bitrate
A short sci-fi story made for a literature class.
bitrate:
the number of bits per second
that can be transmitted
along a digital network
The progress bar painstakingly inched across my vision. 99.7, 99.8, 99.9…
“Lesson download complete,” chimed the classroom VI. “Please take your cognitive pause.”
I blinked away the interface and looked around the Ganymede University classroom. Real-looking, I mean, not through augmented vision. I saw Jupiter looming large outside the classroom windows. My classmates were slowly opening their eyes, some of them grimacing lightly. Feeling the week's coursework integrate into your neural pathways sometimes led to headaches.
Our professor cleared her throat. “Now that you've all downloaded the history of communication technologies, we can begin this term's major project.” She gestured, and a new prompt materialized in my visual feed. “You'll be exploring low-bitrate communication, with a specific focus on the pre-integration era.”
“Professor,” one of my classmates objected, “this seems fairly useless. The information transfer rates back then were absurdly low, just completely inefficient. Aren’t there better ways to be spending our time?”
“The efficiency isn’t what matters here,” she replied. “Your challenge is to create an experience using only the methods available before we had neural feeds. That means no sensory overlays, no emotional resonance fields, and no atom-accurate haptics.” She smiled with quiet certainty. “Just words.”
That evening, I laid back in my bed and loaded up “Red Fields Rising” — last year’s most celebrated narrative experience. I thought that reading a modern story would help me understand what made the old ones different.
The story didn't begin so much as it enveloped me. Colors flooded my awareness, each one carrying its own emotional resonance: deep crimsons that tasted of iron and homesickness, blues that nostalgically whispered for Earth's oceans. The protagonist's emotions flooded my limbic system, perfectly calibrated to overwhelm without overstimulating. I felt the exact texture of Martian regolith beneath my feet, the precise composition of each grain transmitted directly to my cerebral cortex. The tang of recycled air in the atmospheric dome carried notes of human breath, plant respiration, and the subtle signature of bacterial filters.
Then came the crop fields. I experienced the precise mathematical beauty of watching the first wheat strain adapt to Mars-normal gravity. Each genetic mutation unfolded in my mind like a symphony — proteins reconfiguring in real-time, chloroplasts evolving to capture the weaker sunlight. I felt the weary hopes of the colonists, the eureka of the genetic breakthrough, and the sheer relief at seeing calorie projections in the positive.
The story gently faded as a cognitive pause began. I blinked open my eyes, feeling the phantom sensations of Martian gravity slowly ebb away. The sudden absence of input felt… unsettling. It was a silence that was practically physical. My interface rushed to fill the vacuum, throwing up suggestion after suggestion: entertainment feeds, social channels, news tickers; anything to keep my neural pathways stimulated.
I dismissed the feeds, choosing instead to look out my window at what was actually there: Jupiter, massive and ancient. After a moment, I tried to decide how I’d describe its storm bands in my own words.
My neural interface noticed this, and then, annoyingly, kept suggesting better ways to convey it — professionally made holographic visualizers, custom-fit emotional overlays, total sensory captures.
I groaned. How were words ever supposed to compete with that?
I returned to the story, frustrated. My senses dropped back into that familiar overwhelm as I became enveloped in rolling Martian wheat fields, every moment engineered for optimal data transfer.
The university archives were housed in the deepest level of Ganymede Base, where the radiation shielding was strongest. Not for the archivists' protection — most of them were VIs anyway — but for the preservation of actual, physical data storage.
“Your authorization allows access to the pre-integration section,” the archive VI said. It had chosen to present itself as a period-accurate librarian, complete with anachronistic glasses and a cardigan. “Would you prefer direct neural access to the digitized collections?”
“No thanks,” I said. “I’d like to see the original formats.”
The VI led me to a climate-controlled chamber. Through the preservation field, I saw what I'd only experienced in downloads until now: real books. Rows of bound volumes and loose papers stretched into shadow, each one a glimpse of the distant past brought to the present.
Among the relics, a small leather-bound book caught my eye. Its spine was cracked with age, corners softened by countless hands. It appeared to be a handwritten diary.
“That one, please.”
The VI lifted it from the shelf and placed it on a reading stand. I reached out to touch the first page, the paper feeling impossibly delicate beneath my fingers.
The handwriting flowed across pages in dozens of different styles. Restaurant reviews written in hurried scrawls during lunch breaks. Love letters composed in careful cursive, the pen pressed deep into the paper. Questions about the future that felt strange to read now, four centuries later. Some pages bore coffee stains, others had corners folded down to mark important thoughts.
Each section was just a set of words. When they wrote about feeling nervous before the first date, there was no precise neurochemical profile attached. When they described a sunset at the honeymoon, there were no exact measurements of photon scatter through the atmosphere. It should’ve felt completely empty. So why was I feeling the opposite?
I paused at a section near the end of the book. A poem about watching their child sleep, comparing their gentle breathing to ocean waves. My interface tried to supply the exact rhythm of human respiration, the precise sound of surf on shore, but I waved it off.
The poem sat there, staring plainly back at me. Just letters arranged in words, words arranged in paragraphs. But something seemed to happen as I read. The breathing became my sister's, back when we shared a room on Earth. The soft inhale-exhale that meant I wasn't alone, that carried me into sleep on restless nights.
This wasn’t anything like the neuro-experience stories. It was something different. More real, maybe, because this time the experience was my own.
My first attempts at writing were disasters. I kept trying to embed sensory feeds that didn't exist, reaching for emotional resonance markers that weren't there. The words sat dead upon the writing surface, refusing to carry the weight of what I wanted to express.
I erased everything and started again.
Jupiter rises over Ganymede Base…
It just wasn't right. In a modern story, you'd feel the exact radiance of the reflected light on your skin, you’d intuit the precise mathematical beauty of the planet’s orbital mechanics. But all I had for this assignment were these extremely limiting words.
Sighing, I wandered to the observation dome, Jupiter dominating the sight line. The gas giant filled half the sky, its Great Red Spot was churning majestically. I'd seen this view thousands of times. I usually had my neural interface highlight any interesting artifacts or cloud patterns.
But this evening, I just looked. No data feeds. No trivia pop-ups. Just photons hitting my retinas.
I stayed there for a while, then returned to my screen.
Jupiter fills my window like my sister standing in my doorway after a nightmare.
The interface flagged it as an error. Inaccurate comparison. No data correlation. Irrelevant emotional content detected.
I kept writing.
The Great Red Spot stares back, ancient and patient. Here on Ganymede, we measure our days by its turning, just as I once measured nights by my sister’s breathing.
Warnings accumulated. The interface suggested corrections, offered databases of more precise astronomical comparisons. I ignored them all, watching my clumsy words take shape on the screen. They could never transmit the exact experience, but they also didn’t need to.
I worked through the night. The sentences came easier now, each one a small experiment in compression. How much meaning could I pack into a few choice words? What could I leave out and still express the same message?
By morning, I had submitted my work. Not a story, exactly — at least not by modern standards. There were no emotional resonance fields, no sensory overlays, and no atom-accurate haptics. Just words on a page, and that was enough.
Notes
So, there’s a lot to say about this work. And, thematically, a lot that I’m going to leave unsaid!
First and foremost was the process, which I think was extremely unlike anything else I’ve ever written. I’m referring of course to the sheer amount of AI that’s gone into this writing. My process was basically to dump 2 hours worth of brainstorming into a Google document, feed that into Claude, have a brainstorming session where I asked it to pick out themes, then ask it for a section-by-section outline, then have it write those outlines, then I’d take those and tighten up the prose and then send it back, and then we’d brainstorm revisions, and then I’d incorporate some of those revisions and draft some of my own and maybe restructure things, and then finally I’d tighten up the prose, again.
I really enjoy editing, and I really hate being the one to first put words on the page, so AI was a gigantic help. Does this invite questions about whether or not I “wrote” this story? I mean, yeah, absolutely. But it was for a class assignment that suggested using AI, it’s not like I’m making money off of this, and I had a fun time, so I don’t feel too weird about it.
In terms of sources of inspiration, my hero is Ted Chiang, the giant who sits at the intersection of short stories, science fiction, and philosophy. So much of his work explores ideas relevant to this class. The most relevant ones to this specific work were Understand (what does it look like to have a completely different mode of cognition?), and The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling (what gets lost when we improve our memory through external means?).
Some other miscellaneous forms of inspiration come from the show Black Mirror. I’m thinking specifically of The Entire History of You, which, similar to Truth of Fact, explores themes of perfect memory.
There’s also this scene in Children of the Mind (it’s somewhere in the Ender’s Game universe, from Orson Scott Card) which compares digital memory to organic memory.
Finally, my last source was my friend Kenneth, who was the first person I showed drafts to, and whose philosophical influence surely made its way into the final product. You should check out his Substack:
Did I spend too much time on this assignment for a 100-level English class? Yes.
Would I do it again? Also yes!