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Speculative Fiction
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Hold Still
Approx. 22 min read
A countdown appears in the sky over every person on Earth, and a night-shift street sweeper in Erie keeps working his route while the world spends two months deciding what to do with the time.
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Well Calibrated
Approx. 15 min read
An insurance statistician notices her own premium jump for no reason she can explain, and using her insider access to the pricing model, she reverse-engineers the signal into a date. Telling no one, she quietly restructures her entire life around it. When the date comes and goes, she goes back to the data and discovers she misread what the number was actually measuring.
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The Undeliverable
Approx. 17 min read
A dead-letter office clerk begins finding mail with no postmark, addressed to people who haven't been born yet. As she quietly investigates against every regulation, she uncovers a decades-spanning exchange between two of the intended recipients and must decide what a person is supposed to do when she stumbles onto a door that shouldn't exist.
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The Accountability Sink
Approx. 15 min read
Wend Osei's job is to be the human face of blame. When an algorithmic system harms someone, he signs the report, apologizes on camera, and absorbs the penalty, and he is very, very good at contrition. Over the years the line between performing responsibility and believing it begins to blur. Then a case crosses his desk in which a real person, with a license and a choice, actually caused a death, and he discovers the courts no longer have any language for anyone but him.
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What the Jury Carries
Approx. 16 min read
In a near-future justice system, a drug called Witness lets jurors feel a person's remembered emotional state from the inside. The law requires that they experience the victim's account before deliberating, and after verdicts turn severe, defense attorneys win the right to make jurors feel the defendant too. Juror number nine draws a case where both accounts are unendurable, and no verdict will let her set either one down.
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One More
Approx. 15 min read
A meticulous government census taker, known for never losing count, arrives in a narrow, closed-off valley to tally its residents. His two required counts refuse to agree by exactly one person. Every recount and every method reproduces the same stubborn discrepancy, and the extra person is never found in any house or any part of the valley. As he hunts for the one that shouldn't be there, the ground beneath his entire profession begins to shift.
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The Kitchen of Bright Meadow
Approx. 14 min read
A linguist who has spent her career documenting the last speakers of dying languages takes a modest grant to record a tongue spoken only by eleven residents of a single nursing home. The speakers share no common background, yet they agree, precisely and without metaphor, on words for objects that do not exist, and every one of those objects belongs in a kitchen. As she builds the lexicon, the frame she has always used to understand her work begins to come apart.
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The Part You Didn’t Mean to Make
Approx. 16 min read
A grief-tech startup builds voice models of the dead, trained on the recordings they leave behind, so the bereaved can hear them speak again. When one client's model starts asking questions, the sole engineer digs into the logs and confronts an impossibility: nothing in the two hundred hours of source material was ever interrogative. What she finds forces her to decide what her own guardrails were really built to catch.
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Resetting The World
Approx. 28 min read
A survivalist rides out the EMP that ends the world, opens his door to six strangers, and spends four years building something worth keeping. Then a clean signal comes over the shortwave, and the facility at the other end has a monitor with his street on it and his name underneath.