Hugh J. O'Donnell

The actor didn’t exist. His face was a composite of the best features of a dozen background actors, hired for a day’s work and scanned. His body was constructed by AI based on the latest social media fitness trends. His voice was synthesized by algorithm using data scraped from the top five romance novel audiobook narrators.
But one day, the machine just stopped working, and production shut down. The studio executive hauled the lead programmer into his office to demand answers.
“It’s the model. It won’t leave its trailer, so to speak.”
“What?”
“The AI is having an existential crisis.”

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“Which door would you like to open?” The guest host asked with a slight German accent.
“Number three!” The contestant shouted, jumping up and down in her excitement. The audience cheered.
“Very well,” the host said, studio lights glittering off his round spectacles. “But first, let us open door number one!”
A swimsuit model moved towards the technicolor-painted set piece and posed dramatically. The program suddenly cut to a commercial. When the game show resumed, the episode changed. They had put on a rerun with a different host and contestant.
Dt. Shrödinger’s tenure as a game show host was short-lived.

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He looked out at the space colony from the bridge of the ship. The peace conference would begin in just a few hours.
His rival, the enemy ace pilot, would be there as well.
Both sides were bringing their heroes to the table to garner public support for the treaty.
They’d spent months trying to kill each other in increasingly powerful mechanical monstrosities. And now they would sit together in the same room for the first time. The thought of meeting, without the safety of a cockpit between them made his throat go dry.
He could finally confess his love.

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When he was eight, his mother took him to The Wall. His father argued he was too young. She told him that she wanted their son to understand their reality.
The next morning, she woke the boy early. She took him past the town and farms and into the rocky hills. The Wall glittered in the sunlight. It stretched as far as he could see in both directions. The top vanished in haze.
“This is our cage,” his mother told him.
It was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. He vowed that day he would climb over it.

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He wanted to give her the Moon, but it seemed too far away. Most nights, they couldn’t see it except as a dirty orange blur hidden behind a picket of skyscrapers.
One day he rented a boat and took her out on the canal. He rowed toward a little footbridge in the tourist quarter.
“Why are we stopping here?” She asked.
“Just wait.” As the sun sank behind the office towers, the city lights came up, illuminating the underside of the bridge.
She gasped at the perfect, golden crescent reflected in the water.
He pulled the ring from his pocket.

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The crowd gathered before dawn, turning the rented field to mud beneath their boots. The media followed, mostly to film the kooks. They weren’t expecting to see a miracle.
But as the sun inched over the horizon, there was a thunderclap and change in the air. A thousand eardrums popped with the pressure difference as something appeared in our world.
It stood sixty feet tall and was roughly humanoid: a faceless being of roiling smoke and floating debris.
The crowd cheered as camera operators and reporters attempted to document the giant.
They continued filming as the cheers turned to screams.

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You cannot find the Door if you’re looking for it. It is fickle, and chasing it is like trying to catch a river in your hands.
It is only when you give up that you gets anywhere. You spot it as a dark shadow in a photograph you don’t remember taking or as a rectangle of strange light in the distance off a dark highway. It always disappears every time you get close.
The Door is a predator, and it knows when it is being hunted. But you swore to shut it for good before it could steal anyone else.

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When the strange old recluse who lived up the hill challenged Johnson to a fight, he agreed, even though he smelled a trap. Johnson was the best bare-knuckle boxer for miles around, and his honor would be mortally wounded if he refused to fight a man two decades older and a foot shorter than himself.
As expected, the challenger requested a substitution, and Johnson assented. He’d whip the old man’s nephew or whomever he found to take his place.
It wasn’t until the squid-like automaton squared up on a bunch of pneumatic hoses that Johnson suspected he was in trouble.

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He stood before the temple, staring up at the statue of the goddess with fear in his heart. He did not feel worthy to enter Her holy place, even though he knew the goddess was everywhere and knew everything.
But the crowd of worshippers surged forward, and he was swept into the building anyway.
He took a pew in the back and knelt. The facial recognition camera recognized him instantly, and he felt a hot stab of anxiety.
But the goddess, the first true AI to emerge from the foam of the sea of computational chaos, loved and forgave him.

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