Justin Collins

Justin Collins added blog Games
2026-05-31 09:44:15 -

The Last Elevator to Midnight
The rain in Chicago doesn't wash things clean. It just makes the grime slicker. I stood under the awning of the Palmer House and watched the water run off my coat and into the gutters, where it joined everything else that had ever fallen from the sky over this city and decided to stay. Tommy Kowalski was three weeks overdue on his rent and two weeks short of a lead, and the elevator case was...

0 Comments 0 Shares 7 Views 0 Reviews

Please log in to like, share and comment!
Justin Collins added blog Literature
2026-05-23 23:17:12 -

The Faith-Driven Engine
Barnaby was a man of absolute precision. He lived his life by the slide rule and the stopwatch. In the city of Orizon, where the laws of gravity were merely suggestions and the buildings shifted positions every Tuesday, Barnaby was the only one who still believed in mathematics. He spent ten years building the "Axiom," a plane designed with such rigorous logic that it was mathematically...

0 Comments 0 Shares 8 Views 0 Reviews

Please log in to like, share and comment!
Justin Collins added blog Games
2026-06-03 05:41:51 -

The Black Strain
Dorothy Wayne walked into my office like she was walking onto a movie set, which she was, in a way. The rain was coming down hard on the windows of my building on Sunset Boulevard, and the blinds were casting stripes of light and shadow across the desk, across her coat, across the face she had spent ten years learning how to sell to an audience that no longer cared. "Help me with something,...

0 Comments 0 Shares 7 Views 0 Reviews

Please log in to like, share and comment!
Justin Collins added blog Games
2026-05-28 11:38:36 -

The Man Who Listened to the Stars
**Youngstown, Ohio** The garage smelled like motor oil and old beer. Frank Miller sat on a milk crate in the corner, listening to static through headphones that had a crack in the left earcup. The telescope was pointed at Cygnus. It always was. He'd been pointing it at Cygnus for seven years. Seven years of static. He took a drink from a beer can. The beer was warm. It always was. He didn't...

0 Comments 0 Shares 8 Views 0 Reviews

Please log in to like, share and comment!
Justin Collins added blog Games
2026-05-28 15:10:14 -

The Last Operator
Harlan Graves sat on the base of the radio telescope every night and listened to the wind. He was fifty-two years old and had not worked since the coal mine closed. He had been a miner for twenty-eight years, which meant he had spent more of his life underground than above it. When the mine closed, he emerged into a world that had no use for men who knew how to dig holes in the earth. The town...

0 Comments 0 Shares 7 Views 0 Reviews

Please log in to like, share and comment!
Justin Collins added blog Games
2026-05-24 02:25:06 -

The Engineer
The Engineer's Last Shift The numbers on the ionosphere monitor were wrong. Mike Callahan knew this the way a mechanic knows an engine is misfiring—by sound, by feel, by twenty-two years of knowing exactly what every machine in the Brooklyn coal plant was supposed to do. The monitor sat in the corner of the control room, a World War II-era device that had been installed to track atmospheric...

0 Comments 0 Shares 9 Views 0 Reviews

Please log in to like, share and comment!
Justin Collins added blog Games
2026-05-22 09:58:32 -

The Pattern in the Static
The anomaly appeared in the cosmic microwave background data on a Thursday morning, and Dr. Elena Kowalski stared at it for exactly four seconds before she knew, with a certainty that felt like falling, that it was not noise. She was thirty-six, a signal analyst at the NSA's underground facility in Utah, and she had spent eight years studying the cosmic microwave background—the faint afterglow...

0 Comments 0 Shares 7 Views 0 Reviews

Please log in to like, share and comment!
Justin Collins added blog Literature
2026-06-03 11:36:33 -

The Weight of a Pebble
(Act I: The Grey Shift) Sam lived in the town of Oakhaven, where the only thing more consistent than the rain was the sound of the factory whistle. For twenty years, he had worked in the stamping plant, his life a loop of grey concrete and metallic noise. He was a man of habits: the same coffee, the same route to work, the same silence at dinner. He didn't want power; he just wanted the noise...

0 Comments 0 Shares 6 Views 0 Reviews

Please log in to like, share and comment!
Justin Collins added blog Games
2026-06-02 14:41:39 -

The Keeper of Blackwood Shipyards
The Thames fog clung to the cranes and gantries of Blackwood Shipyards like a shroud. Arthur Blackwood stood on the weathered planks of the launching ramp, his hands gripping the cold iron railing, and watched the last light of an English autumn bleed into the river. Behind him, the hull of the Blackwood rose from the darkness—a leviathan of riveted steel, her lines clean and ruthless, her...

0 Comments 0 Shares 10 Views 0 Reviews

Please log in to like, share and comment!
Justin Collins added blog Games
2026-06-02 22:47:14 -

The Night Shift at Oakridge
The coffee at Oakridge tastes like it was brewed in a radiator. I have been drinking it for eleven years, three months, and fourteen days, which is longer than I was married and longer than I worked at the plant before they shipped everything to Mexico. I don't complain about the coffee. I don't complain about much anymore. You learn what you can change and what you can't, and at my age, the...

0 Comments 0 Shares 6 Views 0 Reviews

Please log in to like, share and comment!
Justin Collins added blog Games
2026-05-22 15:01:18 -

Blood and Magnolias
I. The house was sinking. Not dramatically—there were no cracks in the foundation, no doors that stuck, no floors that tilted. It was a slower, more insidious descent, the kind that happens when the earth itself forgets what it is supposed to hold. Bell Thorne noticed it first in the garden. The magnolia trees, which her grandmother had planted in 1921, were flowering out of season. It was...

0 Comments 0 Shares 7 Views 0 Reviews

Please log in to like, share and comment!
Justin Collins added blog Games
2026-05-22 14:59:40 -

The Silent Garden of Ashes
## Act I: The Outset The mud of the Belgian frontier had a way of swallowing everything—boots, hope, and the occasional scream. Julian, a Lieutenant with a penchant for Keats and a gaze that seemed perpetually fixed on a horizon only he could see, stood amidst the ruins of a shattered hamlet. His white dress uniform was a scandalous anomaly in this grey wasteland, a stark, fragile beacon of a...

0 Comments 0 Shares 7 Views 0 Reviews

Please log in to like, share and comment!