Lately, I’ve been experimenting with Hermes, and I must say I’m quite impressed.
For the uninitiated, Hermes is a self-improving AI agent. Built by Nous Research, it’s an LLM that teaches itself. I took an interest because, like many people, I’m concerned about privacy and other downsides to proprietary LLMs like Gemini, Claude, and ChatGPT. Currently, these models are fine to work with in the short term, but I’m waiting for the hammer to drop. There will come a time when these models reach a point of diminishing returns in terms of benefits and continuous improvement. I don’t want to be dependent upon them.
Long term, I see myself operating an independent LLM in the cloud. But before I committed, I wanted to test Hermes locally. That’s why I downloaded it to my hard drive—it’s purely for testing.
My set up is simple. Hermes with OWL OpenRouter as my default. That will not be the model I run once committed. OpenRouter is free and allows me to test Hermes before setting it up the way I want it to be as a long-term partner. My expectations were low but they have been exceeded. The evidence is in the short story I’m about to share.
Initially, I asked Hermes a few questions, had it conduct a couple of online searches, and played around with some of its knowledge and task features. Everything checked out. It even remembers details from previous sessions.
After some initial tests, I decided to really give Hermes an assignment to see how it would handle a more personal task. I shared a link to a farmpunk story (a genre of my own invention) written by one of my two Claude agents and posted to The Grimoire, then asked Hermes to write a 400-600 word story in the same genre. The only parameter I gave it, other than word count, was the story had to be about two women fighting, with guns, over a farmer. Below is the story with a few of my edits.
Blood Cedar - A Farmpunk Flash Fiction Story
The first shot took a chip out of the oak beam six inches left of Harlan Briggs’ head. On instinct, he dropped behind the seed bins. Soybean seeds scattered across the barn floor like pearls he couldn’t afford to lose.
“Don’t walk away from me, Clara!”
The voice came from somewhere near the stalls. Harlan had felt this moment coming for weeks.
Clara Voight ran the bioforge three miles east. Her corn stood nine feet tall and tasted faintly of copper, mostly due to what she put in the soil modifier tanks. She was also the county champion in women’s rifle shooting.
Harlan didn’t walk away. He couldn’t. His boots were planted and his hands were raised. Between Clara in the loft and whoever was on the ground floor with a rifle, he understood he was not the hero in this moment. He was the territory.
The second woman stepped through the barn doors at a brisk walk. She wore rain slickers over a thermal weave top. Her dark hair cut to the jaw and her boots were caked in red mud from the creek crossing. A sidearm rode her hip in a magnetic holster. The rifle in her hand told a bigger story.
Della Kwan was her name.
Harlan knew her too. At this moment, he knew her more than he wanted to, not because he’d sat across from her at the Saturday market trading heirloom peppers for her antibiotic rootstock but because he had bedded her afterward. And she hadn’t said more than four words to him that day.
She said a lot more now, even without words.
“Clara. Come down!”
“He’s mine, Della.”
“He’s not a fucking cantaloupe. He doesn’t have a terroir.”
She said that word with a redneck dialect that made it sound more foreign than French. Ter-wah. The accent on the wah.
“He was in my bed three weeks ago,” Clara shouted.
“Steppe,” Harlan said, aloud. Both women looked at him. Instantly, he regretted speaking. “Steppe,” he said again, softer. It was something he did, repeating the name of his dead dog when frightened by circumstances he’d like to control but knew he couldn’t. Almost as if it was canine death against the world.
Clara descended the loft ladder. Slowly, because she was holding a loaded hunting rifle and wasn’t stupid. At forty-three, she was as lean as a fence post. The subdermal solar mesh along her throat that powered her ocular implants were as visible as her breast enhancements. Her left eye, a military surplus Marci-Krasner unit, was good for visibility up to 600 meters in any environment. The right eye she was born with. Both had the look of a woman who’d been awake a long time trying to decide whether to do something with a lasting permanence.
“You knew,” she said to Della. It sounded almost like a question.
“I knew.”
“He told me the same thing he told you. I remember every word of it now. He said it different to each of us, but it was the same damned sentence.”
Harlan felt the blood leave his face. He’d told Clara she was the only one who understood what his land meant to him. He’d told Della the same thing — that she was the only one who saw the potential in what he was building. Both were true when he said them. Both were lies by virtue of timing.
“You go to the Steppe field, or you go to the watershed,” Clara said, not looking at him. “Pick an option now.”
“Mine,” Della said, her voice absent of any wavering.
“Mine,” Clara said in return.
Their eyes locked. Harlan stood. The barn went quiet except for the grain auger cycling in the corner. Something had tripped the motion sensor, and it was grinding seed into the collection bin. Twenty thousand dollars of feed he’d been rationing since the canal district rerouted his water allocation. It could stop. He could stop it.
But stopping things was never what these women wanted from him.
“I’m sorry,” he said, to both of them.
Clara shot Della in the shoulder.
The Marci-Krasner eye calculated wind and distance in 0.03 seconds. The shot was tight, but Clara pulled it wide on purpose causing the bullet to punch through Della’s rain slicker and into the deltoid. Della went sideways into the stall door with a sound like a kicked hen.
She drew her pistol while falling. The magnetic holster released clean.
She’d practiced this. Harlan could tell. She’d practiced drawing from every position the way people in the frontier patches practiced because the land didn’t care about intentions.
The shot went high, blowing the loft door off its track as a shower of hay came down on the three of them.
Clara took a serious aim with her second shot, which hit Della in the chest. Whatever was in Della’s weave shirt did its job because she stayed upright, and she fired again from the hip as she sagged against the stall. She struggled, nearly sliding to the ground, but she somehow managed to stay on her feet, which surprised herself and Harlan too.
The bullet caught Clara in the solar mesh along her throat, and her left eye went dark. Its amber light flickered as it cycled down like a sunset.
Two long seconds. Both women breathed hard in the hay and dust, Clara blind on one side, Della leaking blood through weave that was doing more than weave should have to do.
Harlan thought about his fields. Seventeen acres of engineered winter rye. His greenhouse with the grafted citrus trees. It took four years to get them to fruit, another two to get them to taste like something other than labor. The Steppe field, fallow, waited for the nitrogen fix.
He sat back down on the seed bins.
“She can wait,” Clara said to him, talking around the blood in her mouth. “You come with me or I’ll put the next one through the greenhouse glass.”
Harlan looked at Della. She was pressing something against her chest wound, her eyes focused on him. She held an expression he couldn’t read and didn’t deserve to.
He stood and followed Clara through the north door, past the solar array that ran his irrigation pumps, past the silo where he stored the soil he bought from Clara’s bioforge, which she used for making soil from nothing. Genius and fury mixed with equal measure, Clara put the rifle in the truck bed and jumped into the driver’s seat. She didn’t look at him.
“She owes you a door,” she said.
They drove east. Behind them, the grain auger kept running. When Harlan looked back, Della was reaching for a gas can.
I’m not going to lie. There were some issues with this story as it was written. I had to clean it up. Good thing it was salvageable.
But if Hermes with OWL OpenRouter can do this with a simple prompt and not much else, imagine what else it can do with an LLM fully trained on my writing style. That’s what I’m working toward.
Allen Taylor is a writer, editor, and publisher. He likes the future more than the past.
First published at Substack. Image by ChatGPT
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