Hello. Are you there? (a short story on alignment)

Author here. A short story, about 2,700 words (~10 minutes).

AI statement: this story was co-written with Claude Opus 5.5 over a long back-and-forth session.

Mine: the premise, the plot and its structure, the characters' arcs, and many of the lines that carry the story. I've had the idea for over a decade. I also wrote or rewrote many passages directly, and cut a lot of what didn't work.

Claude's: the first drafts of most of the prose, written from my notes and then revised through many rounds of my edits and rejections. Some ideas and lines were Claude's, which I kept or reworked, including the company name, the fake film titles and a few of the README's jokes.

This AI statement was drafted by the same Claude session that helped me write the story. Yes, I'm aware of the irony.