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  • The Trust Experiment
    Vivian Cross learned to smile on command at age six. It wasn't a skill she'd been taught so much as one she'd had to invent, the way a drowning person invents the ability to hold their breath. The smile was bright and wide and reached her eyes just enough to convince people that everything was fine, which it wasn't, but the people who needed to believe it were the ones who held the keys to her...
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  • The Iron Collar
    I. The fog in Yorkshire did not roll in so much as it descended, a heavy wet blanket that smothered the valley and turned the world into a grey room with no walls. Thomas Wheeler pulled the rough hemp rope around his palm and walked Bess toward the market at Thirsk. Sixty-two years old, Thomas moved the way his horse moved—slowly, with the careful deliberation of someone who had learned that...
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  • The Oracle of Ash
    (Variant V005: Greek Tragedy Modern) In the city-state of Kallisto, the law was not written in books, but in the stars. The Oracle of the Silver Flame dictated every major decision of the polis, from the planting of the olive groves to the declaration of war. For generations, the citizens of Kallisto had lived in a state of pious submission, believing that to defy the Oracle was to invite the...
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  • The Cartography of Disappearance
    The first sign was the sunlight. Samir Rashid noticed it one Tuesday morning in early October 2005, standing at the kitchen window of his rented house on Elm Street in Oxford, Ohio. The sun was rising over the campus of Miami University, and the light fell across his backyard in a way it never had before, because the neighbor to his left had built a six-foot privacy fence where no fence had...
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  • Novel Submission: The Sovereign Sacrifice (V-02)
    ## Style: Jazz Age Idealism The year was 1926, or at least that was what the calendars in the floating city of Celestia claimed. In Celestia, the champagne never stopped flowing, and the jazz bands played until the artificial sun dipped below the neon horizon. It was a city of gold and glass, a sanctuary for the last remnants of a dozen shattered worlds, all hiding from the "Great...
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  • The Weekend Tyrant
    I. The sandwich was cold. It always was by the time I got to eat it. I was sitting on a milk crate in the basement of the abandoned Packard plant, eating a ham sandwich that had been made three hours earlier, when a man in a beige suit sat down next to me and told me I was a hero. "I don't understand," I said. I was Ray O'Malley. I was thirty-four years old, unemployed for eleven months, and...
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  • The Patient from Below
    ACT I Dr. Henry Blackwood's clinic was on Harley Street, in a building that had been a townhouse before someone with money and no taste turned it into a medical practice. The waiting room smelled of carbolic acid and lavender—two smells that had been mixed together by someone who thought they complemented each other but in fact created an odor that was worse than either alone. Blackwood sat in...
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  • The Last Schoolmaster
    The schoolhouse stood on a hill outside Philadelphia, visible from the road as a small stone building with a single bell and a flagpole that held no flag. Inside, Aodhan MacAllister was teaching Euclid's Proposition 47 to three children who were too young to understand why it mattered. "Listen," he said, tapping the chalkboard. "When the square is constructed on the hypotenuse of a right...
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  • The Inverse Tower
    ACT I Pierre Lefebvre believed in three things: the necessity of honest inquiry, the insufficiency of all answers, and the profound absurdity of a species that shrank itself to avoid confronting its own failure. He was a micro-philosopher, which in the twenty-fifth century after the Pulse meant he was unemployed. There was no market for philosophy in a civilization that had optimized itself for...
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  • The Constant Murders
    I.Dr. Nathan Cross was three years overdue for a promotion when he noticed that the speed of light was wrong.Not wrong in the way that measurement error is wrong—off by a fraction of a percent, within the margin of error. Wrong in the way that the fundamental constants of the universe had quietly, steadily, irrevocably shifted over the past decade.He was looking at LHC collision data from...
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  • The Pearl of Mourning
    The river behind the tenement was black with coal dust and factory runoff, but Thomas Whittaker fished it anyway. Fourteen years old and thin as a rail, he sat on the rotting wharf with a bent hook and a piece of stale bread for bait. His mother's cough had kept her awake all night again. The phthisis was eating her lungs, and the only thing that helped was broth made from fresh fish. Broth...
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  • The Flat Weight - Variant 3: The Blue Bicycle (Jazz Age)
    The Flat Weight - Variant 3: The Blue Bicycle Style: Jazz Age ACT I There was a Saturday morning in the summer of 2019 when the light was golden and forgiving, the kind of light that makes a town look almost beautiful if you're looking at it through the particular kind of hope that comes from being twenty-seven and believing that the worst is behind you. Tommy was such a man, though he was not...
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