Recent Updates
  • The Ring in the Blood
    The rain had been falling on Los Angeles for three days when Crystal walked into my office. I was sitting at my desk, nursing a glass of rye that had gone warm, watching the water run down the blinds and turn the city outside into a watercolor painting of gray and neon. It was 1947, and the war was over, but nobody had told the corruption that. She looked like she had stepped out of a Paramount...
    0 Comments 0 Shares 2 Views 0 Reviews
  • The Thames had begun to flow backward three days before anyone noticed the coins.
    Lord Alistair Blackwood stood on the embankment at Westminster, watching the dark water surge upstream with the force of a broken dam. Floating in the current were objects that made no sense: a brass pocket watch stopped at eleven forty-seven, a sheet of newspaper with a date that read March 15, 2089, and something that might have been a child's toy—a tin soldier, painted red, bobbing like a...
    0 Comments 0 Shares 1 Views 0 Reviews
  • The Last Station Standing
    Every restaurant is a network, and the kitchen is its central hub. If the kitchen fails, the entire network collapses. But what happens when the collapse happens not because the kitchen fails but because the hub becomes too central, because every node depends on it so completely that the system has no redundancy and no resilience? Gabriel Rossi had been the chef at The Kitchen, so named because...
    0 Comments 0 Shares 1 Views 0 Reviews
  • The Little Republic
    I came home to a dead Earth and a live city, and the first thing I noticed was the music. Jazz, coming from somewhere below, rising through the black rock like a song played in an empty ballroom, beautiful but performed for an audience of ghosts.My name is Jack Morrison. Everyone calls me The Ark, which is a joke that stopped being funny twenty-three years ago. I captained the ark ship...
    0 Comments 0 Shares 2 Views 0 Reviews
  • ACT I
    Dr. Julian Frost found his own biography in a Taiping archival document, written in 1854—twenty years before he was born. The discovery happened on a Tuesday, in the imperial archives of Tianjing, where Julian had spent the last three months cataloging rebel propaganda and religious texts for his forthcoming Oxford publication. He was thirty-two, a man of meticulous habits and rational...
    0 Comments 0 Shares 2 Views 0 Reviews
  • THE PEOPLE'S ENGINE
    ### Act I: The Spark James Callahan first understood what engineering meant at the age of twelve, when he was sent into the depths of the Homestead Steel Plant to unclog a jammed conveyor belt that had brought the entire rolling mill to a halt. The foreman had given him a choice: crawl through the gap between two moving rollers, or watch his father lose a week's wages for the downtime. James...
    0 Comments 0 Shares 2 Views 0 Reviews
  • The Keeper of Blackwood Asylum
    The fog clung to Whitechapel like a shroud, thick and yellow as old brandy. Eleanor Starke pulled her collar higher and quickened her pace toward the iron gates of Blackwood Asylum. At thirty-two, she was the first woman Scotland Yard had ever permitted to investigate serious crimes, and the first they had ever sent to Blackwood. The asylum sat on a hill overlooking the East End, a Georgian...
    0 Comments 0 Shares 2 Views 0 Reviews
  • THE PATIENT FROM BELOW
    Dr. Arthur Voss could not remember how he had arrived at the hospital. This was not, strictly speaking, true. He remembered driving through Vienna on a February evening in 1896, the gas lamps casting amber pools on the wet cobblestones, the carriages bouncing over puddles that reflected the windows of the cafés where men sat drinking brandy and talking about the future of the Balkans. He...
    0 Comments 0 Shares 2 Views 0 Reviews
  • The Patient from Below
    Part I: The Lock Henri Leclerc was thirty-three years old, the youngest mathematics professor at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, and in the spring of 1893 he was on the verge of a discovery that would have changed the course of mathematics. He had been working on hypergeometric functions—specifically, on a class of functions that extended the concept of infinity to higher dimensions. In...
    0 Comments 0 Shares 2 Views 0 Reviews
  • The Foreigner's Void
    The world was a white expanse. No mountains, no oceans, no cities—just an endless, shimmering plane of pale light and floating geometric structures. For Kael, this was the only home he had ever known, though he possessed a nagging, phantom memory of a place with green trees and blue skies. Kael was a 'Scribe,' one of the few beings capable of interacting with the floating structures. By...
    0 Comments 0 Shares 4 Views 0 Reviews
  • The Dream of the Architect
    The apartment was a grey box in a grey city, located on the fourteenth floor of a building that seemed to have been designed by someone who hated the concept of light. Arthur lived there alone, with a small cat and a leather-bound notebook that he had found in a thrift store. The notebook was blank, except for one instruction on the first page: *Whatever is written here becomes the Law of the...
    0 Comments 0 Shares 4 Views 0 Reviews
  • The Traitor's Paradox
    The air in Bunker 42 tasted of recycled ozone and old fear. It was the last place on Earth where the lights were still on, a concrete hive buried three miles beneath the radioactive crust. Leo was the Chief of Security, the man who decided who got extra rations and who got "reassigned" to the ventilation shafts. He was respected, feared, and utterly alone. For two years, the bunker had been...
    0 Comments 0 Shares 8 Views 0 Reviews
More Stories