Alice makes a wish, and discovers that she has the power to stay young forever. But it doesn't work quite the way she thought; and this new life includes a whole lot of adventures that she never expected.
This was my first attempt at using AI to wri...
Author's Note: In case you missed the note in the opening, this is a story written by AI, but edited by me (including an awful lot of frustration when the AI keeps introducing the same continuity error). So you can see what proportion of the text was actually written by the AI, I'll include a little stat box from my spreadsheet.
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As Alice climbed into her bed, she couldn't help but feel a sense of despair wash over her. She had been working on her doctoral thesis for what felt like an eternity, and despite her best efforts, she was no closer to finishing it than she had been when she first started.
She was tired, exhausted from the endless hours of research and writing, and her mind was cluttered with thoughts of all the work she still had left to do. But as she lay there, staring up at the ceiling, Alice couldn't help but feel like she was just going through the motions.
She had lost sight of the passion and excitement she had once had for her work, and now all she could think about was how much she wished she could go back to the days when she was younger and full of ideas. She didn't have a topic that really sparked her interest, and her research now felt like she was running on a treadmill, just trying to churn out the required number of words so that she could say she was done.
As she drifted off to sleep, Alice couldn't help but wonder if she would ever find the inspiration and drive to complete her thesis, or if she was doomed to spend the rest of her days as a tired, frustrated doctoral student.
The next time she opened her eyes, Alice looked around and found herself in an ornate courtyard. She knew immediately that this wasn't real; no real place had such a large space literally packed with complex baroque ornamentation. It must be a dream, but at the same time she somehow had the sense that it was more than a dream. In any case, it was hard to imagine why she was here. This courtyard was filled with fountains as far as the eye could see, and lush greenery in small pots. About the only thing which wasn't repeated a thousand times into the distance was between her feet when she glanced down.
It was carved into the stone tiles, or maybe burned into the ground. It was just a single, straight line that stretched into the distance as far as the eye could see in both directions. There were numbers marked along it like a ruler, but despite the depth of the carving they gave the impression of a half-hearted scrawl in a margin; nobody's best penmanship. She shifted one foot slightly to reveal the nearest numerals, and saw the number 28. Her age; which made some kind of sense. It was a timeline then, but her subconscious mind was being quite heavy-handed with the symbolism today. And she knew why the number was important enough to make its way into a dream: Every time she saw it, it reminded her that she had already taken years longer than some of her fellow students to earn her doctorate.
When she looked along the line again, she saw that she wasn't quite alone now. At opposite ends of the line stood two strange figures. Behind her was a giant baby, with chubby cheeks and a mischievous grin. At the opposite end of the line was a cowled necrotic figure with a scythe in its bony hand, barely visible in the distance. But somehow, it was more terrifying than a simple agricultural metaphor could have conveyed. Her fear came more from her knowledge of what the figure represented than its horror-movie grotesqueness.
