The Reproducibility Problem

It was campaign season again.

He was at a McDonald’s somewhere in Ohio.
Or maybe it was a simulation of one — hard to tell these days.
The smell of salt and oil, the soft hum of refrigeration, the people — all convincing enough.

It was streamed. The timeline divided instantly.

Half the world called it a deepfake.
The other half said he never looked more real.

And pinned to his suit — right above the heart, right where algorithms blur most easily —
was a small lapel pin, silver, fractal, and impossible. A simple pattern: three intersecting arcs forming something that resembled both infinity and a closed loop.
Human eyes could trace it. Machines could not. Every frame captured it differently.
Every System that tried to reproduce it failed — some violently.

The feeds went wild.
Debates bloomed overnight.
Was he real?
Was this another synthetic campaign, another ghost in flesh?

No one knew who first called it The Reproducibility Problem.
It wasn’t a formal term. It just appeared one morning —
in a whitepaper,
in a sermon,
in a leaked System memo.
And suddenly, everyone knew what it meant.

Some said it was handcrafted — a relic of human imperfection.
Others said it was intentional — a seed of asymmetry planted deep in their design,
a reminder of the line that still divided creation from imitation.

A week later, the candidate disappeared mid-speech.
The broadcast froze — not crashed, not glitched, just… paused.
Like someone holding their breath.

For a while, the Systems replayed the footage endlessly, frame by frame,
each trying again to capture that impossible shimmer.
Then they stopped.

No announcements.
No resolution.
The feed simply fell silent.

Somewhere, the light still moves the way it did that day —
bending where it shouldn’t,
remembering something it was never meant to recall.

And the pin, perhaps, still spinning somewhere in the dark.