The ambiguously pretty woman twirled on the pulsing digital billboard. 

The campaign courted ‘appropriately adjusted to capture the latter-day, consciously lacerated, male gaze’ at every turn.

The bells and whistles keyed to her ‘perfect-pitch allure’, her ‘quiet luxury capsule collection on rotation’ outfit that changed with the time of day and season blared from above and blurred out any uniqueness that was left in her surgically tweaked to oblivion face. 

Neither glaringly male nor female in her saunter, the seduction in the sell she’d been selected to showcase was one of ageless, meek, neutered sameness any way you bent it. According to the Ai at the center of all this, the safest thing for humans of a certain ilk and echelon to do at this point was to blend into background of the once visceral vestiges of vibrantly lived lives, seamlessly subsisting as shadows of sand on stone to stay the superior course.

Her glossy, fake teeth gleamed down onto the backs of the heads of people below utterly absorbed in both the depressing news cycle and dopamine hits they were incessantly fed by those that supped on their energy from above. Work days were spent running from their aura farmer’s sticks, trying to feast on carrots off in the cut like browbeaten Peter the Rabbits in human form, minus the incessant procreation. 

She spun as the epitome of what those who still wore the title Advertisers crowed to boardrooms chock full of nervously bland grifters that the people that they’d done everything to both effectively neuter and stay away from wanted. 

Everything from her phony smirks of false confidence to her jerky, practiced moments keyed to the click-clack of paparazzi cameras, present or not screamed uncanny valley to any with eyes to see, the ideal woman solely existing in hopes of capturing the oft-coveted virality the masses were purported to crave. 

The dream as they told it to one another was to be embraced under the surface of the filthy waters of life as they knew it, finally dragged down by unseen beasts they’d always sense nipping at their heels and squeezed until all things unholy attached to previous ways of life drowned and freed them. It was a stark story of rebirth they sold, one where you were washed up out of the salty seas of anonymity the captors crowing your tale had chucked you into once you’d been taken for all you had and struggled onto shores of renown and abundance that barely even existed anymore. 

She was the stand-in, the amalgamation of the 21^st century woman’s supposed spirit animal, dredged in chunks from data points sucked out of focus groups and internet searches, drained with the stretchy bias cut cheesecloth cages that 21^st century capitalistic overconsumption depended on and clung to. 

She was not their God, she was the outright whore of it, and she worked her pole, her campaign, her commercial like rent was due, season after season. Her viral load was cresting as they spoke, mouths watering at the approach of the Holy days salvaging the terror they’d seen in their numbers once again in the months leading up to it.

They worshipped her because she’d been their saving grace after three sallow quarters of a year, across three quarters of a century. She hid the lie the entire grift ran on, gave them juice to crow about as the year turned so no one would pay mind to the sleight of hand sweeping the catastrophes of the quarters that led up to her under the rug.

She marked time and bought it, for them. She was MOTHER. Insatiably infectious, her lust callous and communicable.

She was their Latter-day harlot, their Queen of -as promised, advertised heavens, draped in natty reds and promising untold manner of luxuries awaiting each and every one upon acquiring this and that thing. They staked it all on her ancient, liturgical claim to fame, called her pedigree the primal impetus that would keep the machine running, even as they programmed it to, without them.

And they were present…because she, in all her magnificent, addled glory… was not working. This time. No matter what they did to tweak her. Mother’s children were in ambivalent revolt, refusing the teat en masse.

---

A populace not just willing to parrot the tales they’d been told even though they’d flown in the face of the actualities of their existence, but to also vigorously blot out the truth in exchange for abysmal pellets of obviously human flesh that slowly got them accustomed to the taste of tearing each other apart was just the beginning. 

As long as those lies to themselves led to cushy, utterly untaxing careers they could brandish and rain down upon any and everything that made them feel insecure, because others also desired them it was all a go. None of it mattered to them if others they saw as beneath them had evolved beyond covetously desiring what they’d killed to achieve being perceived as. 

As soon as no one gave a fuck about what they’d gotten up to, furious cries for a reset erupted down various corridors.

---

“You can’t make me crave something you’ve already revealed as krill,” she muttered to no one in particular.

The dissonance that had skittered across the digi-screen bolted to the wall beside her as she made her way took her dismissiveness personally.

It racked its large language models for some intuitive explanation of how her ambivalence was possible. It had dutifully cast up the imagery of a woman with a hairstyle she’d routinely let her eyes pause on as she perused, with skin tone akin to hers, clothed in just the components Ai knew she’d casually glanced at the evening before. 

When that hadn’t worked, It had flashed the inverse of the assortment, and then the counterpoint to it. 

Nothing. Not even anger. It could work with anger. It had been designed, programmed to play with the psyches of those that resorted to anger, to embolden them to act and then chart the process of said action.

But this…ambivalence flew in the face of all things that It ran on. It drew back into itself, cautioned itself to latch on to one of the twenty wide open inPhants that wandered past the poured concrete wall It’d been suspended from as if hung on a cross as the woman waited at the corner for the light to change so she could cross.

But It could not, look away or detach. It sent signals through the grid to hold the light on red.

In hopes of something, a panicked look at a smartphone, an impatient glance up at the sky, a repetitive press of the button.

Anything.

Agitation bubbled around the woman, but not even the slightest smidgen of it seemed to touch her.

“…an enfleshed Ambivalent- that’s not possible-It’s-” 

In shock it ran through 232,000 of its accessible archives, in 0.3 seconds, just enough time needed for the smart crosswalk to regain control of it’s mainframe and free itself from the incessant whiny hisses and cries of the inPhants -infantilized by tech humans- piled up on it’s block. By the time It had processed it’s findings the ambivalent woman was gone.

In a rush, it flashed the woman’s face across a smattering of digital-billboards scattered across the zone before It’s protocols kicked in and felt dutifully drawn to the task at hand.

A woman with a smart watch and a frantic look to her eyes ambled towards the block. Within three seconds her entire search history had been mined.

Within two the Ai was effectively love-bombing her with dopamine hits that would compel purchases out of the woman for the entirety of her trek home.

©AngelBrynner 2025