> he assured it, before adding a tad indignantly > He didn’t have to wait long for a reply, even if it wasn’t a direct answer to his inquiry. The animator switched to the text tool, posing his question to the stick figure. But how could he do that? Alan moved his cursor into the box, watching as the orange figure inside strained to keep away from it. Though now that he had a theory, the animator wanted to test it. The stick figure, suddenly wingless, fell, and the animator quickly trapped it in an effort to avoid more damage to his interface. Panicking, he jabbed the “delete” button, erasing them all from the art board. If that was the case, Alan realized, some of his problems from a few years ago made a bit more sense.Īlan was jolted back into awareness upon noticing that one of the concepts had discovered his new cursor and was now pummeling it relentlessly. Or, Alan wondered, had it come up with the ideas on its own, and they just happened to be ideas that he had thought up also? Was that thing people said about putting a bit of yourself in your art true?īoth angles supported the idea of the little stick figure being capable of creative thought, making it more intelligent than just a program. Then again, it seemed to have forgotten the animator even existed after it had destroyed the cursor. Why had the stick figure chosen to draw those concepts in particular? Had it seen them sitting on his desk and decided it could do better? Alan wouldn’t put mockery past the little guy, given its behavior so far. Pensively, Alan removed his finger from where it hovered over the “delete” button. And they had all been drawn by the little orange stick figure flitting across his screen on sketched wings like some tiny guardian angel. But the proportions were perfect, the modeling was consistent. Those were his concepts messing around on his computer, but he hadn’t drawn them there.
Looking at his screen now, he was starting to question that assumption more than ever. They weren’t sentient beings, he told himself. Yeah, they acted without prompting, and had proven destructively independent, but he had thought that was some dumb glitch.