We had talked about the Socotra House encounter with Artificial Intelligence. The hope from Section Leader Miles was that we could mine the exhaustive archive that sleeps on the big machine in the basement of The Trillium, Socotra House HQ. There is material that dates nearly to the turn of the century, plus added debris from external projects worked by team members elsewhere.
We thought this would be an exercise in being able to state a topic into the microphone on our laptops, phones and tablets. A lbor saving device that could sort more than 5,000 previous daily entries, compile them with a learned ability to mimic the Socotra style of dry wit, irony and grave regard for things that actually are important in today’s chaotic United States.

We got highjacked right away. There is a story that has lingered incomplete for years. It is about a friendship with a former Director fo Nval Intelligence, his military and social friends and the lthing that occupied the last part of his military career and became a focus of retirement.

That story was of the only Naval Intelligence Officer lost in combat, imprisoned in a Vietnamese POW camp. That is the fairly well documented part of the story. But this officer was someone special. He managed to dig himself under the wire and disappear into the brush around the camp. The tory then lurches into speculation. After the war’s tension cooled, the Vietnamese made a statement that that the American had been recaptured but succumbed to injuries. He was buried in a riverbank, according to his captors. Unfortunately, the river had washed it away in one of the Monsoons after the war concluded and other stories were resolved.

The admiral wasn’t sure, and the search of records and people he took up involved dozens of the Old Salts in the National Capitol Region. That includes some of the Boomers at the conference table. After his death, the search was put aside in caring for the other members of the Greatest Generation. That went on until fifteen years ago, and the miasma of infirmity passed with the last of the group in their late 80s.

The matter was then overcome with the chaos of the Global War on Terror (and some other things) until the matter that had smoldered burst once more into bright flame. Like the LA Palisades fire.

Splash decided to explore what the AI alogrithms in ChatGPT and Google Gemini could do to jam the existing old files together and save some time for a more relaxed breakfast.

What happened was something quite surprising. The ChatGPT program began to write a thriller.

That is where the story has lurched this morning. The factual edition is being retrieved without the assistance of the computers- the ones represented y the TAHE terminal at the end of the table. We will have to try to explain that Tomorrow…

Copyright 2025 Vic Socotra
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