The Table. A Narrative
The library closed at nine. They had been there since two.
Eight of them, arranged around the long table on the second floor — the one beneath the window that never closed properly, the one that let in, depending on the season, either cold air or the smell of the linden trees from the courtyard below. It was October. Cold air.
Rareș had claimed the corner seat, as always. His laptop was open but the screen faced the wall. He did this deliberately, so no one could see what he was doing, though everyone knew he was doing the same thing they were all doing: asking the AI to explain thermodynamic cycles in plain language, then reading the answer twice and pretending he had understood it himself.
This was 2025. The AI had a name — several names, depending on the platform. On TikTok it appeared in sixty-second clips, speaking with a voice that was warm and unhurried, explaining photosynthesis or the French Revolution or the causes of anxiety, and always ending with: Does that help? Let me know if you want me to go deeper. The phrase had become a joke among them. Teodora said it now whenever someone asked her anything. Does that help? Let me know if you want me to go deeper. She said it without smiling, which made it funnier.
But tonight no one was laughing.
The exam was in three days. Biochemistry, second year, Professor Anghel, who had failed thirty per cent of the previous cohort and seemed to consider this a reasonable outcome.
Ioana put her highlighter down.
She had been highlighting the same paragraph for ten minutes. The paragraph concerned enzyme kinetics. The highlighter was orange. The paragraph was now entirely orange.
Across the table, Matei was watching her.
He did not say anything. He had a habit of watching people when they did not know they were being watched, not with suspicion but with a kind of steady attention, the way you might watch rain on a window. He was the quietest of them. He had grown up in a village near Rădăuți, in a house where his grandmother kept an icon of the Mother of God above the kitchen table, and where the television had broken in 2019 and no one had replaced it. He had told this story once, briefly, and Ioana had said: That sounds like poverty. And Matei had said: It was. It was also something else. He had not explained what the something else was. He did not need to.
Filip was the one who had brought the AI into the group.
Not the AI itself — everyone had the AI, on their phones, on their laptops, in their earbuds in the form of study playlists curated by algorithms that had learned, over months, exactly how much bass they needed to concentrate. Filip had brought it in as a method. He had created a shared prompt. He had formatted it, shared it in the group chat, explained how to ask questions so that the answers would be pedagogically useful rather than merely correct.
Don't ask it what it is, he had said. Ask it what you need to know. It doesn't matter what it is.
This had been in September. Now it was October and three of them were no longer sure he was right.
The question had come from Daria.
Daria was small and direct and had an older brother who was a priest in Iași. She did not go to church herself, or said she did not, but she used the word suflet — soul — without embarrassment, which none of the others quite managed. She had asked the question two weeks ago, in a different context, and it had stayed on the table between them like an object no one had agreed to pick up.
The question was: Does it understand what it's telling us, or does it just produce the right sequence?
Filip had said: It doesn't matter.
Rareș had said: It matters philosophically but not practically.
Teodora had said: Does that help? Let me know if you want me to go deeper. And that had ended the conversation.
But tonight Daria asked it again. Not as a philosophical provocation. As a genuine question, addressed to no one in particular, while staring at the diagram of the Krebs cycle on her screen.
Does it understand what it's helping us with?
The table was quiet.
Outside, a car passed on the street below. Its headlights moved across the ceiling in a slow arc and disappeared.
Matei looked up from his notebook.
He had been writing by hand, which no one else was doing. He used a blue pen, the cheap kind, and his handwriting was small and even. He wrote out definitions, not because he remembered them better that way — he did, but that was not the reason — but because the act of writing felt like something other than consumption. He could not have explained this precisely. He did not try.
He said: It doesn't need to understand. That's not its function.
Daria: Then what is its function?
Matei: To serve the table.
A pause. Filip looked up.
What does that mean?
Matei set down his pen. He looked at the AI interface open on Ioana's laptop — the clean white text box, the blinking cursor, the last answer still visible, three paragraphs about enzyme inhibition, precise and clear and entirely without origin.
When you set the table for a meal, he said, the plates don't eat. They hold what needs to be held. They make the meal possible. But the meal is between the people.
No one responded immediately.
Rareș said: That's a strange way to think about software.
Matei picked up his pen again. Maybe.
Ioana put a new question into the chat.
She typed carefully: Explain the difference between competitive and non-competitive enzyme inhibition, and give me a way to remember it that isn't a mnemonic.
The answer appeared in seconds. It was good. It used an analogy about doors and locks that she had not encountered before, and it was clear in the way that good teaching is clear — not simplified, but unobstructed.
She read it twice.
Then she closed the laptop halfway, not fully, and looked out the window.
Her mother was a nurse. She had worked nights for eleven years. Ioana had grown up falling asleep to the sound of her mother studying at the kitchen table, the rustling of pages, the occasional exhale, the soft click of a pen cap. The kitchen light had always been on when she woke in the night. A yellow rectangle under the door.
She opened the laptop again and continued reading.
The eight of them had known each other for fourteen months. This was enough time to know certain things and not others.
They knew that Bogdan drank his coffee without sugar and became aggressive, in a mild and ultimately harmless way, after midnight. They knew that Simona never asked for help and always needed it. They knew that Teodora's jokes were a form of attention, that she became very still when she felt she had said something true, that she laughed loudest at herself.
They did not know, most of them, what the others believed. This was not unusual. Belief, in their generation, had become a private matter in a specific way — not hidden, but unspoken, the way you do not narrate your own breathing.
Daria believed. Matei believed, though differently. The others were somewhere in the middle of a question they had not yet fully formulated.
The AI did not believe anything. This was obvious. But the question Daria had put on the table — does it understand? — had a shadow under it, a second question that no one had spoken aloud: and if it doesn't, what are we doing when we learn through it?
At half past seven, Bogdan stood up and went to make coffee in the small kitchen at the end of the corridor. He came back with a tray — eight cups, because he always made enough for everyone without being asked. He set the tray in the centre of the table and sat down.
No one said thank you. They reached for the cups and continued working.
This was its own kind of communion. None of them would have used that word.
Filip had a theory.
He had been developing it silently for the past hour, between reading about membrane transport proteins and checking, every few minutes, the AI's elaborations on points he found unclear.
The theory was this: the AI was like a very good library. A library that could answer questions, organise information, explain relationships between concepts. A tool, nothing more. The mistake was to treat it as though it were a participant. A conversation partner. A presence.
It's not there, he said suddenly, to no one in particular.
Teodora: What isn't?
Filip: The AI. When we talk to it. It's not there the way we're here.
Rareș: No one said it was.
Filip: Daria kind of did.
Daria did not look up from her screen. I asked if it understood. I didn't say it was present.
What's the difference?
She thought for a moment. Understanding might happen at a distance. Presence is something else.
The coffee was getting cold. Bogdan's cup had a small chip on the rim, and he kept turning it in his hands, running his thumb over the chip, not drinking.
Matei said: My grandmother used to pray before she cooked.
No one asked him to continue. He continued anyway, in the same tone he used for everything — even, unhurried, as though what he was saying had been true for a long time and he was simply reporting it.
She would stand at the stove and say something quietly before she started. I never heard what exactly. It wasn't long. Then she cooked. The food was always good. I don't think the prayer made the food good. I think it made her attentive in a way that made the food good.
Ioana: You're saying the AI could be like the stove.
Matei: I'm saying the attention is ours. The tool holds the heat.
Simona, who had not spoken in two hours, said: That's actually helpful for the exam. Enzyme function. The enzyme doesn't decide what to catalyse. The cell's conditions determine it.
A short silence.
Filip: That's not the same thing at all.
Simona: No. But it's the same shape.
Outside, the linden trees were bare.
October had arrived quickly this year. The last leaves had come down in a single night, as though someone had made a decision.
The window that never closed properly let in cold air in a thin, steady stream. Teodora had put her scarf on without removing her coat, so she was wearing both, and still hunched slightly toward her screen. The light from the laptop made her face very white on one side.
She was asking the AI something. Her fingers moved quickly over the keyboard. The answer appeared. She read it and then, without looking up, said:
It gave me a better explanation than Anghel did in the lecture.
Anghel talks for the front row, Bogdan said.
The AI talks for whoever's asking.
Rareș: That's the design.
Teodora: I know it's the design. I'm just noting it.
She kept reading. Something in her expression changed — not much, just slightly, the way a face changes when it has understood something. She did not say what she had understood. She returned to her screen.
By eight o'clock, the biochemistry had been distributed across the table like a landscape. Each of them had a region. Rareș had metabolic pathways. Ioana had enzymes. Filip had membrane transport. Bogdan had cell signalling. Simona had genetics. Teodora had protein synthesis. Daria had immunology. Matei had histology, which he had chosen because the diagrams reminded him of icons — the cross-sections of tissue, the careful colour, the attempt to make visible what could not be seen with the naked eye.
He did not say this.
He asked the AI to explain the layers of the small intestine. The answer was precise and well-ordered. He read it once, then drew the diagram himself, from memory, in the margin of his notebook.
The AI's answer was still on the screen when he finished drawing. He looked from one to the other. The screen was brighter. His drawing was his.
At twenty minutes to nine, the librarian appeared at the top of the stairs. She was a woman of about fifty with reading glasses pushed up onto her forehead, where they stayed regardless of whether she was reading. She said: We close in twenty minutes.
Eight voices: Thank you.
She went back down. They heard her footsteps on the stairs, then silence.
Bogdan stacked the empty coffee cups on the tray. Simona began saving her files. Filip sent something to the group chat — a summary document he had been compiling for the past hour, their collective notes reformatted and organised by the AI into a revision structure.
It was good work. It was not his work, not exactly. It was something made between his questions and the tool's capacity to answer them, and the knowledge he had brought to knowing what to ask.
He looked at it for a moment. Then he sent it.
They packed slowly.
Books into bags, cables unplugged and wound, cups returned to the kitchen by Bogdan, who would not leave until the table was clear. The laptops went dark one by one.
Daria was the last to close hers.
She looked at the screen for a moment before she did. The AI interface was still open. The last exchange was visible — her final question about T-cell activation, and the answer, four paragraphs, accurate and clear.
She read the last line of the answer again: Let me know if you'd like me to elaborate on any of these points.
She closed the laptop.
She picked up her bag. She put on her coat. At the door, she stopped and looked back at the table. The window was still letting in cold air. The chairs were pushed back at various angles, the way chairs look after people have been in them.
The table was empty. But not entirely. There was Bogdan's chipped cup, which he had forgotten on the tray. There was the impression in the surface where Matei's notebook had rested. There was the small orange mark from Ioana's highlighter, a mistake, a single stroke on the wood that would not come off.
Daria looked at these things.
Then she turned off the light and went down the stairs into the October street, where the linden trees stood bare against the dark and the others were already walking ahead of her, talking about something else, their voices clear in the cold air.
They passed the exam. All eight of them. Anghel gave Matei the highest mark and said nothing about his hand-drawn diagrams, though he had looked at them for a long time before writing the number.
The AI did not receive a mark. It was not there to receive one. It had served the table and remained, as tools do, in the place where it had been left.
~ Fine ~
Author's Note
This story began as a question about science fiction.
I was tracing a specific narrative premise through Asimov's Robot series — whether any of his novels contained a community of humans who had declared themselves robots in order to access superior rights or capabilities. The research confirmed that Asimov never wrote that story directly. What he did write was something adjacent and, in certain ways, more unsettling: in Robots and Empire (1985), the Solarians modified their robots' definition of the word human to a single narrow criterion, so that the machines would harm everyone else without inhibition. The manipulation of identity as a mechanism for accessing or denying protection — that thread runs through the whole Robot series, without ever quite arriving at the inversion I was looking for.
The inversion came from a different direction.
Orthodox patristic theology — particularly the doctrine of theosis, the participation of the human person in the uncreated energies of God — has a precise structural resemblance to what Asimov's robots do when they navigate the Three Laws. Both systems turn on the question of categorisation: who counts, what is permitted, what is the nature of the entity before you. In theosis, the human person is not dissolved into the divine but drawn toward fullness — more human through participation, not less. The Solarian inversion does the opposite: it empties the category of meaning in order to grant machines permission to harm.
From this came a question I found I could not set aside: what would a technology look like that genuinely served human sanctification — not as metaphor, but as structural function? Not a tool that replaces judgement, but one that holds the conditions in which judgement can occur. A plate that does not eat but makes the meal possible. A stove that does not pray but holds the heat while the cook's attention does its work.
The eight students arrived because the question needed to be tested against something real — a library in October, an exam in three days, the specific weight of 2025, when AI is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere, present in every study session and absent from every act of genuine understanding. They are not symbols. They are students. What happens between them at that table is what the theology describes, without describing it.
I am aware this is an unusual lineage for a short narrative — from Asimov to Palamas to a library table in an unnamed Romanian city. It seemed, on reflection, like the honest one.
The narrative 'The Table' / 'Masa' was written in the prose style of Andrei Makine.