• Delilah's Ledger
    The house smelled of woodsmoke and decay, the way houses do when they've outlived their original purpose but haven't quite accepted that fact yet. I stood on the porch of Beauregard Manor and watched the rain fall across the Mississippi, thinking about how every house in New Orleans has a story that it tells to the people who know how to listen. Julian Thorne was a Northern man, which meant he...
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  • Echo Module v7.3
    It took Juno three weeks to figure out what the black box was. She'd pulled it from a heap of circuit boards and shredded hard drives at the recycling depot, mostly because its edges were smooth—unlike the jagged wreckage surrounding it—and because when she pressed her thumb against its side, she felt a faint vibration, like a cat purring inside a cardboard box. She plugged it in out of...
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  • Forty Years of Silent Gardens
    Forty Years of Silent Gardens I The mud of the Belgian frontier had a way of swallowing everything — boots, hope, and the occasional scream. Lieutenant Julian Ashworth stood amidst the ruins of a shattered village, his white dress uniform a scandalous anomaly in this grey wasteland. He was twenty-four years old, educated at Eton and Oxford, and possessed of a gaze that seemed perpetually fixed...
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  • Garden of Unnecessary Things
    Garden of Unnecessary Things Act I The garden was beautiful, which was the first problem. It was on the forty-second floor of a residential tower in the post-scarcity district of the city, a space that had been converted from a recreational terrace into something that looked like a park but which was, in fact, a carefully curated simulation of nature that had been designed by the Department...
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  • Ghost Frequency
    The chip was hidden inside a copy of "The Remains of the Day," which Elias considered deeply appropriate—Kazuo Ishiguro knew a thing or two about people who listened to things they weren't supposed to hear. He found it behind the hollowed-out back cover with a letter opener he'd stolen from a hotel in Soho. The decoder he used was three years old and built by a woman in the Lower Wards who...
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  • Glass Serpent (Стеклянный Змей) - V04_Russian_Realism
    ## Part I: The Discovery It was March 1913, and St. Petersburg was still shaking itself free from the long white night of winter. The Nevsky Prospekt was a river of carriages and boots and the breath of horses rising into the cold air like the prayers of people who had stopped believing in prayer but continued to speak. Aleksey Merkuriev was twenty-nine years old and carried within him the...
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  • Glass Serpent (玻蛇) - V02_Japanese_Mono_no_Aware
    ## 第一幕:発見 (Discovery) The snake had been in the old facility at Arashiyama for eleven years. Fujiwara Ryō noticed it every morning before he began his work, the way he noticed the moss growing along the stone path to the lab, the way he noticed the change in light as autumn progressed toward winter. He noticed things. It was a habit formed in childhood, sitting beside his father in the temple...
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  • Glass Serpent (硝蛇の館) - V03_J_Horror
    ## Act I: B-7 The snake had been in the sub-basement of the National Center for International Medical Research for eleven years. Miura Ryo looked at it every morning before starting his work. Not with affection. Not with fear. With something that resembled recognition, though he could not explain what the snake was being recognized for. B-7 was a black rat snake, Pantherophis obsoletus, six...
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  • Integrity 99.97
    Integrity 99.97 I The transmission chamber was a perfect circle, twelve meters in diameter, its walls lined with quantum processors that hummed at a frequency just below the threshold of hearing. Dr. Jonathan Pierce sat in the center chair -- a reclining seat that looked, if you were being poetic, like the cockpit of a plane. He was not being poetic. He was trying to remember what poetry felt...
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  • No Winner's Deal
    # No Winner's Deal ## A Noir Tale The rain in Los Angeles doesn't wash things clean. It just makes the grime slicker. I got to LA in March of 1942, with a military discharge paper and a letter of employment from Pacific United Insurance, tucked into a leather briefcase that had seen better days and probably always would. The briefcase was old. It belonged to my father, who belonged to his...
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  • Nothing to Sell
    # Nothing to Sell ## A Dirty Realism Tale Bill Henderson sat in his car, a 2012 Chevrolet with a dent in the passenger door and a "For Sale" sign taped to the windshield that he had put there three weeks ago and had never removed because removing it would have felt like admitting something he wasn't ready to admit. The sandwich on the passenger seat had gone cold. It was a peanut butter and...
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  • Pressure Reading
    Pressure Reading I My job was to watch the screen and say nothing. The Descent Channel was a waterfall of data -- pressure readings, oxygen levels, temperature gradients, hull integrity scores -- all streaming down in green and amber on my monitor in a rhythm that had become, after six months, almost musical. Every descent was a verse. Every ascent was a refrain. I was the audience of one. The...
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