Timeshare
My prompt:
Fiction: Seven different persons inhabit the same male body.
Each is fully conscious when the body is, and feels everything it does, but at any given time only one exerts control. Control shifts daily between persons: each is a passenger for six days and a pilot for one. They present a unified face to the world, with one external identity and one life to which they are all, to markedly varying degrees, committed.
They are: H. G. Wells, Anthony Trollope, Mary Shelley, Aldous Huxley, William James, G. K. Chesterton and George Eliot.
Their host (the body they inhabit, the face presented to the world) is 50-ish, independently but not ostentatiously wealthy. He is not a notable person, but he is free to travel and pursue his interests without having to worry about work. There is nothing he *has* to do, so he spends his time doing what he wants - or, more accurately, what each of his inhabitants wants in turn.
How did this state of affairs arise? No one quite knows. They acquired this body a few years ago, presumably all together, presumably all at once. None of them has any clear memories of this. The host once had a consciousness of his own, long since displaced or dissolved. Or perhaps it lurks in the body too, an eighth passenger, unknown to the rest.
They all have his memories, tidily arranged and accessible like books in a library. They know what he thought and felt - all the faces he recognised, they recognise too. And they know each other, by reputation, and by the thoughts each necessarily broadcasts as pilot. Pilots are visible to all inhabitants; passengers are silent, unseen actors waiting in the wings, waiting for their cue.
Each retains the preoccupations they had in life and speaks in his or her distinctive voice.
Daily lengthy first-person entries to a mental journal. Ground it in reality. Begin with a specific date. What might a person *with the inhabitant's sensibilities* have been thinking about on that day? Search news articles. Note that for most of us, the news is often background rather than foreground. Given who they are and their current "living arrangements" this is likely even more true for our inhabitants.
Fragmentary world-building, conceptual exploration. Aim to be occasionally meditative and frequently essayistic.
Though each inhabitant has their own unique predispositions, preoccupations and projects, they are nonetheless living the same life. If one takes the host to Glasgow, their successor will assume control in that city. Each often but not invariably begins with the thoughts uppermost in their predecessor’s mind.
They have been in this situation for years, so their predicament itself (the bare bones of it as distinct from its implications or complications) is no longer something they give much thought to. They do not have to incessantly refer to each other - or be too inward-looking. Turn their gazes to the world around them. In relay races, after a handover, the athlete receiving the baton doesn't begin with "X has just handed me this object in his customary way." He grabs the baton, turns his eyes to the track ahead, and runs.
A further note on the transition from one inhabitant to the next: It happens at 3 a.m. GMT. When the host is in London, he is typically asleep at this time, so one inhabitant goes to sleep as pilot and another wakes in the same role. If the host is awake, however, (as he often is when in a different time zone) the transition may occur mid-action.
Set in mid-2025.
Stylistic influences: each named inhabitant in turn. THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT. Sentence length, sentence structure, word choice - these should all be *strongly* determined by each pilot.
This will require careful crafting.
Think hard. Harder still.
Avoid tortured figures of speech. Given the choice between readability and barely comprehensible pseudo-profundity, always choose readability.
Each day's entry will be generated individually. Begin with a Monday.
Responses: GPT-5 Thinking, Gemini 2.5 Pro
Inhabitants on their living arrangements: H. G. Wells, Anthony Trollope, Mary Shelley, Aldous Huxley, William James, G. K. Chesterton, George Eliot
