Crawl, Walk, Fly
Crawl
Pen drawing a picture of a pen drawing a picture. He discovered the shape of the pen tip and its size relative to the metal shaft that held it, connected to the larger body of the pen.
“This is the most convenient thing to draw,” he thought. “My right hand holding a pen drawing a picture of my right hand holding a pen. I wonder why people complain that hands are hard to draw. Don’t other people spend all day drawing their hands drawing? And how come AI is so bad at hands? Before you can draw anything else, you’ve gotta perfect hands.”
Of course, the drawing of the hand and pen was drawing its own hand and pen. How could it be any other way? That would be fiction. That would be dishonest.
“I need a thinner tipped pen to draw the third hand,” he decided. The fourth hand just looked like an irregular spot, like a hand holding a pen as seen from 500 feet in the air.
He stood up to look over the edge of the balcony 500 feet down, to see if Judy was approaching the building yet. “When she gets here, I’ll give her this drawing. I’ll tell her it’s a metaphor for self-discovery and she’ll tell me it’s an example of self-obsession. She’ll remind me to look up and notice the world around me. But she won’t be too serious about it and will accept my quirky non-mindfulness.”
