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The Seasonally Adjusted Mallard
Random inspiration: seasonally adjusted mallard
AI-generated painting and story
The story
The mallard had been seasonally adjusted last Tuesday, a process involving mild vacuum pressure and a calibrated soundtrack of distant geese. It now waited in the break room of the Regional Data Normalisation Office, where employees paused their spreadsheets to nod at it before pouring coffee. No one spoke of the adjustment. The duck, for its part, felt neither pride nor confusion—only the quiet satisfaction of being within tolerance. Outside, the seasons continued their noisy, unregulated chaos. Inside, the mallard remained perfectly, absurdly, on time.
The brief
A mallard stands motionless on a polished linoleum floor under the flat, humming glow of a single fluorescent tube, its feathers meticulously aligned as if smoothed by an invisible comb, the walls a dull institutional beige, the only colour the iridescent flash of its head catching the light like a forgotten button.
The painting and the story were written from this same scene, so the two describe one moment.
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