I was three drinks deep when the kid showed me his phone, grinning like he’d just discovered how to jerk off for the first time.
“Check this out,” he said, shoving the screen in my face.
A woman stood there, more beautiful than sin, draped in silk that barely touched her skin, hair flowing like water down her shoulders. Her eyes were wide and haunted, the kind of eyes you only get from living through something real nasty. The kind of eyes that see through you.
It was stunning. It was haunting. It was bullshit.
“AI made it,” he said. “I typed in the prompts and BAM. Took, like, five seconds.”
He was still grinning, waiting for praise. I took a long, slow drink instead, the burn of the whiskey the only real thing in the room.
“She’s beautiful,” I said. “But she doesn’t exist. Neither does whoever made her.”
He looked at me like I was the crazy one.
“It’s art, man. It’s the future.”
I didn’t bother arguing. I knew better.
I’d seen enough futures to know they all end up the same: buried under the garbage of the past, crumbling apart in the rearview mirror.
I went home that night and stared at my old typewriter, that heavy piece of shit that clung to the desk like an anchor. I hadn’t touched it in weeks. Maybe months. The page was still curled up in the roller, taunting me with the half-sentence I’d left hanging there, waiting for an ending I couldn’t give it.
I thought of the woman with the haunted eyes, how she was born without pain or purpose, summoned into existence by some kid with sticky fingers and a keyboard. Five seconds. That’s all it took. And she was more beautiful than any woman I’d ever seen in real life.
Hell, maybe the kid was right. Maybe that was the future. Maybe all we wanted were pretty lies. Maybe all we needed was the illusion.
I sat there, staring at the blank page until the sun came up, taunting me with its brilliance. I didn’t write a damn thing. I just watched the light spill across the room, chasing the shadows away, and I knew I was one of them.
A ghost. A leftover.
I could have written something, I could have fought back.
But I didn’t.
I poured another drink and waited to feel something. Anything.
I was still waiting when the bottle ran dry.
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