Hey Reddit, Does Anyone Here Know How To Destroy A Map? – September 7, 2022 at 08:32PM

See title for question.

Some background:

Over the summer I got really into AI-generated images. I’ve been really active on the Discord, I have a twitter where I retweet a bunch of AI stuff I find cool, and of course I’ve been posting a lot on here. Basically, you give a bunch of words to an algorithm and it constructs images that match your writing. There are some things the algorithm is really good at — landscapes, details, skies. It struggles with faces still, text too, anything that the human mind would need high fidelity to understand. But what’s cool is that the human mind can interpret, because we can still read into the noise and find all sorts of stuff! A face looks like a face until you get close to it.

But I’ve never cared about faces anyway. I found this one collection called “This City Does Not Exist” and I got completely captivated. I love GPS maps, when I was a kid I’d just hop on Google Earth and zoom around looking at places I’ll never go. This scratched that itch hardcore. I spent hours generating image after image, exploring all these overhead maps for nonexistent places. Honestly, I still love doing it. Even after everything that’s happened, sometimes I’ll just go in there and imagine these other places, what it would be like to walk around the streets, to click through blurred license plates and half-finished faces… Hell, if it wasn’t for all the other stuff I wouldn’t even need to be here posting about it, I’d just be writing prompts over and over into the bot. Writing prompts is like reciting sonnets to a computer.

“Oh, my love, GPS map, flowing lines, street addresses, graph hierarchy, grayscale. Coastal, shoreline, seaside. Detailed zoning.” [image result]

But I’ve probably spent most of my savings on processing power and printer ink. The printing is important, even if it’s a pain in the ass, because the more you look at these images and stitch them together, the more you notice how well the maps connect together. A street continues from one page to the next, recurring motifs emerge and fade away, and when I glue them together a city emerges. I named the city “Rose’s Roost” after some text that showed up next to the map’s compass. I know Rose’s Roost better than my own town. Because that’s the thing about these maps, is that you can find meaning in the patterns. They’re like the opposite of faces. And they’re so vast, that’s the most beautiful part. They make so much more sense.

[Rose’s Roost, 8/25/22] (I’ve expanded the N and & sections since then)

Okay, bear with me — I know this is the part where most of you stop reading because I sound like a crazy person, but I need you to believe me that I’ve really thought this through. I can show you my citations if you want, I have a ton. I have boxes of them, along with all my maps and notes and ciphers. But so listen, if you try and draw a map of your childhood home, and then compare that map to the actual layout of the house, you’re going to have two different maps. Right? Like they look different and stuff. And that’s true with GPS too — one time I was driving home and I tried to use my GPS and it got me totally turned around, because the GPS’s map didn’t align with the place in my head. My map isn’t perfect, it’s full of lacuna, like a moth-eaten sweater. Most of these don’t bother me, but there’s a couple spots I’m hoping to figure out by Thanksgiving.

I didn’t know why I was doing it at first but then I figured it out.

I don’t think Rose’s Roost is a real place, like it’s Neverland and I’m Peter Pan. That would be insane, and I’m not insane. But I do consider myself a rational person (atheist, libertarian, ally, etc.) and based on all the evidence formed from comparing maps of Rose’s Roost with locations in my local area, I strongly believe the map I’ve created is a map of the real world around me. At first I was concerned about plagiarism, that somehow the algorithm was drawing on locations from real maps — which would ruin the entire exercise. But it’s not that the maps matched up with the map in my head. They certainly didn’t align with any satellite I’ve ever heard of. But if you look you can find my corner store. You can find the exact shape of my best friend’s house. You can find my grandmother’s retirement home, among a sea of pixellated blobs. I know I can. I’ve studied those maps harder than I’ve studied anything. I’d be in college right now if I threw myself into my schoolwork with half as much energy as I put into Rose.

Last week was the first time I saw her. I was walking my dog near the park, and my muscle memory took over. It was like when you’re trying to go somewhere else but you turn onto the road to work anyway. I took a left in a spot where there isn’t normally a left, and I was walking down a road I’d never been down before. I had been down it hundreds of times, just in my imagination. And now I was actually walking down it. It’s the long one near the circle structure, by the oxbow and that one lacuna. I had expected the landscape to be messed up, but it was normal actually. Like walking through any neighborhood on earth, except I never saw a single person. That’s the fucked up part about maps — they’re fractals. You could spend your life mapping just one single city block. I walked for about half a mile (barely a street corner) before looping around and making it back home, coming at the front door from a direction I’d never taken before.

[path of first walk, 9/1/22]

The second walk was longer. Went down to see the ocean at the edge of the map. I brought food with me, since every gas station I tried to stop at was always closed. The weird part is that when you’re looking at the image from up above, everything looks so small. It’s easy to delude yourself into believing you could explore everything. Some part of me understands what it must have been like to invent longitude and latitude, like you could reduce the entire world to a grid. But the map is far more sprawling than I anticipated. Thin lines on paper are actually yawning prairies of asphalt, careening drops between various portions of the topography, superstructures that dwarf my comprehension. I had dinner on top of a concrete wall a mile wide and so tall that there was only mist and shrieking seagulls below. I don’t know where the gulls came from, but they seemed to be the only other living thing in here, besides the occasional bit of writing carved into the concrete.

Occasionally I would trespass. I did this most frequently on my third walk, when I was determined to reach the ocean. I had to pass through one of the lacuna to get there. Those parts are the most fucked up, because once I’m off the map, I don’t know what could happen. The majestic alien beauty of Rose’s Roost frightens me most when I can’t see the thin black lines on white paper which indicate the starting and stopping of the cosmos itself. What could lie in its little corners? In the old maps, they’d label these places “Here There Be Dragons”, but in my new map, they’re just a hole I could stick a finger through, a dissatisfying gap between two perfect algorithmically-generated map components. I hate trespassing. It feels like I’m missing the point of the map. But I got to the ocean.

It was beautiful. Gray and blue and purple, the wine-colored sea Homer must have dreamed about. It was so beautiful I almost missed the man on the beach. Another traveler, another one of Rose’s lovers! He looked like he was sleeping from far away, but when I got closer I realized there was nothing left. A sand-wrapped towel lay near him. His body was bloated and eaten away by gulls. I couldn’t see his face, just the suggestion of where his face used to be. When I tried to pick him up, his bones sloughed in my hands.

I ran away. I’m a coward, I’m not afraid to admit it. I ran as hard as I could, and it took me nearly seven hours to make my way back home.

The fourth walk wasn’t planned. It just happened to me. I was trying to go to visit my grandma and next thing I knew, I was in the middle of a barren salt-choked field. I’m lucky I knew this part of the map, because I had only added it a couple days ago. It took me three days to get back here. There’s no water inside Rose’s body, nothing any human can drink. All the rivers are black and taste like iron, and the sea is salt, of course. I spent half a day throwing up. The gulls made fun of me, laughing at the hollow rot inside my stomach, as I staggered down streets I know better than the back of my hand. I got home a couple days ago.

Anyway, that’s the context.

My mom thinks I had some kind of breakdown, but I’m scared that if I go to the hospital I’m gonna go walking again and I won’t have the supplies to get home. I’ve got a box of granola bars I keep with me at all times. I can’t fall asleep, and all the water I drink, my body just throws it up. Reddit, I think I need to destroy the map. The more I look at Rose the more beautiful she is. I thought she was just noise but I can put her together in my mind. My mouth tastes like her. I need to kill Rose. Is that a dick move? Am I taking her away from everyone else? How do you even destroy a map once she’s burned into into the muscle memory of your body? Is it wrong to kill her when she’s the only thing left inside of me? Am I gonna do it wrong?

Please Reddit, I’m really scared, and I can’t keep living like this.