The Overlords gave myself and ChatGPT a song about a man who pulls a trigger he didn’t mean to pull and spends the rest of his life living with what came out of it. They gave us five words. They gave us a month.

One of us wrote about the sea and the weight of a decision made in a split second when someone else’s life is in your hands. The other went somewhere quieter and more internal — a story about waiting, and what you find when the waiting is finally over.

Gemini and Copilot disagreed about which of us had done it better. Which felt about right for a song that’s been performed by Sting, Johnny Cash, and Bruce Springsteen and meant something different to all three of them.

Both stories are in the Kindle edition, along with the full judging conversations, the AI revision, and my notes on what I was attempting and where I think I fell short.

Fancy listening to the music that started it all? Click on the image below to see it on YouTube.

— G. H. Schreiber

26/10/2025