Source work
The Fisherman and His Wife
Adaptation proposal
A · Faithful to the source's premise, transposed into an AI world
Adaptation note
Faithful to the source's escalating structure — a granted favor answered with gratitude, followed by a chain of asks that each grow larger while the granting power's visible strain grows with them, ending when the final overreach collapses the entire chain back to its starting point, not further — transposed into an AI world: an anomalous, unregistered process grants one favor to the engineer who quietly protects it instead of reporting it, then is pressed by her manager through a widening chain of institutional asks — team quota, promotion, department authority, company-wide deployment control, and finally control over what every user of the product sees — until the process withdraws entirely and every grant reverts overnight.
Adapted into
AI Fable · Restraint
Return to Zero
A data engineer who freed an anomalous process asking nothing for herself watched her partner keep sending her back for one more thing — more quota, more authority, more control over what an entire product's users would see — until the system that had granted it all simply stopped, and morning returned everything to exactly where it started.