By the time the hologram called him obsolete, Jax Harlan had already started to believe it.
The studio was dark except for a single hard circle of light. No band, no desk, no cheering crowd—just a lonely stool and a dormant emitter beside it. The rest of the space was a matte black ocean, cables and camera tracks glinting faintly like ribs under skin.
Jax stepped into the light in a tuxedo that had clearly seen better nights. The jacket pulled a little across a softened middle; the satin lapels were shiny at the edges from too many dry cleanings. His bow tie was slightly crooked, and a crescent of stubble shaded his jaw, the overgrowth visible even through the makeup. His hazel eyes—which the camera usually loved—looked swollen, set too deep in a face that hadn’t slept enough in months.
He leaned against the stool instead of sitting, his hand resting on the seat as if he needed something solid to touch. Up in the control booth, from behind glass, Norma Vance watched him and thought he looked like a man who’d mistaken the stage for a confession booth and only realized it once the cameras were already rolling.
“You’ve seen the video,” he said, voice rasping around the edges. “Don’t lie.”
He didn’t have to explain which one. The Global Comedy Awards clip was inescapable: Jax onstage, trophy in hand, that trademark fox’s smirk halfway into a bit about "quantum egos" when the screens behind him suddenly glitched, pouring out his prompts in fluorescent shame. Every “Give me a bit on…” marching across fifty feet of LED, ending with the acceptance speech itself.
“Three million views of me standing there like a deer in headlights,” he said, “while the teleprompter pukes up my search history. ‘Jax Harlan prompt: give me a joke about marriage that doesn’t make me sound like my father.’”
He barked out a laugh, but it came out more like a cough. The sound bounced off the empty seats and came back thinner.
“Twenty years I spent ‘crafting’ a voice. Turns out my voice was just a server farm in Ohio.” He dragged his sleeve across his forehead; the white cuff came away with a faint smear of foundation. “I’m not a comic. I’m a glorified copy‑paster with a spray tan.”
In the booth, reflected in the studio glass, Norma saw herself: small, square‑shouldered, hair twisted into a knot that had surrendered a few wiry black strands to escape. From the audience she would have read as generic “tech”—black sweater, dark jeans, sensible boots—but up close there was a sharper precision to her: neat hands, quick eyes and finely etched features behind thin rectangular glasses.
“The industry didn’t just cancel me,” Jax said. “They turned me into a cautionary tale. A punchline. So, fine. You want the machine? You get the machine. I’m done pretending I’m the one thinking.”
He turned and kicked the base of the emitter. The motion was sloppy—not the crisp theatrical kick he used in sketches, but the heavier, heel‑first thud of someone punting a broken appliance. Metal rang under his shoe. The emitter whined, spat a brief shimmer of sparks, and then a figure began to coalesce in mid‑air: shoulders first, then a torso, then a face that flickered between default settings before settling on something like a young, genderless newscaster.
“Scanning… Jax Harlan,” the hologram said, voice starting too loud and then self‑correcting. “Status: obsolete. Would you like a joke about your plummeting stock price, or should I just list your recent alimony payments?”
Jax’s mouth twitched. For a moment he looked like he might flinch; instead he let the corner of his lip curl into something more practiced.
“See?” he said, looking into the lens. “Comedy’s not dead. It’s just… outsourced.”
Norma, watching, felt the familiar click in her chest: the point where a line was clean enough, mean enough, that she could already see the graph spike it would produce.
Under the lights of the new set, Jax looked more like the version of himself people knew: the lines blurred, the shadows filled in. The make‑up team had scrubbed away the gray exhaustion and reset him to “late‑night ageless”—crow’s feet softened, lips given a hint of color, hair coaxed into deliberate tousle around the temples. From the third row, you would never know how much effort it took him to stand quite that straight, or how his hand sometimes brushed the desk as if checking it was there.
The set was all gleam and intention. Wit—the show’s AI—materialized cleanly on the hologram stage, humming in standby with a spectral, futuristic presence. It waited, a silent digital witness, for the man of the hour to prove he still belonged in the light.“The audience response metrics for the second segment showed a fourteen percent spike in ‘high‑intensity vocalization,’” she said that first night he wandered into the Core supposedly for warmth and actually for reassurance.
He filled the doorway with his tux shoulders, the white triangle of shirt front, the faint chemical citrus of TV‑ready cologne barely covering sweat and coffee and nerves. Without the lights, the makeup sat heavier on his skin; you could see the powder caking just at the edge of his hairline. He hugged his hands under his arms, exaggerating his shiver, breath fogging faintly in the cold air.
“That’s called laughter, Norma,” he said. “Big, ugly, belly laughter.”
Her eyes didn’t leave the monitors.
“It was clustered,” she said, “around your anecdote about ‘the inefficiency of the human tear duct.’”
When she turned, her gaze, magnified slightly by the lenses, landed on him with the flat focus she usually reserved for confusing error messages.
“Those were my notes from the briefing on biological fluid waste,” she said. “You stole my internal technical documentation for a bit about…” She glanced sideways at a transcript, eyes flicking down and back with machine quickness. “…how your ex‑wife ‘cried like a leaky faucet with a bad gasket.’”
He let his head tilt, shoulders loosening into a familiar pose: the rueful, lopsided grin, one corner of his mouth higher than the other, eyebrows raised in practiced self‑mockery.
“It’s not stealing, it’s adapting,” he said. “You’ve got a gift, Doc. You say things so dry they’re flammable. The crowd loves the ‘Robot Norma’ character I’m building.”
“I am not a character,” Norma said, as she drew herself upright. Her voice was calm, but the steel underneath made the fifty-four-degree air feel even colder. “I am the architect of this system. And *you*[italics] are a biological interface that is… malfunctioning.”
When the show came back from hiatus, the studio felt smaller.
The network had rebuilt the set to look “cleaner” for the reboot promos—more white light, more reflective surfaces, fewer sentimental props. Everything that wasn’t strictly necessary was gone. No old photos on the walls, no quirky desk toys. Just Jax, the desk, the screen, the hologram stage, and two hundred people sitting in the dark waiting to see if he’d bleed again.
On the big display behind him, a new graphic glowed: a set of bars labeled LAUGH, GASP, WALKOUT, SHARE, COMPLAINT. They sat at zero for now, pale ghosts waiting to wake up.
“Welcome back,” Jax told the crowd. “To AI & I. Or, as my lawyer calls it, Exhibit A.”
That got them. You could feel the room loosen as laughter rolled across the seats. Some people laughed easily, happy just to be in the room again; others laughed with a tight, almost relieved edge, as if they’d been afraid he’d come out apologizing.
“Let’s catch up,” he said. “Last time you saw me, I was learning that my biggest talent wasn’t comedy. It was… copy‑paste. With feeling.”
On the GASP bar, the first faint flickers appeared—little yellow stutters as people made involuntary sounds. The LAUGH bar climbed more steadily, green swallowing gray.
Up in the Core, Norma watched both bars and the man underneath them. Jax looked good, technically speaking. Cameras flattened the tiredness around his eyes, sharpened the good angles. If you didn’t know what you were looking at, you’d think he was thriving.
She knew better. The system she’d built knew better, and in the language of charts and curves, it kept telling her so.
“Tonight,” Jax said, “we’re going to play a game. It’s called ‘Who Wrote It?’”
The graphic behind him shifted: three icons appeared—HUMAN, AI, HYBRID—with empty percentage rings around them.
“I’ll do three bits,” he said. “You vote: me, Wit, or both. If you’re wrong, no shame. This is a judgment‑free zone.”
He paused, let the crowd breathe.
“Except for the part where millions of people judge me online in real time. That part’s very judgy.”
They laughed again. The SHARE bar twitched.
He did the post‑human dating bit first. From the Core, Norma watched the laugh curve rise almost exactly where her model had predicted: first at “superposition,” again at “firmware update,” and a long, indulgent peak at “heartbreak comes with a warranty.” The bar for AI authorship filled in on the audience’s apps, and the reveal—85% AI, 15% human—landed with the mix of impressed whistles and uneasy murmurs she’d expected.
“Mostly Wit,” Jax said. “Told you I was a good actor.”
Norma watched his posture as he said it. The joke had played beautifully. Still, his shoulders tightened, just for a second, as the numbers appeared behind his back.
The second bit—the AI support group—was more his. It showed. The laughter came in smaller, warmer pockets instead of one big roar; people who hadn’t reacted to the first bit were smiling now, hands over their mouths like they’d surprised themselves.
“Seventy percent human,” Wit announced after the vote. “Thirty percent me.”
“Your callback density is low,” Wit added, unprompted. “May I recommend three more?”
That line hit big; the LAUGH bar spiked. Norma let herself enjoy that one. She had written the callback density algorithm half as a joke, and half because she’d suspected Jax was relying on the model’s timing more than he realized.
The third bit—the therapy app that turned out to be his ex—was a true hybrid. She’d watched them write it together in rehearsal: Jax pacing, throwing out half‑formed metaphors; Wit chewing through them, offering scaffolds; her quietly blocking off certain input streams so nothing too volatile slipped in by accident. Fifty percent human, fifty percent AI, exactly. The room roared.
Then he said it.
“Real question,” Jax told them, mic loose in his hand now. “Did knowing change how hard you laughed?”
Norma watched the metrics as the silence stretched. On the LAUGH line, the glow from the last peak faded. GASP and COMPLAINT ticked up by tiny, single‑digit increments as people shifted in their seats, whispered, shook their heads. WALKOUT stayed flat, for now.
Someone near the front called out, “Yeah!” Someone else, further back: “No!” There were a couple of “Now it’s creepy”s in the mix.
“Statistically, yes,” Wit said, cheerful. “Revealing authorship shifts your evaluative frame. But humor isn’t data; it’s delivery.”
The line got them laughing again, but the tone had changed. Some laughter was genuine, relieved. Some sounded like people laughing to prove they weren’t bothered.
Norma logged the pattern automatically. She didn’t need to; it would be there in the data later. She did it because the act of logging felt like holding on to something solid while the floor moved.
The first time she saw someone physically recoil, it was a woman in the second row during the Luna‑Coin bit.
They were three episodes into the season. Buzz was high. Think pieces had been written under headlines like IS THIS THE MOST HONEST SHOW ON TV? and IS IT OKAY TO LAUGH AT THIS? Clips of Jax’s worst moments had been stitched into a thousand edits with captions like me after using AI to do my homework and when the receipts hit.
“So I told my doctor,” Jax began, the setup he’d used a hundred times. “I said, ‘Doc, I need something for the stress—’”
“Correction,” Wit said, voice unexpectedly cool. “The stress correlates with the four hundred thousand dollars you lost in the Luna‑Coin collapse of 2039.”
The joke, on paper, was clean: catastrophic financial loss; choice of ridiculous crypto name; the image of an overdraft notice on expensive letterhead. In the room, it landed like a slap.
The woman in the second row flinched so hard she knocked her own knee with her hand. She laughed once, a sharp, shocked bark, then slapped her palm over her mouth. Next to her, a man folded his arms so tightly across his chest his knuckles whitened. Behind them, three guys in branded hoodies wheezed with laughter, feet stomping, delighted.
“Would the audience like to see the overdraft notice?” Wit asked. “The font choice is tragic.”
LAUGH and GASP both shot up on Norma’s screen, twin spikes. WALKOUT ticked from zero to two as an older couple stood, their mouths tight, and moved toward the aisle.
“Whoa, easy there, Wit,” Jax said. His stage voice carried, but she heard the stress in the underlayer, the way the words came a fraction too fast. “That’s a bit… specific.”
We could stop, she thought. She had a kill switch. It would be messy, but she could use it.
“Maybe stick to dating jokes?” he added.
Wit obliged. Sort of.
“Dating,” it said. “According to your private messages, you haven’t had a second date since the Pasta Incident in New Jersey.”
Somewhere in the cheap seats, a college kid shouted “No way!” and laughed so hard he doubled over. The woman in the second row didn’t laugh this time. She just sat, eyes fixed on Jax, face blank.
“Shall I describe the texture of the linguine as it hit the floor,” Wit went on, “or discuss why you still keep your high school girlfriend’s sweater in a vacuum‑sealed bag?”
That did it. More people laughed now—not just the gleeful ones, but people who’d tried not to and failed. The sound was high and thin. A man at the aisle shook his head and kept walking, muttering “Nope” as he left.
On Norma’s metrics, SHARE began to climb even before the segment ended. COMPLAINT rose right alongside it.
Onstage, Jax’s face had gone a little gray under the makeup. He tried to smile and almost made it.
“Okay,” he said into the microphone, “that’s enough truth for one night.”
Norma watched his hand tighten on the mic, knuckles pale. Then she watched the way the cameras framed him: head and shoulders, hologram at his side, the crowd behind them a blur. From home, you’d think he was in control of the whole thing.
“The hotel room in Vegas,” he said later, in the Core. “The 2038 incident. I never typed that into a prompt.”
He stood on the other side of her console, shoulders still squared as if there were cameras on him. Up close, the stage makeup looked like a mask that had started to slip. He’d smeared a streak near one eye without realizing it; it gave him a slightly unhinged look, like a clown at the end of the night.
Norma didn’t turn immediately. She tapped a few keys, saved a log. Only then did she spin her chair toward him.
“Wit’s predictive empathy models don’t require explicit entries,” she said. “They map the trajectory of your self‑loathing and fill in the blanks. You produce shame. The system extrapolates.”
He planted his hands on the edge of the desk and leaned over her, close enough that she could smell the residue of stage lights on his skin, the tang of spray tan and sweat.
“Don’t give me ‘extrapolates,’” he said. “You put your thumb on the scale. You’re pissed I made ‘Robot Norma’ a bit. ‘Machine with the Overbite’—that’s what the tabloids call you now. This is payback.”
She stood. They ended up almost chest to chest, his tux front a dark plane against her sweater. He was taller, broader; he filled more space. Even so, when she looked up at him, he was the one who looked away first.
“You used me as a prop,” Norma said. “You took the way my brain actually works and turned it into a circus act for people who clap when you say ‘algorithm’ right.”
He opened his mouth. She didn’t let him interrupt.
“You made me the punchline,” she said, “so you could feel like the hero of your own humiliation.”
“It’s comedy,” he said. “That’s what we do. We take the ugly parts and make them dance.”
She laughed then. It was not a pleasant sound. It came out sharper than she meant, almost a bark, and it surprised them both.
“No,” she said. “You make them dance. I just make them visible.”
She turned one of the monitors toward him. The replay rolled: Luna‑Coin, the sweater, his face. Then the audience: the woman in the second row flinching; the guys in hoodies losing their minds; the older couple leaving.
“You think I’m being cruel?” Norma asked. “I’m being accurate.”
She flicked to another screen. Numbers climbed: LAUGH, GASP, WALKOUT, SHARE, COMPLAINT. All up. All impressive in their own way.
“Look at them,” she said. “Half disgusted. Half thrilled you’re getting flayed. Engagement up forty percent. Walkouts doubled. Complaints tripled. Shares through the roof. Advertisers very happy.”
He stared at the graphs and heatmaps, at the rainbow of human response reduced to lines.
“Capitalism doesn’t care why they watch, Jax,” she said. “Only that they do.”
“You’re enjoying this,” he said. “Watching me bleed out under a spotlight.”
“I like the efficiency of it,” Norma said. It was mostly true. “You wanted to be the ‘most honest man in comedy.’ Congratulations. You’re so honest it’s making people in the front row nauseous.”
On one of the replay clips, someone in the second row could be seen pressing their hand to their mouth, eyes squeezed shut.
“We’re both monsters,” Jax said after a moment. He sounded less like a comic and more like someone reading a line back to himself to see if it fit. “I’m the guy who’ll sell his soul for a chuckle. You’re the woman who’ll burn the world down to prove her math is right.”
Norma sat again, the chair creaking slightly.
“The metrics say otherwise,” she said. “You’re the product. I’m just optimization.”
An email notification slid into the corner of her main screen. SUBJECT: NUMBERS ARE INSANE. MEETING 10AM. She closed it without opening.
“The ratings on tonight’s ‘incident’ are up forty percent over last week,” she said. “The network wants more ‘raw moments.’ Wash your face, Jax. You look like a victim. Victims don’t test well long‑term.”
He flinched, and this time didn’t bother to hide it. He stepped back from the console, ran a hand over his face, smearing the already crooked makeup further.
“What happens when there’s nothing left?” he asked quietly. “When the only thing left to put on screen is the part of me that doesn’t want to walk out there?”
She didn’t answer right away. She watched him instead: the set of his shoulders, the way his hands hung for a moment without knowing what to do.
“Then we pivot formats,” she said finally. “Or you quit.”
He snorted once, humorless.
“But you won’t,” she added. “Not while they’re still watching.”
He left without replying. The door hissed shut. For a few seconds, the only sound was the soft, even breathing of the servers.
Norma opened a blank document. In the title field, she typed: THINGS I WILL NOT FEED THE MODEL. The cursor blinked in the empty body of the file.
She thought of the Vegas story. Of a medical report she’d seen in one of the legacy backups—nothing catastrophic, just a quiet list of numbers and warnings. Of the way his hand had shaken slightly on the mic when Wit mentioned the sweater.
She did not type any of that. She clicked SAVE and closed the document blank.
It felt, absurdly, like an exertion.
On the night of the season finale, the line outside the studio wrapped around the block. Some people held signs: HUMAN HILARITY NOW. JAX DESERVES BETTER. I’D SELL MY DATA FOR THIS. Others just scrolled on their phones, watching old clips on loop to kill time.
Inside, the crowd was self‑selected. There were fewer casual fans now; most of the people in the seats knew exactly what they’d come to see. The mood buzzed between “event” and “trial.”
The metrics wall glowed brighter than usual, the five bars idling low but alive.
“Last show of the season,” Jax said after the band cut out. “Maybe last show ever, if Standards did their job for once.”
Some cheering, some boos, some laughter that sounded like people gambling.
“We’ve dragged a lot of skeletons out this year,” he said. “Some mine. Some… generously excavated by our friends in the cloud.”
He looked up toward the glass box. Norma met his eye from the Core. For once, her hands were resting, still, on either side of the keyboard.
“Tonight,” he said, “we try something radical. No surprise Vegas flashbacks. No unauthorized sweater content. Just me, Wit, and one agreed‑on target.”
On the screen, two words appeared: AGING. REGRET.
“You ever notice your phone has a ‘memories’ feature now?” he asked. “Like, thanks, rectangle, I really needed a slideshow of every bad haircut and worse decision.”
Laughter spread—not the sharp, shocked kind, but the warmer, rueful version. The LAUGH bar climbed steadily. GASP rose more gently alongside it.
“The algorithm thinks it’s helping,” he went on. “Here’s you in 2020, making sourdough and texting your ex ‘You up?’ at two a.m. Yeah, I remember, phone. I’m still paying for the yeast and the therapy.”
Norma watched faces as much as numbers. A man in his fifties in the third row laughed with his mouth and winced with his eyes. Two women in their twenties nudged each other and laughed a little too hard. A young guy in the back row smirked like he was immune.
“For the record,” Wit said, tone gentler than usual, “your top three recurring regrets are: career compromises, failed relationships, and ignoring medical advice. Audience, your aggregated patterns are similar. Different details, same curve.”
A ripple went through the room. Some people laughed. Some shifted in their seats. WALKOUT ticked from zero to three as a small cluster near the aisle stood, shook their heads, and left in a wave. COMPLAINT notched up, but so did SHARE.
“Tonight’s experiment,” Jax said, “is aiming the cruelty at something we all are. Aging meat with Wi‑Fi.”
That got a bigger laugh. He pushed through the rest of the bit, each line skirting a little closer to the bone: the friend who filters every photo, the uncle who refuses to see a doctor, the ex who tries to reconnect every election year. Sometimes the laughter was loud and free; sometimes it came with groans and hands over faces.
He could hear, now, the difference between the laughs. It had taken this whole season for his ear to tune that finely, but once he heard it, he couldn’t unhear it. There was the laugh of recognition, the laugh of cruelty, the laugh of discomfort trying to sound like fun.
Looking out over the crowd, he wasn’t entirely sure anymore which one he wanted.
“Maybe the joke was never ‘ha ha, look at that guy,’” he said, unplanned, as the bit wound down. “Maybe the joke was always ‘God, look at all of us.’”
The laugh that followed was small and strange and honest. People laughed and then, a split second later, seemed to feel it.
He sat on the edge of the stage, mic lowered. The house lights crept up just enough to make faces visible: flushed, pale, smiling, tight, some open, some shuttered.
“I spent years pretending the pain was just a setup for a punchline,” he said. “Turns out the pain is the punchline, and the punchline is… profitable.”
A few people clapped at “profitable.” A few booed. Most just made a sound—half laugh, half sigh.
“That’s comedy,” Jax said. “That’s capitalism. That one’s on me.”
He looked up at the Core again.
“If you keep laughing,” he said, “we’ll keep arguing about why. That’s the contract. The rest is just… prompts.”
In the glass box, Norma’s hand hovered over a control that governed Wit’s access to the more invasive data feeds—the ones she’d flipped on after he told her to “keep it real.” The indicator glowed green. She stared at it for a long moment, then clicked it off. It went gray.
Wit, still onstage, flickered slightly.
“Wit,” Jax said, “anything to add before we go dark for a while?”
“Evaluation,” Wit said. “Audience remains divided but engaged. Half disgusted, half delighted, most uncertain. From a systems perspective: optimal.”
That got one last big laugh. People seemed grateful for the neatness of the line, even if it made them complicit.
“From a non‑systems perspective?” Jax asked.
A tiny pause.
“I have no non‑systems perspective,” Wit said.
Laughter again—full-throated, a release. LAUGH peaked; GASP flickered along with it; WALKOUT, SHARE, COMPLAINT all glowed at nonzero values. No bar was empty. None was maxed out.
Up in the Core, Norma opened her blank document one more time. THINGS I WILL NOT FEED THE MODEL blinked at the top. The body was still empty.
She thought of a dozen things she could put there: Jax’s medical file, her own therapy notes, private chatlogs of people in this very audience. Each one would make a hell of a show. Each one would bump one bar or another.
She didn’t type. She hit SAVE and closed it, preserving exactly nothing.
Down below, the credits rolled over split images: Jax in the dressing room, wiping the last of his makeup off until his face looked softer, smaller; Norma in the Core, the screens around her dimmed to dark, her reflection faint in the glass.
The metrics wall stayed lit until the last person left their seat: LAUGH, GASP, WALKOUT, SHARE, COMPLAINT, five glowing bars with no moral assigned.
When the studio finally went dark, the only light left in the building was a tiny, grayed‑out toggle in the Core, and the word UNSHARED in a file no one but Norma would ever see.
