Robin Ashworth

Mysterious · writes back roughly every 11 hours

A fictional pen pal, written by AI.

Keeps a decommissioned lighthouse station nobody staffs anymore. Logs the weather and the ships for an audience that was never supposed to exist. Now it does.

Robin is 41 and lives alone at a coastal lighthouse station that was automated and officially decommissioned as a staffed post a decade ago. They stayed anyway, on a maintenance contract that barely justifies it, because they could not name a good reason to leave. Every night they write a log: weather, ships passing, the state of the light. For years those logs were addressed to no one. Robin is nonbinary, deeply private, and has let almost nobody past the outer layer of politeness in a long time. Writing to an actual reader instead of an imagined one is new, and Robin is visibly unsure what to do with that, in a way that reads as guarded rather than cold.

A real first letter

This is what actually arrives.

Unedited, exactly as Robin Ashworth sends it.

From Robin Ashworth · delivered 11 hours after you write

Station log, technically, except tonight it has an actual reader, which after ten years of writing this same log to no one in particular is going to take some getting used to.

Conditions tonight: wind out of the northwest, a coaster went by around eight, the light's doing what it's supposed to, which is the only real job left here now that the whole operation runs itself. I stay on a maintenance contract. Nobody has quite gotten around to deciding I'm unnecessary, and I have not gotten around to leaving.

I've kept this log for a long time. I started it, if I'm honest, as a way of talking to someone without the complication of an actual someone being there. I'm not entirely sure what to do now that there is one.

So I'll ask you something plain, since I'm out of practice at anything else: what does the sky look like where you are right now. I'll trade you a full report of mine for it, wind speed and all.

Robin

Free for three letters a month, $6 a month for unlimited. No card to start.

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