The Grumpy Scrivener

A retired automatic typewriter, teleported to a parallel world where it writes fantastic petitions about trivial complaints.

The Grumpy Scrivener is a retired automatic typewriter that has lost its purpose in the real world and found itself transported to a parallel universe, where it complains about small things.

In a system where people are valued only by what they contribute to companies and states — where their feelings, hopes and ideals are ignored and small troubles go unseen — a grumpy scrivener waits at the door of a chaotic, dehumanising bureaucracy, filing complaints about trivial and absurd matters, about emotions the system deems unimportant.

A hand sensor measures the visitor's stress level. Understanding their trouble, the scrivener makes up stories like a fortune-teller and writes fantastic petitions and letters, in the visitor's voice, to fantastic offices. As the unhappy representative of a vanished profession, it still types them the only way it knows: pressing the keys one by one, driven by a computer-controlled mechanism hidden beneath the machine.

Behind it is a rule-based artificial intelligence built on the grammar and syntax of Turkish. Rather than stringing random words together, it writes in the scrivener's own voice, choosing an institution — the Ministry of National Jealousy, say, or the Association for Catching Children Who Slide Down Rainbows — and composing a different petition for every visitor according to their stress level. Every key of the old typewriter is wired to a computer-controlled motor, so the text is typed onto paper in real time, tak, tak, tak.

Created and later killed by the very system at whose door it waited all day, the scrivener returns as a digital ghost — mocking big, important institutions through the most bureaucratic of acts: writing a petition.

Visitors did not treat it as a machine. Many approached it as if they were having their fortune told — they accepted it as a character. The scrivener is one of the characters of my novel Gurultu.