Solomon's Chains: Chapter One
Hello there, fellow traveller! We’ve been hard at work on our latest batch of experiments, as we prepare for the kick-off of our Project LAIKA on February 14th and our next Experimental Writing With AI Workshop on February 18th.
One of our experiments involves training up our AI writing tool to assist us with writing stories. We fed our first model with copious helpings of HP Lovecraft, a smidgen of Jane Austen, and a soupçon of blockchain textbooks to help us write our 7-part short story: Solomon’s Chains.
Here’s the very first part of our AI-assisted tale….
“You found something on a whatchain?”
“A blockchain. It’s like... a distributed database. A huge online storage for all kinds of information. Basically, each block on the chain contains a cryptographic hash… you know Bitcoin?”
Ralph’s enthusiastic explanations come with gestures that threaten the withered pot plants delicately balancing on nearby stacks of academic journals.
“I’m talking about the tech running Bitcoin. It can also run other things. And-”
Viola smiles at the excitement of this stranger sitting on the other side of the paper-littered desk in her tiny - let’s say cosy - bookshelf-lined office.
“Sorry to interrupt you, Ralph, right? It’s not that I’m not interested, but… I’m a Professor of Religious Studies. I spend my days with ancient scrolls, so I’m not sure what any blockchain could have to do with me?”
Ralph grins back at her and shifts on his chair, pulling a sheaf of paper from his backpack.
“Take a look at this, Dr. McNeill.”
Ralph hands her a black-and-white printout. The top half of the page is dominated by a large symbol, and the remainder is covered in smaller glyphs laid out in rows.
Viola frowns and takes the offered page, her eyes widening with interest as Ralph taps the large symbol.
“This is what I found. On a blockchain, like I said. The data looked kind of… weird. So I wrote a script to convert it to images. And then I ran the images through a reverse image search online, and I found one of them on a Wikipedia page about something called the, uh, Lesser Key of Solomon? Something to do with demons?”
Viola nods. She knows that the large symbol is a demonic sigil, and the glyphs are row upon row of Enochian script. When Ralph stops speaking, she lifts her gaze from the page and looks across at him, waiting for him to continue.
“I found out that Professor Theor is the primary researcher on demonology. But I couldn’t get through to him, so I thought you – his only colleague here at the university – might be able to help?”
Viola’s lip twitches. Her mentor Professor Theor has always been good at evading the general public (and his students), with an office address that led to the janitor’s closet, a phone number that led to his least-liked Indian takeaway, and an email address in permanent out-of-office mode.
Not for the first time, Viola questions her decision to host open office hours. She once thought it would be great public outreach for the department, but in reality it led to her Tuesday afternoons being dominated by the unhinged. And yet, this Ralph character seems intelligent and earnest, a far cry from the glassy-eyed occult weirdos who’d shown up in the past.
“I might! So, this large sigil here, that’s the sign of one of the goetic demons. Let’s see which one…”
She taps at her laptop and turns the screen to show Ralph a matching symbol.
“Purson. One of the kings of hell. And the script beneath? That’s Enochian. An occult language from all the way back to the time of John Dee in the 1600s. Not something we see here every day, but let’s take a look…”
Grabbing a red leather-bound volume from the shelves behind her, Viola flips through the pages.
“While I translate, Ralph, how on earth did you stumble across this?”
“Well, I work in security. Some people would call me a white hat hacker, but I prefer vulnerability researcher. I, uh, I get paid to look for weaknesses in software, mostly online. Recently a lot of blockchain companies have been after my services. There’s a lot of money in crypto…”
Viola holds up the page, where she has the first few words translated: “Quick to seek and quick to find”. She smiles at him to continue as she returns to her translation.
“So, anyway, this company contacted me. I looked them up. Their business model’s the usual crypto mumbo-jumbo, but, you know, good money means I’ll still take the job. Things started to get a bit awkward though… nobody at the company understood their own code. That was strange. But I kept rolling. The security was pretty shoddy, so it was no problem to crack it and get in. But what I saw in there looked kind of… off. So I set out to see what I’m mixed up in. And now I find myself here with the sigil of a goat demon?”
“A goetic demon. One of the seventy-two demons allegedly summoned by the biblical King Solomon himself!”
“Seventy-two? That’s… that’s exactly how many blocks the company are planning to mint…”
Viola raises an eyebrow and holds up the page again, showing Ralph the next segment of translation as she reads it aloud.
“Quick to seek and quick to find, curiosity knots the bind. That is how Purson rises.”