The morning had absolutely nothing to do with rap.
That was the first thing.
There was calm piano music playing in the apartment—the kind that asks almost nothing of you. Dustin was comfortable. Not inspired in the capital-I sense. Not building. Not looking for the next thing.
Just sitting there.
He opened Instagram.
Which was his first mistake.
Two people stood beside a microphone.
Rap music played.
Scroll.
Two more people stood beside a microphone.
Scroll.
A celebrity and another version of the celebrity.
Scroll.
A dog.
Scroll.
Somebody's cat.
Scroll.
A horse.
“Okay, what the fuck.”
Apparently the internet had agreed that everybody needed to become a rapper this week.
Dustin laughed.
He'd seen Adam Ray doing it and assumed it was an Adam Ray thing.
It was not an Adam Ray thing.
It was an everybody thing.
And somewhere between the calm piano coming through the speakers and another impossible pair of performers standing beside another microphone, Dustin remembered something else.
Harry Mack.
Not just Harry Mack himself.
Something Harry had said recently on a podcast while talking about AI and rap.
The question, inevitably, was whether AI could beat him.
Harry joked that of course it could.
And there was an obvious logic to that.
A machine doesn't forget words.
It can carry absurd amounts of vocabulary.
It can search patterns at speeds a human cannot.
Give the technology enough capability and the purely computational advantages become almost unfair.
But Dustin knew there was something missing from that answer.
He knew because, once upon a time, he had become sufficiently curious about why Harry Mack was so good at freestyle rap that he had done the most Dustin thing possible.
He built software.
Not yesterday.
Not as part of this trend.
Almost a year ago.
There had been databases and transcripts and scoring systems. Rhyme structures. Cadence. Setup and payoff. Callbacks. Pivots. Attempts to take something that felt almost magical when Harry did it and ask:
What is actually happening here?
Could you measure it?
Could you explain it?
Could you teach it?
And somewhere along the way, because apparently serious research eventually requires a stupid character, another idea appeared.
AI Mack.
AI Mack had one dream.
He wanted to beat Harry Mack in a rap battle.
There was one problem.
Harry Mack doesn't really do rap battles.
AI Mack did not consider this relevant.
For a while, Dustin kept building.
Eventually the project reached the edge of what he could reasonably do with the tools, hardware and models he had available.
The scoring system could recognize interesting things.
It could also occasionally recognize complete garbage as surprisingly talented.
The performance technology wasn't convincing.
The voice wasn't good.
The gap between analyzing rap on a screen and performing freestyle music like a human being was enormous.
So the project stopped.
Not failed.
Stopped.
There are differences you only learn after building enough things.
Some projects are abandoned because you no longer care about the question.
Others are simply waiting at the edge of whatever was possible when you last touched them.
And now Dustin was sitting in his apartment listening to piano music while the entire internet apparently discovered that artificial people standing beside microphones was hilarious.
He laughed again.
Of course.
AI Mack had been downstairs this entire time.
Probably furious.
Probably warming up.
Probably still waiting for a battle Harry had never agreed to.
And Dustin had better tools now.
Better models.
More experience.
Soon, better hardware.
He could probably do things with that old project that weren't realistic when he built it.
Maybe the scoring system could finally be tested properly.
Maybe performance could become part of the experiment instead of an embarrassing computer voice bolted onto the end.
Maybe the original question—what exactly makes an elite freestyle elite?—was still sitting there.
And, wonderfully, the internet had just supplied a reason to remember it.
Dustin looked at another video.
For approximately thirty seconds, he considered making one himself.
It would actually be funny.
He had the backstory.
He had AI Mack.
He had nearly a year of ridiculous provenance explaining why this particular internet trend had somehow wandered directly across one of his abandoned experiments.
He could make the video.
He could post it.
He could join the thing while the thing was happening.
Dustin looked around the apartment.
Piano music.
Quiet.
Comfortable chair.
No microphone.
No audience.
No obligation whatsoever to convert an interesting coincidence into participation.
He put the phone down.
AI Mack could wait.
The internet would survive without Dustin standing beside a clone of himself pretending to rap into a microphone.
And maybe that was the nicest part.
He hadn't discovered a new project.
He hadn't received an assignment from the algorithm.
He hadn't missed his chance.
He had simply remembered:
Oh yeah. I made that.
Somewhere on a hard drive was an unfinished experiment about one of the best freestylers alive.
Somewhere inside it was an artificial rapper with an impossible ambition.
The technology had kept moving while they were away.
So had Dustin.
They could meet again later.
For now, the piano kept playing.
Instagram kept rapping.
AI Mack remained downstairs doing vocal warmups for a battle nobody had scheduled.
And Dustin remained exactly where he was.
Comfortable.
Which, at least this morning, was considerably more appealing than going viral.