by Romie Stott
Romie Stott’s “A Reclamation of Beavers,” appears in our [March/April issue, on sale now!]. For this blog post, Stott discusses the various influences, from her work as a closed captioner to wetland reclamation, behind the AI she conceived for her latest short story.
“Writer” is in my job title, the same way “reporter” is in the job title “court reporter”—I’m a Voice Writer, a specific subcategory of closed captioner for live television. For more than a decade, for many hours a week, I’ve broadcast real-time text transcripts to millions of televisions during live sports games, congressional hearings, stock market shifts, riots, college courses, hurricanes, and a pandemic. To keep up with the speed of speech, I use a cyborg approach—a combination of trained speech recognition, typing, hotkeys, and predictive text, which I tweak constantly for each context. A pickleball tournament needs different words than a sociology lecture.
That’s the origin of the Beaver AI in “A Reclamation of Beavers,” in more ways than one. The last several years of wildfires in the US and Canada affected a lot of people I care about, whether it was smoke haze keeping my Massachusetts hometown overcast, wildfires on the march toward my sister’s house in Atlanta, or my cousin in Oregon sleeping with car keys in her hand because the fire line was five miles away and an evacuation could be called at any time. A Californian colleague of mine at Strange Horizons lost her home and a partial lifetime of art projects.
When I went to work, the fires were there, too. Sometimes I spoke-wrote the suffering of people fleeing, and newscaster pleas for charitable aid. Sometimes, I was the emergency broadcast informing locals which roads were still clear and open. I was alone at my microphone. I didn’t have time to pause, reflect, react—the words kept going, and I am a conduit to bridge aural text into something visual. Often, I was in an abstract argument with my assistive computer about whether the solution to the problem was a boat, or a vote.
That’s the Beaver AI. I wrote it before the public release of Chat GPT-3 and the other large language models. The Beaver AI is every time Google has given me a search result that “corrects” what I asked for into something easier to find. It’s every time Microsoft Word has suggested I rewrite a sentence so it’s more banal. And the Beaver AI is every time I’ve disabled part of a program to keep it on track, or deleted a word from the computer’s vocabulary. You don’t believe me when I say “Stimpson Road”? Then the Simpsons don’t exist anymore. Nor do stims, simps, or stems. I’ll resurrect plants and medicine in an hour or two.
The rest of the story required more research, although a lot of it was passive. I was already interested in wetland reclamation, rewilding as flood control. A couple of times a year, I go to a campsite in New Hampshire where there’s an active beaver population—although I never see them. Only their works. Nocturnal. I had to read to find out why. I’ve touched the fur of an old beaver pelt at a museum, and have smelled a recreation of their smell. For descriptions of beavers’ vision, I have to trust the experts. Human color perception, I know more about; my graduate degree is in filmmaking. (If the story feels like a movie, that’s probably because the present-tense narrative brings it closer to screenwriting than most of my stories.)
I have never burned holes in my tent. But it’s an old, old tent, and I didn’t think I could rely on my familiarity with its texture to predict what might happen. I had to look up what fabrics go into newer, lighter-weight tents the firefighters would likely carry, and consider the ways they would (or wouldn’t) melt. That was a two step process: find the tent fabric via camping supply stores, and then search garment repair forums to see cigarette burns. For insight into the lives of the fire crews themselves, my jumping off point was episode 727 of This American Life, ” Boulder v. Hill.” Other stories, I heard on local news broadcasts I captioned.
The Beaver AI is every time I’ve disabled part of a program to keep it on track, or deleted a word from the computer’s vocabulary. You don’t believe me when I say “Stimpson Road”? Then the Simpsons don’t exist anymore. Nor do stims, simps, or stems.
In general, audio played a dominant role in how I thought of the fire; as a captioner, I don’t always have a visual reference. Or I am the one creating the visual reference; I experience events through my ears. Lee, the protagonist, is in darkness, in smoke, is enveloped in a tent. As a result, I didn’t look up video of wildfires; I looked for audio recordings. Yellowstone National Park has a wonderful online sound library.
If you do a web search, you really can find out how to assemble a D.I.Y. air cleaner, using tutorials from the Washington Department of Ecology and the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation. Here’s a YouTube video. I liked the idea that the Beaver AI, because of its attachment to the park service and to Lee, would prioritize government sources, and would have a West Coast bias.
If you’re interested in learning more about natural flood management using beavers, here’s a recent open-access academic article from The Journal of Flood Management, via the Wiley Library. The state of the science is basically: turning an area over to beavers reduces the risk of big floods and reduces the risk of wildfires. The way they work the land makes the land more able to hold water. However, they cause more frequent unpredictable small floods in the process. At this stage, most attempts to reintroduce beavers aren’t about a need to prove what they can do—they’re about convincing the nearby famers and landholders that it’s worth putting up with the hassle. I don’t think anybody has yet assigned a dedicated beaver babysitter and spokesperson like park ranger Lee, but I wouldn’t be surprised to find out I’m wrong.
Orchids are weird flowers that are difficult to grow on purpose but sprout like weeds in certain landscapes where they don’t have to compete with other plants and won’t be eaten by deer; wild ones show up in places like abandoned strip mines, or collapsed slopes after floods and fires. Lee’s experience defending this area of the park from off-trail orchid hunters is a clue to my imagined backstory for the beaver habitat itself; it’s easier for the government to acquire a bunch of land if nobody wants to farm it or build houses on it, and its easier to pitch a remediation project in an area with a history of disasters that might need extreme solutions.
The orchids, like the beavers, are a stage in the process of the local ecosystem restructuring itself; they underscore how relatively new this landscape is, the same thing that’s said but unsaid by Lee’s need to keep doing community outreach to explain the park’s goals. In bare clay soil, orchids are a pioneer species, a technical term meaning one of the first things to grow. The trees in that area are still saplings; we’re not that far into secondary succession. A wildfire hit this edge of the park maybe five years ago, maybe ten. The wildfire in the story is the “next” one; the test of whether beaver remediation will work. If left undisturbed, the nature reserve will probably take another hundred years or more to become a “mature” landscape with a stable ecology.
I have never once been able to get an orchid to re-bloom. I can keep them alive, but that’s it. To figure out how plants behave after wildfires, I read a lot of writing by fire ecologists. There’s a lot out there, but here’s a quick primer from the University of Chicago.
The usual collective noun for beavers is a colony, although you’ll also hear family, team, and lodge. But I figure as long as Lee and the Beaver AI are renaming things, it can be a reclamation.
The Astounding Analog Companion 