Dr. Wren Halvorsen had built a machine that could see into infinite alternate universes, and the only thing it had shown her all week was a version of Earth where everyone communicated exclusively through jazz flute. "Turn it off," she said to her lab assistant, Leo, who was recording everything on his phone. "Turn it … Continue reading The Interdimensional Complaints Department
Speculative Fiction
The Locksmith
Renata Cole had watched four hundred hours of stolen memory, and none of it belonged to her. That was the job. As lead investigator for Halcyon Dynamics' Continuity Division, she spent her days inside other people's heads, sifting the backed-up minds of executives who'd paid a fortune to have their memories archived against death, dementia, … Continue reading The Locksmith
The Ledger Will Burn
Mara Okafor had eleven minutes before her Provision score reset, and she was going to spend every one of them somewhere she wasn't supposed to be. The maintenance shaft beneath Sector 12 smelled like ozone and old rain. She dropped the last three feet onto the access grate, boots silent on the metal, and checked … Continue reading The Ledger Will Burn
The Assigned
The letter arrived, as it always did, on the morning of a child's eighteenth birthday... printed on government-issue cream cardstock, sealed with the blue wax emblem of the Bureau of Productive Placement, and slid under the front door at precisely 6:00 a.m. by a courier who never knocked and was never seen. Nora Calloway found … Continue reading The Assigned
The Weight of the Eagle
The aqueduct hummed. Marcus Varro had never noticed it before — not in fifteen years of service, not through three postings across the empire. But standing here in the pre-dawn stillness of the Virginian hills, listening to the ancient water channels feeding the sprawling city of Nova Londinium below, he noticed it now. A low, … Continue reading The Weight of the Eagle
