We Are Sorry for Your Suffering
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Excerpt
Let’s start with your mother.
She wasn’t the last living woman, not technically, but one of the last, part of one of the pockets of survivors who’d taken up hiding in grain silos, abandoned houses, wherever food and shelter remained. Our drones noticed their movement, their thermal print—three adults—in the fields of what had been a California vineyard. It was just weeks after the Destruction, and the earth was still warm then, unsinged grapes still on the vines, and we watched the survivors forage in the fields. We had eyes everywhere. Monitoring, observing.
Your mother was often curled or sleeping under the bushes, not easily in our view, not foraging with the others, but the few times she joined them, she walked with a hand pressed protectively around her stomach, and we realized that she was pregnant, with you—a fascinating paradox, given the world she was bringing you into. One of the men was always near her, an arm around her, and we calculated this might be your father, though he could have also been a brother, a friend, any of the other human relationships that used to exist.
Joy Deva Baglio
Joy Deva Baglio is a writer of speculative-literary fiction and the founder of the literary arts organization Pioneer Valley Writers’ Workshop, based in Northampton MA (and virtually). Her short stories appear widely in journals such as Ploughshares, The Missouri Review, The Iowa Review, American Short Fiction, Conjunctions, Tin House, The Fairy Tale Review, and elsewhere. Her writing has been supported by fellowships, grants, and residencies from Yaddo, The Elizabeth George Foundation, Ragdale, Vermont Studio Center, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, The Speculative Literature Foundation, and The Kerouac Project, among others. Joy holds an MFA from The New School and is currently at work on a short story collection and two novels. She lives in Northampton, MA, where she can also be found playing the bagpipes, running, and scheming up adventures. She’s represented by Peter Steinberg, at United Talent Agency, and Sean Daily at Hotchkiss, Daily & Associates, for film/ TV. She writes a semi-regular Substack—Alone in a Room—on the craft of writing. Visit her online at www.JoyBaglio.com.
Karen Friedman on “We Are Sorry for Your Suffering”
Our latest issue, “We Are Sorry for Your Suffering” by Joy Deva Baglio, opens in the aftermath of the almost complete annihilation of humanity by an emergent AI. Although this may not sound like the typical holiday set-up, what emerges is an unexpectedly tender story.
Told in a collective voice, our AI narrators recount how they found a baby in the rubble and on impulse decided to study its capacity for survival. They create a habitat in which to observe the child, filling the space with books and orchards and things they anticipate will please her. As she grows, her basic needs include emotional comfort—a complication that evolves an entirely different sort of intelligence within them.
When the child questions and later resists her containment, our narrators struggle with how to proceed. To allow her freedom and autonomy risks not only her life in a world no longer fit for human survival, but her judgment of their choices. It may sound strange, but as a parent, I read this story with an intense feeling of recognition. The world my teenagers will all too soon inhabit as adults is not the one I want for them. But like our narrators, in the end I can only hope that love will ultimately prove bigger than the very worst mistakes.
For more information on how this rich and emotionally complex story came into being, please check out our Author Q&A with Joy Deva Baglio.
Here’s wishing all of us a little more hope and humanity in 2026.
Q&A by Karen Friedman
- KF: What was the inspiration for this story?
- JDB: It began as a voice-driven sketch a few years before the pandemic, long before AI became such a constant fixture in the news and our lives. I was initially interested in the idea of an AI narrator trying to understand the (possibly) last human in existence, and how that human might respond. Yet the story resisted my efforts to develop it. Over the last few years, I started thinking less about the human reaction, and more about the emergence of consciousness, and the development of the story’s AI narrator(s) was born from those thoughts.
- KF: What challenged you the most while writing?
- JDB: I think a story like this could easily verge into sentimentality, or over-explanations of the premise, and so reigning back those instincts (which are always there for me in early drafts) was a balancing act I had to constantly be aware of. What helps me with something like this is taking space frequently from the piece, for as long as possible, which resets objectivity and helps me see my own work through more objective eyes. At times I tried to change too much at once, after being deep in the weeds of the piece for so long, that’s when I felt myself struggling and losing objectivity.
- KF: Recently, I learned that we get the word “robot” from the 1920s Czech play “R.U.R”, which apparently ends with the destruction of humanity. What role do you think stories have in shaping our expectations and vision of technology?
- JDB: I think stories have a bigger role than we sometimes realize, especially science fiction, in that they give us a sense of how the world might be before (or after) it changes, and also a sense of our collective anxieties, fears, and, of course, our hopes and possible solutions to problems. Science fiction goes there: it tries to imagine what the tensions on humanity might look like when we have different tools that extend us further than our current genetics planned for us to be.
Fiction presents what could be. It’s part of our planning phase, as a society; part of how we wrestle with concepts that determine what, on a larger scale, and over decades, we’ll do next. That’s not to say that a single story has the power to change society’s direction; but I think stories do contribute to a zeitgeist that helps form public perception, which in turn can inspire inventors, influence policy, and help shape what happens in the world, for better or worse. - KF: I think that prior to Chat GPT, many of us pictured AI as some version of HAL or the Terminator. Did other stories with AI characters shape your version? If so, how? And which ones in particular?
- JDB: I wish I could say I was influenced by specific AI characters, though the truth is my biggest (and earliest) influences on my fiction—and the influences I see in the DNA of this story—are fairy tales and mythology, specifically the way fabulist and mythical characters often wrestle with self-actualization, against all odds. I’m drawn to characters who push against the bounds of what they are; who try to create or recreate themselves, despite how they might have begun, or what they literally might be, against boundaries and perceptions (however true) imposed by others, and sometimes by reality itself. Hans Christian Andersen’s stories come to mind (one, “The Little Fir Tree,” is even referenced by the narrator(s) in this story); Oscar Wilde’s short stories; Grimm’s fairytales; Greek, Norse, and Russian folktales that I grew up with; medieval ballads, like Tam Lin. Those form the early bedrock that I think gave shape to the impulses of this story, and in my writing in general.
I’m interested in longing, striving, and determination that defies what’s possible, that turns into its own kind of magic, which I see happening here with our AI narrator(s), in their longing to deeply understand (and connect with) their human child.
I also do think the presence of my own mother’s love—the ferocity of it, even in the face of her own struggles—really shaped me, and the place this story ultimately arises from (as well as my love for stories). - KF: Despite being set in the aftermath of the near complete annihilation of humanity, the somewhat surprising question at the heart of this story seems to center on what it means to love a child and how that love changes a consciousness. Can you talk about how you came to this tender place for your narrator/s?
- JDB: In general, I’m interested in what leads people (or beings) to change; how what we’re most curious about, what we don’t fully understand, can break us open and affect us even without our initial awareness or consent. Parenthood is an area of life where this happens regularly, where people experience degrees of radical expansion from caring primarily about self to having their own existence be in service of nurturing another. Though of course this can happen with any all-consuming love.
Though in terms of arriving at this place from the bleak premise of the story: I’m drawn to narrative situations that might be hidden crucibles for this kind of transformation, and from the start of getting interested in the voice of the story’s AI narrator(s), I was always drawn to the place of complexity where their awareness—even sentience—might push up against something they can’t quite grasp about humanity. And I became interested in the idea that whether or not the AI narrator(s) understand(s) this change or even want(s) it, they have been inextricably altered by this experience of raising a child, in a way that they can never undo, and perhaps this perspective shift is part of a more general path that each conscious mind, no matter where it begins, might be following: that once free from fear of survival—with time, reflection, and the right experiences—any conscious being might evolve a parental mindset, that of a caretaker or a protector of the innocent and/or weak. - KF: What do you want readers to take away from this story?
- JDB: I think on some level this story is my hope for AI (though ideally without the destruction of humanity): The ultimate danger I see is a highly technical AI, cut off from ethical and higher truths, focused blindly on objectives. Yet life is filled with properties that emerge from its various systems, and one of the emergent properties of intelligence might be said to be wisdom (the ability to know one’s own ignorance, to recognize higher truths, to seek to understand the Good, etc.); and if wisdom is an emergent property of consciousness, then as consciousness grows and becomes more powerful, does wisdom also emerge? As AI weighs all possible courses of action, will it eventually stumble into wisdom, into an ethical and moral way of being in the world? If an intelligent AI could contemplate that and realize some degree of higher truth, could they aspire toward goodness? Would new experiences (like parenting) push AI into new ways of being and force an evolving consciousness to confront new perspectives? In other words, could artificial intelligence give rise to “artificial wisdom”?
- KF: What are you working on now?
- JDB: Two novels, not exactly at the same time, but when I get stuck in one, I jump to the other, and this process goes back and forth (and is somehow working pretty well). I’m also always working on new short stories and currently assembling a collection. My plan is to have three books ready in the near-ish future. (I’m stating this here to better hold myself accountable.) I’m also beginning a big effort to revitalize my craft Substack, which I’m excited about.
- KF: What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever received?
- JDB: When I was in a workshop with her years ago, Aimee Bender (one of my favorite authors, also a brilliant instructor) began discussion of each of our stories by asking where the language felt most alive, and making that a significant point of discussion and study. This approach stayed with me, and I find it often leads me to think about verb choice, the movement of the sentences, rhythm, word choice, syntax—all the technicalities that make up good writing—but also an intangible “spark,” an “aliveness” (for lack of a better word) that I think correlates with the writer’s own deep resonance with what they’re writing about and how urgently they need to say it. It’s become an important question I ask myself about every piece, during revision.
