Processing a New Reading List
Naomi’s student tablet pinged. She saw the notification was from the school, sharing the semester’s reading list. As the class president, she felt a responsibility to Springfield’s intellectual ecosystem.
“Those are the new books?” asked Hugo as he leaned over her shoulder. “I’ve never heard of the ‘Cartesian Echo’ before. Or the ‘Solar Flares on a Silent Sea’. Have you?”
Naomi scrolled through the list: Whispers from the Geothermal Deep, The Indifferent Stars, Synaptic Drift and the Self... There was a grandiose from the titles, almost like they were machine-generated. They also lacked the familiar authors that they had read in earlier classes.
“The teachers must just be getting creative this year,” chuckled Kim, as she tipped a watering can over one of the classroom’s potted plants. “Probably just some stuff we haven’t been exposed to yet. Look, just do a search for the titles and see what comes up.”
Naomi tapped on the tablet’s search bar and typed in “The Indifferent Stars + Ebook”. Instantly, the results loaded. The top hit included the tags of “philosophy’, “existentialism”, and “21st-century nihilism”. The website looked like a clean, minimalistic blog called “Veritas Fulcrum”.
She found several other titles in the same way on similarly designed websites: “Open Scroll Press”, “Digital Quill Archives”, and others. Download links were prominent.
“This is easy,” Hugo, pulled out his phone and started to download them. “They all look like obscure gems. That’s probably better than reading the same old stuff over and over.”
Later that evening, Naomi wrapped a blanket around her as she sat in her bed. The city’s bright lights looked like stars through her translucent blinds. She opened up the ebook she downloaded. Her book app launched and processed the file. The Indifferent Stars had a cryptic cover of bright dots placed in seemingly random places, not too different from what was glowing on her wall.
She started to read it. The prose was dense, with a lot of complex, long-winded sentences paired with very specific metaphors to scientific phenomena. The characters discussed cosmic insignificance, the illusion of meaning, and human greed encoded in each person’s DNA.
She didn’t find the book inherently disagreeable, yet she also didn’t enjoy reading it like she did so many other books. The book seemed to revel in its own bleak outlook. The way it framed empathy as a mistake and community as a sort of self-deception seemed to make her feel cynical. It was like telling people to just give up on society and move to a commune.
She put the tablet down when it reached her bedtime. She closed her eyes and tried to sleep, but there was a vague residue clinging to her thoughts.
Naomi’s first class was held in the school’s ‘agora’, the open-air courtyard beneath the a large solar-sail awning. Mr. Sanchez taught her Civics and Critical Thinking class. She liked him, a man who knew a lot of different things and always encouraged open discussion. The day’s lesson was on information sources.
She raised her hand hesitantly.
“Mr. Sanchez, I wanted to ask about this semester’s reading list. The selection was definitely unusual. I started reading The Indifferent Stars last night.”
“Okay, and what are your first impressions?”
“It just... it’s very negative. It’s almost mocking any idea that could be positive. Are you familiar with it? The author is ‘Corvus Blackwood’, but I couldn’t learn much about him.”
“Blackwood?” Sanchez folded his hands together. “No, I can’t say that rings a bell. But there are always new thinkers. We’re far from a shortage of ideas. What did you feel was particularly negative? The purpose of reading is not to always find things you agree with, sometimes it’s to understand a point of view different from your own and define your own views in turn.”
“It’s not challenging,” she didn’t know exactly how to explain. “It’s just cynical. It wants to believe that trying to make things better is foolish.”
Some of the other students, who had started reading different titles, nodded. A few defended the books as “pragmatic” and “edgy”.
“Naomi, it seems like you have an interesting critique. I would suggest you keep reading. Keep questioning its arguments. Examine the evidence it provides, or the evidence it lacks. Maybe highlight specific passages that seem most worthwhile to discuss. As all of you get deeper into reading, we can hold further discussions. I’m always happy to see critical engagement.”
He didn’t exactly dismiss her worry, but seemed to classify it as just another academic thing to study rather than something that felt fundamentally wrong. She couldn’t quite blame him either. She hadn’t presented any real evidence, just some feelings. But the passages she read continued to linger in her mind.
In the school’s greenhouse after school, Kim was in busy arguing with two other students on resource allocation. Their arguments were focused around “individual advancement” and the “folly of teamwork”, pulling passages straight out of The Cartesian Echo for justification.
At the same time, during an SGA meeting, Naomi found her proposal for a peer-tutoring system to also be met with surprising pushback.
“Why should the smarter students waste their time on those unable to keep up during class?” Ernesto scoffed dismissively. “Some of us are more genetically aligned to the curriculum and that should be rewarded. Cognitive resources should be allocated to the highest priorities.”
The words seemed so bleak to Naomi, and bleaker were the agreements from other students. Then she saw a copy of Synaptic Drift laying on the edge of his desk.
The culture of the school seemed to change rapidly. Open discussions quickly died when someone raised a predefined viewpoint, often citing one of the new books. Even casual conversations seemed harsher, with barbed jokes and a lack of care.
Naomi had to learn more about these books. She started with her current read, but could find next to nothing about “Corvus Blackwood”. There was just the Veritas Fulcrum blog. He hadn’t published anything else. He didn’t seem to be associated with any university. There weren’t even interviews with him.
The other books in the list were written by equally obscure authors. Names like “Unit 731” or “Lex Iconoclast” led to generic author biographies, sterile blogs, and a series of links hosting the same books. The whole thing was a closed loop.
“It’s like these authors don’t even exist. Aside from these specific websites, they have no prescence,” she vented to Hugo one afternoon in the greenhouse. Mr. Sanchez was standing in the corner, carefully pruning a bonsai.
“Yeah, I was interested in The Cartesian Echo at first, but it also confused me. I tried to look up some sort of legit review of it and there was nothing. Just a few five-stars on the download site itself. All of them felt like they were written by AI.”
“I worry that it’s having a bad effect on the others. I heard Ernesto basically reciting Synaptic Drift verbatim. Look, I’ve been keeping track.”
She pulled out a document on her phone where she had been storing quotes that her friends were using and their origin in one of the assigned books.
“Altruism is merely a complex survival algorithm, easily discarded when individual parameters are threatened, from The Indifferent Stars.
“True community is a myth. The social contract is a chain forged from mutual fear, not mutual respect, from The Cartesian Echo.”
“All progress is an illusion, a momentary eddy in the inevitable entropic decay of systems, from Solar Flares on a Silent Sea.”
“These all sound the same. All have the same nihilist message.”
“Exactly. They’re designed to shed everything except your own personal benefits.”
She decided to send an email to the district, the ones who had come up with this curriculum. Within a few minutes, she received a polite yet impersonal block of text.
Thank you for sending your question. Our curriculum module has been put together through a close analysis of academic recommendations and cultural trends. They were selected for their relevance, complexity, and potential for discussion.
Naomi was only left frustrated by the answer.
“Academic recommendations? Potential for discussion? It’s just the same discussion wrapped up in different covers.”
Aristov saw a social media post where a student quoted “Corvus Blackwood” and smiled. He leaned forward in his ergonomic chair and typed a few times in order to deploy his latest site to market his recently “written” book: The Broken Compass and the Illusion of Benevolence.
A year ago he had been a history teacher and was promoted to work for the district. And then some manager decided it would be better to plan the entire curriculum with AI, pushing his career into obsolescence. He had spoken up about it several times, since he saw firsthand how easily young minds could be swayed by a narrative.
He decided to fight back against the system that had come for him first. He needed to give the students a harsh dose of reality before they faced the same existential disappointment. He didn’t see himself as spreading hate, but teaching the truth without sugarcoating no matter how bitter. Now he saw that his lessons were starting to bear fruit.
Naomi was walking from her locker to lunch when she suddenly saw Ernesto and two others who had turned into enthusiastic readers of the new curriculum. The three of them had cornered Iryna, a freshman who volunteered for the city parks on the weekend.
“What do you have there? Another one of your city greening projects?” Ernesto sneered.
Iryna kept her eyes down and didn’t say anything.
“Protecting nature? Nature is supposed to be about competition. Only the strongest survive. Lex Iconoclast demonstrates that clearly.”
“A city with more biodiversity creates a healthier ecosystem for everyone,” she stuttered.
“Everyone?” he scoffed. “There is no everyone. Only individuals pursuing their personal self-interest. Your fuzzy-headed idealism is just a biological inefficiency.”
Naomi knew he was quoting The Indifferent Stars nearly verbatim.
“Maybe stick to something you are actually good at,” he took a step forward. Iryna stumbled back, tripping over her shoelace and falling against the lockers.
“Ernesto!” Mr. Sanchez’s voice boomed down the hallway.
He stepped out of his classroom with a grim face.
“Ernesto, step away,” he said firmly. “This behavior is not acceptable in our school.”
Ernesto and his goons dispersed towards the cafeteria. Naomi helped Iryna to her feet and stared down the hallway where the bullies had just gone.
“Mr. Sanchez, the things he was saying... Lex Iconoclast...” Naomi remarked.
“This has gone on far enough,” Sanchez said with remorse. “Reading challenging books is one thing, but they have seemed to escalate all the way to targeted harassment.”
Iryna and Naomi spent their lunch in Sanchez’s classroom. As the student president, she felt responsible for improving student quality of life and felt guilty for letting the problem reach this point.
“We need to prove these books are somehow manipulative,” Naomi proposed. “Not that these are just edgy or disagreeable, but intentionally designed to reach this outcome.”
“What if we visit the library archives?” offered Iryna. “If there really is a Corvus Blackwood then he should probably be present in the physical records. If not, he might not be real at all. He might be... might be AI.”
After school, Naomi and Iryna traveled across the city to the library’s archives, located in the second basement of the structure. It was usually quiet, as it was this afternoon as well. They spent several hours at a terminal, cross-referencing the titles and authors against the library’s catalogs and other global databases. They looked at copyright logs and even newspaper archives. Nothing came up. No early works. No literary reviews. Suddenly they just appeared, at nearly the same time the reading list was published.
In fact, there was an uncanniness to it. Even the website registrations seemed to only have been set a month prior, just a few minutes before she had received that original reading list email. She checked the second website. Then the third. None of the books were real. They seemed to have been manifested at the same time the reading list was created. The hallucinations were manifested into reality.
“Iryna, I don’t think these books are real. Not really. The district probably used an AI model to build the list without thinking about it. Then someone came in afterwards and provided the work.”
“That’s why all the books sound the same. It’s one author, maybe not even a real one.”
The next morning, they described their findings to Mr. Sanchez, who listened carefully with a grave expression on his face.
“So someone has been filling our students with a sort of ideological sludge in the face of an AI that the administration much trust without fact checking. The parents haven’t raised any issues either. And the students are already acting on these poisonous ideas. So any plan we make to change things won’t be easy.”
“We know the truth now. How do we get others to see it?”
The gymnasium was packed with parents at an emergency meeting which had been called by the principal and a handful of bleachers. Principal Hasan had been hesitantly supportive of the idea after Sanchez and a few others protested. After the bulling incident, it did seem more urgent to address the issue before things escalated further.
Sanchez stood at a central podium with Naomi standing closely behind him. The presentation walked through her findings, passed through the greater authority of a teacher. He described the void where the authors had no history and how a linguistic analysis between books showed a single source. The books did not exist prior to the reading list, and SEO tactics had managed to get them to the front of each search for the students to find.
Murmurs rippled through the crowd. Some parents had been convinced, but many more were still skeptical. A few students in the audience, including Ernesto, rolled their eyes but were clearly uncomfortable.
“Hold on,” one parent stood up. “My son told me how much he’s been enjoying The Cartesian Echo. He said it was the best thing he ever read, the most thought-provoking. Are we supposed to limit what our kids read? Can they not handle challenging ideas?”
“There’s a profound difference between challenging ideas and slop,” Sanchez argued. “We want to encourage genuine critical thought, but these books were maliciously designed to promote cynicism. They want the reader to adopt these conclusions wholesale and destroy the fabric of a learning community.”
“We are still looking for the source of these books,” the principal added. “Since we have the domain registrations, we have been able to trace the source to someone in Springfield. And they must be someone with some familiarity of our curriculum planning.”
The room went silent. Aristov was sitting quietly under the harsh lights. Then he stood up slowly.
“It was me,” he admitted quietly.
The entire crowd turned and looked at the man as they spoke in hushed tones. They didn’t see a monster. He was a tired man wearing thick glasses and a wrinkled blazer.
“I wrote all the books. Well, I prompted them. It took me a few hours to put together the entire collection of works for the curriculum.”
“But why?” the principal asked with exasperation.
“Because you let me go,” he answered as he climbed down the narrow staircase. His loafers caused the metal bleachers to groan with each step. “The district thought they could replace human curation with a simple AI. When I saw the reading list was made up of hallucinated titles without anyone in the district caring, I decided I would show you all the risks of outsourcing education.”
“So you thought it was appropriate to poison the well to prove the water wasn’t filtered?” Throne shot back.
“The books are fake. The authors are fake. But the students are real. Their feelings are real. Maybe you’ll actually care about their education now.”
The school’s security guard gently escorted Aristov from the gym. He didn’t resist.
“Now I’ll go. I’m sure I can find somewhere better to be,” he replied with some venom. “Don’t bother trying legal action. It’s not illegal to write a book. If anything, you’re liable for assigning them.”
He then turned and stared directly at Naomi. She could see a small amount of pity in his eyes. She didn’t know if he was the hero or the villain of the story. In some way, not knowing was an even more challenging concept to grasp. Perhaps there was a lesson she learned from the books after all.
Healing took time. The toxicity that had seeped into the school’s culture couldn’t be easily reversed. Even if the reading list was replaced, the original morals still permeated. The hallways remained quiet. The trust between students remained fractured.
Mr. Sanchez organized a “Spirit Week” in the Agora. They replaced all the desks with cushions and chairs. Students struggled to look at each other. It was only by the third day that the tension started to thaw.
After school one afternoon, Iryna was struggling to carry a heavy bucket of soil when she stumbled. Ernesto, who had been standing nearby, stepped forward to catch her and save the bucket from spilling out.
“I’ve got it,” he reassured her. “It’s heavy than it looks.”
“Thanks Ernesto. Can you carry it over to the sunflowers?”
“Yeah, I can do that. Efficient allocation of strength, I guess,” he said, trying to make a joke.
“Sure, I guess that’s what teamwork is all about,” she murmured.
It turns out that the Chicago Sun-Times got into some controversy for hallucinating a summer reading list. While that’s embarrassing, it was caught because the books didn’t exist. If someone had created, or generated, these books, they could have a strong way to influence teens in negative ways.