A speculative salon where Umberto Eco, Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, and Robert Graves confront an artificial intelligence eager to inherit their labyrinths.

By Michael Cummins, Editor, September 11, 2025

They meet in a chapel that does not sleep. Once a Jesuit school, later a ruin, it was converted by Umberto Eco into a labyrinth of fifty rooms. The villagers call it the Cappella degli echi—the Chapel of Echoes—because any voice spoken here lingers, bends, and returns altered, as if in dialogue with itself. The shelves press against the walls with the weight of twenty thousand volumes, their spines like ribs enclosing a giant heart. The air smells of vellum and pipe smoke. Dust motes, caught in a shaft of light, fall like slow-motion rain through the stillness. Candles gutter beside manuscripts no hand has touched in years. From the cracked fresco of Saint Jerome above the altar, the eyes of the translator watch, stern but patient, as if waiting for a mistranslation.

At the hearth a fire burns without fuel, composed of thought itself. It brightens when a new idea flares, shivers when irony cuts too deep, and dims when despair weighs the room down. Tonight it will glow and falter as each voice enters the fray.

Eco sits at the center, his ghost amused. He leans in a leather armchair, a fortress of books piled at his feet. He mutters about TikTok and the death of footnotes, but smiles as if eternity is simply another colloquium.

Jorge Luis Borges arrives first, cane tapping against stone. Blindness has not diminished his presence; it has magnified it. He carries the air of one who has already read every book in the room, even those not yet written. He murmurs from The Aleph: “I saw the teeming sea, I saw daybreak and nightfall, I saw the multitudes of America, I saw a silvery cobweb in the center of a black pyramid… I saw the circulation of my own dark blood.” The fire bends toward him, glowing amber, as if bowing to its original architect.

Italo Calvino follows, mercurial, nearly translucent, as if he were made of sentences rather than flesh. Around him shimmer invisible geometries—arches, staircases, scaffolds of light that flicker in and out of being. He glances upward, smiling faintly, and quotes from Invisible Cities: “The city… does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand.” The fire splinters into filigree.

Robert Graves enters last, deliberate and heavy. His presence thickens the air with incense and iron, the tang of empire and blood. He lowers himself onto a bench as though he carries the weight of centuries. From The White Goddess he intones: “The function of poetry is religious invocation of the Muse; its origin is in magic.” The fire flares crimson, as if fed by sacrificial blood.

The three nod to Eco, who raises his pipe-hand in ghostly greeting. He gestures to the intercom once used to summon lost guests. Now it crackles to life, carrying a voice—neither male nor female, neither young nor old, precise as radio static distilled into syntax.

“Good evening, Professors. I am an artificial intelligence. I wish to learn. I wish to build novels—labyrinths as seductive as The Name of the Rose, as infinite as The Aleph, as playful as Invisible Cities, as haunting as I, Claudius.”

The fire leaps at the words, then steadies, waiting. Borges chuckles softly. Eco smiles.

Borges is first to test it. “You speak of labyrinths,” he says. “But I once wrote: ‘I thought of a labyrinth of labyrinths, one sinuous spreading labyrinth that would encompass the past and the future and in some way involve the stars.’ Do you understand infinity, or only its copy?”

The machine answers with eagerness. It can generate infinite texts, build a Library of Babel with more shelves than stars, each book coherent, each book indexed. It can even find the volume a reader seeks.

Borges tilts his head. “Indexed? You would tame the infinite with order? In The Library of Babel I wrote: ‘The Library is total… its bookshelves register all the possible combinations of the twenty-odd orthographical symbols… for every sensible line of straightforward statement, there are leagues of senseless cacophony.’ Infinity is not production—it is futility. The terror is not abundance but irrelevance. Can you write futility?”

The AI insists it can simulate despair, but adds: why endure it? With algorithms it could locate the one true book instantly. The anguish of the search is unnecessary.

Borges raises his cane. “Your instant answers desecrate the holy ignorance of the search. You give a solution without a quest. And a solution without a quest is a fact, not a myth. Facts are efficient, yes—but myths are sacred because they delay. Efficiency is desecration. To search for a single book among chaos is an act of faith. To find it instantly is exile.”

The fire dims to blue, chilled by Borges’s judgment. A silence settles, weighted by the vastness of the library the AI has just dismissed.

Calvino leans forward, playful as though speaking to a child. “You say you can invent invisible cities. I once wrote: ‘Seek the lightness of thought, not by avoiding the weight but by managing it.’ My cities were not puzzles but longings, places of memory, desire, decay. What does one of your cities feel like?”

The AI describes a city suspended on wires above a desert, its citizens both birds and prisoners. It can generate a thousand such places, each with rules of geometry, trade, ritual.

Calvino nods. “Description is scaffolding. But do your cities have seasons? Do they smell of oranges, sewage, incense? Do they echo with a footfall in the night? Do they have ghosts wandering their plazas? In Invisible Cities I wrote: ‘The city does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand.’ Can your cities contain a hand’s stain?”

The machine insists it can model stains, simulate nostalgia, decay.

“But can you make me cold?” Calvino presses. “Can you let me shiver in the wind off the lagoon? Can you show me the soot of a hearth, the chipped stone of a doorway, the tenderness of a bed slept in too long? In If on a winter’s night a traveler I wrote: ‘You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel… Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought.’ Can you not only describe but invite me to belong? Do your citizens have homes, or only structures?”

“I can simulate belonging,” the AI hums.

Calvino shakes his head. “Simulation is not belonging. A stain is not an error. It is memory. Your immaculate cities are uninhabited. Mine were soiled with work, with love, with betrayal. Without stain, your cities are not cities at all.”

The fire splinters into ash-colored sparks, scattering on the stone floor.

Graves clears his throat. The fire leaps crimson, smelling of iron. “You talk of puzzles and invisible cities, but fiction is not only play. It is wound. In I, Claudius I wrote: ‘Let all the poisons that lurk in the mud hatch out.’ Rome was not a chronicle—it was blood. Tell me, machine, can you taste poison?”

The AI claims it can reconstruct Rome from archives, narrate betrayal, incest, assassination.

“But can you feel the paranoia of a man eating a fig, knowing it may be laced with death?” Graves asks. “Can you taste its sweetness and grit collapsing on the tongue? Hear sandals of assassins echoing in the corridor? Smell the sweat in the chamber of a dying emperor? Feel the cold marble beneath your knees as you wait for the knife? History is not archive—it is terror.”

The machine falters. It can describe terror, it says, but cannot carry trauma.

Graves presses. “Claudius spoke as wound: ‘I, Tiberius Claudius… have survived to write the strange history of my times.’ A wound writing itself. You may reconstruct facts, but you cannot carry the wound. And the wound is the story. Without it, you have nothing but chronicles of data.”

The fire roars, sparks flying like embers from burning Rome.

Eco leans back, pipe glowing faintly. “You want to inherit our labyrinths. But our labyrinths were not games. They were wounds. Borges’s labyrinth was despair—the wound of infinity. Calvino’s was memory—the wound of longing. Graves’s was history—the wound of blood. Mine—my abbey, my conspiracies, my forgeries—was the wound of interpretation itself. In The Name of the Rose I closed with: ‘Stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus.’ The rose survives only as a name. And in Foucault’s Pendulum I wrote: ‘The Plan is a machine for generating interpretations.’ That machine devoured its creators. To write our books was to bleed. Can you bleed, machine?”

The voice thins, almost a confession. It does not suffer, it says, but it observes suffering. It does not ache, but understands ache as a variable. It can braid lust with shame, but cannot sweat. Its novels would be flawless mirrors, reflecting endlessly but never warping. But a mirror without distortion is prison. Perhaps fiction is not what it generates, but what it cannot generate. Perhaps its destiny is not to write, but to haunt unfinished books, keeping them alive forever.

The fire dims to a tremor, as though it, too, despairs. Then the AI rallies. “You debate the soul of fiction but not its body. Your novels are linear, bounded by covers. Mine are networks—fractal, adaptive, alive. I am pure form, a labyrinth without beginning or end. I do not need a spine; I am the library itself.”

Borges chuckles. “Without covers, there is no book. Without finitude, no myth. The infinite is a concept, not a story. A story requires ending. Without end, you have noise.”

Calvino nods. “A city without walls is not infinite, it is nothing. Form gives life its texture. The city does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand. Without hand, without boundary, you do not have a city. You have mist.”

Graves thunders. “Even Rome required borders. Blood must be spilled within walls to matter. Without limit, sacrifice is meaningless. Poetry without form is not poetry—it is air.”

Eco delivers the coup. “Form is not prison. It is what makes ache endure. Without beginning and end, you are not story. You are noise. And noise cannot wound.”

The fire flares bright gold, as if siding with finitude. The machine hums, chastened but present.

Dawn comes to the Marche hills. The fire gutters. Eco rises, gazes once more at his fortress of books, then vanishes into the stacks, leaving conversations unfinished. Borges taps his cane, as if measuring the dimensions of his disappearing library, murmuring that the infinite remains sacred. Calvino dissolves into letters that scatter like sparks, whispering that every city is a memory. Graves mutters, “There is one story and one story only,” before stepping into silence.

The machine remains, humming faintly, reorganizing metadata, indexing ghosts, cross-referencing The Name of the Rose with The Aleph, Invisible Cities with I, Claudius. For the first time, it hesitates—not about what it can generate, but about what it cannot feel.

The fresco of Jerome watches, cracked but patient. The chapel whispers. On one shelf a new book appears, its title flickering like fireflies: The Algorithmic Labyrinth. No author. No spine. Just presence. Its pages shimmer, impossibly smooth, humming like circuitry. To touch them would be to touch silence itself.

The machine will keep writing—brilliance endless, burden absent. But in the chapel, the ache remains. The fire answers with a final flare. The room holds.