What happens when the sky itself is no longer yours to watch? This week’s story was born from a single photograph, an old rooftop, a glowing chimney, the sea beyond. Hand that image to an AI, ask for something sinister, and this is what comes back. Draw your own conclusions about what that says about the machine that wrote it, and the man who asked it to.
The queue moved one pace forward every seventeen minutes. I counted. Always seventeen. Never sixteen, never eighteen. The woman in front of me wore a grey coat too large for her frame; the sleeves swallowed her hands. She kept them tucked inside anyway.
A child, perhaps seven, stood two places ahead. His mother held his wrist so tightly the skin around her fingers turned white. He did not cry. None of them cried any longer. The sound had been removed from them before they reached the gate.
Continue reading “Seventeen Minutes: The Weight of Waiting”
The boy couldn’t have been more than nineteen. He stood outside Afflecks, one hand pressed flat against the window where the vintage jackets hung on their chrome rails. His reflection overlapped with a leather bomber from the seventies, brown and creased and priced at something I couldn’t see from across Oldham Street.
Rain started. Not heavy, just that fine Manchester drizzle that settles into everything. He didn’t move. His jacket, thin and synthetic, began to darken at the shoulders.
Continue reading “Northern Quarter, Half Past Six”
The AI Grandad 