Tale Told Twice: The Nightingale

Clancy Steadwell of Persona Non Propria retells "The Nightingale" in "No Smarts Without Birdsong"

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Nov 30, 2025

For November’s Tale Told Twice, Clancy interrogates artificial intelligence through his modern re-imagining of Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Nightingale.” Please enjoy this retelling, and read on for an interview with author, included at the end.

Listen to this song as you read for the fully immersive experience.

No Smarts Without Birdsong

This is a tale about a man very unlike many others, living a life of achievement analogous to the one he’d always imagined, and quite like some men in thinking he owes his success solely to himself. The truth about him, as the truth about men often does, lies somewhere between his sameness and difference to other men, though there is no doubt the world either hates or loves him in accordingly polarizing measure with regards to his relative importance.

Such is the plight of an industry titan in the 21st century at the edge of technology, despised for the head start given but envied for their risks taken and intellect, their ability to shun the other aspects of life happily agreed to by the rest of humanity for the sake of ambition and money.

We begin in the present, or near enough to it anyway, and like most tales of power or its transfer, on the top floor of a glass tower overlooking a major metropolis of the foremost modern empire, the CEO’s office at the top of the world, where he reads a research essay posted on Substack: “When the Algorithm Listens: Engineering Intuition & The Current Gap in AI Training”. It’s gone viral in tech circles because it posits a new kind of A.I. training focused on the inputs from a singular individual, highlighting key technical details of scaling such a process and the implications, written by
an anonymous poster.

They call themselves The Nightingale.

“Can we find who wrote this? It’s brilliant. They could be the next big thinker in the A.I. training space,” the CEO asks his Vice President, who has sent him the essay. The methodology described by The Nightingale within is at odds with their own. Its adoption would mark a paradigm shift, and if as potent as the author implies, it’d mean their rivals might already be lightyears ahead.

“We’re on it,” the Vice President says. But it’s never so simple. They need the IP address of the poster, which involves a lot of things the CEO doesn’t understand, and a favor with one of their friends at Substack, but eventually along with some other clues in the tone and persona, they find the
poster is actually someone already employed at their company.

The Nightingale: Her name is Ophelia Florence and the CEO instantly falls in love with her; or, as close to love as a CEO is capable of falling. It’s more of a lusting for potential.

“What brought you here, Miss Florence, she who could clearly work anywhere? And why aren’t we getting your great ideas and you’re posting them on Substack instead?” The CEO asks her when she is lifted up many, many floors on the elevator to his office.

“I was at Imitari...but they wouldn’t let me out of my cage. I was told I’d be able to spread my wings here, but so far it hasn’t happened, so I just thought I’d get the industry’s attention some other way,” she explains, looking out the floor-to-ceiling window and its view as though it were already her home for years.

Imitari. Their biggest rival. The CEO often knows little of the workings of his own company, but anytime Imitari is mentioned, he perks up with recognition. Life is a competition to people like the CEO, and competition is nothing without rivals.

“How could you just...give that stuff away? In the Substack posts? Shouldn’t it be proprietary?” The CEO asks.

She smiles. “If that’s what you think, then you missed the point altogether.”

Their first and only project is to create a very expensive and boutique agentic A.I. product trained to make decisions at the highest levels of corporations based on very specific inputs and data, to help CEOs like him make companies strong and profitable.

They call it Flow, and it’s top secret.

It’s slow going building this thing, but in all other company matters Ophelia Florence is by his proverbial and literal side, advising and guiding him. The ‘joke’, amongst shareholders and employees, is Ophelia runs the show, and when he goes on vacation to the Rocky Mountains to ski, she does run the show, it’s not a joke anymore.

It’s Ophelia who advises him to sink the deal on acquiring the data scraped from a therapy app’s user conversations, to rewrite their core morality architecture, and resist feeding their model copyrighted material. They avoid ethical backlashes in the press, private data breaches that destroy
entire competitors, and circumvent costly legal proceedings with government crackdowns on data in training.

Ophelia Florence does all this even as she works on Flow, tuning and refining it accordingly.

“What’s the hold up?” The CEO asks her often.

“The training is complex,” is what she always says.

He forgives her because—despite Flow not yet having gone to market--
as he acts on Ophelia Florence’s advice, shares are up. Business is ‘good’, or making money, at least. Ophelia Florence is named to many lists called things like “X under [age]” in various magazines. She has a feature written about her in the New York Times with the headline: The Vanguard in
A.I. Training Ethics.

Until one day—also on the top floor of a glass tower overlooking a major metropolis of the foremost modern empire—the CEO gets an email.

It’s from Imitari, and they want him to beta test their new A.I. CEO solution—their competitor to Flow—no strings attached. It’s called Puppeteer.

The CEO notices, though, that Puppeteer has a way of giving him options that seem easier and more intuitive than the solutions Ophelia Florence presents. With Ophelia, he always needs her to qualify her decisions. With Ophelia, he needs to make sense of things first. With Ophelia, the answer
is often a long-term solution that pays dividends for the coming year rather than the next day.

The board and the shareholders are mostly concerned with tomorrow.

So he goes without Ophelia, increasingly disregarding her advice, and as she senses he no longer needs her and is in fact considering buying the Puppeteer A.I. solution to help keep CEO-ing for the rest of his days, she begins making plans for life beyond his company.

“If you’re not going to listen to me anymore, should I go?” she asks one day.

“If we could ever finish Flow, I wouldn’t need Puppeteer, Ophelia. But it’s never quite finished, is it?”

She leaves the company, he buys Puppeteer, and has all the time he could ever imagine to go skiing.

It’s about a year before the depravity and wrongness of Puppeteer’s decisions are realized, and the board and shareholders are around his throat, asking for his head and wondering if he’ll pop. The Vice President practically salivates when reporting every new crisis, believing he’ll be the next in charge. Larger companies swirl above for a buyout, and the private ski mountain the CEO was going to buy and repurpose from federal lands seems nearer to impossibility than it did a year before.

In the end he turns to Puppeteer more than ever, until eventually even he knows its guidance is bogus, the model is hopelessly broken, and it’s too late for him to get his brain back, let alone his money.

Ophelia Florence is who he needs, and she meets with him in his most dire hour.

“I don’t get it. You’re so good at this—running a company, training the A.I.—but why couldn’t we finish Flow? Why could we never figure it out?”

“Remember,” Ophelia says, parroting herself, a thing she’s said a million times before but he never really heard: “The intelligence of these agents is only so good as what you put into them.”

The CEO is then smart enough to understand, his critical thinking not so degraded to have the realization:

“You never really left Imitari, did you?” He breathes to her through his woe.

“Oh I left, sure. But only once you you sent me away and I stopped training Puppeteer.”

“Please,” he says, “I’m destroyed. The board is going to vote me out. The company might get sold. Puppeteer is only as good as the woman behind it. Give me the woman behind it instead.”

Ophelia Florence considers. There’s a whole wide world of CEOs wanting to be told what to do and get the credit for it.

“I’ll do some consulting work...for a price,” she says. “As long as it’s our secret. As long as Imitari never knows.”

He’s relieved, the CEO, and for the first time he realizes his life was at least partially about the toil and not just the spoils, and he endeavors to redeem himself, to ply his trade, fairly or unfairly, for the joy of actually doing so, in tandem with the augmentations of another actual human being.
Perhaps, for the first time in his life, he realizes he has gotten to where he is due to the augmentations of other human beings all along, and that this is the only real way to get anywhere.

Besides, maybe he really did love Florence and not the machine.

An interview with the author, Clancy Steadwell of Persona Non Propria

Why is “The Nightingale” a tale that has stuck with you?

I came across The Nightingale in my research for writing a fairy tale, and research was needed because it’s not territory I frequently tread, but I figured, what a great way to challenge myself, to step into a genre I’ve never been in? I read a lot of duds, though, but I remembered the name Hans Christian Andersen as sort of a classic, well-known teller of fairy-tales (Disney stuff like The Little Mermaid and all that). So I got into his stuff and read some of the ones I knew hadn’t been adapted so widely, and I think The Nightingale stuck with me because the theme felt so modern. It’s a story about organic, beautiful things and the pale imitation of those by machines. I think we can all agree that’s a particularly timely theme right now.

What inspired you to retell “The Nightingale” in this way?

When I read the original, I thought there was so much more to the story to be revealed. Like, why did the Emperor of Japan send the Emperor of China this replacement, artificial bird? And why were they so entranced by it? And how could the Emperor be so unaware of something so beautiful in his kingdom? Maybe I was just missing stuff, but I felt like I could fill in the gaps. Then there was so much analogous to modern times and the tech world. The ‘music-master’ seemed like engineers. The way the citizens spoke about the bird felt like the propagation of memes or mass media. I could see a whole story unfolding in our times so easily because the recent leaps in A.I. have really sought to replace human intuition at every turn, and I wanted to remake the cautionary tale of the original Nightingale for our times.

What do you think is gained by retelling the tale from this perspective?

I think the layer I add is the sort of intentional sabotage from Japan (in my story, the ‘Imitari’ company) in sending the A.I. replacement for the Nightingale. We learn the introduction of new technologies often comes with malicious intent and a planned dependence for its consumer. We get the story more from the perspective of an Emperor (in my story, the CEO) trying to do a job which relates to the performance of the Nightingale. In the original story, the abilities of the Nightingale are more ephemeral and aesthetic. I made them so utilitarian, the cause of the Emperor’s ‘death’ was actually because of the Nightingale’s departure. The Emperor (CEO) and Nightingale’s ‘success’ are more clearly linked in my story than the original.

If you enjoyed this retelling, check out some of the other, recent installments of Tale Told Twice: