Author's note: I am posting these today because I will be busy for the next two weeks. There will be no posts during that time.

Chapter 22: Media Backlash

This is an AI-generated story and is a continuation of “Test Drive”.
I have kept edits to a minimum, making changes only when the AI would repeat phrases a bit too much.
(Only the Test Drive series will be written with AI assistance)

Chapter 21: The Charges

The ride to the station felt like an eternity to Yuqi, though it couldn’t have been more than ten minutes. She sat in the cramped backseat of the patrol car, her mind swirling with a tempest of confusion and fear, the biting metal of the handcuffs digging into her wrists like a cruel reminder of her predicament. The two officers in the front seat maintained a stony silence, their eyes fixed on the road ahead, amplifying the sense of dread that coiled tighter in her stomach with each passing second.

I was an assistant producer for a TV station, in Phoenix, Az. Deedra, my producer, and I were discussing a bit of information we had just learned about. It was still in the rumor stage, but if true might require us to delve into this mystery, since anything remotely connected to this would make for a great story locally, maybe even nationally.

The parents of a troublesome teenage son finally had enough and sends him for special training. He gets more than she bargains for.

The New One
A Vignette
By Maryanne Peters

I had come home from the party early. Walt had been talking to some of his business buddies and I was bored.

“That’s okay, sweetie,” he said. “You go home and slip into something nice and I will be along shortly.”

This is an AI-generated story and is a continuation of “Test Drive”.
I have kept edits to a minimum, making changes only when the AI would repeat phrases a bit too much.
(Only the Test Drive series will be written with AI assistance)

I was dropping off my wife at her beauty salon, a sudden need to use the bathroom causing me to go in with her, so I could use their facilities. It was sudden, like one minute everything was fine, the next I had to go real bad. It felt like I was leaking a little as I walked towards the restroom, trying to hold my legs together to keep from letting go. I paused at the door, both gender symbols displayed on the same door.

I, me, the one with the rapid-fire gob, it was still hanging open, so I hauled it shut by pure force of will, and sought the right words, hoping to avoid the reflex “Didn’t think you were a queer”. I may be ‘queer’ myself by most people’s definition, but I had to learn about homophobia. I’m as straight as they come, in every double meaning of that word, and the idea of two men together had always been a bit ‘ick’ to my younger self. I know full well how wrong those thought are, so did my best to make it ‘were’, but my hindbrain still kicks in at inappropriate moments.

“For all his flaws – and for all of mine – I’d just like to have my father back. Maybe now, after all these years, we can do better.”

I took the skewers out as instructed. Leaving them to be slathered with gloop and slapped onto the grill, and then stood for a few seconds to put my thoughts in order. There was something about him, something off, that didn’t match the Norman Rossiter I remembered from that school. The lad I had known had been one of the rugby crowd, exactly the people I had spent so much energy in avoiding., and their behaviour could never have been fairly described as ‘accommodating’ or ‘inclusive’, unless it was a matter of intersectional hatred. The Venn diagram of their world had been a classic double circle: ‘Us’ and ‘every lesser being’. That second circle could just as easily be labelled ‘targets’.

This is an AI-generated story and is a continuation of “Test Drive”.
I have kept edits to a minimum, making changes only when the AI would repeat phrases a bit too much. I also wanted to test how the AI would handle love scenes (I guess we could call it that…) and….not so good.
(Only the Test Drive series will be written with AI assistance)

This is an AI-generated story and is a continuation of “Test Drive”.
I have kept edits to a minimum, making changes only when the AI would repeat phrases a bit too much.
(Only the Test Drive series will be written with AI assistance)

It was pretty quickly obvious to me when I arrived here that this world was way more Earth-like than I expected. The people look mostly like humans with one or two major exceptions, the trees and other animals look familiar, and once I was able to find a map of the world, even the place names and the land forms (pre-icecap-melting versions) were mostly a match for my memory.

Chapter 20: Addressing Systemic Failures

Breakfast was more than a little awkward, Jules sneaking little glances at me before ducking her head whenever I caught her gaze. I assumed it was a mixture of smugness and shame, like that song about him knowing that she knew that he knew and so on. The two of them had shared some intimate moments, occasionally with most of the county from what I’d heard prior to inserting my little foam plugs, and she knew that I did, indeed, know. In an instant, my traitor mind came up with ‘Not so much kiss and tell as shag and scream’, but I think I managed to hide the smirk, and to be sure, I covered it with words.

It was a strange time to be a peacekeeper of any kind, because it was a shameful kind of peace to preserve. Multiculturalism had failed; polite society had ceased and democracy had mutated into the exercise of force through strength in numbers.