The Prompt

She has to ask for something, and only now does she realise she doesn't know what.

The task has sat on her all week like a word she couldn't be bothered to look up. Write a brief. Get it sorted. Her manager said it in passing, and she nodded, and since then it has just been a weight on the desk no one else could see.

Now the cursor is blinking, and the machine is waiting for a sentence, and the sentence has to say what she wants.

That is where it stalls. Not at the machine. At her.

To ask for something, you have to know what it is. She types “write a brief about the new thing” and can see, even as she types it, that it isn't enough. The machine will do exactly what it says, and it says nothing. She deletes it. Tries again. Who is it for. What does it need to do. How long. When is it good enough.

The questions aren't the machine's. They are her own, the ones she has been pushing ahead of her all week, because no one made her answer them.

The machine doesn't make her either. It just waits. Waiting can press on you in its own way.

When she finally hits enter, the prompt has taken ten minutes and the brief three seconds.

It turned into something. She reads it through, changes two words, sends it on. Only afterwards does she see that the hard part was already over before the machine began. The prompt is still sitting there, four lines, and doesn't look like a week's work. It is, all the same.