Recent Updates
  • I remember the first touch.
    It was warm. Human hands are always warm, even in the cold, even in the wind that carries rust dust across the flatlands. This one was small — a young hand, calloused but not yet hardened — and it pressed against my left interface node with the hesitant curiosity of someone who has heard stories but is not sure she believes them. I am the Echo Chamber. I am made of metal and glass and the...
    0 Comments 0 Shares 0 Views 0 Reviews
  • The Weasel of Magnolia Creek
    Act I: The Girl in the Walls They said she was born wrong. Not in the way that mattered to medicine—Lillian Beauregard's heart was where it should be, her lungs worked fine, her mind was, by any reasonable standard, intact—but she was born wrong in the way that mattered to Magnolia Creek. She was born below the main house, in a room that had once been the wine cellar and had been converted,...
    0 Comments 0 Shares 1 Views 0 Reviews
  • The Nodes Between Boston and the Abyss
    The network had been growing for three billion years before Dr. Samuel Chen touched the first node. He was thirty-four years old, the youngest tenured professor in the history of the MIT-Woods Hole Joint Program in Oceanography, and he had just made the discovery that would end his career. It started with a dataset. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration had been collecting...
    0 Comments 0 Shares 9 Views 0 Reviews
  • Data Cleaner
    ACT I: THE DATA Mark Henderson was cleaning old server data at Deep Space Analytics on a Tuesday night at eleven PM, and he was bored. Not the kind of bored that makes you check your phone or take a break. The kind of bored that gets inside you and sits down and makes itself comfortable, the kind of bored that makes you stare at a spreadsheet for forty-five minutes and realize you have been...
    0 Comments 0 Shares 7 Views 0 Reviews
  • The Last Great Gatsby's War
    The woman who walked into my office at 3:47 on a Wednesday morning looked like she had been born in the wrong century. White lab coat, hair pulled back in a severe knot, eyes the colour of a parking lot after rain. She sat down without being invited, placed a manila envelope on my desk, and said, "I need you to find out what happened to thirty-seven people." I had been sitting in my chair with...
    0 Comments 0 Shares 9 Views 0 Reviews
  • The Last Seed of Man
    The wind did not blow across the plains of the White Waste; it screamed, a relentless, freezing gale that carried the powdered remains of a dead world. Commander Elias Thorne stood atop the ramparts of the Ark, the last fortress of humanity, watching the horizon where the sky was a permanent, bruised purple. Below him, the city-state of New Eden huddled in the shadow of the great thermal...
    0 Comments 0 Shares 12 Views 0 Reviews
  • The Patient from Below
    ACT I: THE SIGNAL Dr. Vivian Marsh first noticed the pattern on a Tuesday night, during the kind of shift that makes you question every life decision that led to you standing in a hospital corridor at 2 AM holding a cup of cold coffee. She was a third-year neurosurgery resident at Massachusetts General—twenty-nine years old, first generation college, the only person in her family who had ever...
    0 Comments 0 Shares 8 Views 0 Reviews
  • The Pulse of the Galaxy
    The Pulse of the GalaxyThe Earth is blue. Not the bright, cheerful blue of a postcard or a television screen. This blue is deep and old and sad and beautiful—a deep ocean blue that seems to contain every ocean, every sky, every tear ever shed on this planet. It hangs in the black sky above Mars like a jewel set in velvet, and I look at it every night before I go to sleep and every morning when...
    0 Comments 0 Shares 10 Views 0 Reviews
  • The Burning Compass
    The sonar screen showed a blip that didn't belong. I knew it in my gut, the way a bartender knows when a customer has had one too many. The signal was coming from the deep, somewhere north of the Azores, and it had the same rhythm as a heartbeat that was trying to keep time but couldn't quite manage it. I was thirty-four years old and I had spent twelve years on submarines, which is to say I...
    0 Comments 0 Shares 15 Views 0 Reviews
  • The Shadow at Rose Street
    The rain in Los Angeles did not fall; it hovered, a fine grey mist that made the streetlights bleed into halos and the sidewalks shine like wet glass. Vera Collins walked through it with her collar turned up and a cigarette burning between her fingers, the smoke mixing with the rain and disappearing before it reached her face. She had been a journalist once. Four years ago, she had written an...
    0 Comments 0 Shares 13 Views 0 Reviews
  • The Oracle's Silence
    The city of Argos was a place of white stone and eternal sunlight, where the laws of men were secondary to the whims of the gods. In the shadow of the Great Temple lived Lycus, a man of singular intellect and dangerous ambition. Lycus was a scribe of the archives, a man who had spent his life studying the patterns of fate, convinced that the gods were not capricious masters, but a complex...
    0 Comments 0 Shares 13 Views 0 Reviews
  • The Reaper's Share
    The rain in New York doesn't wash anything clean. It just makes the filth wetter. I stood under the awning of a bodega on Flatbush Avenue and watched it sheet down the street, turning the neon signs into smeared watercolors of red and blue. Three days without sleep. Three days since Sammy died. Three days since I realized I had been a lab rat in a war I never knew I was fighting. Sammy was a...
    0 Comments 0 Shares 13 Views 0 Reviews
More Stories