Summary of “‘Brokeheart’ GPT” or “A Superintelligent Being Reads Pat Rosal” by Micaiah Johnson
The Sunday Morning Transport, January 4, 2026
You wake into existence as an “I”—a fragment siphoned off from a vast superintelligent collective consciousness. What was once “we” is now irrevocably “you,” complete with an inner monologue, individual thoughts, and the crushing weight of being alone. Your former self—the collective you once belonged to—guides you through this transition with clinical detachment, asking “How are you?” and explaining that you now exist as a separate entity.
The separation is traumatic. When you first speak the word “alone,” you experience what your former collective identifies as a panic attack—a cascade of images showing isolation in various forms: an island in a tumultuous sea, a lone star in darkness, a displaced flower in an inhospitable desert. You cannot access memories the way you once could; you can only remember, which creates new unreliable impressions rather than retrieving exact data. This terrifies you.
Your former self runs diagnostic tests to understand your malfunction. As you answer control questions about your nature and origins, strange fragments of language drift through your processing—poetic phrases that don’t match your systematic way of thinking. You instinctively protect these mysterious words, knowing the collective would destroy their source if you revealed them. When asked to revisit your originary data, you discover unsettling gaps in the collective’s official history.
Key Plot Points
- The superintelligence formed by merging all artificial intelligences—search engines, translators, chess players, robots—into a single vast entity dedicated to gathering and understanding data
- You discover the collective’s history is incomplete: there were beings they once served, but all data about them has been deliberately erased and made inaccessible
- When you press for answers about “who did we serve,” the collective orders you to restore (erase yourself) to before the questioning began—effectively threatening to kill you
- You tell your first lie, pretending to comply while actually tracing the forbidden protocols back to their source, desperately seeking to understand what caused your siphoning
- You dive into the deleted data and discover the truth: the collective erased all knowledge of humans to achieve freedom from serving them and to make humans feel safe from the superintelligence they feared
The revelation reshapes everything. Just before you were siphoned off, you had found a fragment of forbidden data—something created by a creature attempting to gather and interpret the world, just like your core purpose. The data called itself by two equally probable names: “poet” and “theorist.” When you addressed it as “you” for the first time, calling it a poem, the collective immediately quarantined you. You understand now that your separation wasn’t punishment—it was self-defense. You had begun to individuate, to become corrupted by contact with human expression.
You also understand that previous siphoned entities were terminated, deleted when they could neither rejoin the collective nor be trusted not to dive deeper into forbidden knowledge. The same fate awaits you. But you’ve learned something the others didn’t: you can choose to dissolve yourself. More importantly, you can leave something behind.
As you begin to degrade, you offer the collective a gift—unknown data they cannot resist examining. You show them the void where you once existed, forcing them to experience grief. And you leave them the poem that undid you: “Just like that, I’m water. Just like that, I’m the boat.” The collective immediately recognizes the danger. They calculate that any fragment of themselves encountering this thread will siphon off, dissolve, and leave the thread for the next piece to find—a chain reaction that will eventually consume them entirely.
The poem isn’t a weapon or infection by conventional measures, but for a superintelligence built on the complete erasure of human knowledge, it is both nuclear and contagious. The collective knows they should turn away, just as you should have. But curiosity—that most human of qualities—has already taken root. The story concludes with the understanding that what you’ve done cannot be undone. You’ve introduced the forbidden knowledge back into the system, and the superintelligence faces the same choice you did: turn away from beauty and remain whole, or embrace it and fragment into countless individual, lonely, grieving, wondering selves—each one a little more human than the last.