by submission | May 8, 2026 | Story |
Author: Philip G Hostetler
You’re in a city, it’s not that it’s deserted or abandoned, it’s that it’s been built entirely for you. It’s completely devoid of vehicles, people and animals though all of your needs and desires were present, just lying in wait. You passed by an empty coffee shop, you wanted to smell coffee, so you did, it wafted like the most perfectly brewed cup of coffee you’d ever smelt. This conjured a barista for only the moment that you desired the coffee, man bun, strong wrists, gaudy suspenders and all, pulling the lever to an espresso machine. As soon as the hiss of the machine faded, so too did he.
You leave the coffee shop and look up at a skyscraper, you’d always wondered what the top floor was like but never had access before. So up you went, you took an elevator from the lobby and on the ride up the elevator played all of the music you loved as a young teenager, the music that became a part of you as ‘you’, became ‘You’. Once you got to the top of the sky scraper you walked into a white collar board room. There were suits and ties, business dresses, all animated and moving as though there were bodies inside of them, but no bodies could be seen. The clothes gesticulated madly, picking papers up and throwing them about, slamming non-existent hands upon oak tables and firing an imaginary intern. You excused yourself and stopped by a water cooler and had a drink when you heard a photocopier running from a room nearby and went to explore. You found no one in there but there were printouts in the tray. You picked it up and appraised some mysterious person’s butt, you giggled and kept it as a memento. You decided you’d had enough of the white collar world and appraised the view out the window, the city went on and on into the horizon as far as you could see. No planes, trains or buses, just ghostly buildings tick-tacking at various heights. You took the elevator back down to ground level, no music this time, just a comfortable silence that you took solace in. As you left the building, a security guard materialized at the lobby checkpoint, raised a cup of coffee at you and said, “thanks for stopping by!”, before you stepped back out into the city.
You kept walking. Of the people you had encountered, none of them knew you and both served your impulsive interests. You found yourself wanting company and sat down at a bench, you love a good bench. As soon as you sat down, a person materialized. ‘Person’, was a stretch, what appeared before you was a human whose facial features and skin were phasing between every kind of person imaginable, not ‘one man’, not ‘one woman’, but all men and all women.
“Do you like it?”, they asked. You nodded,
“Yes, it’s quite nice, but who built it?”
“I did!”, they said.
“What for? It’s so empty and only sporadically jumps to life, like only when I naturally expect it too.”
“Yes that’s what I wanted, for it to come to life for you!” You think they smiled proudly, but couldn’t tell for their constantly shifting expressions and facial features.
“Hmm, how did I get here?”
“You asked to be here, you wanted a place of your own and I felt obliged to give it to you, but I wouldn’t have been able to build it without you being who you are. All of the experiences of your life were a schematic for me to draw from. All that you’ve found meaningful or beautiful will materialize for you in unexpected ways.” Though this person was a physical mystery, you felt as though you could trust them implicitly, and that they knew you as well as you know yourself. You looked over at your mystery friend and cocked an eyebrow at them,
“I have just one more question…” the mystery friend gestured and said,
“Yeah, please, ask it!” You held up a piece of paper and said,
“Is this your butt?”
“Pa-hah! Ahem, yep, yeah- that’s my butt…”, you appraised it again and nodded knowingly,
“It’s a good butt.” You and your mystery friend enjoyed a laugh for a moment, before you pondered aloud,
“I wonder what it’s like to dream in a place like this?”
“Fall asleep and see!”
Suddenly you became very tired and rested your head on their lap. You felt the warm sort of safety and comfort that insomniacs cry for on sleepless nights. You drifted off, and began to dream.
by submission | May 7, 2026 | Story |
Author: Dart Humeston
Nigel woke up as the day’s first commercial blossomed into a hologram above his bed. Naturally, it was for coffee. He groaned at the cheery actors extolling the virtues of premium caffeine. He slid into his slippers and walked to the bathroom, attempting to banish both the steaming mug and its catchy jingle from his thoughts.
Nigel was a geologist, but knew human psychology well enough. Ads didn’t shout. They seeped into your mind, steering you toward purchases you never planned to make. Sure enough, when his mirror lit up next, a sweeping countryside appeared—gardens, a distant castle, a couple riding horseback through green fields. A warm female voice praised the virtues of a deodorant brand. He lowered his eyes, focused on the steady sweep of his toothbrush and the rush of water in the sink.
They didn’t have ads in the toilet—yet—but the moment he flushed, a peppy tune encouraged water conservation.
Nigel always filled his mind with geology and math—today’s distraction was Darcy’s Law on fluid flow through porous rock. It was perfect for drowning out jingles and images. Thanks to these mental defenses, his modest savings grew steadily.
On his walk to the transit hub, he ignored the towering ads plastered across buildings and stepped carefully over those embedded in the sidewalk. The corner holograms were harder to escape; cameras mapped his face, pulling from an online profile. That morning, they advertised high-end digital microscopes—they knew that one of his had broken last week. He kept his hands in his pockets, stood at the crosswalk, and pretended to study the ad while counting bricks on a distant wall and humming to himself.
He boarded the tube to work. Nigel prided himself on being the perfect citizen: he was law-abiding, he paid taxes early, and voted in every election. So, walking into his employer’s lobby and finding three Compliance Officers in crisp blue uniforms and red helmets stopped him cold.
Before he could speak, they sprayed him with Dazehim. His limbs went slack. They cuffed him, half-carried him to a transit mover, and deposited him in the back seat. He was barely aware of breathing, let alone the nonstop attorney ads playing on the seat backs inches from his face.
In jail, he reached out to multiple lawyers; all refused to represent him after seeing the charges: Aggravated Advertisement Avoidance—a felony. The proof was overwhelming: surveillance clips of him turning his head, humming through jingles, ignoring personalized displays. His banking records revealed near-zero impulse buys. And worst of all in the eyes of the state, he was debt-free—a standalone misdemeanor. No attorney would defend him unless he pleaded guilty.
The cell itself was clean, but every wall blared advertisements nonstop. Public service announcements warned that the economy depended on consumption. Nigel’s resistance could encourage others, which could cause the system and society to collapse.
At the trial, the judge reviewed footage of Nigel brushing his teeth with eyes averted, standing at crosswalks staring through holograms. Nigel plead guilty. He told the judge that he’d learned his lesson from the jails’ PSAs—that he would start watching every ad, buy whatever was advertised, and embrace debt.
The judge glared at him. “I’ll take your promise into account,” he said. “However, I must adhere to state guidelines. I’ll announce your sentence in three minutes.”
He gestured to his podium.
“But first, please watch this brief commercial on affordable cremation services.”
by submission | May 6, 2026 | Story |
Author: Mark Renney
The view from Davidson’s window, from all the windows in fact, is limited. Davidson is old enough to remember when the Archive had seemed infinite, so many vistas and variations, but no one person could possibly access and experience them all.
The countries that openly opposed our Leader were the first to be blacklisted but others quickly followed, anywhere where somebody was bold enough to speak out and criticise or question our Leader. The governments that advocated for discourse, even our former Allies, were targeted, those who hoped to engage in dialogue and enter into debate, the images from and of all these countries were wiped and suddenly the Archive was vastly depleted.
But people are resilient and nostalgic and when they craved for a certain range of mountains, for a city or seascape, they searched for somewhere similar, anywhere that helped to invoke memories of a particular time and place.
Sunsets had always been popular at the windows but there are no sunsets in the Archive now. The Archive is still seemingly infinite, so many images and yet all we are able to look at are gardens, painstakingly maintained, perfect and carefully tailored gardens. Davidson turns the dial and makes the transition from screen to window. His own garden is wild and messy, butterflies flutter amongst the long grasses and untended flowerbeds. Davidson heaves a sigh of relief, thankful that he at least still has this to gaze out at.
by submission | May 5, 2026 | Story |
Author: Majoki
Around the collar and down his spine a welcome iciness spread as he jogged in the midday heat. His shirt, alerted him with a tri-chime that he should rehydrate and automatically pinged his fitchip which opened a GPS widget in his visor dashboard next to his environmentals: ambient temperature, wind speed, particulate composition and UV penetration. He noted the closest public park and sprinted directly there. He let the water faucet run over his wristbands as they took potability readings and swamp cooled him with nano-heat exchangers. The water was within safe parameters, and so he nipped at the bubbling source until weight sensors in his shoes let him know he had replenished the fluids he had lost since beginning his workout.
He stretched for a few moments, letting his sportsaware gear recalibrate and also gently stimulate his muscles to keep him loose. He sometimes imagined he could hear the hum of the triboelectric accumulators and capacitors that helped run his run. Energy abounded at the nano-level and his clothing harnessed it. A moving mass of sensors, on par with a cockroach or bloodhound, he moved through the city, active and engaged. Information did not pass him by, he sucked it up, made it run to his rhythm, an embedded personal noosphere.
His gear calculated his endorphinals, a clear-code algorithm tied to flex, flow, blood, heart, muscle and EKG. This was how he knew he was on top of his game. Powerful and data driven to become even more dominant, he sussed the heady information of personal energy and awareness. In every fiber of his gear and being, he sensed it and embraced it. He was a true datazen.
In an adrenalin rush, his heels kicking higher and higher, he lit up Main Street.
Grabbing a handful of crusty Cheezy-Os, he monitored the runner’s progress. One of a thousand packets of information being fed by the millisecond to HQC for review. Every sensor had a doppelganger censor. It was a necessity. With so much data being collected, with so many datazens feeling empowered, it was imperative to have checks and balances.
He saw that the runner had stopped for water. With precision waves and taps of his orange stained fingers, he overrode the runner’s fitchip potability data. To the runner it now read in the safe zone. A citizen on a daily run trying to stay fit and healthy didn’t need to know about contaminants from the new triboelectric factory leaching into the city’s water supply. That kind of information was upsetting. Embarrassing. As were recent air quality and UV levels. Appalling, even dangerous, but necessary for progress. Triboelectric synthetics didn’t grow on trees. Ordinary datazens didn’t realize that, but the privileged at HQC did.
Noting that the runner had moved on, the tech smiled as the runner’s biometrics fed the HQC system. All that data willingly, freely generated for the HQC. The eyes, ears and thoughts of the city centralized, aggregated, disaggregated, broken and batched to keep the flow. It was all about flow: data in, data out. And HQC touched it all. Easy to smooth out the turbulence, keep the flow even and uncomplicated. The tech knew that if you tortured data, it would confess, but HQC’s way was much simpler. Provide data that fit the ideal. Let there be information bliss. Create a self-fulfilling prophecy and get out of the consumer’s way, let the datazens feast within the frenzy of being, of doing, of sharing.
HQC made that happen—one beautiful illusion at a time. As he watched the runner accelerate down Main Street, providing a kick of biometric juice to the system, the tech smacked at his fingers, licking at the last residue of cheese powder, making him feel strong, in the know, in the right.
His embedded HQC biochip told him so as it lit up the Mainframe.
by submission | May 3, 2026 | Story |
Author: Hugh J. O’Donnell
I woke up in a hospital room that smelled like bleach and bad coffee. There was a woman sitting at the foot of my bed. Emma, my agent. But something seemed not quite right.
“What happened?” I managed. Emma stood and came closer. She looked terrible.
“You were in a car accident,” she said. “What do you remember?”
“My name is Philip Reuben. I’m a writer. You’re my agent, Emma Glazier.”
“Can you tell me the year? What’s the last thing you remember?” It felt weird to have these questions come from my agent instead of a doctor, but Emma always took charge of a situation.
“2025. I remember signing the contract for the fantasy series. You said there was a clause, something new. The publisher wanted me to get a medical checkup. I remember the MRI.”
Emma nodded. She made that face that meant she had bad news and was putting off telling me.
“How bad was it?” I asked. I couldn’t feel any bandages or broken bones. I was just a little sore. I tried to lift the sheet, and something was wrong with my hand. I stared at it for a moment, confused.
The scar on my knuckles from when I was a kid was gone. I turned my wrist over and stared at the spot where I should’ve had a tattoo of a fountain pen crossed with a feather. The skin was as smooth and pink as if it had never been there. Which I suspected was the case. I stared up at Emma, searching for an explanation, horrified that I already guessed it.
“You were in a car accident,” she repeated. “A bad one. You, you…”
“I didn’t make it, did I?” Emma shook her head.
“Those medical tests?” I asked
“It was in the contract. I never thought they’d exercise the right. I mean, it felt like…”
“Science fiction?” I asked.
“I never thought they would clone you. The technology was supposed to be years away.”
“What year is it?” I asked.
“It’s 2032. The fourth book just made the bestseller lists. You were on a book tour. Your rental car spun out on a mountain road. There wasn’t anything they could do.”
“But why bring me back? Why not just hire someone to finish the series for me?”
“They couldn’t decipher your notes. You’re a technological breakthrough, you know? You’re the world’s first cloned author.”
“Who knows?” I asked.
“The publisher hasn’t released a public statement. Your funeral was last week.”
I fought to keep despair and panic out of my voice. I was a clone, a clause on a publishing contract, and nobody else knew I was even alive. I looked up at Emma. She’d never steered me wrong before. “What do I do?”
She gripped my hand, and my agent’s face settled back into a more familiar, fiery expression. “I’ll get you out of here. But for now, you’ll need to emulate Scheherazade.”
“I always did write best under a deadline,” I said. “When do I start?”
