Deepseek Short Story

## The Unspoken Words

The first rule of the Verity Lane Writers’ Circle was that there were no rules, only rituals. The second, unspoken but more fervently held, was that you suffered for your art, preferably audibly. Every other Thursday, in the backroom of “The Grind,” a coffee shop that smelled perpetually of damp oak and over-roasted beans, five writers gathered to dissect each other’s words with a tenderness that often bordered on the surgical, which is to say, it was sharp, clinical, and occasionally left the patient in pieces.

Maya, the de facto moderator by virtue of owning the loudest voice and the most intimidating collection of hand-knitted shawls, sipped her mint tea. “Right. Who’s first to bleed tonight?”

The usual hesitant shuffle of printed manuscripts followed. There was Ben, a perpetually rumpled historical fiction writer whose stories of medieval peat bog farmers were as dense and moody as the landscapes he described. Next to him sat Chloe, who wrote lyrical, almost painfully introspective coming-of-age novels about queer women in coastal Maine. Opposite was David, a retired engineer who crafted meticulously plotted techno-thrillers that were, by unanimous but silent agreement, competent but soulless. And then there was Leo, the newest member, a quiet man in his thirties who wrote speculative fiction—quirky, conceptually bold stories about memory markets and emotional weather systems.

It was Leo who broke the stalemate. “I can go,” he said, his voice soft. He distributed copies of a short story titled “The Echo Gardener.”

Maya beamed. “Brave soul. You know the drill. We read. We sit in the silence. Then we begin with what works.”

They read. The story was about a woman who could cultivate the echoes of sounds in her greenhouse, growing roses from laughter, thorny brambles from arguments, and delicate, vanishing orchids from unheard whispers. The prose was clean, vivid, and strangely moving. The imagery was fresh, the emotional arc satisfying. When they finished, the silence was not the usual fraught pause searching for a polite entry point, but one of genuine, appreciative absorption.

“Well,” said Ben, scratching his salt-and-pepper beard. “That’s… bloody good, Leo. Really. The metaphor holds. The peat-bog of loneliness, if you will, tilled by this… echo gardening. I’ve got notes on a few historical inaccuracies about greenhouse construction in the 18th century, but they’re minor.”

Chloe’s eyes were glistening. “The relationship with the deaf neighbor, the way she grows an echo of his late wife’s voice from the vibration of an old wedding ring… Leo, it’s beautiful. It’s so *human*.”

David nodded, tapping the page. “Structurally sound. The planting of the echo-seed in act one, the blight in act two, the harvest in act three. Efficient.”

Maya leaned forward, her shawl slipping. “The voice is so assured, Leo. It reads like you’ve found it. That pure, unadulterated channel from brain to page. No strain.”

Leo flushed, murmuring thanks, looking down at his hands. The critique that followed was the gentlest in the circle’s recent history. It was as if they were all relieved to be discussing something genuinely good, a respite from the usual labor of propping up each other’s frail creations. The evening felt like a success, a testament to the circle’s nurturing power.

The shift began two months later. Leo had produced another story, then another. They were all of a piece with the first: imaginative, emotionally resonant, technically flawless. The concepts were increasingly complex—a library that lent out personalities, a city that ran on distilled regret—yet the execution was never muddy. His output was also remarkably steady. Where Ben would arrive haggard, confessing to a week-long battle with a single paragraph about monastic irrigation, and Chloe would speak in hushed tones of staring at the ocean for days waiting for a sentence to break, Leo just… produced.

One Thursday, David was in the hot seat with a chapter about a cyber-attack on the Stockholm stock exchange. The critique was thorough, focusing on his flat characters. “They feel like chess pieces, David,” Chloe said gently. “Moved around by the plot.”

David, usually stoic, looked pained. “I’m trying. I chart every motivation on a spreadsheet. But getting them to *feel*…” He trailed off, then glanced at Leo. “How do you do it, Leo? Your characters, even the ones in these wild settings, they pulse. What’s your process?”

All eyes turned to Leo. He shifted in his seat. “Oh, you know. I just… think about them. Walk in their shoes. Do some free-writing in their voice.”

“But so quickly?” Ben pressed. “The gardener, the librarian last time, the regret-distiller… they’re all fully formed. It takes me months of research to get a 14th-century peat-cutter to even *smell* right, let alone have an inner life.”

Leo’s smile was tight. “I daydream a lot. On the bus.”

An uneasy quiet descended. Maya cleared her throat. “We all have different processes. Leo’s is apparently more… prolific. Let’s get back to David’s firewall protocols, shall we? Are they realistic, David?”

The subject was changed, but a seed had been planted. A suspicion, small and ugly, had taken root in the fertile soil of their shared insecurity.

It was Ben who voiced it, though not in the circle. He cornered Chloe after the meeting as they refilled their cups at the counter. “You don’t think…?” he muttered, nodding subtly towards Leo, who was packing his bag.

Chloe’s eyes widened. “Think what?”

“You know. That it’s all a bit *too* good? A bit too… frictionless?”

“Ben, that’s a horrible thing to say. He’s just talented.”

“I’ve been writing for twenty years, Chloe. Talent doesn’t look like that. Talent is messy. It’s wrong turns and gut-wrenching revisions and throwing away ten pages for one good sentence. Leo’s work… it reads like it was born whole. No sweat. No fingerprints.”

“Maybe he’s a genius,” Chloe whispered, but the defense lacked conviction. She’d had the same thought, a nagging feeling she’d suppressed as envy.

The next week, Maya distributed a story she’d been labouring over for months—a sprawling, magical realist tale about a woman who inherits a house that contains all the doors from her ancestors’ homes. It was ambitious but messy, overwritten in places, confusing in others. The critique was kind but pointed. Maya took notes, her jaw set.

When it was over, she sighed. “I know, I know. It’s a beast. It fights me every step of the way. Sometimes I think I should just scrap it and start something… cleaner.” She looked directly at Leo. “How do you avoid the mess, Leo? Your stories are so… controlled.”

The question hung in the air, heavier than before. It wasn’t about process anymore; it was an accusation in the guise of curiosity.

Leo looked cornered. “I don’t avoid it. It’s just… the mess happens in my head, I suppose. Before I write.”

“A tidy mind,” David observed, a hint of something cold in his voice. “Lucky you.”

The social pressure was not to accuse, but to *not* accuse. To downplay the gnawing doubt. It manifested in subtle, pervasive ways. A compliment from Ben—“Such a uniquely *digital* clarity to your imagery, Leo”—that felt barbed. Chloe, who used to gush over his emotional depth, now focused her praise solely on his “interesting concepts.” David began prefacing his comments on Leo’s work with, “Well, assuming this is all original thought…” before launching into a structural analysis.

Maya, as the leader, felt the tension most acutely. Her role was to maintain the sanctity of the circle, its purpose as a sanctuary for the struggle. Leo’s unspoken struggle, or apparent lack thereof, was becoming a toxin. One evening, after Leo presented another flawless story—this one about a linguist decoding the language of dying stars—the critique was stifled, polite, and brief.

After Leo left early, claiming a headache, the dam broke.

“It’s not right,” Ben said, slamming his hand on the table. The empty cups rattled. “It’s just not. I was up until three a.m. last night trying to get the smell of a bog iron furnace onto the page, and he waltzes in with *sentient constellations*? Where’s the graft? Where’s the *humanity*?”

“We don’t know he’s not grafting,” Maya said, but her tone was weary.

“Come on, Maya,” David said, his engineer’s mind seeking data. “The consistency. The pace. The sheer lexical range without a single thesaurus-y misfire. It’s statistically anomalous for a new writer.”

“What are you saying?” Chloe asked, her voice small. “That he’s plagiarizing?”

“Worse,” Ben muttered. “I think he’s… outsourcing.”

The word landed in the centre of the table like a dead thing.

“AI,” David stated. “Large Language Model. He’s prompting and polishing.”

A collective shudder went through them. To the Verity Lane Writers’ Circle, AI writing was the ultimate heresy. It was the antithesis of everything they held sacred: the sweat, the doubt, the personal voice wrung from experience. It was cheating of the most profound, soul-crushing order.

“We have no proof,” Maya said firmly. “Only suspicion. And until we do, we treat him as a fellow writer. This circle is built on trust. On *faith* in the process, however it looks.”

“Even if that process is typing ‘write me a sad story about star-language’?” Ben shot back.

“Yes,” Maya said, with finality. “Our job is to critique the text, not the author’s soul. Unless he confesses, or we have irrefutable proof, we say nothing. To do otherwise would poison this group. We’d become detectives, not writers.”

Her decree established the new, unbearable norm. The pressure to downplay their suspicions became the circle’s central, unspoken drama. They performed their roles with strained cheer. They praised Leo’s stories, but the praise grew generic, focused on surface elements. “The plot was very engaging!” “What a cool idea!” The deep, probing questions about character motivation, about thematic heft, dried up. They were treating his work like a product, not a creation, and the insult was palpable on both sides.

Leo felt it. He grew quieter, more withdrawn. His submissions became slightly shorter, less daring. A defensive wall went up. When Ben made a comment about a particular sentence in his latest—“This line here, ‘The sorrow hung in the air like a forgotten chord.’ Very… precise. Almost algorithmic in its optimal metaphor selection.”—Leo finally snapped.

“What is that supposed to mean, Ben?” His voice was quiet but sharp.

Ben reddened. “Nothing. Just an observation. It’s a nice line.”

“It sounds like you think I didn’t write it.”

The room froze. The unspoken thing was now on the table, quivering.

“No one said that, Leo,” Maya interjected, her voice a forced calm. “Ben’s just being Ben. He’s allergic to anything that isn’t stained with peat.”

A weak laugh circulated. The moment passed, but the fracture was now visible.

Chloe, perhaps the most empathetic of the group, was torn apart by it. She believed in the sacredness of human art, but she also saw the hurt in Leo’s eyes. One afternoon, she invited him for a walk along the riverbank, away from the claustrophobic coffee shop.

“The group… it feels different lately,” she ventured, watching the grey water slide past.

“Does it?” Leo said, his hands in his pockets.

“You know it does. They’re… intimidated by you, Leo. Your consistency.”

“They think I’m using AI,” he said flatly, stopping to look at her.

Chloe’s heart hammered. “Some… have wondered. About the process. It’s not an accusation, just… curiosity.” She was downplaying, just as Maya had instructed. It made her feel sick.

Leo’s face was a mask of disappointment. “So that’s it. The suffering Olympics. If you don’t suffer enough, you’re disqualified. If the words come too easily, they must not be yours.”

“It’s not that simple—”

“Isn’t it? What do you believe, Chloe?”

She looked at him, at his earnest, wounded expression, and her certainty wavered. “I believe the story about the Echo Gardener was one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever read. I can’t… I can’t reconcile that with a machine.”

He held her gaze for a long moment, then nodded, some of the tension leaving his shoulders. “Thank you.”

But the reprieve was temporary. The pressure cooker was set to explode. It was David, the engineer, who brought the proof. He arrived at the next meeting early, his face grim. He laid his phone on the table before Maya, Ben, and Chloe. On the screen was a blog post from a obscure speculative fiction magazine. The story was titled “The Resonance Keeper.” They read, with growing dread. It was Leo’s “Echo Gardener,” published online eighteen months prior, under a different name.

“It’s plagiarism, plain and simple,” David said, his voice hollow. “He didn’t even generate it. He stole it.”

The betrayal felt physical. The beautiful story, the one that had moved them, that had felt so uniquely *Leo*, was a lie. The AI suspicion was suddenly replaced by something more traditional, but no less vile.

When Leo arrived, the atmosphere was glacial. He sensed it immediately, his confident posture deflating.

“Leo,” Maya said, her voice devoid of all its usual warmth. She pushed the printed copy of “The Echo Gardener” across the table towards him. Next to it, she placed David’s phone, displaying the blog. “Would you care to explain?”

Leo’s face went ashen. He stared at the evidence, his breath shallow. The silence stretched, agonizing.

“It’s… not what you think,” he finally whispered.

“It looks very clear,” Ben spat, his earlier suspicions vindicated into rage. “You’re a thief. You took our trust, our praise… for this.”

“I wrote that story!” Leo’s voice cracked. “I wrote ‘The Resonance Keeper.’ That *is* my name. My real name. Leo is… a pen name.”

Another stunned silence.

“What?” Chloe breathed.

“My name is Leonidas Vass,” he said, deflated. “I published a few stories under that name, years ago. In tiny places. No one read them. I got discouraged. I stopped writing for five years. When I moved here, I wanted to start fresh, without the baggage of failure. So I became Leo. I submitted my old story, the one I was still proud of, to see if it was any good. To see if *I* was any good.”

He looked at their incredulous faces. “The next stories… they were mine, too. But written under this… this pressure. The pressure of being ‘the good one.’ After the first meeting, I was so terrified of being a disappointment, of not living up to that first story. So I… I used help.”

“What kind of help?” David asked, his tone still accusatory.

Leo swallowed. “An AI tool. Not to write the stories, but… as a sparring partner. I’d have an idea—a memory market, emotional weather—and I’d feel stuck. So I’d talk to it. I’d ask for ten metaphors for loneliness. I’d ask it to critique a paragraph for pacing. I’d get it to generate a terrible version of a scene so I could see what *not* to do. It was a… a fancy thesaurus, a relentless editor. The words that ended up on the page were mine, chosen by me, from a million possibilities. But the process… was augmented.”

He looked around at them, his eyes begging for understanding. “You all spoke with such agony about the process. The block, the doubt. I have that too! I have it cripplingly. But I was ashamed of it. And here, you all seemed to valorize the struggle itself, not the result. So I hid my method. I let you think it was all pure, effortless inspiration. Because admitting I used a tool… it felt like admitting I wasn’t a *real* writer. Not like you.”

The revelation landed not with a bang, but with a profound, unsettling weight. He wasn’t a cheater; he was a liar of a different, more complicated kind. He had plagiarized from his past self, and he had used a tool they all despised, but his core sin, in the context of the circle, was presenting a process that was inauthentic. He had violated the cult of suffering.

Maya leaned back, her shawls seeming to swallow her. “So. The Echo Gardener was yours, but old. The others were yours, but… assisted. And you lied by omission about both.”

“Yes,” Leo said, his head bowed.

Ben was the first to react. “You made fools of us. All that time we spent tiptoeing around, afraid to accuse you of using a machine, and you were! You were using it to… to *optimize* your writing. It’s grotesque.”

“It’s still my writing!” Leo insisted, a flash of his old spirit returning. “The choices were mine. The heart, the intent—that was me. The tool just helped me get past the fear. The same fear you all wear like a badge of honour!”

“It’s not a badge,” Chloe said softly, tears in her eyes. “It’s just… the truth. My writing comes from a place of confusion and feeling. I can’t outsource that. To hear you talk about ‘optimizing’ it… it makes my skin crawl.”

David, ever practical, asked, “What percentage of the final text would you estimate was generated by the AI?”

“None! And all of it!” Leo cried in frustration. “It’s not like that. It’s a conversation. It’s like… having a supercharged, infinitely patient member of a writers’ group in your head at 2 a.m.”

The comparison was unfortunate. The group exchanged looks. They were his writers’ group. They were supposed to be that soundboard. Had they failed him so completely that he needed a machine?

Maya finally spoke, her voice aged by disappointment. “Leo, the Verity Lane Circle is built on a shared understanding. That understanding is that we are human beings, grappling with the infinite difficulty of translating human experience into words. We share our stumbles, our false starts, our raw, unvarnished attempts. Your process, however you justify it, exists outside that understanding. You presented a finished product, divorced from the honest struggle. You broke the trust.”

“So that’s it?” Leo asked, his voice hollow. “I’m out?”

“I think,” Maya said, looking at the others’ grim faces, “that you already left. A while ago.”

Leo didn’t argue. He gathered his papers—the printouts of his AI-assisted stories—and left. The bell on the coffee shop door jingled with a shocking finality.

The four remaining members sat in the silence, but it was no longer the creative, fertile silence of before. It was a silence of exhaustion and moral hangover.

“Well,” Ben said after a long while. “We were right. And it feels absolutely terrible.”

Chloe wiped her eyes. “Were we right? He did write them. He just… didn’t suffer correctly.”

“He lied,” David stated.

“He was ashamed,” Chloe countered.

Maya sighed, a deep, weary sound. “The pressure we put on him… the pressure we put on *ourselves*… to perform a specific kind of artistic agony. Did we create the environment where he felt he had to hide?”

They pondered this. Their suspicion had been a form of social pressure, a policing of the boundaries of ‘real’ writing. Leo’s deception was a response to that pressure. It was a vicious cycle, and it had shattered their little community.

“What do we do now?” Ben asked, his anger spent, leaving only emptiness.

Maya looked at the empty chair. “We write. Messily, doubtfully, agonizingly. Because that’s what we do. That’s all we have left that feels real.”

The following Thursday, only three people showed up to The Grind. Chloe had sent a text saying she needed a break. The dynamic between Ben, David, and Maya was awkward, freighted with unspoken recriminations and a shared grief for what was lost.

Ben distributed a new chapter. It was about a peat-bog farmer discovering a strange, smooth, metallic artifact in the mire—an object utterly alien to his world. The prose was, as ever, dense and laboured. But as Maya read, she noticed something. A sentence describing the artifact: “It hummed with a silent frequency, a vibration that seemed to erase the very dampness from the air around it.”

It was a good line. A clean, precise, optimal line. The kind of line Leo might have written, or might have been prompted to write. She looked sharply at Ben. Had he, in some subconscious act of defiance, or curiosity, or surrender, tried to write *like* the machine-assisted prose they’d all despised? Or was he just improving?

She didn’t ask. She downplayed the suspicion, even to herself. It was just a good sentence. That was all.

But as the critique began, the ghost of the fifth chair sat with them. The pressure was still there, internalized now. The pressure to be purely, authentically, imperfectly human in a world where the lines were blurring, and the fear of being mistaken for a machine, or for someone who used one, was enough to make you question every word you chose, every phrase that came a little too easily. They wrote on, but the unspoken words—about authenticity, assistance, and the price of their precious, performed suffering—now echoed in the room far louder than their critiques ever could. They were, all of them, echo gardeners now, tending the spectral remains of their broken circle, unsure of what would grow from the silence they had cultivated.