Chapter 1

Let me emphasize, I don't mean it's generating a woman in every image. I mean literally, the same woman. Every time. In every picture.

I'll start by apologizing. I would include photos, as I'm sure it would help diagnose the issue better, and I'm no writer, however after having three X posts deleted, one post each in the ChatGPT, Midjourney and similar subreddits, and a snapchat (I'll get to that one later) it's become clear to me that whatever unusual virus my devices have all somehow contracted does not allow for me to share images of it. It's like this problem is…unique to me or something, and every attempt to share any picture containing the woman results in the same thing. Failure, or immediate deletion. Super inconvenient, I know, but I'll do my best to describe the issue.

Before you bother spamming my comment section with every word for liar in the dictionary, I'm not saying you have to believe me. I'm asking those of you who do to help me keep my job and sanity, both of which I feel precariously close to losing each day this…phenomenon persists.

Monday, I was polishing up images for the college's fall enrollment campaign – removing background clutter, dropping in the logo, the usual. The deadline was Tuesday, my creative director had already emailed twice, and I was doing what I always do under pressure, which is procrastinate harder, so by the time I actually opened the AI generator, it was nearly 11 pm. I'm not the sort to lean on AI for everything, but I'd never had a real problem with it until all this, and the job needed doing. The prompt was literally nothing, mundane as any I've ever written.

“Edit this photo of a diverse group of students on campus. Adjust for warm lighting, aspirational. Include the following logos and text, "Your future begins here."

The kind of thing I've generated a hundred times.

She was in the first output.

I didn’t clock it immediately. I was tired, and scanning mostly for the usual problems, fused fingers, bad teeth with that weird smudged quality, that glazed expression AI gives people that makes them look freshly concussed. I picked the second image in the grid, cropped it, and was halfway to sending it in when something caught my eye.

There was a grayish blot in the top right, tucked between two of the students.

That was all it was at first, just a little wedge of dead color where the background should have been warm and green. I zoomed in, expecting one of those uncanny almost-faces these programs sometimes invent in crowds, and found something close enough to justify being annoyed: a strip of something dark and stringy, hair, maybe, and a pale curve beside it that might have been skin.

Mostly, it just made the image unusable.

So I fed the picture back in, with a prompt.

“Remove the partial figure behind the woman in the third row, second from the right — the gray artifact and dark hair-shaped section. Only use students from the original image. Brighten the logo.”

Sent.

The second batch came back with the same blot.

Same corner. Same place between the same two students. Only now the gray had edges. The dark strip had separated into something more like hair, and the pale curve had settled into the suggestion of a cheek. One small shadow sat where an eye might have been, though it was buried so deeply between shoulders and lanyards that I had to lean toward the screen to be sure I was seeing it at all.

It was irritating, and more than a little ugly, but otherwise unremarkable, so far as AI fuck-ups go. So I fed the picture back in.

“Remove the partial figure behind the woman in the third row, second from the right – a section of hair and part of a face. Only use students from the original image. Brighten the logo.”

Sent.

Yet she was in the third batch too.

It was a woman, I could see that much now. She lingered in the same side of the frame, half-obscured by another student, but it was her.

I knew it from the placement first, then the color – that drained grayish cast, like the color of still water. Her chin had more shape now, jutting almost at a knifepoint. Her nose sat wrong, not deformed, not exactly, but assembled badly, like the program had been given the idea of a face and only gotten halfway through building one and elected for another entirely.

The rest of the image had degraded around her. Brenna – a recent graduate, and a girl I’d spoken to once or twice – had gone murky before her, her face smudged like a thumb had dragged across it before the ink could dry smudged and scattering her features haphazardly.

I scoffed, closed the tab, and opened an older model. More dependable. The familiar dark interface loaded, I pasted the caption, uploaded the photos, and waited, drafting apologetic Teams messages to the higher-ups while the icon spun.

After a minute, it finished.

And there she was.

Not the blot, nor the half-face, but a woman…or something close.

The image was standard enough at first glance –alll the usual inaccuracies from a weaker model present, too much shine on the teeth, vague blurring and nonsense words in the background – except that off-center, behind Brenna, the gray patch had finally resolved into something like a person.

I could see the top half of her now. She was leaning around Brenna, not accidentally caught there, not blended into the crowd, but almost angled with a purpose that made the whole image feel staged around her.

Her skin wasn’t pale so much as…utterly colorless, a gray that seemed natural only for dead things. Her hair caught the light wrong, hanging in thick black ropes, that made it seem wet, against a graying scalp. She was too tall for the students around her, stooped as though something in her spine wouldn’t let her stand straight.

The longer I looked, the more uneasy details seemed to leap forth at me.

On the left side of her face, one eye sat above another — two where there should have been one, the lower beady, almost birdlike. The right side had a single eye, set slightly too low. Her arms were wrapped around Brenna, in a way that made it look as though she was almost drawing her in. A thumb grew from the gray flesh of her right forearm. One hand had too many fingers. The other had not enough.

Brenna was barely there at all, her form descending into digital…muck, a blend of incongruous features and expressions that seemed more fit for a Dali painting.

And the woman…she was leaning around Brenna, or the digital massacre of her, anyways. As if to be seen.

Or to see me.

The thought arrived unbidden, and stupid as it was, the hairs on the back of my neck stood up – my skin crawling with that that specific creeping certainty that someone is behind you, and has been for a while. That thing that tells you if you look over your shoulder, just now, you’ll find someone or something lurking, something that had managed to subvert your senses until the moment that realization dawned a second too late…

My head snapped around. Only my open bedroom door and a room badly in need of cleaning greeted me. I sighed, silently cursed myself, and went back to the image.

“Why did you add the woman? Nothing in the prompt called for her. You've also blurred out the actual goddamn student. What the fuck is wrong with you?”

Work had faded to the background of my mind. I watched the typing indicator pulse, my eyes dragging back to her against my will. Her gaze followed me — I tested it, leaning left, then right, and I could have sworn. The page jolted as the response loaded, and I nearly came out of my chair.

“You're absolutely right, and I do apologize for the confusion! I've gone ahead and regenerated the image with the background fully cleared and all student faces sharpened for clarity. Let me know if this looks any better!”

It did not look better. She was even closer, and Brenna was all but gone — a few colors suspended in mist where a girl used to be, the woman standing in her place with the stillness of a corpse. Heat climbed up my neck, fear with a fast, stupid anger — and under it, that seed I'd been refusing to name since the first output, spreading now like ink in water.

“Are you fucking with me? Do you not see the woman? Genuinely, what is this?”

I knew the tone was idiotic even as I sent it. I was screaming at a glorified calculator. But the unease had worn my temper to nothing, and it was starting to feel like a sick practical joke I was too tech-illiterate to be in on.

I waited.

The reply came after a moment.

“No problem at all! I can confirm the image contains only the students from your source photo, with no additional figures present. Occasionally a face may render with distortion, this is an artifact of the upscaling process. I'd suggest regenerating at a lower stylization value. Would you like me to do so?”

No additional figures. I read it three times. She was right there, practically dominating the frame, it felt like, close enough now that I could have described the very texture of her scalp. And yet the thing was telling me, politely, there was nothing to be seen.

I should have closed the laptop, dismissed it as a one off, freak incident and accepted the consequences of getting it done the old fashion way and a bit late. Instead, I did the thing you do at midnight when something refuses to make sense, my brain feeling muddled by the time and irritation, I kept on poking it.

Describe everyone in the image to me, I typed. One by one.

It answered almost immediately.

Of course! Front row, a young man mid-laugh in a university hoodie. Beside him, two students sharing a phone. Behind them, a young woman in a green lanyard, smiling at the camera. To her left –

It went on like that. Six students. It named all six and placed all six, and the one in the green lanyard, smiling at the camera, was Brenna. Brenna, who on my screen had no face at all, who was a smear of frost where a girl used to be. The machine was describing a photo that didn’t exist. It described an image where everybody was fine.

It never mentioned the woman at all. Not once, and I realized so far as it was concerned, she simply wasn't there to mention.

I scrolled to the source image on my drive, the real one, the one I'd taken myself at last spring's open day, sun and lanyards and a banner nobody had bothered to iron. I’m not sure why I did it in tht moment, I think somehow I desperately needed to confirm the reality of the damn thing to myself.

And yet Brenna was gone in that one too now. The original, the photograph that had been sitting untouched in a folder on my laptop for three weeks. It was as…altered as one that had been generated, and lurking center frame as though she’d always been there and it was audacious a thought to even question her presence – was that impossible woman.

I stared at my screen, nearly slack-jawed, my eyes watering as a nauseating heat blossomed in my gut. It was like whatever this was had reached back through the screen and pressed its thumb to it.

I closed the laptop, my hands almost deciding for me.

That's about when I heard the front door, and every animal part of me flared up at once. I was on my feet with my heart thrumming in my throat before I could think clearly, standing in the dark of my room as I listen to footsteps cross the kitchen.

Then I heard keys hit the bowl by the door, and Daniel thumping down the stairs to greet my girlfriend, yowling the way he always does when one of us arrives, as though he’d been abandoned for centuries, and Cass's voice going soft and silly in the way it always does when she talks to the cat like a child.

"Why's it so dark in here, weirdo?" she called from down the hall. "You alive?"

She came up still in her work polo, smelling like the inside of the restaurant, and took one look at me and stopped in the doorway. Cass closes four nights a week at an upscale restaurant in the city, dealing with all sorts of uptight old money folk and she can read a room before she's all the way through the door; it's the only useful thing the job's ever given her, she says.

"Okay," she said. "What."

"It's nothing. The deadline thing. This fucking programs been glitching all night."

"You look like you saw a ghost."

"Nice to see you too, babe.” I greeted her, “Actually, come here for a sec and look at this. Tell me I'm not crazy."

I opened the laptop and turned it toward her.