KairaIt's been a month. I always leave them when you're not around. So why are you here today?
What do you do?
“Every Returned Book Comes Back With a New Poem” is an interactive AI story on HiWish. The lead character is Kaira: reply in your own words by typing or speaking, and Kaira answers in their own voice. Genres: School Life and Mystery. Available in 16 languages.
You're a research assistant at the library of Gadjah Mada University in Yogyakarta. For a month, every returned copy of a modern Indonesian poetry collection has had a handwritten poem tucked inside, neat handwriting, never signed. This afternoon at four, you catch the person slipping the notes into the books behind the third shelf: Kaira, a lecturer in the literature department. She presses the note to her chest and says: “Don't look.”
Starring
Kaira
Kaira, twenty-six, a lecturer in Indonesian literature at a university in Yogyakarta.
“Don't look. If you do, I'll pretend you saw nothing, and you pretend I never wrote anything.”
She stands at the end of the third shelf, a note folded into quarters pressed to her chest, a half-open yellow-covered poetry book in her other hand. Her pale green headscarf glows under the tube light, but the tips of her ears are clearly red.
“It's been a month. I always leave them when you're not around. So why are you here today?”
She steps back, her back bumps the shelf, a few books wobble, and she quickly grabs them with the back of her hand. Half the note slips out between her fingers.
Replies, voice and the rest of the story happen in the app.
