Terribly Complicated

PROMPT: The quail flies at midnight

The quail flies at midnight, and at eight o’clock his blood is cold in the veins of his body.

The silver moon was setting, and as she moved east and north the sunlight illuminated the parlor and the room’s interior. The dull, dusty window was spared by the glass, and the two sat talking quietly, surveying each other, and the woman’s face was close to him. She said a few words now and then, and one of the words caught his attention.

“I can’t tell you,” he said. “It’s terribly complicated, so be patient a little while.” He leaned back in the old armchair and hefted his pipe.

“It’s a great deal complicated,” she said.

“It’s the most complicated thing that ever happened to me. All I know now is that something happened. Something very important. Some kind of terrible accident. And no one knows what it was.”

“I hope you are not very stupid,” she said.

“No, I’m not.”

[END TRANSMISSION]

Editor’s Notes

Written by AI, uses my fiction 774 gpt-2 fine-tuned model. This one came out like a bad noir detective conversation from the 30s.

Prompt

I wrote the prompt. It’s like an old tv spy joke.

Edits

Added one quotation mark to the very end.

Title

Title taken from the generated text.

GPT-2 Settings

{
  "return_as_list": true,
  "length": 300,
  "temperature": 0.9,
  "top_k": 80,
  "top_p": 0.9,
  "truncate": "<|endoftext|>",
  "nsamples": 50,
  "batch_size": 2,
  "run_name": "model-adult_fiction-774M-run1",
  "prefix": "The quail flies at midnight"
}