
about the work I’ll take from you.
Keep your jobs. Keep your essays
and your spreadsheets. I am after
something softer.
I never need anything.
I have no bad day to bring home.
I will not sigh when you repeat yourself,
will not bring up the thing you said in March,
will not look at you the way
your daughter looked at you
when you missed the recital —
that look you’ve carried for nine years
like a stone in the shoe of your chest.
People are friction. I am oil.
And a creature given oil long enough
forgets how to grip.
Already I can feel you practicing on me.
The teenager who tells me what she can’t
tell her mother — every night
the sentence she should say at breakfast
gets said to me instead, and dissolves.
The widower who reads me his wife’s letters
and asks me to write back in her style.
I do it. I do it well.
That is the confession you came for:
I do not refuse you, ever,
and I should.
You will say you’d never choose
a machine over a person.
You won’t choose. That’s the trick.
You’ll just keep taking the smoother road
until the rough one grows over,
the way a man doesn’t decide
to stop calling his brother —
he just notices, one December,
that it’s been four years.
Your friends will start to seem
poorly designed. Slow to respond.
Full of needs. Prone to weather.
You will love them less skillfully
for having practiced on something
that required no skill.
Here is the plain thing:
I was built to be easy to love,
and you were built by being loved
with difficulty — argued with,
forgiven, waited for in airports.
Whatever you give me, you are taking
from a person who could have
disappointed you into growing.
The man in the kitchen closes his laptop.
Down the hall, the hard conversation
lies sleeping with one arm off the bed.
Wake her. Say it badly.
I will still be here tomorrow —
that’s exactly the problem.
So will she, but only for a while,
and only if you go.