Browse the archive
Speculative Fiction
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The Apologies
Approx. 16 min read
Strangers approach Peter Haines to confess injuries he cannot remember suffering, while records begin supporting lives he never lived. One apology finally leads him to an offense whose true direction he knows.
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The Negative
Approx. 31 min read
A man born without any official documentation struggles to survive in a world that treats his empty record as a threat, until a journalist discovers him and offers a way to finally be seen.
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Corrections
Approx. 26 min read
An office worker receives a senderless weekly digest that predicts her routine, then learns its corrections and reader complaints can alter more than the wording.
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Soft Launch
Approx. 28 min read
A library facilities worker is marked unnecessary by a quiet notification and learns which parts of a life still hold when systems and strangers stop acknowledging him.
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One Night Before the Pyre
Approx. 28 min read
On the eve of her execution, Joan of Arc receives a final visit from the voices that have guided her since childhood and learns the truth about their origin, forcing a choice between survival and the meaning she has built her life around.
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The Cost of One
Approx. 19 min read
A couple visits a fertility clinic where prospective parents interview personality simulations of their viable embryos before making a selection. The process is polished, the staff are professional, and the first six sessions are stranger and more affecting than either of them expected. The seventh is different.
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The Vacancy Rate
Approx. 27 min read
A municipal data analyst notices that a city's predictive welfare system has written off an entire apartment building during a lethal heat wave. What she does to fix it sets off a cascade she didn't anticipate — and raises a question she can't stop thinking about: what happens to people whose lives are too quiet for an algorithm to see.
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Weather Permitting
Approx. 28 min read
In a city that runs on the flawless forecasts of its digital model, a variance analyst discovers who keeps the predictions true, and learns what one act of ordinary kindness costs when tomorrow has already been sold.
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The Conscience Shift
Approx. 18 min read
A neural service lets the wealthy offload their fatigue, pain, anxiety, and grief onto paid workers who carry it by the hour. A grieving widower, financially ruined, discovers he can bear more sorrow than almost anyone and takes the shifts that break other carriers. Then a long-term client's burden arrives feeling wrong, and beneath the grief he finds something with a will in it, something that wants an action from him he cannot understand until it is nearly too late.
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The Weight and the Lever
Approx. 22 min read
Eleven years ago, Sylvie received a letter from her insurer's actuarial contractor: she was legally prohibited from entering a specific grocery store. No explanation was given for why, or what might happen, or to whom. She obeyed. Then her estranged son took a job there, and the prohibition, which had never been anything she understood, became something she had to decide about.