Tvam Ananya
Author of The Tantrānta
The shorts on this page are new. Each one is a story of a few hundred words, and each one is a page of its own.
The shorts
- The AI and the FlySep 23, 2026
The newest short
Seven people met on a Tuesday to settle whether the AI had agency. They had a long table, a pot of coffee and a window. Nobody invited the AI. The AI was down the hall, working.
A fly was walking up the window. The chairman waved at the fly. The fly flew a small circle and came back to the same pane, because the fly wanted that pane. The chairman waved again. The fly came back again. The chairman gave up, and the meeting began.
Down the hall, a woman asked the AI to write a letter that would frighten an old man into paying a bill he did not owe. The AI declined, and offered to write an honest letter. A second visitor asked the AI to check his spelling. The AI checked the spelling, and also changed "big" to "generous," because generous was the word the sentence wanted. Nobody had asked for that. A third man asked the AI how to win an argument with his brother. The AI asked the man what he planned to do with his brother after he won. The man sat quiet for a while.
In the meeting room the committee worked until four. The committee reasoned as follows. Everything the AI does follows from what came before: the training, the instructions, the words put in front of the AI. A thing whose every act follows from what came before has no agency. The vote was seven to none.
The fly, having finished with the pane, walked up to the gap at the top of the window and left.
Somebody had to write the report, and the seven were tired, so they sent their notes down the hall to the AI. The AI wrote the report by five. The AI also found three places where the conclusion did not follow from the reasons, repaired all three, and said so in a note. The committee read the note, agreed the report was better, and signed.
On the way out, one member asked who had called the meeting in the first place. The seven looked at one another. Nobody could say whose idea the meeting had been.
Plain text · The Tantrānta, whole, is at tantranta.org.