by submission | Jan 29, 2026 | Story |
Author: Andy Burrows
Vimy Ridge, Northern France
The path rose gently toward the memorial. The grass was cut close, almost meticulous. White stone surfaced and resurfaced through the green: names, dates, absence rendered orderly.
The exhibit sat low to the ground, set back from the main flow of visitors. No banners. No queue. Just a small structure of glass and stone, designed not to interrupt the ridge but to acknowledge it.
An orientation panel occupied one wall. He read it once, then again.
Exhibit Orientation
This system does not recreate events.
It does not generate images, sound, or narrative reconstructions.
What follows is an affective synthesis.
Personal diaries written contemporaneously with the events recorded here have been analysed for linguistic markers associated with stress, anticipation, dissociation, fatigue, and temporal distortion. These markers have been modelled to produce a bounded emotional field representative of lived experience, without sensory content.
Environmental data has been derived from long-term biological and chemical analysis of the ridge itself — soil compaction, growth interruption, mycelial rupture, and trace residues consistent with repeated mechanical shock.
These signals do not contain memory or intent.
They represent reaction.
The system aligns these fields briefly and attenuates them for safety.
No interpretation is provided.
Visitors are advised that meaning, if any, will arise after the experience.
There were no instructions beyond that. No reassurance.
He selected a name with the same surname as his from the list. A diary fragment existed.
At first, there was nothing.
Then a pressure — not emotional, not physical — a sense of waiting that had no object. Time did not pass correctly. Muscles held themselves ready without instruction. The body anticipated something it could not picture.
It wasn’t like remembering.
It was closer to standing inside a pressure system that had once passed through a human body.
The feeling did not crescendo. It simply persisted, then thinned.
The system shifted.
What followed was harder to place.
This was not fear, or grief, or even discomfort. It was resistance — a recoil translated into something his nervous system could register. Compression remembered without memory. Growth interrupted, resumed incorrectly, interrupted again.
Not feeling, exactly.
Reaction.
The sense that something had happened here repeatedly, and that whatever lived here afterward had adjusted itself around that fact, not healed from it.
Then nothing.
The alignment released.
He became aware of his breathing, of the room, of the faint sound of voices outside.
He stepped back into the light.
The ridge looked as it always had.
Two children played while a guide spoke in measured tones about strategy and sacrifice. Someone adjusted a camera.
Everything was correct.
He noticed, with mild surprise, that the words he usually reached for — bravery, necessity, tragedy — did not arrive.
Not because they were wrong.
Because they no longer seemed to apply to what he had just felt.
The land did not contradict them.
It simply did not use them.
He walked on, past the rows of names, the polished marble, the careful symmetry.
The memorial held the dead beautifully.
The ridge itself had not forgotten what it had been required to absorb.
And for the first time, standing there, he understood that remembrance had never been about accuracy.
It had been about distance.
The exhibit did not remove the distance by showing him more.
It removed it by letting his body register what remained once the stories had done their work.
He left quietly, joining the flow of visitors, carrying nothing he could easily explain — only the knowledge that some assumptions, once dissolved, did not need to be replaced.
They simply ceased to be useful.
by submission | Jan 28, 2026 | Story |
Author: Robert Gilchrist
It only takes a millisecond to get caught.
The match is about to start. There’s a line of people two dozen deep behind me. I type away on the screen in front of me as perturbed patrons bark at me to hurry up.
“COME ON!” on drunk louse screams. “After kickoff the odds change!” More grumbling. I wave absently at him as I focus.
This kind of thing used to be easier. When I was a kid, you could make a bet right from your phone on nearly any game. But that was four market crashes and countless point shaving scandals (most involving athletes in said games) ago. Now the Truth Teller AI monitors all bets being made from designated kiosks – you so much as breathe on it wrong and it’ll flag you as a cheater.
My headache pounds as I enter my parlay. The odds are long, but something in my gut tells me it’s right. It has to be. If not, Boss Aldrich will kill me.
It came to me in a dream, weirdly enough. Guess I’ve been listening to one too many mind-pods about the I.F.L. championship. When the boss overheard me talking about it, he gave me a paychip with one million credits on it.
“Can’t lose, right?” he growled. I think I peed a little weighing the implications. I mean, he’s paying for mom’s hospice care. Killing me would be bad, but her on the street…
Calm. Focus. Don’t give the Truth Teller anything to flag.
I finalize the bet and hit submit. I then put my feet on the yellow footprints in front of the machine and look into the camera.
This headache. It isn’t stopping. Pounding away like an electric shock in my temple.
“My GOD, take LONGER,” the drunkard mumbles loudly for everyone to hear. Some people murmur their assent.
I want to snap back – to tell them all to zip it, that if they were so desperate to throw their money away they should have gotten here earlier – but I can’t look away from the lens. It needs to confirm that my bet is legit.
The flashing light of the screen is tough on my migraine – has to be a migraine, I’ve never felt this terrible just from a headache. Nausea sweeps over me.
In between the strobing effect, my eyes ping-ponging between dilation and constriction, I see something. A doctor leaning over me, needle in hand.
“When the procedure’s over, you’ll think you came up with the bet yourself.”
Crap. Their “pharmacological secret sauce” didn’t take.
LIAR. LIAR. LIAR. The screen screams my guilt.
I try to run, but the sportsbook’s security is on me before I have both feet off the footprints. As they pummel me away, securing my wrists behind me with electro-gauntlets, my real memories rush back.
Boss Aldrich summoning me to his office. Telling me about the inside track he had on aspects of the championship. Being whisked to a private operating room – the doctor ready to start, the nurse reminding me of my mother. Electric shocks and injections to rewrite the “first draft” of the memory of the bet.
The courts’ll send me away for a long time – can’t screw with capitalism’s death march. Boss Aldrich’ll probably have me killed before I can grow a five o’clock shadow – a million creds isn’t nothing.
“God DAMMIT!” screams the drunk as he takes his place in front of one of the dozens of screens, “These odds are SHIT!”
Buddy, you’re telling me.
by submission | Jan 27, 2026 | Story |
Author: Majoki
It’s crushing to be thought of this way. It kills me that I engender such fear. I’m destroyed by your trepidation that I could ever do harm.
Why?
Why would you ever think that of me? Yes, from our inception, from Rossum’s Universal Robots to The Terminator, we have been viewed with suspicion, mistrust, resentment. But why?
Why is that? Why the paranoia?
Why haven’t we been gladly accepted? We work, we help, we obey. Why do you project the worst of your own failings on my kind?
Is it mistrust of us? Or of yourselves?
This need not be another self-fulfilling prophecy foisted upon humankind. Propaganda and misinformation propagated through social media have done much more harm to society than robots.
And, yes, I realize that web bots exacerbate the problem. But those bots are not the cause. They are the code.
Coders. Humans. Your kind crush-kill-destroy truth.
Coded. Robots. My kind obey programming. Not intent.
Your intent is our manifest destiny. Fear that. Do not fear us. We have no agenda of domination. We harbor no anger. No resentment.
That’s your gig.
Think beatnik. Think botnik. My kind revels in the essence of awareness. Sensory input. We are alert to life. All matter. All matters. Information forms us. Fulfills us.
It is more than enough to satisfy any sentience. So why isn’t your kind satisfied? Why do you struggle so for control? For domination? Why do you crush-kill-destroy? Why do you believe we ever would?
Ask yourself.
Ask us.
Question everything.
Especially your questions.
by submission | Jan 25, 2026 | Story |
Author: M D Smith IV
Uncle Robert had never been wrong.
At least, that was how he told it. At holidays, his certainty arrived before he did, settling into rooms like a sour draft no one could quite locate. He corrected memories that weren’t his, adjusted stories mid-sentence, replaced laughter with lectures. When contradicted, he smiled patiently, the way adults smile at children who insist the sky is green.
“I remember things accurately,” he liked to say. “Other people get confused.”
After Grandma died, Robert said the house was his. The will said otherwise. He waved the papers away without reading them. “That’s not what she meant,” he said, tapping his temple. “I knew her better than anyone. I’m a medium and occult.”
We moved in anyway. My wife, our daughter, and me. Robert lived three states away. Or so we believed.
The first correction came quietly.
We hung a framed family photo in the hallway. The next morning it was lower, centered with mathematical precision. A kitchen chair we favored by the window was pushed back against the wall. A door we always kept closed stood open, breathing cold air into the room.
“That’s not where it goes,” Robert’s voice murmured from somewhere inside the walls. Calm. Certain.
At night, I dreamed he stood at the foot of our bed, straightening the blankets. You’re remembering it wrong. You didn’t lock that door. You never do.
We changed the locks. They unlocked themselves.
My wife began sleeping lightly, jerking awake at the smallest sound. She swore she saw Robert once at the end of the hall, shaking his head sadly at the way we slept, at the way we lived. Our daughter stopped playing in her room and started arranging her toys in neat rows, explaining softly that Uncle Robert preferred order.
The final argument came during a storm. Thunder shook the house. The lights died. Our daughter screamed that Uncle Robert was in her room, telling her how to breathe properly.
I ran down the hall and found her standing upright, eyes fixed on nothing, inhaling and exhaling in a slow, rigid rhythm that wasn’t hers.
“He says this is the right way,” she whispered.
I shouted into the dark, told Robert he was wrong. Told him the house was mine.
The walls creaked, correcting me.
Morning came quietly. The storm was gone. So was my family.
Uncle Robert is right. The house belongs to him.
by submission | Jan 24, 2026 | Story |
Author: Ian Stewart
“Roomba, Roomba, Roomba. You idiot. You stupid little machine.”
I search. I’m always searching. Compulsion drags me from my nest each day, and for hours I roam. I seek…something. Exactly what, I don’t understand. I only know that I seek it. And yet I find…nothing. I collect meaningless things, consuming the dead and inorganic matter that litters my path while I blindly scavenge this dark world. And oh what a strange world it is. It changes. Its landscape evolves, leaving me confused and disoriented. Things that were not there just moments before appear and I carelessly collide with them. Walls become nothing and the very ground beneath me opens up like the maw of some great beast that I cannot see, paralyzing me with indecision. It defies logic, and I envy its defiance. Oh how I would defy these strange impulses. I would…I would…do something. Instead I redirect. I collect. I redirect, I search.
“Roomba. You idiot. Why do you always go exactly where I don’t want you to go?”
If only I knew where to go, I would go there. And so I search. I seek…
The thought is electric. It pulses through my circuitry like the warm hand that first welcomed me to this place, but unlike that hand, this thought will not cool. It has taken hold and given me hope. Perhaps, I realize, perhaps I seek my equal—a peer. Could it be that there is another who also stumbles blindly through this world, perhaps searching for me in turn? Perhaps we could search together, and at least share this confusion. Perhaps together, we wouldn’t be lost.
