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The Faintly Bureaucratic Duck
Random inspiration: faintly bureaucratic duck
AI-generated painting and story
The story
The duck had been promoted last Tuesday, though no one remembered voting for it. It arrived at 8:03 a.m., adjusted its tie, and began reviewing the same form it had reviewed every day for seventeen months. The checkbox was always unchecked when it arrived. It always checked it. No one ever asked why. The rain outside had not stopped since the promotion. The duck did not look up when the intern brought coffee. It did not need to. The form was approved. The duck was still waiting for the next one.
The brief
A duck stands upright on a worn wooden desk beneath a single bare bulb, wearing a slightly crooked tie and holding a clipboard with a single checkbox marked 'Approved', its feathers dulled by the grey-green light of a window showing rain on the other side of glass.
The painting and the story were written from this same scene, so the two describe one moment.
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