Latest Stories
Most recently published stories in Fiction.
AI Interrupted
Kristin loves AI. Ever since AI became a thing, she has been on the phone or using it on her laptop, uploading photos and stories to her social media. It’s like it was made for her. It’s brilliant and perfect in her eyes. She can escape the daily grind of high school and other trivial matters thanks to AI. She spends her days creating things like an image of a goat eating at a diner with a monkey as a waiter. She proudly shows it to all her friends. Her friends seem to love the wild ideas she comes up with. They even insert their own ideas at times. Anytime there’s a new assignment due, she is thrilled because it’s an excuse to improve her AI technique.
By Meredith McLarty3 days ago in Fiction
On The Way To Work
I sidestepped another man walking down the street. Again, taking no care in the world to watch his surroundings - if I was as distracted and nonchalant as he, I’d likely have already been hit by a car. He’s lucky people see him, notice his presence. I don’t get that. Most of us don’t.
By Maddy Haywood3 days ago in Fiction
The Warrior Who Forgot Victory. AI-Generated.
The soldier did not know his name. He knew this was not always the case. Somewhere in the architecture of his mind there existed a room where his name had once lived — a room he could locate by feel, the way you know where furniture stands in a dark house — but the room was empty now, swept clean, and had been for longer than he could calculate, because calculating required memory and memory was precisely what he was running out of.
By Cordelia Vance3 days ago in Fiction
The Man Who Couldn't Boil Water. AI-Generated.
Carlo Benedetti had exactly three culinary skills. He could boil water — usually. He could open a can of tomatoes without injuring himself — mostly. And he could, when the circumstances were sufficiently desperate, produce a plate of scrambled eggs that was edible in the same way that a Tuesday afternoon in February is technically a day: technically correct, bringing no one any particular joy.
By Cordelia Vance3 days ago in Fiction
The Phonograph of Hollow Souls. AI-Generated.
The dead, Edmund Voss had come to believe, were simply a matter of frequency. He arrived at this conclusion not through any mystical awakening or feverish religious crisis, but through the careful, methodical application of scientific reasoning — the same reasoning that had earned him a modest reputation among London's emerging class of acoustic engineers and a less modest reputation among its society gossips, who found a bachelor of forty-three with wax-stained fingers and an apartment full of recording cylinders somewhat difficult to seat at dinner parties.
By Alpha Cortex3 days ago in Fiction
The Last Ember. AI-Generated.
The last star was dying. Caelum-7 had known this was coming for approximately four hundred million years. That was the nature of being a Warden — you watched, you calculated, you prepared, and still, when the moment finally arrived, the numbers offered no insulation against the weight of it. The instruments aboard the Persistence hummed their soft confirmations: luminosity declining at 0.003% per century, core hydrogen reserves at 0.00017% of original mass, estimated time to final collapse somewhere between eighty and ninety million years. Give or take.
By Alpha Cortex3 days ago in Fiction
The Door at the End of the Hall. AI-Generated.
The dream always began the same way. Margaret would find herself standing at the end of a long hallway — walls the color of old teeth, carpet the deep burgundy of dried blood, and a single door at the far end that seemed to breathe. Not move. Breathe. The wood expanding and contracting in a rhythm that matched her own pulse, as if the door had swallowed something living and hadn't yet finished digesting it.
By Alpha Cortex3 days ago in Fiction
A Mouse In The House
Walking into the kitchen one morning, I could smell something burning. There was a mouse whose tail was caught in the burner. I hollered for my husband. He arrived, took the mouse out of the fire, hit it on the head with a hammer. Damn you, Paul.
By Denise E Lindquist3 days ago in Fiction
The Sly Donkey and the Burden of Cleverness: A Moral Tale
The Sly Donkey and the Burden of Cleverness: A Moral Tale Once, on the outskirts of a quiet village, lived a donkey. He was a bit simple-minded but incredibly hardworking. He worked for a local merchant, carrying heavy loads of sugar on his back to be sold at the distant market.
By Amir Husen3 days ago in Fiction
