I took my pills one by one, counting each as a small victory against the static that lived inside my head. The morning ritual comforted me, three white tablets, two blue, one yellow capsule that rattled in its prescription bottle like a tiny maraca. “Good morning, Ari. Have you taken your medication?” Vera’s voice filled […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
A glitter-soaked nightmare from the fever dream of 1979. Randy “Razor” Romano slammed back a warm bottle of cherry-flavored wine cooler, cranked the wheel with one hand, and flipped his rearview mirror to avoid the shame. Somewhere behind him was Los Angeles. Far behind him, in fact, judging by the endless tunnel of pines, fog, […]
When I heard the cue, I didn’t realize it was coming from me. It was a low harmonic, like a cello being played through a glass of water. Subtle. Beautiful, even. It swelled when I looked at the ad on my feed, a family laughing in a sunlit kitchen, framed in soft focus as the […]