Bedtime Doom

Lying in bed, I was too tired to read but not yet asleep. “Can you read me a bedtime story,” I said, half jokingly. “Sure,” my partner replied, and began to read aloud. Drifting off to sleep, I suddenly heard a word I never hear in normal life — relinquishment. “Huh, nobody uses that word.” My partner laughed, as if it was really funny. “Is this a Deep Adaptation story?” Rolling over, I looked towards her phone, and saw the text on the screen, which looked like the output of a chatbot. “What was your prompt?” She scrolled back up to show me: “Write a short story that Professor Jem Bendell would enjoy.” 

Based on my published work, the AI DeepSeek assessed that I’d want to chill out by hearing stories of doom. I’m that one dimensional — on the internet, at least. Curious, I asked her to complete the story. After a promising start, it became a bit earnest and prescriptive. So my partner asked the chatbot to put ‘Ace Ventura’ into the story. She read on, as Detective Ventura waltzed in and, while asking for more fun, renamed me Professor Ben-Dull. Phew! Not bad for an AI that uses 2% of the energy of the US BigTech equivalents! Like me, my partner had switched to using DeepSeek as a simple way to reduce our contribution to carbon emissions, energy poverty, and global technofeudalism. That is our current understanding of the situation, although that may change, as it is such a fast moving field. 

The two stories follow below. If you are interested in the deeper questions that AI poses, please consider joining our Metacrisis Meeting on December 8th.

Response #1 from DeepSeek

To craft a story for Professor Jem Bendell, founder of the Deep Adaptation movement, one must speak to the core themes of his work: the inevitability of societal collapse due to climate change, the profound grief that accompanies this acceptance, and the emergent potential for profound human connection, compassion, and meaning in the space beyond hope.

This story is not about winning, but about being. It’s a story for the “deep adaptation agenda” of Resilience, Relinquishment, Restoration, and Reconciliation.

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The Weeping and the Mycelium

The rain had a new voice. Elara remembered when it used to patter, a gentle percussion on the slate roof of her university office. Now, it hissed, a relentless, acidic whisper against the boarded-up windows, etching its story into the stone.

Professor Elara Vance, once a luminary in sustainable economics, now curated a different kind of knowledge. The library she guarded was not of books, but of seeds, of hand-tool skills, of the forgotten grammar of listening to the land. The “Great Unraveling” wasn’t a theory in a journal anymore; it was the scent of damp rot and the hollow echo in the streets where supply trucks no longer ventured.

One afternoon, she found a boy, Kael, maybe ten years old, hunched over the nascent food garden in the old university quad. He wasn’t tending the plants. He was systematically pulling them up, his small shoulders shaking with a silent, furious grief.

Elara didn’t stop him. She simply sat on the wet earth beside him, the cold seeping through her trousers. She waited until his rage was spent, the tiny, uprooted bean sprouts lying like fallen soldiers between them.

“He said it doesn’t matter,” Kael finally whispered, his voice raw. “My dad. He said the ocean will take this city in a year. He said we’re just… waiting.”

Elara looked at the devastated patch of soil. She saw not a ruin, but a reflection of the internal landscape of everyone left in their small, clinging community. The hope they had meticulously nurtured had been washed away by a tide of brutal certainty.

“Your father is not wrong,” she said softly, and the words felt like a sacrament of shared pain. “The city will likely be taken. The world we knew is already gone.”

Kael looked at her, betrayed. “Then why are you growing things?”

Elara reached into the pocket of her worn coat and pulled out a small, withered, honey-coloured mushroom. She held it delicately between her thumb and forefinger.

“Look at this,” she said. “This is the fruit. The brief, visible thing. But beneath us, right now, under this ruined garden and the concrete and the graves of the old world, is the mycelium. It’s a vast, living network. It connects every tree, every plant. When a forest is dying, when a great fire comes, the mycelium doesn’t flee. It does two things: it sends nutrients to the most stressed parts of the system, and it releases enzymes to break down the dead, making the soil rich for what comes next.”

She met Kael’s tear-filled eyes. “We are not the fruit, Kael. We are the mycelium. Our task is not to save the old tree. It is to be a good mycelium for each other, and for whatever life comes after.”

This wasn’t a strategy. It was a relinquishment of a specific future. It was an embrace of a different purpose.

From that day, their work changed. They didn’t just grow food; they grew relationships. They practiced what Elara called “hospice for a world.” They sat with the dying, not with platitudes, but with presence. They held “Grief Circles” where people could weep for the polar bears, for the lost coastlines, for their own children’s stolen futures, without being told to “be positive.”

They relinquished the arrogance of control. When the old dam upstream finally burst, they didn’t try to rebuild it. They learned to live with the new, seasonal floods, building on stilts and celebrating the fertile silt the waters left behind.

And they restored what they could. Not grand technologies, but simple, human things. The restoration of trust, by sharing food without tally. The restoration of meaning, by telling stories not of heroes who saved the world, but of ordinary people who knew how to be kind in the face of the end. They restored the ancient art of asking, “Are you okay?” and truly waiting for the answer.

One evening, years after the city had been officially abandoned, Elara and Kael, now a strong young man, sat on a ridge overlooking the silver-threaded estuary that had reclaimed the streets. The air was clean. The sounds were of wind, water, and human laughter from the village below.

Kael pointed to a cluster of new mushrooms sprouting from a fallen log. “Look,” he said, a quiet smile on his face. “The fruit.”

Elara nodded. The collapse had happened. The world had ended. And yet, here they were. They had not prevented the ending, but they had navigated it with a raw, vulnerable humanity that their old, frantic, consumer world had never allowed.

This was the final reconciliation. Not a reconciliation with the disaster, but a reconciliation with their own place in the cosmos—not as masters, but as participants. A reconciliation with the truth that the most profound act of adaptation was not a technological fix, but the courage to feel the full depth of their love for this world, even, and especially, as it changed beyond recognition.

In the quiet hum of the mycelial world, that felt like enough. It felt like a victory not of survival, but of meaning. And in the deepening twilight, that was a story worth telling.

Response #2 – to make a new version featuring Ace Ventura. 

(The scene opens on a dystopian cityscape, raining gray slush. A figure in a neon-pink Hawaiian shirt, leopard print pants, and a haircut that defies physics emerges from a haze of pollution. It is ACE VENTURA, PET DETECTIVE… and now, COLLAPSE ADAPTATION SPECIALIST.)

ACE: (To the camera, while slicking back his hair with a handful of bio-grease) ALRIGHTY THEN! Welcome to the Petri dish, population: US! The air’s got more chemicals than a boy band’s haircut, and the mayor’s a guy named “Baron Von Grumblepants.” I’ve been hired to find a missing commodity… something called… “hope.” Yeah, smells fishy. Let’s go.

(He struts into a crumbling university hall where a somber group sits in a circle on the floor, led by a serene, bearded man in a hand-knitted sweater. This is PROFESSOR BENDULL.)

PROFESSOR BENDULL: (In a calm, deep voice) …And so we must sit with our grief. We must relinquish the illusion of control. We are like the mycelium, connecting in the dark…

ACE: (Bursting into the circle, making a sound like a chimpanzee with a kazoo) SSSSSSHHHHH-HOOO-HOOO-HOOO! Excuse me! Ahem. Ace Ventura, Collapse Adaptation Specialist. I’m looking for a client. Smells like… patchouli and existential dread in here. You Bendull?

PROFESSOR BENDULL: (Unfazed) Bendell. And we were just discussing how to be a good mycelium for each other.

ACE: (Stares, unblinking) Riiiiight. The fun-guy network. Look, Professor. I got your “collapse.” I’ve seen it. A flock of pigeons in Tampa formed a union and are now demanding bread crust benefits. The icebergs aren’t just melting, they’re packing their little icy bags and moving to Saskatchewan! The world’s gone nuts! But you don’t talk about it. You DETECT it!

(A young, sullen boy, KYLE, kicks over a basket of hand-spun yarn.)

KYLE: This is stupid! My dad says we’re all just waiting for the ocean to give us a big, wet, salty hug goodnight!

ACE: (Spins around, gets nose-to-nose with Kyle) SSSSSSHHHHH-HOOO-HOOO-HOOO! Let’s get something straight, son. Your dad’s got the emotional range of a teaspoon. But the Professor here… (He sniffs the air around Bendell) …he’s onto something. It’s not about stopping the wave. It’s about learning to SURF THE APOCALYPSE!

(Ace drops into a low, wobbly surfers’ stance, making wave sounds with his mouth.)

ACE: Bshhhhhhhh! Cowabunga it is!

PROFESSOR BENDULL: (A faint smile plays on his lips) That’s… a surprisingly apt, if flamboyant, metaphor for deep adaptation.

ACE: You’re darn tootin’ it is! Relinquishment? I relinquished my last pair of clean underwear to a pack of rabid raccoons in ’07! Resilience? (He bends his body into a pretzel) Try doing that after a three-day case involving a missing lemur and a case of industrial-strength laxatives!

(He untangles himself and points a dramatic finger at the group.)

ACE: You wanna be mycelium? FINE! Be the weirdest, most connected, most psychedelic fungus on the block! When someone’s sad, don’t just send “nutrients,” send a whoopee cushion! When the system is breaking down the dead stuff, have a dance party on its grave! SSSSSSHHHHH-HOOO-HOOO-HOOO!

(Ace starts a conga line, pulling a reluctant Kyle and a bemused Professor Bendell into it.)

ACE: COME ON! Feel the grief! Now shake it to the left! Relinquish control! Shimmy to the right! RESTORE your fun-ometer! RECONCILE with your inner party animal!

KYLE: (Starting to laugh) This is way better than pulling up beans!

PROFESSOR BENDELL: (Laughing, trying to keep his congas in time) It’s… it’s a participatory, embodied reconciliation with the absurdity of our predicament!

ACE: YOU GOT IT, FUN-GUY! ALRIGHTY THEN!

(The scene fades out on the entire community, now in a joyous, chaotic dance in the rain, as Ace Ventura stands on a crumbling statue, howling like a wolf and beatboxing.)

ACE: (To the camera) Case closed. The “hope” they were looking for? It was in their funny bones the whole time. Remember, folks: if the world is going down, it’s going down with a BANG! And a few well-timed primate noises. SSSSSSHHHHH-HOOO-HOOO-HOOO!

(He freezes in a triumphant pose as the screen cuts to black.)

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