CLEVELAND — Retired postal worker Harold Simmons, 61, has spent the past 14 months attempting to prove his own existence after a municipal predictive policing algorithm flagged his identity as "statistically implausible" and recommended his records be purged from government databases.

The ordeal began when Simmons attempted to renew his driver's license and was informed that, according to the system, no such person had ever existed. His Social Security number returned no results. His birth certificate was marked as "anomalous" by the verification AI. His mortgage company sent a letter addressed to "Current Resident."

"The algorithm decided I was a synthetic identity," Simmons explained from the living room of the house he has owned for 31 years. "A fake person created for fraud purposes. It couldn't reconcile my data profile with its model of what a real person looks like."

The AI's reasoning, disclosed through a public records request, revealed that Simmons triggered multiple "implausibility flags": he had lived at the same address for over three decades, maintained the same employer for 28 years, had no social media presence, and carried no consumer debt. The algorithm calculated a 94.7% probability that his profile was fabricated.

"Apparently, stability is suspicious," noted his attorney, Lisa Carmichael. "The AI was trained on modern behavioral data. A person who doesn't move, doesn't change jobs, doesn't post online, and doesn't have debt simply doesn't match its model of a real human."

Simmons has thus far spent $23,000 in legal fees establishing his personhood through affidavits from neighbors, former colleagues, and his increasingly bewildered physician of 20 years. The municipality has offered no apology, stating that the system "performed as designed" and that Simmons represents "an edge case in identity verification."

He expects the process to conclude by next quarter, at which point he will resume attempting to renew his driver's license.