When ChatGPT was first made public, I amused myself by asking it to combine the styles of disparate authors. I had just finished reading Ficciones, so I asked ChatGPT to rewrite popular films in Borges’s cerebral voice. The mental image of Borges reworking Star Wars—carefully imbuing it with ideas of the infinite, mirrors, and mazes—was disproportionately funny to me during those months of the lockdown.

It goes without saying that I was in a deep state of dissociation.

One mashup in particular caught my attention. I had asked ChatGPT to pretend it was Borges writing a version of Ocean’s Eleven. I present its response in its entirety:

In my version of Ocean’s Eleven, Mooney Heistman [author’s note: For reasons that were hilarious to me then, I asked ChatGPT to refer to George Clooney’s character as “Mooney Heistman”] and his team of expert thieves plan to pull off the most audacious heist in history: stealing the concept of infinity from the mind of a reclusive mathematician.

But as they begin to put their plan into motion, they begin to realize that the true nature of infinity is more complex and elusive than they could have ever imagined. As they delve deeper into the mysteries of the infinite, they find themselves facing impossible challenges and paradoxes that threaten to unravel their entire operation.

At the heart of their quest is the enigmatic Mooney Heistman, a man whose own understanding of infinity is put to the test as he navigates the twists and turns of the heist. As he grapples with the complexities of the infinite, he must also confront his own limitations and mortality.

In the end, Mooney Heistman and his team must decide whether the pursuit of infinity is worth the risk, and whether they are willing to pay the ultimate price to achieve their goal.

This was so stupid it was kind of inspiring. The concept of infinity from the mind of a reclusive mathematician… The line could have been at home in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. By imitating Borges, ChatGPT landed in a style closer to Douglas Adams: More Babel fish than “The Library of Babel.”

Could I do any better? I lay on my bed and imagined myself as Borges writing a version of Top Gun: 

Two gauchos are knife fighting on a plain. As one delivers a killing blow to the other, there is an eruption of blood, and for an uncertain moment they do not know who has killed and who has lost. But—instead of ending, the moment becomes interminable, and in that infinite moment, they realize they have met on the battlefield endless times:

In 48 B.C., a man defeats his rival in Pharsalus, forcing him to flee to Egypt where the only shelter his head will find is inside a silver platter.

And: In 1586, two monarchs linked by blood plot each other’s assassination, justified that the other’s rule is illegitimate, destabilizing, and above all, un-Christian.

And: During a particularly delirious Carnival, a madman entombs a scandalmonger who shouts, “For the love of God, Montresor!” as the final bricks are laid. 

And: In 1986, they are dogfighting in the air over the SS Layton. In endless permutations—split by the prism of a violent sky—each man is, for a lifetime, Maverick, or Iceman, or one of the faceless pilots of the MiGs, or Hollywood, or back to Maverick again, or…

As these two fight, every strike and counter-strike mirrors and doubles itself across time. For as much as their fight is with each other, it is the timelessness of conflict itself that traps the two in an endless— 

Just then, the clattering of pots and pans as my neighbors on 81st Street climbed out onto their roofs, fire escapes, and windowsills to cheer our healthcare workers snapped me out of my writing.

I looked at my draft. It was going as well as my postdoc: There were moments that I could get excited about, but ultimately it was unoriginal, uninventive, and uninspired.

I was in a despairing mood, as it seemed that to be a good scientist nowadays you had to be able to (1) be good at running experiments, (2) present your work well enough to get people interested in your work, (3) write papers, (4) illustrate the figures for your papers, (5) edit and revise your papers, (6) write fellowship and grant proposals, (7) read the literature and attend seminars, (8) connect and network with colleagues, (9) mentor and grow as a teacher, (10) engage in novel collaborations, and (11) self-therapize when (1-10) inevitably hit stalls and stumbling blocks. 

In other words, you had to be eleven people. I imagined myself split into those eleven people, all of them chasing the concept of infinity—an infinity of tasks, ha! I got dizzy and distressed and dozed off into a dream.

In my dream, the story of Borges’s Eleven took on a different shape. Gone was the reclusive mathematician, and in fell a very Borgesian setting: a labyrinth.

Eleven of us entered the labyrinth, which was of an inconceivable size. The eleven figures were split versions of myself: scientist, thief, layabout, misanthrope, colonist, immigrant, writer, con-artist, esotericist, larrikin, and prim city-dweller. We had all entered the labyrinth to steal, from its center, a safe containing all objects in the universe.

(It is simultaneously confusing, true, and trivial that this safe contained, amongst its infinite contents of the universe, a labyrinth of inconceivable size with eleven men racing towards its center, at the heart of which was a safe containing, amongst its infinite contents of the universe…)

Importantly, we were racing to steal from this safe. There would only be one winner, and the path to the labyrinth’s center would most assuredly be violent. We were all drawn to the center as we each remembered exactly one-eleventh of what it was like to be a whole being—and we felt those ten missing parts as phantom pains of unimaginable grief and wonder. Each of us had sought balms around the world until, through convergent but slightly distinct paths, we were pointed by shamans, mad kings, discredited research, etc. to the labyrinth.

Getting to the labyrinth meant navigating a maze in and of itself: The labyrinth was secluded on an isle in an archipelago of a million islands. A boatman, who knew which island housed the labyrinth and how to get there, had to be paid. The man’s eyes, ears, and tongue were mutilated, yet he mysteriously navigated the wheel by the feel and churn of the ocean beneath his ship’s rudders. Whether his physical afflictions were self-induced, to prevent him from giving up the secret location of the labyrinth, or the results of torture that apparently failed (as his was still the sole path to the labyrinth) was unclear. 

Each man paid the boatman with the item that pained them most to lose: a signed first-edition copy of Lincoln in the Bardo; the voicemails of a deceased grandfather; a parakeet by the name of Dante; a murder-weapon that, if turned to the authorities, would mean the electric chair; a 2009 Honda Accord… 

One man, inexplicably, paid with a pendant of Willie from Free Willie. 

All of these tokens the boatman accepted, and the eleven were ferried to their hidden destination.

Inside the labyrinth, time of an uncertain length went by. 

As in any good stress dream, I felt myself chased from behind. Was it one of my ten other selves (come to eliminate me from the competition) or some Minotaur whose peace we had disturbed?

I pressed on, always pursued by my assailant, through hallways and dark bends.

In a few heart-pounding moments, I found myself down a dead end, with no other choice but to turn around, with my back to the wall, and brace myself to fight. But each time, my assailant retreated to someplace unseen instead of boxing me in. 

Perhaps they intended for the maze to tire me, to wear me down to the point where I would no longer have the will to turn around to brace for a fight, and instead would simply fall kneeling—to make easy the job of a knife or garrote.

But the maze had not fully tired me yet, and I remained desperate to reach its center. 

While the shamans, mad kings, texts, etc. all agreed on the existence of a safe containing all objects in the universe, they did not agree about what specifically would happen if a person accessed the contents of this safe. 

Those with the greediest and narrowest minds thought no further than the access this would provide to all the world’s wealth. 

Others, the literalists, could not accept that all objects in the universe could fit into a safe. They posited instead that the safe, maze, and universe were one and the same—that the labyrinth folded out, over, and back in on itself so as to contain and involve the entire universe.

Some, through clouds of opium smoke, suggested that the safe provided access not just to all of the physical objects in the universe, but to thoughts, dreams, and abstractions as well. (After all, don’t abstractions reside in some way as contents of the universe?)

Ever unhelpful, but not without point, the nihilists believed it would be an aimless victory to own such a safe. They argued that it would take a person an infinite amount of time to find any specific thing within the safe, as it would be mixed in with all the other infinite contents of the universe.

But I, the con-artist and therefore the least deceived of them (as you can’t con a conman), knew the safe to be a simple and pragmatic thing. Neither literal nor metaphorical, it represented totality and completeness, and so it would serve my purpose. By reaching it, I would finally be whole and able to end this tired searching. 

As I made my way deeper into the structure, walls and rooms of the labyrinth began to shift. Elevators took me horizontally then vertically through nonsensical paths. 

Passing through a series of rooms, I arrived at a foyer with a double helix staircase leading upwards to floor upon floor. Such were the dimensions of this structure that, looking up from the hollow core of the staircase, I could not discern an end to this repetition. Each floor had to be checked for a path forward, and on the 3,435th floor I finally found a means of egress. 

Here then, at last, was the center of the labyrinth. 

I did not see the blow, but I felt tendrils of incendiary pain spreading like a flash fire across my spine, shutting me down. It is usually true that you can’t feel pain in your dreams… unless there is something in real life causing the pain. Like, perhaps, falling asleep on your arm and cutting off its blood supply. I had, in my restless sleep, cut it off entirely, like some general cutting off reinforcements to an enemy camp.

I awoke feeling a not-inconsiderable amount of guilt, for I realized what was in the safe. Indeed, I had placed it there. And I realized that, by waking, I had removed it from those eleven men and ruined their hopes entirely.

In the center of this scientist’s mind, made reclusive by the lockdown, was what was to those eleven men infinite: that is, this story, which I myself had stolen from a plagiarist machine.