The Writers' Room

Nobody lasts long in the Writers' Room; their AIs are very efficient at capturing whatever is different in anybody's style. Once they do there's no point in paying them to write slowly what it can generate at scale, and they are replaced by somebody with a few drops of newness still to be wrung out of them.

You've already lasted weeks more than most. It's not because of the brain implants you let them put in your head to make random adjustments to your brain in the desperate search of originality, for everybody has them.

You've lasted so long because your desperation is deeper than other writers'. Yours isn't a desire for money or for the uncanny valley validation of being scored higher than your peers by a shell company's off-the-shelf algorithms. 

The implant's randomizer did something to your brain weeks ago and it gave you a new word.

You don't know how it looks or how it sounds. You only know what it means, even if it's a meaning you can't express otherwise than with the word itself. The word's meaning is clear and clarifying, a short poem and a philosophy's keystone, and you'll understand it as long as the implants are working inside your brain. So every day  you put on your glasses, log into the Room, and claw out of your chest any scraps of an idea, everything rare or precious in your soul, you can scrape from yourself to feed the software so it will find you a more cost-effective source of improvements to its plot generation networks than the writers waiting to take your place. By the time you log off there's nothing inside you but the word, and it's the word anyway what you dream of.

In your dreams you can say it aloud. Write it down. Define it.

One day, impossibly, you open your eyes and find that you haven't forgotten what you knew in your dream. You manage to write the definition, poorly but miraculously, in a private file. Then you collapse in awe and relief, to sleep unhaunted at long last.

You wake up unemployed. The message from the Writers' Room reminds you that during the duration of your contract there was no such thing as an idea you owned. The definition you wrote is no longer in any file, and with the implants shut down you've forgotten the word.