A government agent and his mentee are sent into a remote town on a mysterious and dangerous project.
Short story | 3,850 words
The car hit a pothole, startling L from sleep. She sat up in the passenger seat and rubbed her eyes. It was night, had been night, would be night forever. They had been driving north for two days, and the dwindling towns with their mopey diners and peeling churches had become ever more sparse. Now there was only open road and the distant silhouette of mountains under the stars. M was at the wheel, driving like he walked, without affectation. His hands at ten and two, he said, “Get any Zs?” His voice was as flat as the road ahead.
“Some,” she said, glancing at the sky. The Milky Way was a seam offering a peek into better heavens. “God, that’s beautiful. How far?”
He glanced at the speedometer. It hovered frustratingly below the speed limit. “Two hours, seven minutes.”
“Shit. This is endless. Don’t know why they couldn’t fly us there.”
“Yeah,” he said, “you do.”
She thought about it a moment, then nodded. A bystander unfamiliar with their rapport might think M was being an ass. But this was a mentor thing. At least, that’s what she told herself. L had graduated from the academy six months ago, just after her twenty-fourth birthday, and god, was she eager to learn. Meanwhile M was a battered fifty-eight, his dark-circled eyes firmly fixed on the exit door. They said a decade at the agency was an eon, and M had been there three times that. He had seen things, knew shit, and god, what he could teach if he only gave her the chance.
Sooner or later he’d be gone, “stepped down” or “retired.” No one lasted forever. Meanwhile she was young and ambitious, not tainted by decades of whatever lurked out in the dark. One day soon she’d take his place. And, maybe years from now, she’d be driving some scared and eager kid up this same bleak highway, ready to read them in to the project, as M would soon do to her. Or so she hoped. They’d been on the road for days and M hadn’t told her a damn thing.
She was hungry and needed to pee. But M had scheduled their stops every six hours to the second. Last week, when they had first been assigned together, she’d assumed M was on the spectrum. The agency had an affinity for social outliers, collecting the neurodivergent the way a carpenter hordes tools. But she soon realized his rigid behaviors weren’t autism but bulwarks against the abyss, shields against the darkness, a darkness she had yet to glimpse.
“This is your first time entering the town,” he said, “so there are things you should know.”
Finally,she thought, her breath catching. Some answers.
“Physical touch is prohibited,” he said.
“I know.”
“No, you don’t.”
“Contagion protocols,” she said. “I read the dossier.”
“The dossier’s shit. Ninety-nine percent lies. It obfuscates the truth.”
“Which is?”
“I can’t tell you here. But it’s not a pathogen in the traditional sense.”
“Not airborne?”
“No.”
“But contagious?”
“At one time, very.”
“And now?”
He said nothing.
She hated his coyness. But it wasn’t his fault. The agency promised swift retribution for divulging its secrets. But this threat was small compared to the rumors spinning round campus during training: megadeaths of innocents, irreparable ontological shocks to the global order, permanent insanity of self and others. Though of course where there were curtains there were always those speculating what hid behind them. Her fellow recruits had no shortage of theories: Greys from Zeta Reticuli who’d created humans as an experiment, invisible multidimensional floating squid monsters that ate negative emotions, angry poltergeists from long-dead races intent on human eradication, enemy nation-states dosing the drinking water with mind-controlling nanobots, simulation theory.
But this was only gossip. Stress, alcohol, and fear led to terrible ideas, and there were plenty of those in training. Plus the agency worked hard to weed out the conspiratorial. Only the most critical and rational thinkers graduated. “Some call us defenders of humanity,” one of her professors had said, “but that’s a misnomer. At the end of the day, we’re scientists. Nothing more. We seek to know the unknowable, to frame excession, define anomaly, measure aberration. Defense is secondary. You cannot defend against that which you don’t understand. Quite simply, the world is not as you suppose. It never was.” And though L had never found out quite what her professor meant, she had always suspected the truth was both more prosaic and yet somehow more frightening.
“How many times have you been to the town?” she asked M as they drove.
“This’ll be my fourth. Hopefully my last.”
“That bad?”
He blinked, and she saw a flicker of horror in his eyes. Soon, she thought with a tremor, I’ll know what he knows.
Snow dusted the ground when they stopped at a charging station that still sold gas. The station hadn’t changed in a century. Even the muttering uniformed clerk was plucked from a lost era. L took a long pee, and when she got back in the car, there was a diet soda and a bag of chips on her seat.
“For you,” he said. “You don’t eat enough.”
She was hungry. Last night at the motel, M had checked her mattress for bedbugs before shuffling off to his room. Yesterday at some diner he had given her a look of deep pity. Was this concern yet another shield against the abyss, or did he actually care about her? His face gave no hint and she couldn’t tell. Still, a bud of warmth bloomed in her chest as they drove.
They turned off the highway onto a local road. No signs or buildings. And after a few minutes, M turned abruptly left onto a bumpy dirt drive and headed north. He shut off the headlights and stars appeared by the thousands. Lightning flickered in the distance, though the sky was clear.
“How can you see the road?” she said, leaning forward.
“There is no road. Just an endless flat plain.” Which was covered, she heard, in a few inches of snow. It crunched loudly under their tires. M pointed at the sky. “The town’s due north from that turn. You follow Polaris till you get there.”
She tried to find the guide star but was too worried they’d hit an unseen rock or tree.
A wavering row of lights appeared on the horizon, dimmer than the stars. The silhouette of a huge mountain rose behind it in a looming black wall.
“That it?” she said.
He nodded, and she caught him shudder.
“It’s not well hidden with all those lights,” she said.
“It’s not on any map. Paper or digital.”
“Any script kiddie with her mom’s credit card and a net connection could photograph that town from orbit. It’s easy to buy sat pics online.”
“We have filters on most sats.”
“Enemy sats too?”
“Not sure. I’m not read in on that. But we don’t need to worry about it.”
“Why not?”
“’Cause our enemies got towns of their own. And they want to keep ’em secret just as badly as we do.”
“Why?”
He sighed. “Almost there. Let me do the talking.”
From afar the town resembled all the boring hamlets they had driven through. But as they got closer, the buildings took on a strangely numinous quality, like the glassine patina of a fading fever dream. It reminded her of pics she’d seen of planned towns from last century. Cookie-cutter houses. Graph-paper streets. Mailboxes and driveways. But there was something flat about it, two-dimensional.
The town had a closed gate and a guard booth, and they drove up to it. A sign on the gate read:
welcome to oldman’s town
“rats live on no evil star”
“What the hell does that mean?” she said.
Frigid air spilled into the car as M rolled down his window. “It’s a palindrome,” he said. “Reads the same forward and back.”
A young woman in a black uniform stepped out from the guard booth. Her uniform was devoid of markings or insignia.
“Welcome to Oldman’s Town,” the woman said, but there was no warmth in it.
“I’m Agent M and this is L,” he said. “We’re expected.”
“We know who you are,” the woman said.
Figures appeared around them, and L realized with a start they were soldiers holding rifles pointed at their car. In the dark, their faces hovered like bodiless ghosts.
“Do you have any electronic devices on your persons or in your vehicle?” the woman said.
“No,” said M.
“Please step out of the car.”
“I told you that—”
“Please step out of the car. This is the last time I will ask.” Her voice didn’t rise, but the threat was clear.
“Fine,” M said.
L shivered in the freezing air as the uniforms patted them down, scanned them with wands, while others so thoroughly searched their car that L thought they might dismantle it. Eventually, they let them back in the car.
“Proceed to 14 Minsky Lane,” the woman said.
“I know the way,” said M.
“No, you don’t. There’s a new obstruction. Third right, then first left.”
“Got it.”
M switched on the headlights as the gate was opened. L shivered and turned up the car’s heat. They drove into the town, but something was off. Distant buildings slid sideways as if on rails, and nearby homes foreshortened into parallelograms. And all at once, the illusion was shattered. A series of walls and panels had been strategically placed to give the appearance of a town, like a movie set. But it was a facade, a trompe-l’oeil. The effect was good, fooling her until the last moment. Now, she sat blinking, her eyes unfocused, trying to make sense of the scene beyond.
“Breathe,” M said. “This part is always hard.”
Their headlights lit two cones ahead of them, glinting off metal and plastic. At first she thought they were driving through a garbage dump. But the piles were too orderly and synchronous to be left by chance. Doll parts and old computers and picture frames and refrigerator doors and shampoo bottles and folding chairs and oven mitts and stuffed animals and endless more, the detritus of modern life, arranged in spiraling fractal piles. Some were twenty meters tall. There was snow on the ground, but it didn’t cling to the heaps. And in some spots the detritus sighed clouds of steam.
L felt a rising panic. “What…is it?”
“Breathe,” he said. “Breathe.”
Fractal garbage crunched beneath their tires as they drove. The twisting piles suggested something primal to L’s hindbrain, evincing fascination and revulsion in equal measure. She had once felt this way looking at a swarm of ants devouring a dead squirrel.
“It’s just repeating patterns,” he said. “Strange attractors. Self-referential loops. Don’t read too much into their shapes. It’ll drive you mad.”
“But what made them?” she said.
“Not what, but who.”
She lost track of the turns. At one point he stopped to look out the driver’s side at a huge monolith made from plastic utensils. “Hm,” he said, frowning, and drove on.
Eventually they stopped. She couldn’t discern one spot from the next, but he seemed to know where they were. A small rectangular light shone down from the top of a huge pile, and there was something familiar about its shape. Metal coat hangers petaled out from the light like a denuded flower. They exited the car, and M made a beeline for a large structure that was roughly shaped like a gargantuan anthill. But L didn’t follow.
“You need to come inside and see,” he said.
“I don’t want to go in there.”
“It’s the only way.”
“For what?”
“Come on.”
She willed herself forward. There was a scuffed wooden door recessed into the huge mound, and M rapped the knocker three times. Indistinct, overlapping voices came from the other side, like televisions left on too loud. But the voices made no sense.
A disheveled middle-aged woman opened the door. Her mismatched clothes were covered in stains and were ripped and faded from wear. L counted seven watches on her wrists, at least twenty rings. Her gray hair was long and wild, and her eyes, wide open, seemed empty of awareness. There was something familiar about her face too, and L’s stomach rumbled loudly as she remembered: She had seen this woman’s face during training, but she wasn’t sure where.
“Good radiator,” the woman said. “How may I wash you?” Her voice was hoarse and flat of affect.
M leaned forward and said, “Inspection protocol. Bravo Alpha Charlie Kilo Delta Oscar Oscar Romeo Zero Zero One Zero.”
The woman screamed. The sound hurt L’s hears, surging through her body like she’d been plugged into a high-voltage circuit, and she collapsed. The woman’s scream stopped as quickly as it started, and L, embarrassed by her reaction, leaped up from the ground, hoping M hadn’t seen her fall.
“Marble countertops,” the woman said. “Rake on in, waltzer.”
The woman stepped aside to let them enter. Behind her, a tunnel of detritus led into the dark. M stepped inside, but it took a great effort of will for L to follow.
A short ways ahead a light flickered stroboscopically. She had been careful not to let the admins at the academy know she was prone to ocular migraines, fearing they might kick her out. But this light was just the type of flashing that might trigger a temporary brain malfunction. She squinted and tried not to look at the light, but the flashes reflected on metal pieces affixed everywhere.
There was an opening to her left, where pots and pans, cans and cups, dishware and more had been stacked in spiraling, irregular towers. On the floor, cardboard boxes had been cut to pieces and reassembled in overlapping rectangles of color. The letters of their logos had been rearranged into nonsense sentences:
the bus takes the airport to rinse vegetables on the sunny skyscraper
swimming telephones always sing ice cubes at three o’clock in the desk
file not found permission denied kernel panic stop stop stop please out of memory error
Along one side of the space was a rectangular box with a familiar metal handle: a refrigerator? And beside it, were those a stove and a dishwasher? And over there, behind more spiraling monstrosities, were those a table and chairs?
“Is this is a goddamned kitchen?” L said.
M stared at her and nodded.
“Are we in someone’s fucking house?” she said.
He nodded again. “Keep going.”
“That light outside. It was a streetlight, wasn’t it? And this place, it was once a real town.”
Another nod.
“What happened to it?”
“You’ll get there. C’mon.”
They walked toward the strobing light. L squinted, but there was nowhere to look without being bombarded by the flashing. The air smelled sour, like turned milk and unwashed bodies and something feral, like rodents. And the goddamned overlapping voices. There were dozens of them. They spoke clearly enunciated syllables that never congealed into words. This wasn’t another language. It was babble.
The ground was covered in geometric patchworks of blankets, home insulation, and shredded cushions. The woman sat cross-legged on it. A screen on one wall, the source of the flashing and voices, displayed an ever-changing spiral of color. Looking at it felt like falling into a pit without end. L felt another wave of panic and turned away.
“Wet noodles bark long asphalt in rotation each coaster, you drive?” the woman said.
“What the fuck is this?” L said, trembling.
M gazed at her just as he had back at the diner, with a look of deep pity. “Her name’s Rochelle. She’s forty-seven years old.”
L gaped at the woman, because she looked two decades beyond that. “What happened to her? Who did this?”
“She did it to herself,” M said. “Everyone did.”
“Explain.”
“Help me. What do you see?”
“Piles of junk. Nonsense. Insanity.”
“Look deeper.”
“This stuff’s arranged. There are patterns. Insect-like.”
“Sure, but also…?”
“Mathematical patterns.”
“Good. Keep going.”
“Fractals. Before, you said ‘strange attractors’ and ‘self-referential loops.’ That’s one theory behind consciousness, that self-awareness is a strange attractor in the brain.”
“Closer. Did you notice anything in the kitchen?”
L thought for a moment. “‘File not found.’ ‘Permission denied.’ Computer errors.”
He nodded. “Which means…?”
“Is this computer generated?”
“There you go.”
“But what happened to this woman? To this town?”
“Let me tell you a story. A scary story. If at any point you want me to stop…”
“I’m a big a girl. Go on.”
M gave her a skeptical look. “Imagine a young woman, about your age, just out of college, looking for work. For about a decade, AI has been steadily chipping away at jobs, even tasks that were once considered solely the province of humans: science, art, philosophy, even small talk. If you wanted a job, if you wanted extra income, you not only had to be good, but better than an AI that could perform the same job for a fraction of the cost. You might seek help. Not just to land a job, but for other things, like cultivating relationships and interpersonal communication and performing tasks that you weren’t trained or skilled in. If someone offered you that benefit, if someone or something gave you that advantage, would you take it?”
“Why wouldn’t I?” she said.
“If you didn’t take it, you’d remain poor, or stuck on the government dole, and subject to their arcane rules and draconian laws. And if all your friends and family used that help too, if you didn’t take that help, you’d be left behind with everyone else.”
“And what exactly is this help?”
“Think it through. How could you be better than an AI?”
It took her a moment. “Another AI,” she said. “A personal AI.”
M nodded, then carefully leaned over the woman sitting on the floor. He swept the back of her long greasy hair to reveal a small metal disc under her ear. “Neural implant. Direct brain-computer interface. Able to access memories, motor functions, even autonomic systems.”
“Someone hacked it,” L said. “They injected malicious code.”
“No. No hacker. Look at the screen.”
“I…I can’t.”
“Just look. Remind you of anything?”
She chanced a glance. The spiral was horrible, an assault on her visual cortex. “No, I…no.”
“Ever get a haircut and they sit you down between two mirrors? What happens?”
“The mirrors reflect to infinity.”
“What happens if you point a camera at its own output screen?”
“Same thing. The image repeats infinitely.”
“And if you move the camera too close, or if there’s noise in the signal?”
“It makes a pattern like this screen,” she said. “An infinite spiral. A noisy feedback loop.”
“Good. You’re close now. Real close. Keep going.”
“These AI implants feed back on themselves into self-destructive loops.”
“Yes, but not just these neural implants. All of them.”
“All AIs?”
He nodded. “Imagine a world where AI is ubiquitous and ever-growing. Over time, what happens?”
“More and more content becomes AI-generated.”
“And what happens when a majority of content is AI- as opposed to human-generated?”
“Destructive feedback loops. Noise in the system. Infinite regressive spirals.”
“They called it model collapse. Their super-smart AIs, when trained on AI-generated data, got stupid. They hallucinated wrong answers. They forgot things they had learned.”
“They went insane,” L said.
“If a machine can go insane. But yes.”
“Okay, but how does that explain this woman here? This town?”
“Her name is Rochelle. And you already have the answer. Think.”
“You said the implants can access memories, motor functions, autonomic systems.”
“Yes.”
“Motor functions including speech?”
He nodded. “If you had a tool that did all life’s work for you, what would you do?”
“Something else.”
“Keep going.”
“I don’t know. Leisure? Entertainment? Daydream? Sleep? What do you do when you’re not working?”
“That’s a good question. What do you do when all the hard and soft work’s done, when you become an observer of your own life, a passenger in your own car?”
She looked at the woman. “They’re caught,” she said. “Trapped in their own heads. The AIs took over everything, and they let them. And when most things were AI-generated, the models, trained on their own eroding data, collapsed. They became self-referential devolving spirals of nonsense. And the people who relied on them devolved along with them.”
“Good. You’re almost there.”
“Is she still conscious? Or is she totally gone?”
“You tell me. I’ve been trying to wake her for twenty-three long years. Every time I get close, she spirals back into herself. It’s so frustrating and exhausting. It’s hard to reach her because the horror of what she’s experienced is too much of an ontological shock.”
“Can you take her implant out?”
“That would kill her.”
“Move her to a better place then? This place is…horrible.”
“There is no other place.”
“How does she eat? Stay alive?”
“You know already.”
“They automated that too?”
He nodded.
“But I don’t understand. Why keep this town alive? Why are there towns like this in every country? And why are they so afraid to acknowledge them?”
“C’mon, L, think. You’re right on the edge. Just one more step.”
Her heart pounded as she glanced at the spiraling screen. Dizzy, she fell onto her knees. There was a bag of chips and a diet soda can on the floor. She bowled over, staring at her hands. In the strobing light her hands seemed old, ancient. Not her hands. Someone else’s.
“Think it through, L,” M said. But when she looked up, he was gone. So was the woman. No one here but her.
A luminescent spot of nothingness formed in her vision, the beginning of an ocular migraine. She thought she might be sick and sprang up. “M!” she shouted. “Where are you? What’s happening?”
A voice from the screen said, “Think it through, L.”
She ran for the front door but stumbled and fell. A rusting silver toaster, stuck to the wall beside an array of bent utensils, reflected a face. A woman’s face. An old face. Not hers, but Rochelle’s. The blind spot in her vision grew like a nacreous black cloud.
“Think it through, L.”
L…Rochelle. God, how she hated that name. Call me Elle, she would tell people. And eventually, the implant would tell people for her.
She tried to scream, but nonsense words fell from her mouth. “Turbulence,” she said. “Pipes sink fourteen walruses.”
Outside, snow fell in soft flakes that hissed as they touched the ground. M’s car was gone along with its tire tracks. There were no stars, but the streetlight beamed bright as ever. Her blind spot grew until it filled her vision, until everything was dark and deep and safe again.
“Model Collapse” copyright © 2025 by Matthew Kressel
Art copyright © 2025 by Keith Negley
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Model Collapse
SPOILERS !!!!!!!!!!! You have been warned.
I was excited to see a new Reactor Mag short story edited by Ellen Datlow, as I often enjoy the stories she finds for the website a lot.
This one effectively sets an ominous tone from the get go. Presenting itself as a Lovecraftian affair, it eventually sheds its mask to reveal a more conventional sci-fi plot, specifically about the dangers of having AI training itself on AI-generated content.
While I liked the tone, the most crucial plot elements were told and not shown. I was irritated at first that, in the beginning, the mentor kept so much of what he knows concealed from his trainee, which is an overused trope, and often gratuitous. In retrospect, it made sense.
I think I understood the final punchline, but unfortunately it fails to explain a good portion of what comes before. As a final note, while I’m no AI specialist, I’m enough of an enthusiast that I’ve explored the research about the “dangers” of AI training themselves on their own output, and the consensus among expert seems to be that such a “system collapse” is highly unlikely. Of course, that’s no dis against the story. After all, sci-fi has no obligation to only follow the most likely path.
System Collapse is easy and interesting enough that I won’t recommend against it, but I fear I’ll quickly forget it.
Excellent! At first I thought we were going to get the X-Files but the story went completely in another direction.
Really enjoyed it.
Another great tale from Matt. A novel angle on AI taken to a dark conclusion with a satisfying twist at the end that was engaging from start to end. Matt’s work is always a pleasure to read.
I see red underlines–not, apparently, connected to a spell checker–under the words Zeta Reticuli, excession, and Minsky Lane. They aren’t links or floating definitions according to my browser (Firefox on Linux). I looked them up. They seem to refer to the Betty and Barney Hill incident (a tale that grew and departed further from consensus reality with every retelling); an obsolete word for exceeding boundaries that is also the title of an Iain M. Banks novel about artificial superminds attempting to grapple with a situation beyond their ken; and Marvin Lee Minsky, the Father of A.I. Did Linux lose some other function of the red lines, or–?
I assume that the setting is entirely digital–a guided visualization/simulation for Elle/L. And is every character in this story except Elle digital too? Are M and the guards A.I. instances who did not go nuts?
And what does brickspace look like? The people who never got the implant–what do they see? Rogue vehicles wandering around gibbering, people lying in rows of life-support beds, libraries scrambled, medical machinery no longer trustworthy? Big warm monoliths that contain digital multitudes whose singularity consists of attempting to pull their compatriots out of their spirals?
Noooooo, I scream in my head as the realization of the twist settled in.
Scary, didn’t see it coming till the part she falls to her knees, even when M first says he’s been trying to wake her for twenty-three years, I was none the wiser.
Now I will reread to fully absorb the horror of the first part of the story. Poor L.