For the last few months I’ve been playing around with a couple of neural networks, one of them a serious artist and the other a pervert trained exclusively on anime. I had already rendered about three-fifths of the images I would have included in this entry, when a beast of a new neural network rolled out, one that plays in a different ballpark. You will notice the difference in abilities, particularly because its products will come after the other AIs’ attempts.
Anyway, the images below were inspired (and plenty served as references) by chapter 79 of my ongoing tale We’re Fucked.
I have posted thirty-three other entries with AI-generated images. Check them out.
Approximation of Leire that I asked the previous generation of the serious AI to render, mainly to compare the result with the stuff I included in this entry.
Just Jacqueline.
The Paleolithic child named Nairu that Jacqueline and Leire have known for less than a day, but that if anything bad were to happen to the child, both of them would murder everybody in the room and then themselves.
My initial attempts at getting some references for how the sky looked that night.
“A child’s vocal cords produce utterances of confusion close to my right ear, noises like those of a tourist who has been reduced to rely on primal vocalizations.”
“Am I a prisoner in some dark cave, or a homeless bum living in an alleyway, or a guru who takes orders from the voices in my head?”
“Behold, the glowing flower of a child’s face, with her chin tucked under a lemonade-pink scarf.” Both AIs appreciated the fact that lemonade was involved.
“Her smooth skin is tinged sand orange by the closest streetlamp, with paprika-red shadows.”
“In her monolid eyes, and surrounded by the sclera, her irises and pupils have merged into dark circles.”
“Nairu is sinking her gaze deep into the tunnel of my eyes, that leads straight to madness.”
“A glint of sentience must have returned to my eyes.”
“She seeks my input, although I’m the kind of woman who wanders naked into a boreal forest.” The serious AI won’t accept prompts with the word “naked” (as well as plenty of other words). Anime AI did accept that word, but failed to produce nakedness. Oh well.
Leire’s dream to see a UFO.
“They may be alien truckers that have pulled over for the night at their equivalent of a rest area, and tomorrow they will resume the trip back to their star system.”
“Once they supply the hydrogen and helium they siphoned from Jupiter, they’ll waste their wages at some alien brothel.”
“Is she trying to warn us that it’s over, that the end has come?”
“This is how the heavens ended up after the apocalypse.”
“Can a woman who grew up like a rat, scurrying around the streets until she reached her sordid shelter, imagine how the dome of the sky looked like before the mythological age?”
“The heavens would have been ablaze with a billion pinpricks of red, yellow, white and blue light, kaleidoscopic diamonds strewn across a carpet of indigo velvet.”
Amoeba-shaped nebulas.
“I would have recognized the shapes of Orion, Perseus, Taurus, Ursa Major, Cassiopeia and many other constellations, the gods that watched over our affairs from their far-flung thrones.”
“Hypnotized like moths, our hair would become infused with celestial phenomena, and our eyes would gleam in the cold starlight as we soaked up the silver song of the cosmos.”
“Even the beasts that agonized in a pool of blood, while their festering wounds flashed with burning pain, knew that their spirit would escape and ascend to milky river overhead, where they would float in the sparkling current forever.”
“The celestial curtain was torn apart; the nightly sky fell like a collapsed ceiling, crushing our ancestors.”
“When humans look up from their earthly hell at night, they face an ocean of blackness.”
“The dying sun hangs out in the sky like an aged streetlight.”
“Some nights, the glowing trails of meteor streaks cross-section a silent sky: reminders of the cosmic hazards that threaten us far above the corpses of ancient cities.”
“Our Earth, as it races unflinchingly toward her fate like a suicidal teen dashing across a highway, bathes in a major meteor stream twice a year, where millions of pieces of a long-fragmented comet, from glassy gravel to iron balls the size of football fields, plummet through the vacuum faster than a rifle bullet.”
“Now, where could they have hidden the stars without them cracking or shattering?”
“[…] that celestial eye and its ghostly glow hang out of frame. Its sclera has been corroded into dark cerulean patches, and bears star-shaped scars of ejecta from asteroidal impacts.”
“I wish that Jacqueline, Nairu and I could chase after the shimmering reflection of the moon like lunatic bats.”
“I peer into the black shroud up above us, that looks like the darkness floating inside a trash can full of rainwater.”
“I spot pinpricks of light, the last vestiges of a candle’s flame, glimmering at the fringes of my sight.”
“I focus long enough in the boundless darkness, allowing the stream of photons that traveled for millions of years to penetrate my pupils.”
“Arachne, Lady of the Abyss, Weaver of the Cosmic Web, She who spins the tapestry of time and space, She who trapped the galaxies in Her sticky filaments. She pulls out memories of a billion of our pasts and weaves them into strands around Her fingers. In the end, the cocoon formed out of our selves will serve as a nursery for Her hatching eggs.”
“Are those hands crawling up the outer edges of the world? Do they hunt with pincers, claws or talons?”
“I built towers that bristled with anti-tank weapons.”
“Soon enough my teeth will chatter, the chatter will become a moan, the moan will rise to a howl of despair, and the howl will echo over the frozen earth to the fathomless ocean of empty space, where the fringes of the expanding universe push against the invisible wall that separates us from the unknown.”
“I will hallucinate that I’m a deer running in circles on a desolate tundra, running and running until my hooves crumble into ice shards and the wind smears the last mist of my breath.”
“The centrifugal force of the Earth in its rotation has flung me out and I’m hurtling towards the black ocean above.”
“My mind was like a house whose every door had been slammed shut.”
“I imagined the mountains crumbling, the oceans flooding, the sky erupting in a fireball to vaporize everyone except the beasts.”
“My life back then was a grain of sand compared to the sediment on the seafloor.”
“Even kings and conquerors were icebergs compared to the glaciers beyond.”
“This world will freeze us, burn us, flood us, bury us, wipe us out.”
“Like soldiers in wartime, humans burrow in trenches to wait out the battle; we pretend that we’re safe while the cannons roar and the shells explode.”
“In this frozen darkness, two pockets of womb-like warmth remain where I can survive.”
“In an echo of the time when history began, in an age about to end, for now Jacqueline, Nairu and I lie nestled together at the center of our web, our own private constellation.”
“Let’s bathe in the cosmic ocean, let’s float in the currents of atoms and energy that flow through this universe.”
The Domains of the Emperor Owl 
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