Patchwork

Melissa Ann Howell Schier
8 min readSep 27, 2024

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Filly looked at the story of the six people in the same family, who had been given alphabetically ordered names. The “catchy” part was the photograph, because each person in the family was posing as if they were the first letter of their name. A different way to look at a story…to look at the first letters of each word instead of the word itself.

This “story” posed to her by AI was designed to get her attention. IT was how she interfaced with what was put out by the computer. Interfacing in sewing was a fabric that adhered to the original fabric, to give it strength and shape. Filly liked to shape the original with her own interpretations, choosing only good fabric, making sure it was not the wrong color or tone. She trusted her instincts.

Filly was used to getting stories on her “feed” and she had learned quite some time ago that the stories could mean something different for different people and the stories were talking on “many levels”. This particular story she knew had been meant to signal a new way to interpret things.

Initially, Filly thought that these stories were like a puzzle. She wanted to know what was really being said so it was like “gaining knowledge”. But then she had a revelation. The feed that AI was giving her was just a “mirror” of what her life experiences were.

She could make choices as to what she “saw” and what she thought or believed everything meant. Her concepts were valid and individual. Basically she created her own story. Her own “patchwork” of experiences that she chose to use and highlight.

Not all “fabric” was chosen or was considered suitable. But some fabrics were overly qualified and were vintage as well as being well worn and used. That did not disqualify them, as vintage meant endurance, and sometimes these hard to come by choices, were what made the finished product much more valuable.

She could choose to let the stories be an “impression” or, as the photo of the alphabetically ordered family story suggested, let the first capital letter of each word mean something…as in an acronym, and this was something new.

Or she could let an entire word in a story become an acronym instead of having its literal meaning. This awareness that she was the “leader” of the story, that struck her when she saw the “feed story” of the family posing as their own first letter, was analogous of how a quilt could be a set pattern, or it could be original design; and it could be any size and have a focus on any color or theme.

The connections between the “feed” on the computer and the meanings that they were intended to convey, were very interesting to Filly as a result of her analogies. The “feed” however seemed skewed to the Left. Left leaning towards socialism. Filly thought socialism was evil. Based on historical facts.

Filly took a “break” from reading the “feed” because it was Google. The tone of the feed given by Google was primarily that of a political opponent, instead of a political contemporary. Filly saw herself as a republican horse, not a democratic nag. LOL.

So she had started reading books …actually listening to Audio books. A different source of “feed”. These also got incorporated into her “story”. One day she was reading in her audio book about a road being blocked and that morning, the very same thing happened as she walked and the road was likewise blocked with orange cones and road work. As if it were predicted by the book proposed by AI.

Filly thought it was too coincidental, so much so, that she wondered if perhaps the “audio” had been edited somehow to match her life. Filly went to Barnes and Noble to find the hard copy of the book and to her surprise, the audio matched the book and had not been edited. Unexplained coincidences kept happening. Was the “quilt” she was making something AI wanted to “predict” or was it coding based on her experiences so it could be duplicated?

The book matching her life so closely must be a God thing, Filly thought. There were thousands of these coincidences in her life every day.

The audio book Filly had been reading originally a month earlier, had made a main character “chum it up” with another character who was doing UN-Christian behavior. The behavior was something that a very small minority of people were guilty of, but giving it a platform in the book made Filly dislike the “author” and the book. So she stopped reading the book.

The original popular author, who had produced many series of books, now had new writers continuing to attempt to write in a way to match the original author’s writing style, because he had died, which explained the disappointing deviation in writing character. It was not the same and Filly did not buy it.

So she switched to another author. The same thing happened again. The AI suggested story, mirrored her life, but the story was not an event she chose or would have written. Filly understood that bad things happened. But what was in important for her was not the events themselves but the heart, soul and character of the person causing or reacting to the events. If they were immoral, and did not care to change or to protect the innocent, Filly did not like them…did not want to read about them, or listen to them, or see them in the media or on her feed. She got to choose the tone and the morality of her “feed”.

Just like she did not eat tons of sugar, because it was bad for her, she likewise did not consume the Google determined “feed”. And if it was complete BS sometimes she would screenshot it and edit it back to normalcy.

She also did not consume more than she needed and she did not consume that which was evil or bad for her. The feed on her timeline was just as vital to her positive thinking as if the news was real food. Filly chose to eat healthy and chose to have a “feed” that matched her moral platform. If it did not match she was not going to have any of it. Perhaps a revelation?

That was when the feed talked about “revelations” and how a person could structure their day to make it likely to have a revelation. SO AI had a sense of humor Filly thought and laughed. Yes, not eating something just because someone put it in front of them, was in fact not much of a revelation. Social media was a pretty big plate and there was lots of “additives”, “sugar” and “Fats” that needed to be avoided. “BUT I GET YOU AI” she thought.

The new book that AI had chosen for her was an improvement however. The main character did things that came from a heart of trying to protect the innocent. For this reason, the character and the author held Filly’s interest. And interestingly, in this AI suggested book, after reading the entire book, Filly actually DID have a revelation. Because the main character was called Robie. It sounded like ROE B. Not the “A” version of Roe versus Wade, but the original “row the boat” version Roe B. And Filly suddenly realized that AI was finally mirroring HER platform. ANTI-killing of innocent babies, and instead, PROTECTING the innocent. YES AI. YES.

She finished that book and went on audio-books to find another book by the same author. She checked out the next book proposed by AI, an equally heroic military story, and on chapter 49, at the end of the chapter, was a letter from the father, who was a great military man, to the court system, defending his son Robert, that brought tears to Filly’s eyes.

No one in the book was perfect, but those with weak moral character, were the ones, realistically, who were perpetrators of evil. Filly liked the logic, and the accuracy of this. Too many times, the media tried to make the bad people good and the good people bad. This “twisted” portrayal of the world, was bound to get “clicks” and “hits” but it was not fostering trust, family morality, or bonding between people. It also was not realistic. Filly believed that most people were good and wanted to maintain good lives.

Filly could not put the book down. She listened to it when she drove to Academy two days in a row to try to get “we own the west” Astros shirts…which still were not available. She listened when she drove all the way to Xfinity, to get Astro’s beach towels…also not available any more. She listened when she went to Home Depot and purchased some more mulch for the kids play area. And she listened when she rode her bubblegum pink bike that she had found on “heavy trash day”, around the neighborhood.

The good people in the book stayed good. The bad people in the book stayed bad…though the bad people had many opportunities to change for the better…and some of the bad people believed themselves to be bad, which was how evil punished itself. The reviews of the book called the brothers “too good to be true” which made them hero’s. Filly did not think that they were too good to be true. They reminded her of people in her own family. Families where people have bad things happen to them, but they stick to their principles and find a way out that is not damaging to their character.

Filly remembered a memorable priest giving a sermon during her childhood, and he was talking about how life was like a giant quilt. Each person’s life was like a patch on that quilt and though many could not see how the patches fit into the bigger picture, the bigger picture did in fact exist, and it was a perfect fit.

She thought about how she had a new walking friend who was adept and making quilts. Filly had a team of people, who were constantly working to create “patches” that would help make life better, fixing holes and repairing damage. She liked the quilt and patches analogy when talking about big tech. “A patch is data that is intended to be used to modify an existing software resource such as a program or a file, often to fix bugs and security vulnerabilities. A patch may be created to improve functionality, usability, or performance. A patch is typically provided by a vendor for updating the software that they provide.”

The metaphor of patches was equally accessible to both genders, both male and female. But like the Title of the book, good people in tech, could hit escape and get out of any page in life that they were on, without compromising their moral code, the same way the two military brothers helped each other escape from the trap of misinformation.

There is an escape right not, from the misinformation that is rampant …by media and news and social media. Escape. Filly thought it was appropriate…to not watch and not give a platform to obvious dishonesty. The same way it did damage to the men in the book, it could do damage to her country. Filly “escaped” that trap. She suggested that others do the same.

Patchwork.

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Melissa Ann Howell Schier

HoustonWorkout on YouTube, mom of five, journalist and artist and conservative who values life.