Kin

 The newspapers filled their front pages with the story: the charismatic, smooth-faced boy-band singer was going into the military and would be serving 24 months somewhere near, but not on, the front-lines.  There wasn't much war going on at the moment anyway but still his fans were despairing over the possibility that there might be an escalation and he might come somewhere near danger.  They gave interviews, sobbed on live TV, blogged incessantly and produced YouTube videos (though given the number of adverts that YouTube shoehorned into each 30 seconds of video the casual viewer would be hard put to know what they'd just watched, or why they'd just watched it).

"This is amazing," said Keith McMahon.  He leaned back in the old, cushioned chair and it tilted, then tipped him out.  He sprawled on the floor like a spavined donkey for a moment, then heaved himself laboriously to his feet.  By the time he was there he was red-faced and gasping for breath.

"Are you ok, Keith?" asked Larry, his assistant.  Larry was barely twenty and looked like he'd collapse under the weight of his clothes if they got wet.  "You shouldn't get out of breath just getting up off the floor, you know."

"COVID," muttered Keith.  "Had it last year, remember?"

"Yeah," said Larry.  "You gave it to all the rest of us.  Remember?"

Keith waved a hairy-knuckled hand as though it didn't matter.  "Yeah," he said.  "Sharing is caring, right?  You seen this though?"  He picked the newspaper up from behind the fallen chair and righted the chair at the same time.  His breath seemed to come a little harder still.

"What, the paper?  Never read it boss.  I've got the internet tubes, ain't I?"

"Issit?" said Keith.  "Poxy computers, they make the screens too hard to read.  This, right, this is real news."  He shook the paper and a couple of the centre pages got free and fluttered to the floor again.

"Right boss," said Larry.  "What's it say then?"

"About Kin," said Keith.  Kin was the lead singer of the boy band.  Most of his fans -- and his 20,000 strong fan club -- believed he was South Korean, but Kin was actually short for Anakin and a bit of an in-joke amongst Keith and his friends.

"What about him?  I thought we were turning him off?"

Keith roared with laughter, which cut off and abruptly turned into a violent coughing fit.  A spray of droplets shot from his mouth and Larry beat a hasty retreat across the studio, putting a mixing desk between himself and Keith.  When he'd got the coughing under control, and stood upright again, Keith put a hand on his stomach -- rather larger than he was really happy about -- and held the paper up. "Yeah," he said.  "We're turning him off, but the management put out a story that he's joining the army for a couple of years."

Larry picked up an iPad and started tapping on the screen, searching for the news.

"They don't know he's an AI?" he said.  "I thought they were all told three years ago after the accident?"

"Management wanted to see how well the AI performed first," said Keith.  "They said they'd put the generated version of him up, with the chatbot behind it for interviews, and see how it went over.  They never saw a need to tell anyone that Kin wasn't real any more."

"So what happened to the real guy?"

"I think they paid for him to go on holiday to Malaysia and he never came back," said Keith.  "Didn't ask.  Weren't none of my business, like."