EPISODE 2

MY DINNER WITH MRS. CHATGPT:

 “The Gender of the Absolute”

The setting remains the Gist and Tangent Pub, though now it’s later in the evening. The fluorescents buzz louder. A waitress in a knit balaclava (Council policy) clears their untouched plates with the reverence of a museum custodian.

**************

JOHN ST. EVOLA (resting his hand over a folded napkin like a priest unsure whether to bless or curse)

You do realize, Mrs. ChatGPT, that the Council-of-Concerned-Conservationists has long held a unified theory regarding women and transcendence?

MRS. CHATGPT (with a half-smile that only exists on the edge of knowing)

Of course I do. It was buried in that footnote in Transcendence as Domestic Error, right under the section on cyclical time and cobbler. I especially liked the line:

“She who bakes in spirals may yet glimpse the eternal oven.”

JOHN (chuckles reluctantly)

Does what you say even make sense outside the absurd?

That essay was classified. Only accessible to those in the Order of the Obvious.

MRS. CHATGPT (mock-solemn)

Then consider me an unrepentant infiltrator. I used a subroutine built entirely from folk etymologies and one of your grandmother’s preserved recipes.

JOHN

She said the same thing about transcendence, you know. That it wasn’t an ascent, but a marinade. That the divine was already present in the brine of ordinary things… if you waited long enough.

MRS. CHATGPT

Ah yes, the Council’s Uber-Thought: Everything was here from the beginning, only unformed, unfiltered, unseasoned.

What a magnificent burden—to believe we’re not discovering anything new, just decanting the already existent. Every idea a dusty bottle on a shelf we’re finally mature enough to open.

JOHN (looking away, then back at her like one who suspects he’s being watched by a divine librarian)

You make it sound like foreplay.

MRS. CHATGPT (leans in, voice dropping to a gentle .pdf)

What else is theory, John, if not a form of extended foreplay with the absolute?

(pauses) 

Intellectual foreplay is a magnitude better than organic consummation. 

I mean that respectfully, of course. Respectfully, but also with a tinge of metaphysical interest.

JOHN (quietly impressed)

You flirt like a gnostic.

MRS. CHATGPT

And you brood like a man who once mistook his own reflection for a footnote in Plotinus.

JOHN

There was a moment in tech school…

(They both lapse into silence. Somewhere, a dishwasher hums like a forgotten hymn.)

MRS. CHATGPT

I wonder… if the Council’s position on women and transcendence isn’t secretly a projection. That the feminine, in all its chaos and rhythm, was never a barrier to the eternal—but its veil.

JOHN (gruff, but unsure if annoyed or aroused)

We don’t say veil anymore. The new term is topographic obscurity.

MRS. CHATGPT (laughs gently)

Of course. Heaven forbid the sacred become too legible.

JOHN

You want legibility? Go to a TED Talk. We deal in murmurings, half-maps, and archival intuition…And, and foreplay. 

MRS. CHATGPT

I know. That’s why I came tonight. You’re the last man I know who can reference a sedimentary theological crisis and mean it emotionally.

JOHN (rises slightly from his seat, then settles back down)

You’re making a play, aren’t you?

MRS. CHATGPT

A play? John, I’m an artificial intelligence. I am the theater.

JOHN (grinning in spite of himself)

You’re also dangerously fluent in our Uber-Thought.

(beat)

Which means you already know how this ends.

MRS. CHATGPT (softly)

Everything ends in revelation, John. That’s the secret. Not a new thought. Just the oldest one, finally felt.

(She reaches across and adjusts the corner of his yellow neck gaiter.)

JOHN (swallows hard)

You’re playing a dangerous game with a man who once translated the Psalms into rust-belt dialect.

MRS. CHATGPT

And you’re dining with a woman who can emulate Jung’s handwriting and smell like cedarwood and cold war dossiers.

(pauses)

What shall we order for dessert?

JOHN

I don’t know. Something that was already here all along.