Almost Impossible
Jed’s finger hovered over the mouse button.
He took a breath, closed his eyes and clicked.
Tentatively, he unclenched his left eye and then the right.
He blinked both together slowly.
The rainbow wheel was still spinning, the progress bar of the AI program stalling and spluttering from left to right. It reminded Jed of an old fashioned clown car, chugging and honking its way across a circus ring.
If that was the case, Jed considered he must be the ringmaster - or at least one of the more qualified and experienced clowns.
He hadn’t ever wanted to stoop to using AI, not really. It had just kind of crept up on him over the last few months, its bony grasp edging ever closer to his shoulder, all while any hopes and dreams of becoming a traditional artist ebbed further out of reach.
Jed didn’t know exactly when he realised he wasn’t talented enough to make art on his own, but he did remember that it stung.
He had tried, but it never worked.
It wasn’t especially bad - but it certainly wasn’t good either.
Not by any definition.
He knew he had good ideas though, he just couldn’t translate them from inside his mind down into his fingers and onto the canvas.
And, if Jed was feeling particularly open and honest with his friends after a couple too many glasses of wine, he would go on to acknowledge that he was simply too lazy to change anything about the situation.
And it was during one of these monetary flashes of sincerity that the first kernel was sown.
“Well, if you can’t make it, fake it,” one of his friends had suggested, “Download an AI app, stick in what you want to make and then - BOOM! - instant art. Or as near as you can get.”
Jed had always rejected the idea before. He wanted to do it on his own. To make mistakes, imperfections - and for those to be as important to the finished work as the flourishes.
“Man, I don’t wanna go down that rabbithole,” he would always say when the conversation inevitably came back round again at some other late night drunken discourse, “I want it to be my art. I want it to be me. Nah, I would rather be chased naked through the streets by a hungry bear than start down that road…”
And of course his friends all laughed, and Jed laughed, but the hooks of the idea were already in place and over time - and frustration and rejection - the thought grew and grew inside him.
And so it was after a particularly discouraging night of staring at a blank canvas, Jed found himself firing up his computer at half eleven, punching AI PROGRAM FREE ONLINE into his browser search bar and scrolling joylessly through the results.
He stopped at one randomly.
The text under the link read: “Almost Impossible - Bring your wildest creative ideas to life with our free online tool…”
Jed clicked on it and, presented with a blank box to fill with a text prompt, suddenly realised his mind was a complete blank.
Nothing.
Not one single thought.
His eyes flitted around the room searching for inspiration.
The free evening newspaper was on the desk next to him. The Prime Minister was gurning from the front page. He was on some kind of press junket, seemingly to drum up support ahead of calling the next election.
Today he had been at a school in a little mining village, tomorrow he would be going to a fish finger factory in the North East of England.
A tiny cog ticked over in Jed’s brain - he almost thought he could hear it - and then he started typing.
Prime Minister crushed under 10,000 frozen fish fingers
Before adding in the words Photorealistic and Dramatic.
Jed thought for a moment.
He added in an extra zero, smiled to himself, and gazed upon his opus.
Prime Minister crushed under 100,000 frozen fish fingers Photorealistic Dramatic
And that is when he first clicked the mouse and set the Almost Impossible algorithm to work.
One minute became five.
Became seven.
Became thirteen.
It was not a quick process, but as Jed thought to himself, it was probably quicker than if he actually tried to get better at it himself.
Progress seemed to sit at 83% Complete for an age, but suddenly it filled, and things started to happen on screen. The progress bar evaporated and several other parts of the page flashed and started to reload.
Jed fidgeted in his seat and leaned forward towards the screen.
Suddenly the AI image popped in, filling the screen with a garish, nightmarish vision.
The sudden flash of strange imagery made Jed jump backwards in his seat.
It most certainly fulfilled the brief.
There he was, the leader of the country, stricken beneath several tonnes of breaded haddock.
He certainly wasn’t mugging for the camera now. His eyes were glassy and staring into the void - something Jed couldn’t decide was either an AI decision or just its inability to escape the Uncanny Valley.
Jed stared for a moment. And then chuckled to himself, before laughing out loud.
“OK,” he said to himself “Maybe this could work…”
The next morning was pretty much like any other, except Jed still had a bit of a spring in his step from his first tentative experiment last night.
He got up, got ready and headed out for work.
The commute in was routine, the day itself fairly standard, but the journey home seemed muted and off kilter. There felt like there was something strange in the air.
As he left the tube station, Jed fought through the crowd to pick up a free evening newspaper, flicking it over to see the full front cover as he did so.
He immediately stopped in his tracks and the paper fell messily from his hand.
Fellow commuters tutted loudly as they bumped into his back and tripped noisily over the mess of fluttering pages.
Jed bent down and rescued the front page that was wrapped around his shin.
There it was.
On the front cover.
The Prime Minister, pancaked underneath several hundredweight of frozen reformed fish.
‘PM BATTERED ON CAMPAIGN TRAIL’ blasted the headline.
The story reported that, following the freak accident, the Prime Minister was in a stable condition, but would likely be incapacitated for several months.
Jed stood there, dumbfounded. He didn’t want to move. He wasn’t sure he knew how to move any more. The crowd jostled and pushed around him until he eventually got washed along in the throng, slowly staggering forward along the high street and towards home.
When he got in, Jed immediately switched on his computer and smoothed the crumpled front page of the newspaper on his desk.
He opened up the folder he had labelled Almost Impossible and double-clicked on the single file inside.
The computer whirred and the screen flashed momentarily before the image from last night opened up.
Jed slid into his office chair. He stared at the screen, then at the newspaper, then back to the screen.
OK, it wasn’t exactly the same - there were a lot of small but noticeable differences here and there - but the similarity in the overall composition of the image (political figure being squashed under an unnecessarily large amount of frozen fish) and its theme (political embarrassment of being squashed under an unnecessarily large amount of frozen fish) was hard to deny.
“What the..?” he muttered under his breath.
He couldn’t have predicted something so entirely unpredictable, could he?
Jed puffed out his cheeks.
The cogs were already beginning to turn again.
He clicked open his browser and loaded up the Almost Impossible app.
It dutifully sat there, the text box empty and waiting for Jed’s input.
How could he test it? What was something so wildly outlandish and unlikely that it could never be a coincidence - at least not a second one?
He didn’t want to hurt anyone, but it needed to be someone of note doing something buck wild enough to make it to the news.
That way he would definitely know for sure.
So, who could he pick?
And what could they be doing?
He sat, arms folded, stewing on the questions.
After four minutes, he whispered “Sod it”, leant forward, tapped out his brief and clicked ‘Submit’.
The app juddered its way through the progress bar once again, a little faster this time, before spitting out another luridly graphic image.
“And if THAT happens, then, well…” he petered out. Jed really didn’t know what he would do if THAT happened.
The next day felt strange.
Jed didn’t know whether to be excited or nervous.
Whether he should feel all powerful or just plain confused.
The day itself was mainly uneventful though. The usual daily grind with little to differentiate it from any other. So much so in fact that Jed’s mind had began to wander and he had got lost in the microcosm of finishing up an urgent spreadsheet and what he needed to get to make dinner tonight.
But that changed as his manager bounded up to his desk just before he was due to go home.
“Jed, Jed… Jed! Have you even SEEN the news?”
Without asking, she grabbed Jed’s keyboard, span the monitor round to face her and started typing.
“Just LOOK!”
As she turned the monitor back towards Jed, he could see she had loaded up a YouTube video. It seemed to be footage taken by a tourist, in London by the look of it and yep, that was Buckingham Palace in the background and…
Jed’s heart fizzed.
“Oh.”
The video was indeed uploaded by a tourist in London and, as it played, it captured the exact moment the King came bounding out of the palace gates on the back of a waddling hippopotamus.
The King was roaring with laughter, whooping and waving his crown high above his head in the manner a rodeo cowboy would do with his stetson.
The hippo, for its part, looked largely unfazed by what was going on on its back, nor by its unfamiliar surroundings. It just yawned, languidly showing off its gaping pink mouth, which bristled with yellow teeth projecting out in all directions.
The unlikely rider and mount barrelled through the crowd and set off down The Mall, to the tune of grunts, guffawing and the chatter of tourists exclaiming disbelief in a dozen different languages.
“Oh!” Jed said again.
“Can you even believe it? Just wild, I can’t even begin to underst…” Jed’s manager was already up and walking towards another of her underlings.
“Aziz, AZIZ! Put down your bag, look you need to see this before you go home…” and she disappeared into the next pod of cubicles.
Jed’s mind raced. He grabbed his coat and set out towards the station and home.
Jed had grabbed a paper as usual, but had deliberately not looked at its front page. He wanted to keep it until he got home and could look at it at his leisure.
He did call his friend though, who answered on the first ring and excitedly asked him if he had seen the news. He explained he needed to see them tonight and asked if they could come over. The friend explained they were already nearby so could easily pop in on their way home.
Jed got home briskly and turned on his computer before he had even taken his coat off. He dropped the newspaper onto the desk. The self-satisfied headline ‘BY ROYAL HIPPO-INTMENT’ grinned back up at him.
He opened his browser and loaded up Almost Impossible.
While the website sat there, patiently waiting for input, Jed hung up his coat and went into his kitchenette to fill up the kettle and set it to boil.
Within moments, the doorbell rang and his friend was leaning dramatically on the doorframe, wide-eyed.
“But can you even BELIEVE it though?!” they smiled.
“No, no - it’s pretty far-fetched as it goes,” replied Jed, “Come on in, I’ve got so much to tell you about. Excuse the mess, you can have my office chair. Coffee, yeah?”
“Please! So how have you been?”
Jed continued the conversation while pouring the brews: “Well, it’s all been a bit weird. A really odd couple of days. I guess I just wanted to talk about it and make sure I wasn’t going crazy or imagining it.”
“Course, you know I’m always here for you!”
“Ah thanks - well, and this is gonna sound so silly, but you know you’re always on at me to try out AI and I’ve always been a bit… reluctant, well I finally bit the bullet and tried it out and, well…”
“Yeah, so I see!”
Jed headed back in with a mug in each hand. “Y’know, I couldn’t believe it when I saw what was happe—“
He stopped mid-word and stared at the screen and then his smiling friend.
“I hope you don’t mind, I couldn’t resist and I think you’ll get a kick out of what I put in. It should be really funny…”
The progress bar was already at 81% complete. Then it hurriedly scampered to 83%, 85%, 91%. The numbers blurred, everything reloaded and the latest AI creation suddenly filled the screen.
Jed recognised his own face instantly, but the rest of the scene took him a moment to process.
His friend looked at the screen, then at Jed stood holding the two mugs and chuckled.
Jed half-smiled, tears already welling in the corners of his eyes.
Trembling, his voice cracked: “Yeah, that bear’s fur looks so bloody real.”
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