That name “Elara” is a red AI flag to me. A frequent name ChatGPT likes to pick for a character in a sci-fi or fantasy story.
Why would it pick the name Elara?
My guess is something frequent in its training. I’ve seen it crop up in the outputs so often I’ve grown to hate the name now. 
I’ve seen the name pop out of ChatGPT and Gemini. I haven’t seen it from Grok yet, but I don’t use it as much in attempted stories. Was that story in fact an AI result from your search?
And if not, @Wendell_Wagner, what is it from?
I put those words into Google. It returned the answer I gave above. eschereal, does the answer resemble the story you read about any more than a random collection of sentences?
Obviously it is not a random collection of sentences, but the story I remember had much less boilerplate-style writing.
I can almost guarantee that’s AI slop, either a hallucination or the AI thinking you were asking it to write a story. In a few paragraphs, it hits all the exact points in the description. And if you search for any specific phrases, there are no results.
Yeah, that was its AI-generated answer, and it did that because it thought you wanted it to write a story. If the AI had found a match for a story published somewhere, I’m pretty sure it would have said so more clearly and not reproduced a section of the story with no attribution.
Never before have I gotten from a Google search anything other than an answer to my question. Sometimes the answer wasn’t accurate. It was like asking a poor researcher a question and getting a bad piece of research. In this case, I didn’t find the writing that it gave me to be that bad. Now I wonder what would happen if i wrote a decent summary I could come up with for a novel. I then ask Google to write a novel-length piece of fiction based on that summary. I take the resulting novel and read though it, changing anything that sounds too like any other book or just sounds like bad writing. I then self-publish that novel and send copies to reviewers. They all think it’s great and I get a regular publisher to publish it. I spend the rest of my life living on the enormous royalties from it.
So for some reason, this recent discussion has triggered the memory of another story that maybe the esteemed minds here can help me find. I’m particularly interested because this is another one of those ones where I can remember the set up but not what actually happened.
In the story I’m thinking of, it takes place either in a small village or perhaps a small country with a town that abuts a tall wall. No one knows what’s on the other side of the wall, and the wall goes in either direction from town an unknowable distance. At some point, some of the more restless minds in the village attempt to figure out what’s on the other side. It’s possible there’s some taboo around this that they ignore.
At any rate, a tall ladder is procured, and it turns out that the wall is very very wide. Anybody who sets out to cross to the other side of the wall walks for a long time and ends up returning to the village without consciously having walked in a circle. If I will call correctly, it’s either stated or implied that despite the use of some technique to ensure walking straight line, the path always loops back.
That’s all I have. Sound familiar?
Very familiar. I can’t remember the title or author either, but I remember the ending:
The loopback happened because there was no other side of the wall, it was like a Möbius strip.
That actually triggered some memories. That’s more or less what I remember too.
And that’s enough for me to google it. The Wall of Darkness by Arthur C Clarke..
Dangit, I remembered that it was Clarke, and what collection it probably was in, and I still got beat to it.
It also had a line about the hero riding something “that it is convenient to call a horse”.
This one may be out of bounds because it isn’t technically an SF story, but you can’t tell that right up until the very last sentence. A “scientist” builds a fake time machine into the side of a mountain to scam criminals. He claims the mountain location is necessary because of the fields the minerals put out or some such BS. The machine is big and noisy. A mobster approaches him running from a murder rap and wants to use the machine. The scientist sends his “assistant” into the past, say to 1910. The assistant returns a bit later with a 1910 silver dollar and a couple of other old items that he didn’t have when he went into the “Projection Chamber”. So the mobster goes in but didn’t know that the projection chamber had two concealed doors. One to the side, where the assistant hid for a couple of hours and had stored the 1910 items. The other, in the floor, located over a really deep mineshaft.
I read a short story once about, well, farming people.
The first person storyteller was visiting a livestock farmer who raised “gentleman” Their behavior was to end up as perfectly proper gentleman, in how they spoke, dressed, and so on.
It was in a collection but I don’t remember the name of the collection either. There was one scene in which they were allowed to look into an area where the stock was having sex, and the farmer said a gentleman liked his sex dirty.
If it was women being farmed, the name Piers Anthony would come to mind…
Either a book or a movie, I just remembered a scene.
Set in an alternative history, people watch a fictional film depicting “our” world and they start crying because it’s so beautiful but unobtainable to them. Eventually more people see the film and they all start crying.
Didn’t that happen in The Man In The High Castle?
It was all men