Frontier Road - Short Stories, Literature, History and Religion

• AI Slop? Or the End of our Economy? (A Short Story)

  “It’s AI slop,” Doug said, without hesitation, but with a trace of fear.He’d seen the phrase tossed around in the Reddit threads he followed. AI slop was the new shorthand for any piece of modern writing that felt off. Bloated. Predictable. Sanitized. Or maybe from a jealous reader. You saw it in Amazon reviews like a stamp, This is AI slop. Don’t bother.It wasn’t a critique. It was an execution.Doug dismissed the style.“Look at the em dashes and the way the tone swings negative,” he said, holding his phone out. “It reads like ChatGPT.”Tess slid closer on the couch. Doug pointed to the section he meant, the part about the layoffs and the seven tech companies. It wasn’t wrong, exactly. But it had that tone. That clean, polished, context-aware rhythm that never quite earned its confidence.Tess re-read at the paragraph, then nodded slightly.She knew. She absolutely knew.She was living in the minefield every day. At the college, nothing was clear. No campus-wide policy, no ethical guidelines. Just rumors and half-statements passed around in department meetings.Some professors had gone scorched earth and run everything through the filters, fail anything under 75% human. No negotiation. No grace.Others tried to work with it. Blend it. Teach their students how to use it without becoming it.Tess hadn’t picked a side. Not fully. She still marked up papers by hand. Still circled lazy sentences. But more and more, she was marking structure.She pointed to the sentence Doug was referring to.“This one here,” she said. “‘Not governments. Not voters.’ That’s classic corrective contrast. It’s not X, it’s Y. It’s quintessential ChatGPT”.Doug nodded.“It’s the pivot,” Tess said. “Sets you up, then flips it. ChatGPT does it constantly. It feels decisive. But it’s just a pattern.”“And the em dashes?” Doug asked. “Only AI uses those, not a student in your university would know how to use one properly. Ain’t no one there James Baldwin.”“Cover for voice,” she said. “When the AI doesn’t know how to keep tone consistent, it leans on punctuation to hold the sentence together.”Doug smirked. “So your student fed it a prompt?”“Maybe,” she said. “Maybe she wrote it. Maybe she wrote with it. That’s what’s hard. Is it cheating?”

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• Dear Moses Part 2: Where’s the Grave?

  Start with the end. Just how the story of Moses is given to us. Not in triumph or resolution, but in a passage of scripture so abrupt and unadorned that it invites suspicion. Here is Deuteronomy 34:“And Moses went up from the plains of Moab unto the mountain of Nebo… And the Lord shewed him all the land… And the Lord said unto him, This is the land which I sware unto Abraham, unto Isaac, and unto Jacob… I have caused thee to see it with thine eyes, but thou shalt not go over thither. So Moses the servant of the Lord died there in the land of Moab… but no man knoweth of his grave unto this day.”

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• Anna Karenina Abridged and Modernized

  This version of Anna Karenina was created in 2020 well before the advent of artificial intelligence. It was translated and thoughtfully modernized by a human hand, with the goal of preserving Tolstoy’s original prose while making the language and pacing more accessible to today’s reader.Leo Tolstoy stands as one of the greatest voices in Russian literature. Born into aristocracy, he dropped out of school and spent much of his early life on his family estate, gambling heavily on cards and sports. After racking up significant debts, he joined the army with his brother during the Crimean War. There, the mass suffering deeply disturbed him, and his disillusionment with violence and institutional power began.His fiction reflects the society he lived in and the personal philosophies that consumed him. A baptized Christian who believed in God, Tolstoy was never at ease with organized religion. His vocal criticism of the Russian Orthodox Church eventually led to his excommunication, after which people in Moscow would reportedly line the streets and cheer when he passed by.Tolstoy began Anna Karenina in 1875, thirteen years into his marriage to Sophia, the woman he both adored and struggled to understand. Their recovered diaries show a man tortured by lust and spiritual guilt, confessing to Sophia that he often felt “not in control of himself.” Despite these tensions, they had thirteen children and remained together until the end of his life.At 82, Tolstoy quietly left home one night, desperate for peace and solitude. He boarded a train bound for a remote monastery but fell ill with pneumonia and died at a small station days later. Sophia, despite years of strain and sorrow, remained devoted to him. In her final reflections, she said simply: “The truth is, I have much love.”Chapter 1Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.There was chaos in the Oblonsky household. Dolly Oblonsky had discovered her husband, Stepan, was having an affair with a French girl who had once been the family’s governess. Dolly announced she could no longer live under the same roof with him. Three days had passed since then, and everyone in the house felt it. The mood was heavy. No one saw the point of pretending anymore. Strangers thrown together at a roadside inn seemed to have more in common than the Oblonskys did now.Dolly stayed locked in her room. Stepan hadn’t been home in three days. The children ran wild through the house. The English governess got into a fight with the housekeeper and began searching for new work. The cook quit just before dinner.

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• Dear Moses - Short Story Series Part 1

  Part 1 of the Short Story Series, Dear Moses“And the woman conceived and bore a son; and when she saw that he was a goodly child, she hid him three months. And when she could not longer hide him, she took for him an ark of bulrushes, and daubed it with slime and with pitch, and put the child therein; and she laid it in the flags by the river’s brink.”—Exodus 2:2–3I killed for Pharaoh.Not just once. Not just the overseer in the sand. I carried a blade for him before that, before I knew who I was. I rode chariots with the king’s soldiers. We fought against Kush. Against raiders from the east. I saw fire in the hills and bodies split down the middle. We killed fast and hard and didn’t bury anyone who wasn’t ours.I was good at it. My arms were strong. I didn’t flinch. The generals liked me because I followed orders and didn’t ask why. They said I had the blood of gods.Maybe I believed it. But not in the Gods. Just in the strength of a human willing.They started to favor me, fed me well. Dressed me in fine robes. Taught me how to sit at court and drink like a noble. I spoke their language clean. Not like the workers. Not like the Hebrews.That word, Hebrew, it didn’t mean much to me then. Just a name for the ones who built everything and got nothing.I passed them every day. Men hauling stone in the heat. Women with their backs bent from the fields. Children crying and still made to work. And I didn’t look long.Not until I did.There was one man. Couldn’t have been older than me. His hands were bleeding. Rope burns across both wrists. He was lifting bricks anyway. No shouting, no noise. Just working through it. I watched him. I don’t know why.He looked up at me.Not in fear. Not hate either. Just a tired kind of knowing. Like he already knew I wasn’t who I thought I was.I couldn’t stop thinking about him.After that I started walking the long way through the quarter. Not just once. A dozen times. More. I listened. I saw how the guards talked to them. How they spat near their feet. How they hit them just to be seen hitting someone.Something started cracking.I didn’t know God. Not then. I knew Pharaoh. I knew kings. I knew bronze and fire and the way a man’s eyes go when you cut too deep. But God? No.What I felt was smaller. Human.I started to see them not as slaves, but as people.And that was the beginning of the end.You can’t fight for Pharaoh with the same hands that watch a man bleed and know he didn’t deserve it.So I stopped going to court.I stopped showing up at the drills.I started walking more in silence.I didn’t know what it meant. I didn’t know who I was. But I knew I wasn’t theirs.Not anymore.

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• A Boy in the Peninsular War

  Napoleon didn’t invade Spain. Not at first. He came in through the back, through Portugal; quickly, quietly, and with hardly a shot fired.By the fall of 1807, France and Spain had signed the Treaty of Fontainebleau, supposedly agreeing to carve up Portugal between them. The French would march in from the north and center. The Spanish would help from the sides. On paper, it was about punishing Portugal for its alliance with Britain. But in truth, it was about control, Napoleon’s control, and Portugal was the test run.The French Army of the Gironde, 25,000 strong under General Junot, crossed into Spain on October 18. They took their time, covering three hundred miles in twenty-five days. No battles. No resistance. Behind the scenes, French engineers sketched out every fort, bridge, and mountain pass they passed, mapping Spain like a future enemy, not a friend.Meanwhile, Spanish troops, unknowingly aiding their own undoing, moved into position from Galicia and Badajoz. Their role was to secure the flanks and help the French take Lisbon. But the real purpose of the operation became clearer with each step. Napoleon had no intention of stopping at the Portuguese border. Portugal was never the endgame. It was the excuse.By the time Junot marched into Lisbon in November, the country had been taken without a single major engagement. A kingdom of three million had surrendered in silence. Not from lack of pride, but from the sheer psychological weight of Napoleon’s name. The Portuguese government crumbled. The royal family fled to Brazil. And with Portugal in hand, Napoleon had his foot firmly planted on the western edge of Europe.Spain was next. It just didn’t know it yet.

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