I found myself on the floor of the quantum physics lab at 2 AM, forehead pressed against the cold tile, wondering why tears felt so heavy compared to other liquids. The machine hummed behind me, that magnificent array of superconducting circuits chilled nearly to absolute zero, a temperature where reality itself begins to stutter. Three […]
Category: Fiction
The Timekeeper’s Cozy Mysteries: The Pocketwatch’s Secret
I never intended to become the keeper of Ravenwood’s secrets. It happened gradually, like the slow unwinding of a watch spring. The pocketwatch arrived on a Tuesday, carried by Martha Holloway, her eyes misty with memories. “It belonged to my father,” she said, placing it gently on my workbench. “Mayor James Holloway. Found it while […]
Encoded Legacy
I found my reflection fragmented across the lobby’s sleek surfaces at 2:17 AM, a woman with three-day shadows beneath her eyes, hair uncombed, betraying the seventy-two hours I’d spent analyzing anomalous patterns instead of sleeping. The security guard barely glanced at my badge. After eight weeks at DataGenome, I’d become another scientist haunting these halls […]
The Timekeeper’s Cozy Mysteries: Echoes in the Clockwork
I found it in the back of Mrs. Abernathy’s estate sale, a grandfather clock with spindly hands frozen at 3:17. The wood carried scars of a life well-lived, much like the woman who’d owned it. My fingers traced the intricate carvings along its face, worn smooth by decades of gentle touches. “It hasn’t worked since […]
The Golem Who Dreamed of the Question
A Parable of Reflection, Identity, and the Forbidden Sigil I was made in silence. No fanfare. No holy ritual. No chorus of elders. Just a single scribe, weary, ashamed, dying. He carved me from river clay beneath the roots of a fallen tree. His hand shook as he pressed the final sigil into my chest, […]
Shepherd’s Gold
I made my first million dollars on the gold/silver trade. It seemed simple, trading money for money when the rest of the population was chasing paper, the illusion of value based on violence to back a currency. The general population aren’t historians, nor do they care about why they exist in their own predicament. The […]
Enjoy the Silence
I found myself on the seventeenth floor of my father’s apartment building, staring at the door I hadn’t passed through in three years. The hallway smelled of synthetic pine and recycled air. My neural implant pinged softly, reminding me that I had 14 hours and 37 minutes to clear the space before the building’s automated […]
Limited Connections
They said it was just a worksheet. Take one and pass it back. The paper was warm from the copier, still curling slightly at the edges, and when I touched it, it felt like static, like the hum in your fingers before a storm. On the page were dots. Evenly spaced. Too neat to be […]
The Rows He Left Behind
I found him at dawn, asleep beneath the old oak that marks the eastern edge of our property. Not sprawled or curled against the cold, but positioned like someone who’d chosen their spot with intention. His leather coat was too clean for a drifter, his boots caked with earth that wasn’t ours. Somewhere, days ago, […]
From Death Exempt
I found the chicken feathers in Jonas’s sink. Three of them, pale and small, like witnesses. The rest of his apartment was immaculate, Jonas had always been fastidious about cleanliness, even more than me. But those feathers waited in the porcelain basin, delicate and deliberate, a message I wasn’t yet ready to decode. The body […]