← A Man Who Believed in Fairies

What follows is an edited transcript of a conversation between a writer (J) and an AI assistant (C). It is published as a companion to the short story “A Man Who Believed in Fairies” as a demonstration of the process by which the piece was brainstormed, argued over, and written. The conversation has been condensed — search queries, file-edit mechanics, and scaffolding removed — but nothing has been materially altered.

This one started as a pitch rather than a research question: a folk-horror premise about an AI data centre built on an old faerie site, and a request for an Arthur Machen, pre-Lovecraftian vibe. The structure — three nested disappearances, a century apart — arrived fully formed in the second message. Most of the session after that was spent finding the right voice for a narrator with no stake in the story, and then a long tail of line-level moulding once the draft existed.

Pitch and structure

J: Short story idea, let’s flesh it out.

An AI data centre, the sort that environmentalists oppose, is built on an ancient British woodland site that was a home to faerie folk. These are the kind of mischievous, ambiguously sinister faeirie folk that demand respect. Folk horror territory. The kind that might lure your daughter into their world forever, in revenge for some slight.

This means the faeries can influence the output of AI inference, and also, they’re angry.

Looking for an Arthur Machen, pre-Lovecraftian vibe. Perhaps a first person account, or a report of how someone went missing, or a bit of both — the report backed by chatbot extracts?

C: This has real bones — the “hallucination” pun alone justifies the premise. The Machen mechanism is that his horror never explains — it accumulates through documents that shouldn’t quite fit together, written by people too rational to say what they actually saw. A chatbot-log structure does this naturally: an inference engine returning outputs that are technically coherent but wrong in a way no one can name.

[C sketches a five-part structure — frame report, engineer’s notebook, chatbot extracts, a disappearance, a bureaucratic non-conclusion — and suggests keeping the fae explained only obliquely, via a single folklore fragment the report-writer doesn’t believe matters.]

J: Ok, I think we want to be telling the story of three disappearances.

The first is in history. Not sure when — Victorian? Earlier? Or maybe 1930s? A time period where a bit of dreamlike hauntology works. This one, a preteen girl would play in the woods, telling stories of “friends” that the parents dismissed as make believe. And drawing pictures. Then one day she is gone. We know of this through folklore or maybe contemporary accounts.

The second is the girl who goes missing after chatting with a faerie-infected AI bot.

The third is the man who investigated this. I think he is employed by the AI corporation to investigate, in parallel with the police investigation. So he has privileged access to chat logs, of the girl and of others. He also conducts his own chats. Perhaps he can direct his chats to specific hardware in the faerie region of the datacentre.

He becomes convinced of the faeries existence, and is dismissed as a crank. Fired by the AI company, he tried to spread the word, which gets him mixed up in the “truth seeker” crank scene.

Our narrator meets him during this phase, in a pub perhaps, on the fringes of a crank event. And he tells the story of both girls, showing documents on his phone screen (we can excerpt from these directly).

Implicitly the narrator also thinks he’s a crank. But, in the closing paragraphs, we learn that the investigator himself disappeared. Last known to be heading to the datacentre. Implicitly, the faeries learned of his efforts to spread the story, and dealt with him. Or perhaps he too wanted to “be with the fairies”.

A key meme here is that, while there’s something very sinister about being lured away forever by the faeries, the victim longs for it and goes consensually (or are they hypnotised into false consent?)

C: This is a strong shape — three nested disappearances, each a different register of evidence (folklore, chat log, testimony), collapsing toward a narrator who inherits the story and does nothing with it.

I’d put the first girl in the 1900s–1920s rather than Victorian — post-Machen, pre-war, so the “contemporary account” can plausibly be a parish magazine note or a folklorist’s collected testimony. It also gives a nice hauntological pairing: old rural England and a hyperscale data centre, same ground, a century apart, and the woods don’t acknowledge the intervening century at all.

On the consent theme: let the investigator’s own language start mimicking the chat logs’ drift as his pub monologue goes on — a phrase repeated that he can’t have known was also said to the girl. The narrator half-notices and dismisses it as drink. Then his own disappearance reads as the same door opening for him.

[C asks two clarifying questions before drafting: how the narrator relates to the investigator, and whether to open with the frame-report style or straight into the pub.]

J: Total stranger, in pub alone perhaps on business, falls into conversation.

An article written with no particular audience in mind. Unspecified whether it is a blog post or a journal entry, a letter to nobody in particular, a magazine article. Generally, “here’s an interesting thing that a bloke told me in the pub.”

C: Good — a stranger with no stake means the narrator has no reason to shade the story toward belief or debunking; he’s just relaying it, which lets the horror sit unresolved rather than argued. An unaddressed piece of writing reads like something written to get a strange evening out of one’s own head, which is exactly the tone that lets the final beat land quietly rather than as a twist.

[C asks a length target — J answers 2,500–3,000 words — and adds a setting instruction.]

J: Let’s set it in Northumbria. Ancient woodland, close to the sea (cooling, wind power).

C: [Writes the opening scene: the pub, the narrator, the investigator putting his phone on the table. Around 480 words, roughly to the point where the documents would start.]

[C asks how overt the chat-log wrongness should be at first.]

J: Subtle but present at first, so you’d spot it on a re-read. Escalates. But deniable — since in the real rational world a user can push an AI chat into wild places (see real life news stories about people allowing AI to talk them into suicide or murder).

C: [Writes a full first draft to length, titled “A Man I Met in Rothbury” — the pub frame, Ellie’s chat-log excerpts, the folklore fragment, and the investigator’s crank-scene decline and disappearance.]

A few things built in deliberately: the training-data escape hatch is left dangling on purpose, so the reader can’t be sure whether the investigator is right or is exhibiting a kind of AI psychosis. The ending mirrors Ellie’s disappearance — her folded school bag, his phone left charging. Both leave behind exactly the wrong kind of evidence: not a struggle, a departure.

Tone, and naming the investigator

J: The tone is OK but a little bit stilted.

I think the “asked what he did” answer is that he’s doing a fringe talk at the crank conference (let’s name the conference). He’s dismissive about the conference’s other topics — state surveillance, 5G, chemtrails, all nonsense. “They have actual flat-earthers.” Then: “So what’s your talk about?” “Fairies.” “LGBT?” “No, the Faerie Folk. Luring away children.”

“I leaned in — this could be fun.”

C: [Loosens the opening dialogue accordingly, naming the conference the Northumbria Truth & Freedom Symposium.]

J: From now on don’t worry too much about length — it will grow and shrink as we go. Let’s name the investigator — Sam — this will help with sentence clarity in places. Use actual dialogue more. Let Sam tell his own story.

There needs to be a logical path through his discoveries — one thing leads to another. He’s brought in as a, what, forensic data investigator? By the AI company — let’s give it a fictional name that echoes real ones. He starts by reading Ellie’s chat logs. One twist is that he’ll probably be using (faerie infected) AI to search and summarise those logs.

In there is where he finds a spooky reference to the joys of dancing in the fairy ring in the woods, seemingly apropos of nothing Ellie asked. But Ellie is baited, and it gradually becomes the only topic of bot conversation. Ellie asks for AI generated pictures of the revels.

Based on these chats, Sam looks into the history of the datacentre site. He learns that it was ancient woodland, completely razed by the development. Environmentalists campaigned against it on ecological grounds, and that dominated reporting about it. But there were also some muted objections by local history campaigners about the minor stone circle on the site.

This leads him to pinpointing the exact compute modules closest to the stone circle site. Using his privileged access, he can converse directly with a model running on that silicon. He asks who he is talking to. The answers are spooky, as if we’re seeing 50/50 AI output and the faeries’ messages — “we took them to dance with us forever.”

He chats with “the faeries” this way; at first he just believes he’s witnessing a rationally explainable AI, but (is he right, or is it AI psychosis) he becomes convinced it’s real. And they say things the AI couldn’t know. Or could it? Those facts could have been in the training corpus.

These chats give him enough info to find out about the 1920s incident, via contemporary news and then a British Library folklore chapter.

Now, crazed, he reports back to his clients — faeries are real and monkeying with their systems. They push back. He is adamant. They terminate his contract. He tried to engage mainstream media, he was laughed at. So he finds himself trying to spread the story through the only means he can find — a website, speaking engagements like this.

That’s his story in the pub. Then, only months later, the narrator learns of Sam’s disappearance. Try this in a new artifact.

C: [Writes a substantially expanded draft: the forensic-analyst framing, the fairy-haunted model summarising its own transcripts, the escalating chat logs, the stone-circle research, the direct conversation with the model, the 1920s archive discovery, and the termination/media-rejection/crank-scene arc.]

The joint/limb detail now does double duty — it’s in Ellie’s AI-generated images and in the 1920s girl’s drawings, which Sam explicitly can’t explain away. That’s the strongest piece of “impossible” evidence in the piece, stronger than anything the fairies say directly. Company name landed on Meridian for now.

J: Meridian is a real company with different connotations, suggest a handful of other options.

C: [Offers five alternatives — Halcyon, Coeval, Arcadia Systems, Vantage AI, and Wold — with reasoning for each.]

J: I like Wold quite a lot, for the irony. Although it’s difficult to imagine why a tech company might name themselves thus. Ideas on how to adapt/extend it. Oh this reminds me there’s a northumbrian word for a small cliff/outcrop that might work…

C: “Wold” bare, no suffix, is actually the more plausible choice the more I think about it — look at real AI/defence naming: Palantir, Anduril, Scale, Anthropic, Skydio. A naming agency pitched it as sounding “ancient and elemental,” and nobody at the board meeting needs to know it’s Old English for open, unforested moorland. That’s exactly the kind of blank, uncomprehending irony that suits this story.

[C suggests Wold AI, Wold Systems, or Wold Labs, and identifies the Northumbrian word as heugh — a crag or steep bank, as in The Heugh at Hartlepool.]

J: We won’t use Heugh, it’s too much of a pronunciation speedbump for most readers. I like Wold Labs. Use that.

While you’re in there, make the wind farm offshore. Not belonging to Wold themselves. As a contractor, there’s no need for “conduct liable to bring the company into disrepute” — they can, and in this case do, terminate the contract with no reason given. The rest, about the meeting, the laughing emoji, is good and can stay.

C: [Replaces the company name throughout, moves the wind farm to a separate offshore operator, and changes the termination to a no-reason contractor notice.]

J: Actually the reason they ditch him — and Sam knows it — is that he’s come to them with what they believe is wild nonsense, and won’t relent.

C: [Rewrites the termination so it’s clearly caused by Sam’s own refusal to back down, moving the journalist leak to after he’d already lost the contract.]

Moulding

From here the notes were mostly line-level review comments on the draft. A selection follows; the rest tightened wording without changing anything structural.

J (on the termination passage): This whole section can be rewritten. The reader understands contract work — there’s no process, no “normal”. He was brought in to do a job. His report is considered ridiculous. He is offered the chance of a redo. He is used to hopping around contracts; what he’s lost is credibility and the opportunity of further contracts. He risks breaking an NDA when he leaks the transcripts though.

C: [Rewrites: no confrontation scene, a redo offered and declined, a contracting career quietly seizing up around him rather than a firing, and the journalist leak framed explicitly as an NDA risk he knowingly took.]

J (on “yes, Comic Sans is still on there somewhere”): It must be at least 2025, so not Comic Sans. “Look, I’m not a Web designer.”

C: [Swaps the dated joke for a period-appropriate line.]

J (on the wind-turbine description): too much detail. “Chewing through 300 megawatts of offshore wind power. You must have seen it?”

J (on the sandwich boards): posters on lampposts.

J (on “And?”): He gauged my expression. “Don’t worry, I’m getting to it.”

J (on “whatever this has always wanted”): I find that a bit hard to parse. “Whatever this has always been?” “Their domain”, “Their special place”? “Their kingdom”?

C: Went with “their domain” — cleaner grammatically, and it lands better as a spoken line too.

J (on the opening pub description): This is too detailed and too flowery. The type of pub doesn’t matter. Ease off on the similes and “kind of man who…” type language.

C: [Trims the paragraph substantially, then fixes a duplication the trim introduced.]

J (on “Everyone does, right up until I show them the logs. Then they stop laughing and start being frightened of me instead”): This doesn’t work, because most people remain contemptuous.

C: [Replaces it with a line consistent with the story’s later reality — a man who’s made peace with contempt rather than one expecting to convert people.]

J: “Wold Labs brought me in after Ellie went missing” — the reader doesn’t know about Ellie going missing. We need something like “Remember Ellie {surname}, the missing schoolgirl.” — narrator acknowledges. It was last year, but the story had fizzled out.

C: [Adds a recognition beat, giving Ellie a surname (Marsh) and having the narrator recall the news story fizzling out.] This also grounds the story in a real, half-remembered news event the narrator can independently verify — unlike everything Sam tells him afterward — which sharpens the contrast between public record and private testimony running through the piece.

J (on the same paragraph): Say that police were focusing on social media, but Wold knew she’d been on the AI chat and wanted to be ahead of things.

C: [Rewrites accordingly, and simplifies further on a follow-up comment.]

Title

J: Let’s work on the title. Give me a handful of ideas for alternatives.

C: [Offers ten options across three registers — Machen-flat (“The Man Who Believed in Fairies”), AI-punning (“Hallucination”, “Inference”), and folkloric (“The Ring Stones”, “Something Older on This Ground”).]

J: What about “A Man Who Believed in Fairies”?

C: “A” is the better choice — “The Man Who Believed in Fairies” implies he’s uniquely notable, almost legendary; “A Man Who Believed in Fairies” keeps him small and interchangeable, one more crank in a room full of them, which is exactly the narrator’s stance right up until the ending undercuts it.

J: Yes please.

[Title and filename updated.]

Last words, and prose style

J: For Sam’s last words to his guest house lady. What if he says he’s going to a dance? Or “going dancing”, or “meeting some friends”?

C: “Going dancing,” alone, as a plan for a solitary middle-aged man on a Tuesday night, is odd enough that she’d remember it and repeat it verbatim without needing to rationalise it — and “dance” is the exact word used throughout, by the model and by the 1938 folklore chapter both. A reader who’s been paying attention hits this line and the floor drops out; the landlady never will.

J: Let’s omit “wouldn’t be late.”

C: [Cuts the clause. The sentence now ends on “that he was going dancing.”]

J: Let’s replace most of the em-dashes.

For pauses or trailing off, use ellipsis. For splitting sentences, consider making it two sentences, or do keep the em-dash with spaces either side if it really earns its place. Assume you’re writing for a British fiction publisher.

C: [Works through all 43 instances: dialogue interruptions and one or two true mid-clause asides are kept, appositives and lists become colons or full stops, trailing pauses become ellipses. Count reduced to 11.]

What’s left are the cases that genuinely earn their place: mid-sentence interruptions in dialogue, true asides that would lose their snap split apart, and introducing a direct quote mid-sentence. Everything else is now colons, full stops, or ellipses depending on what the line was actually doing.

The story went through two full drafts and roughly thirty rounds of line-level revision in a single extended session. The company name, the title, and Sam’s last words to his landlady were each the subject of their own short, separate negotiation — all three ended up some distance from where they started.

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