"Quite Simply, the World Is Not As You Suppose. It Never Was."

LET'S get a jump on Halloween with a story where high tech collides with horror inside a . . .

"Model Collapse."

By Matthew Kressel (ISFDb HERE; homepage HERE).

First appearance: Reactor Magazine, October 1, 2025.

Illustrated by Keith Negley.

Short story (17 pages as a PDF).

Online at Reactor Magazine (HERE).

(Parental caution: Very strong language.)

   "A government agent and his mentee are sent into a remote town on a mysterious and dangerous project."

"KNOW THYSELF." So says the inscription on that Greek temple, but for one person in our story such knowledge will reveal a terrible truth . . .

Main characters:

~ L ("was young and ambitious, not tainted by decades of whatever lurked out in the dark. One day soon she’d take his place"), 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"), the woman guard ("in a black uniform stepped out from the guard booth. Her uniform was devoid of markings or insignia"), and Rochelle ("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").

References:

- "the neurodivergent":

  "Neurodivergent is a nonmedical term that describes people whose brains develop or work differently for some reason. This means the person has different strengths and struggles from people whose brains develop or work more typically. While some people who are neurodivergent have medical conditions, it also happens to people where a medical condition or diagnosis hasn’t been identified." (Cleveland Clinic HERE).

- "Greys from Zeta Reticuli":

  "The bestseller The Interrupted Journey (1966) about Barney and Betty Hill reproduced a 'star map' drawn by Betty, allegedly based on one she saw aboard an alien spaceship. Based on the map, a fan of the book named Marjorie Fish speculated that the aliens might originate from Zeta Reticuli. By 1974, the Hill case was referred to as the Zeta Reticuli incident.

  "In the episode entitled 'Encyclopaedia Galactica' (S1 E12) of the limited series Cosmos (1980), Carl Sagan demonstrated that the Hill map bore no resemblance to the real-life map." (Wikipedia HERE and HERE).

- "excession":

  "An act or state of exceeding something; excess." (Wiktionary HERE).

- "follow Polaris"; "the guide star":

  "The position of the star lies less than 1° away from the north celestial pole, making it the current northern pole star. The stable position of the star in the Northern Sky makes it useful for navigation." (Wikipedia HERE).

- "a trompe-l’oeil":

  "Trompe-l'œil (French for 'deceive the eye') is an artistic term for the highly realistic optical illusion of three-dimensional space and objects on a two-dimensional surface. Trompe-l'œil, which is most often associated with painting, tricks the viewer into perceiving painted objects or spaces as real. Forced perspective is a related illusion in architecture, and Op art a modern style mostly dealing with geometric patterns." (Wikipedia HERE).

- "spiraling fractal piles":

  "The term 'fractal' was coined by the mathematician Benoît Mandelbrot in 1975. Mandelbrot based it on the Latin frāctus, meaning 'broken' or 'fractured,' and used it to extend the concept of theoretical fractional dimensions to geometric patterns in nature." (Wikipedia HERE.)

- "Strange attractors":

  "An attractor is called strange if it has a fractal structure, that is if it has non-integer Hausdorff dimension. This is often the case when the dynamics on it are chaotic, but strange nonchaotic attractors also exist." (Wikipedia HERE).

- "Model collapse":

  "Model collapse is a phenomenon where machine learning models gradually degrade due to errors coming from uncurated training on the outputs of another model, such as prior versions of itself." (Wikipedia HERE).

- "too much of an ontological shock":

  "Ontology is the study of being. It is the branch of philosophy that investigates the nature of existence, the features all entities have in common, and how they are divided into basic categories of being. It aims to discover the foundational building blocks of the world and characterize reality as a whole in its most general aspects." (Wikipedia HERE).

Resources:

- When it comes down to how artificial intelligence (AI) should be employed, there seem to be some dark aspects to the technology, especially with its effects on children; see "Transcript: U.S. Senate Hearing on ‘Examining the Harm of AI Chatbots'" (Tech Policy HERE).

- We've lost track of how many times we've encountered AI and its physical embodiment in the real world, i.e., robots, which are usually presented in a negative light. As examples, you might have missed Dan Morgan's "Insecurity Risk" (HERE), Harry Harrison's "The Velvet Glove" (HERE), Allen Kim Lang's "I, Gardener" (HERE), Francis Flagg's "The Mentanicals" (HERE), and Ben Singer's "REALIZATION" (HERE).

The bottom line:

Unless otherwise noted, all bibliographical data are derived from The FictionMags Index created by William G. Contento & edited by Phil Stephensen-Payne.

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