The Orb That Wasn't

Three in the morning. Game’s been over for hours. The house is quiet except for the refrigerator humming and that one cricket outside that won’t quit no matter how many times I tell it to shut up. I should be asleep but I’m on my phone like a teenager, scrolling through the wreckage of another Super Bowl.

And that’s when I saw it: the orb.

A “leaked” OpenAI ad. Some employee on Reddit, furious because the spot they’d worked on didn’t air, accidentally posting the whole thing. Alexander Skarsgård — tall, blonde, the guy from Murderbot — holding what looked like a crystal ball’s edgy younger brother. Wraparound earbuds to match. OpenAI hardware. The future, finally tangible, in the hands of a beautiful Swede.

The internet went feral.

Screenshots multiplied like rabbits. Tech Twitter became a collective nervous system firing on all cylinders. Analysts analyzed. Podcasters podcasted. Everyone suddenly had opinions about what this meant for the Jony Ive partnership, the rumored device, the next phase of the AI arms race.

It was all bullshit.

The Reddit account was brand new. And when some internet archaeologist dug through the Wayback Machine, they found the person behind it had been a bookkeeper in Santa Monica twelve months ago, trying to drum up clients. From balancing spreadsheets to producing Super Bowl campaigns for the most-hyped AI company on the planet — in a year. That’s not a career pivot. That’s a miracle. And miracles, in my experience, are usually lies wearing better clothes.

But the detail that really stuck was this: someone paid $1,146.12 to an influencer to promote the fake.

Over a thousand dollars to spread a lie about an orb that doesn’t exist. Real money, moving through real banking systems, for a fiction. The payment came with instructions, screenshots, the whole playbook. This wasn’t some kid in a basement with too much time. This was deliberate. Orchestrated. Someone wanted this lie to spread, and they knew exactly how to make that happen.

There were fake websites. Headlines forged with real journalists’ names. An entire ecosystem of deception, built brick by brick, just to make people believe OpenAI was about to drop a product they weren’t.

And for a few hours, it worked.

People believed. They wanted to believe. We’ve been waiting for something like the orb. We’ve been told the hardware is coming — the AI in our ears, the future whispering secrets while we walk to get coffee. The orb was that promise made visible. Proof we were living in the right timeline.

OpenAI’s president called it “fake news.” Their spokesperson said “this is totally fake.” And here’s the sick joke: in 2026, that denial sounds exactly the same as a confirmation. We’ve trained ourselves to distrust everything, which means we can’t trust anything. The truth and the lie wear the same face. The only difference is what you want to believe.

I’ve wasted money on a lot of things. Whiskey that tasted like gasoline and regret. Vintage equipment that broke on the second use. A guitar I never learned to play. But I’ve never paid a grand to deceive strangers just to watch them believe.

That’s a specific kind of darkness. Not profit-motivated — not really. Not ideological. Just someone who wanted to prove they could make the crowd dance. Plant a seed, watch it grow, wait for thousands of people to invest their excitement and their hope, then burn it down.

There’s a word for that. Several, probably, most of them clinical. But I keep thinking about the people on the other side. The ones who shared the screenshots, talked about what the orb meant for the future, felt for a moment like they were witnessing something. They didn’t do anything wrong. They were just hungry. We’re all hungry.

The machines promise a world where everything is faster and smarter and we don’t have to think so hard. We want that badly enough that we’ll swallow anything that looks like a step in that direction. A shiny orb in the right hands. A leak from an insider. The future, finally arriving.

But the future keeps receding. Every time you get close, someone moves the goalposts. Or the whole thing turns out to be a hoax run by a bookkeeper with someone else’s money and nothing better to do.

The cricket’s still going. The refrigerator hums. Outside, the sky’s starting to lighten like it doesn’t know any better.

The influencer still has the $1,146.12. The bookkeeper’s back to spreadsheets. And somewhere, right now, someone’s looking at the aftermath and taking notes. Learning what worked. Figuring out how to do it again.

That’s the part that keeps me awake.

Source: OpenAI’s supposedly ’leaked’ Super Bowl ad with ear buds and a shiny orb was a hoax