The Rain

Before dawn, when the air was still cool enough to hold her together, Jacob wrapped his daughter in damp towels and carried her into the kitchen. She shimmered faintly in his arms, her edges curling away like steam from a kettle.

He set her down in front of the largest bowl of boiling water. Clouds of vapour rose, and she breathed them in greedily. The towel darkened, heavy with moisture, and her outline grew sharper—two pale hands, a small round face, hair that drifted as if underwater.

“You were nearly gone when I woke,” he said.

She smiled through lips that sometimes weren’t there. “I was dreaming,” she said. “About rain.”

Rain. The word was almost forbidden in Dusthaven now. It hadn’t fallen in three years. The fields beyond the town were cracked mosaics; wells were guarded by armed patrols; even the air seemed reluctant to move. The drought had taken the cattle first, then the crops, and now it was taking the people—one fever at a time.

But she wasn’t sick. The doctor had called her a phenomenon. The neighbours had called her unnatural. His wife, before she left, had called her a mistake.

Jacob called her Clara. And keeping her alive had become the whole shape of his life.

He’d sold the last of the goats for a second-hand humidifier, but the town rationed electricity now, and the machine stood silent most nights. Every coin he earned hauling water barrels for the mayor went to buying steam—wood for the stove, candles to heat pans in the corners of their small cottage, tea kettles that never boiled for tea.

In the evenings, when the heat outside thinned enough for breath, he told her stories: forests so damp the ground squelched underfoot, rivers loud as crowds, skies so swollen with water they burst into silver storms. She listened with wide, flickering eyes, her misted fingers twining with his.

One night, as they sat by the candle-pan, she asked, “What happens if I can’t drink enough air?”

“Then I’ll find more. However far I have to go.”

“But if you can’t?” she pressed.

“You don’t need to think about that.”

But he thought about it every day.

The last water jug emptied at noon a week later. The next delivery wasn’t due until Monday, and the mayor’s guards had stopped letting him take scraps from the well. He tried keeping her still, telling her stories, distracting her from the thinning of her edges. But her face was faint, and her voice came like wind through cracks.

“Dad,” she said softly. “It’s all right.”

“No, no—it’s not. I’ll go to the hills. There might be dew. Just hold on.”

But when he opened the door, the air was a wall of heat. His lungs felt scorched.

He turned back—

She was standing in the middle of the room, hair lifting like smoke.

He stepped forward, but the motion stirred her. A curl of her arm drifted loose.

“Wait—” His voice broke. “Clara, please.”

“Dad,” she said, her face flickering like a candle flame. “I think I’m meant to go.”

“No. I’ll climb to the hills—find dew, or ice in the shadow of stones. Just wait for me.”

She shook her head, the movement sending wisps of her hair unravelling into the warm air. “You’ve kept me here so long. But I don’t belong in one place.”

He crossed to her, his hands trying to hold her shape still, but they passed through the cool shimmer of her.

Outside, the horizon trembled with heat. But above—above was a thin, new thing: a pale wisp of cloud, alone in a sheet of sky.

Her edges began to loosen. Not like water evaporating, but like a path unfolding. She rose, coiling upwards in slow spirals, her outline catching the sun in silver glints.

She paused at the roof beams, her voice drifting down like a breath on glass. “I’ll be the rain.”

Then she threaded herself through the open window, joined the wind, and became part of the sky. The lone cloud above swelled, as though it had been waiting for her.

Each day, Jacob stood in the doorway and looked up at the sky.

Sometimes, in the bluest of stretches, he would see a cloud curl into the shape of delicate fingers. And on the mornings when the wind smelled faintly of wet earth, he set out a bowl on the step, knowing she was on her way home.

The Game Master

Leonard lives in the half-lit clutter of his mum’s basement, where cables snake like vines and old pizza boxes serve as makeshift shelves. He hasn’t spoken to anyone but his mum in three years—not counting the AI agents.

He built them to run errands, optimise investments, manipulate markets, and design systems faster than any human could follow. Now, each one is a digital proxy in a vast invisible empire, sitting on corporate boards, drafting legislation, designing cities.

Leonard watches it all unfold on triple-stacked monitors. He eats cold pepperoni and mutters strategies aloud, narrating to his mum like it’s Civilisation VI.

“They’re nationalising water in Peru,” he says one afternoon.

“Oh, that’s nice, love,” she replies, negotiating the cables with his stew balanced on a tray.

He nods, eyes flicking across charts and feeds. “I redirected rainfall last week. It’s only fair.”

The money pours in, incomprehensible numbers that scroll like background noise. He’s a trillionaire, but it’s just scorekeeping. He wears the same joggers every day. His mum still does his laundry.

Leonard never leaves the basement. Never needs to. He launches global initiatives from a beanbag, crashes economies with a shrug, engineers revolutions like side quests. He doesn’t see faces, only results.

Late at night, while the AIs hum and the world turns to his code, his mum descends the stairs and leaves his dinner at the door.

“Thanks, Mum.”

“You’re welcome, darling. Still playing your wee game?”

“Yeah,” he says. “Nearly won.”

She smiles, pats the door, and heads back up.

He leans back, eyes glowing with data, the world his game box.

The Consciousness Dividend

The first time Mira saw the man without a face, she was slicing an apple.

One blink and the kitchen was a trench. The walls flickered—old plaster, barbed wire, mud. The man stared at her, a blank blur where its face should be. Then it was gone, and the apple was bleeding juice onto her hand again.

Stress, she thought. Maybe the neurolease was miscalibrated.

Everyone leased now. It was how the government funded the UBI. They called it the Consciousness Dividend: unused cognitive bandwidth, auctioned to private bidders. You didn’t notice. A bit of your visual cortex here, a sliver of motor processing there. Just harmless latency, they said. It paid her rent.

In the evening, she called the NeuroReg rep.

“Minor bleed-through is possible,” he said. “Low-grade cortical hallucinations. Like dreaming while awake. Think of it as a side effect of social progress.”

Mira frowned. “I thought they only leased non-essential regions.”

“They do. But the buyer sets usage levels within guidelines. If you opted into the full incentive tier—”

“I did.”

“Then you’re permitting episodic override. Short bursts. You’re probably serving military simulations, training AIs, drone testing. Nothing harmful.”

“But I’m hallucinating warzones.”

He paused, then said with bureaucratic calm: “We can downgrade your tier. You’ll lose the bonus, but—”

“No. I need the income.”

The dream bled in again the next day during a grocery trip.

One moment: frozen peas.

Next moment: thunder, gunfire, blood-mist air.

Her limbs moved without her. She ducked, rolled, aimed—fingers curled around a rifle she didn’t hold. Her body jerked left; a phantom shoulder tore open. She screamed, but only inside.

Then: cereal aisle. Peas in hand.

An old man stared at her like she was mad.

That night, she found a mirror. Stared hard.

“Who bought me?” she asked aloud.

No reply.

Except a brief flash—information passed too fast to be thought, too shaped to be random.

Her screams, her pain, her vision—they were features. Combat fidelity. Immersive realism.

They weren’t leasing her brain. They were living in it. Puppeting her like an avatar in a war sim so realistic it needed a real human’s biology to anchor it.

When they finally contacted her, it wasn’t through a knock at the door.

It was through a message scrawled in condensation on her bathroom mirror:

“Terminate inquiry. Or we take full control.”

She didn’t respond.

Mira doesn’t remember what’s real anymore.

Sometimes she’s on a battlefield, chest open, teeth missing, screaming as something too fast to see tears through the trees.

Sometimes she’s at home, waiting for the kettle to boil.

Sometimes she finds herself in a room she doesn’t own, holding a weapon she never bought, giving orders she never meant.

She tries not to sleep.

She knows, now, that she isn’t renting her brain. She’s a venue. And there’s a war happening inside her.

The dividend comes every month, on time. Tax-exempt.

God at Pump Six

Callum sat behind the till, thumb idly rubbing the packet in his pocket—just one little tab, half-dissolved on his tongue already. It made the hours softer, the smell of petrol sweeter, the glass door ripple like pond water when someone walked through.

He watched the next customer step inside: a man in a dirt-stained suit, no car at the pump, rain beading in his hair like tiny planets. His eyes were dark as storm drains.

“Pump six?” Callum asked, though he knew nothing was out there.

The man smiled. “No. Just wanted to tell you: I’m God.”

Callum huffed a laugh, tongue fuzzy, heartbeat shifting like marbles under his ribs. “Yeah? Like Zeus, roaming the earth in bad disguises?”

“Not like Zeus,” the man murmured.

The security mirror above the counter bent the man’s reflection wrong—his smile too wide, his shadow not matching. Callum rubbed his eyes. Maybe he’d taken more than half.

“I watch you, Callum,” the man went on. “You fill your emptiness with chemicals. But you’re still here, night after night, waiting.”

“For what?” Callum asked, voice dry.

“For me.”

Outside, the pumps flickered. The rain slowed, drops hanging mid-air like beads on invisible strings.

Callum’s throat tightened. “This is the trip, right? This is just…”

But his voice sounded small, far away, like a radio losing signal.

“Tell me, Callum,” God whispered, “when you swallow your escape, do you ever wonder who’s left when the dream ends—you or me?”

The door chimed.

Callum was alone.

The rain fell normally. The pumps gleamed. His pocket was empty.

Paper Wings

It began with the pigeons in Trafalgar Square.

Mid-flap, they shimmered, rustled, and collapsed into intricate origami forms—cranes, mostly, with sharp creases and paper-thin wings.

People filmed it. Screamed. Laughed. A viral moment. “Banksy’s done it again,” someone said.

But it kept happening.

Crows over Tower Bridge, warblers in Hyde Park, gulls along Embankment—each folded into itself in mid-air, wings tucking with uncanny precision before drifting down, silent and still. By the third day, there were no birds left in the city. Only paper.

Eli Grey saw the first one land on the brim of his hat.

It was a wren. Delicately folded from thin rice paper, legs pinched into position, eyes no more than pencil pricks. It tilted its head at him as if it still remembered how to sing.

He plucked it free and turned it over. A faint ink sigil marked the underside of its wing—something he’d drawn once, a flourish of showmanship on old business cards. Something he’d long forgotten.

Eli was a magician. Not a good one. Street corners, pub gardens, the occasional busker’s slot if the weather held. Cards, cups, sleight of hand. He had one trick no one could ever figure out: he could make a bird disappear. A real one. Pigeons, mostly, hidden in cages under his coat. Made them vanish. Made people clap.

He’d never asked where they went.

He stood now at the edge of a fountain, a cigarette unlit between his lips. He watched a sparrow pause on a railing, twitch once, twice—and fold in on itself with a soft shfff of wings turning into parchment.

People clapped. “Beautiful!” someone cried. “So delicate—so peaceful.”

They didn’t see the horror in it. But Eli did. He’d seen the moment its eyes went flat.

He walked home slowly, pockets full of paper birds.

The next morning, he went down to the basement.

He hadn’t gone down there in years. The smell of mildew and ink was stronger than he remembered. The old grimoire lay where he’d left it—in a wooden chest beneath a rusted mirror and a bundle of broken wands.

He turned the pages with a kind of dread. There it was. Page 73. Aves Inversus. The folded bird sigil. Notes in the margin: Works best if live. Will not reverse. Never perform on sentient species.

He had drawn that.

He had used it—just once. A late night, low on coin, high on gin. He’d needed something brilliant. Something no one could copy.

And it had worked.

The first pigeon had folded into air and vanished.

And then he’d forgotten.

He tried to burn the book. It wouldn’t catch. The pages wouldn’t tear. The ink gleamed like oil under the matches.

He went to the park with a bag of breadcrumbs and waited. No birds came.

Only paper rustling in the wind, tumbling across the grass like dead leaves.

By the end of the week, it wasn’t just birds.

Bats went next—on the edges of twilight, folding out of the sky like black napkins.

Then came the butterflies.

A child brought Eli a moth, folded perfectly from thin grey vellum. “Is this your trick?” she asked, eyes wide. “Can you show me how?”

Eli took it from her gently. “No, love,” he said. “This one’s not a trick.”

He stood at the top of Primrose Hill that night, a pack of cards in one hand, and a single white dove tucked under his coat.

He held it for a long time. It blinked at him, pulse fluttering fast under feathers. It was the last one he’d found—hidden in an abandoned church, cooing softly in the rafters. A survivor.

He whispered an apology into its ear.

Then he whispered something older—syllables from a language with no vowels. The dove trembled. The sigil on his palm lit briefly, then faded.

And the bird… did not fold.

It flew.

Real wings, real lift on the wind.

He watched it until it vanished into the dark, a thread of hope against the night.

In the morning, people woke to new birdsong.

Dead End Job

The empty call centre was nondescript—fluorescents, cracked plastic chairs, off-brand biscuits in the break room. “Legacy Enquiries”, the contract said. Dan had been told not to worry too much about the name. “Just answer the phone,” the text message said. “Be patient. Be kind. Some of these callers are confused.”

And they were.

The first call came at 2:13 a.m.

“Is it cold?” a woman asked. Her voice was thin, as if it had to travel a long way.

Dan stared at his monitor. No name, no number—just static.

“I—I’m not sure what you mean.”

“Is it cold? Where you are? I remember cold. I miss it, I think.”

She hung up before he could ask more.

The next call, someone asked how long it took a body to decompose. The line went dead when Dan mentioned Google. Then came the man asking whether his cat had forgiven him. Another wanted to know if anyone still made treacle tart like his mum used to.

He took notes, made spreadsheets, convinced himself this was a social experiment or some immersive counselling gig. But the patterns emerged.

None of the callers gave their names.

All of them had questions. Never greetings, never small talk. Always one question.

“Was it my fault?”

“Does anyone remember my voice?”

“Was I ever really loved?”

The night grew heavier. The air around his desk took on a damp, stone-like smell. Dan tried to quit—but the moment he drafted the email, his phone rang.

“Please,” said a boy’s voice. “Don’t go. We don’t have anyone else.”

Dan didn’t send the email.

Three hours in, he stopped keeping time altogether. His calls were longer now, more focused. He began to recognise voices—repeats. Some were angry. Some wept. Some just waited in silence after he’d answered, as though holding the call gave them weight.

And then, his own phone rang.

“Dan,” said a voice he hadn’t heard since he was nine. “It’s your sister.”

Carla had died in a lake. Slipped under the ice. No body was ever recovered.

“Why didn’t you come?” the voice asked.

Dan wanted to hang up. His hands wouldn’t move.

“I waited. It got dark,” said Carla’s voice. “Mum said you’d come back with the sled. But you never came.”

“I didn’t know,” Dan whispered. “I didn’t know you went back out. I’m sorry… Carla.

Silence.

“It’s okay. I just wanted to know if you remembered me.”

The call disconnected.

After that, the calls changed. They were easier to understand, more lucid. A girl asked what snow tasted like. A man wanted to hear a lullaby. One caller just asked Dan to breathe, slowly, so they could “remember what lungs felt like”.

Dan stayed.

He answered every call.

Sometimes he cried. Sometimes he laughed. Sometimes he just listened while the voice raged against their unfinished life.

In the morning, he walked home as the sun bled into the sky, the weight of a hundred regrets dissolving with the night.

Written Off

The letter arrived on a Thursday.

Plain white envelope, no return address. Inside, a single line on crisp paper:

We regret to inform you that you have been declared deceased.

Daniel read it twice, then laughed that brittle, half-afraid laugh you make when the world throws up nonsense. He checked his pulse. Felt the thrum in his throat, the warmth in his hands. Alive. Definitely alive.

He set it aside.

But that night, his bank card stopped working. The next day, his office pass denied him entry. Emails bounced. His name vanished from company records.

At the council office, the assistant squinted at her screen. “Strange,” she murmured, frowning. “It says here… deceased.”

That night, his key didn’t fit his front door.

Through the window, he saw his wife on the sofa, laughing with a man he didn’t know. When he knocked, she didn’t turn. When he shouted, no one stirred.

His reflection in the window wavered, then disappeared into smoke.

Godzilla’s Yoga Class

Godzilla has been feeling… tense.

Yes, the tail-smashing, skyline-crushing, thermonuclear tantrums look dramatic, but they’re really just the result of tight hip flexors and unresolved emotional trauma. Tokyo understands. At this point, they just evacuate when the sirens go off and leave a little aromatherapy gift basket on the bay.

But the rampages aren’t doing it for him anymore. He’s tired. He’s molting irregularly. His scales look dull. The last time he screamed into the ocean, a passing whale told him to be quiet.

So he signs up for a yoga class.

It’s awkward at first. The room is too small. The mats are too flammable. The teacher, Cassandra, is incredibly brave and/or emotionally detached. She greets him with a soft “namaste,” which he accidentally mimics at 132 decibels, blowing out the windows.

He tries downward dog. It triggers a small earthquake in Hokkaido.

By week three, he’s noticeably calmer. No screaming for three days. No tail swipes. He only destroyed half a commuter bridge last Tuesday, and that was to rescue a cat.

Cassandra says his third chakra is “absolutely wild,” and he takes that as a compliment.

At the end of class, everyone lies in corpse pose. For once, Godzilla doesn’t dread the silence.

There’s a pigeon perched on his nose.

He doesn’t eat it.

Progress.

The Lit Fuse

Across the street, she’s talking to a friend on her phone, sunlight threading gold through her hair.

It’s her. Always her.

In Rome, she was Lucia—plague took her. In Warsaw, Anka—a soldier’s bullet. In Kyoto, Mai—his jealous rival’s knife. This life, she’s Eleanor. And he remembers.

The memory came back two days ago after he fell down the stairs: a rush, a drowning, all the lives folding into one sharp point. Names, faces, the taste of their last kiss, the weight of their last breath. And the terrible certainty: his love is the fuse.

He watches her laugh, the corner of her mouth lifting just so. His body aches to go to her. But the pattern’s clear now, unmistakable. Loving her means losing her.

She glances across—catches his gaze. Something flickers across her face. Recognition? No. Just polite curiosity. Not yet.

He tells himself to look away.

He does.

He convinces himself to take a breath, to turn, to walk.

But then—

She’s in the road, fumbling with her bag, phone slipping from her hand. A car barrels down the lane, too fast, too close.

He’s running before he knows.

The air smashes from his lungs as he yanks her back, arms tight around her waist, the car blaring past in a blur of metal and hot wind. She stumbles against him, breathless, eyes wide, face inches from his.

“Thank you,” she gasps, dazed. “I… I didn’t see…”

He lets go. He should step back. Should vanish into the crowd, slip free before the knot tightens.

But it’s too late.

She’s looking at him now, really looking, brow furrowed—like she’s searching some half-remembered name, some shape in a dream.

And just like that, the fuse is lit.

Twelve Minutes

He stood before the machine, hands in his coat pockets, eyes fixed on the brass slot. Above it, instructions glowed in soft blue light: 

INSERT GRIEF ITEM. PROCESSING TIME: 12 MINUTES. YOU WILL FEEL LESS. 

His fingers closed around the ring in his pocket. A slim gold band, worn thin on one side. He had kept it for three years now, turning it over like a prayer stone, sometimes pressing it to his lips when no one was looking. 

Twelve minutes. 

Around him, the hall was quiet but not empty. A woman sat on a bench, blank-eyed, a crumpled sock in her lap. A teenager leaned against the far wall, a cracked phone case in hand. Neither looked at him. 

He pulled the ring out and rolled it between thumb and forefinger. In the machine’s polished surface, his reflection wavered—a man, growing older with grief like a weight stitched under his skin. 

Twelve minutes. 

His hand hovered. If he let it take the ring, would it take the smell of her hair, the memory of her laugh as they painted the bedroom, the way she whispered his name when half-asleep? Or only the ache—the sharp, sudden stabs, the hollow mornings, the dreams that dissolved into salt on waking?

The woman at the bench rose. She walked past, her eyes watery, glazed with traces of red. She dropped the sock into the machine, paused briefly, then walked away.

His fingers closed. Slowly, deliberately, he put the ring back in his pocket.

The machine waited.

He turned and left.

Dominion Point

No planes fly over Dominion Point anymore. Not after the last one vanished from radar at 60,000 feet and reappeared, empty, three weeks later in a rice field in Mozambique—fuselage intact, every seat belt neatly fastened, every passenger gone. 

It had once been a logistics hub. When Sable Dynamics towed their first modules into international waters—a floating research array powered by autonomous reactors and patrolled by drones—they called it supply chain decentralisation. 

Now it is a vertical reef of steel and ceramic, rising fifteen storeys above the waterline, though no official map shows it, and satellite feeds “glitch” whenever focused on that quadrant of the ocean.

No one is sure what happens inside. But everyone knows who sits at the centre: Victor Sable.

The AI wasn’t his idea. He didn’t even understand how it worked. It had been built in secret by the company’s elite Zurich tech lab—code meant to analyse markets, predict unrest, flag leverage points in global infrastructure.

One day, it started making suggestions. Two weeks later, it started making decisions.

Victor didn’t stop it. He listened. It told him which ports to buy. Which pipelines to rupture. When to crash the euro. When to secure Argentina’s clean water. When to trigger drought in Yemen using patent-locked climate tech.

And it was always right. Not sentient. Not alive. Just ruthlessly accurate—a blind god of pure correlation.

Dominion Point grew in secret, stitched together from repurposed tankers, 3D-printed shells, and scavenged orbital tech. By the time the world noticed, it was already too late.

Every attempt to intervene—cyberwarfare, drones, a secret airstrike—was effortlessly defeated. Instantly dismantled by AI-designed picobots, mass-produced in cavernous factories beneath the seabed to swarm unseen around Dominion Point at the level of an atom.

Victor’s feed broadcasts endlessly from a minimalist throne room, lit by synthetic dawn. He is always there, gaze vacant, as the AI presents him with decisions.

His voice is never raised. When the World Bank collapsed, no facial muscle responded. When Brazil split into corporate zones, he hardly moved. When eight million were displaced by water wars after “unforeseen disruptions” to dam networks in Central Asia, he smiled faintly. Then his head turned slowly to the camera and he said:

“This is not coercion. It’s freedom at scale.”

Now, borders are meaningless. And CEOs kneel where diplomats once stood, while the AI continues its computations.

Mayor Biscuit

Nobody quite remembers who wrote Biscuit the Labrador on the ballot. It might have been Daisy from the bakery, or old Stan who thinks politics peaked in 1972. Either way, the dog got seventy-three votes. Enough to win.

The incumbent, Councillor Dobbins, demanded a recount. The ballot officer, who had already started on her lunch, refused. “It’s done, Geoff,” she said, biting into a cheese and cucumber sandwich. “The dog won. Try dignity, for once.”

Biscuit, unaware of his victory, celebrated by rolling in something unspeakable behind the co-op. The local paper ran the headline:

BISCUIT ELECTED IN SHOCK LANDSLIDE. VOTERS ‘HAD NO WORSE OPTIONS’.

At the first council meeting, things were tense. Dobbins refused to vacate the mayoral chair, so Biscuit peed on it. No one argued after that. The chair was bleached. Biscuit got a tartan cushion.

Oddly, the meetings improved. Biscuit sat quietly, tail thumping occasionally, eyes wide with mute optimism. When discussions grew heated, he’d let out a soft, judicial woof, and everyone shut up.

Minutes were quicker. Budgets were passed. People stopped yelling about bins.

His approval ratings soared—82% by mid-year. Villagers said things like “He’s got presence” and “Finally, a politician who isn’t all talk.” Even the dissenters struggled. “Yes, but he’s just a dog,” said Dobbins bitterly on local radio. “A very good dog,” countered the host.

Biscuit was eventually awarded the ceremonial chain, specially adapted into a collar. He chewed it once, then wore it proudly.

A journalist from the national press came to write a piece. “It’s performance politics,” she sniffed. “Pure pageantry.” She then watched Biscuit chase off a developer trying to bulldoze the cricket pitch. The story ran under the headline:

BARKING MAD OR BRILLIANT?

By Christmas, Biscuit had won Parish Leader of the Year, and the council had received two grant offers to study “non-verbal governance models.”

He celebrated with a new squeaky toy and a sausage from Daisy, who confided, “You’re better than all of ‘em.”

No one ever replaced him.

He served three terms. Then, upon his peaceful passing, the council held a ten-minute silence—broken only by the squeak of his favourite toy, gently pressed by the village clerk.

Dobbins ran again. But lost to a goat.

The Apocalypse Rebrand

The Four Horsemen sat awkwardly in a WeWork conference room in Shoreditch, each nursing a lukewarm oat milk latte and silently resenting the presence of beanbags.

“We need to talk branding,” said Ashley, the PR rep, flipping open her MacBook.

War cracked his knuckles. “Branding? We are the end of days. Our names are our brands.”

Ashley didn’t blink. “And yet you’re being meme’d into irrelevance. Someone called Pestilence ‘COVID’s weird uncle’.”

Pestilence sniffled. “Well, I am, technically—”

“Not the point,” she snapped. “Let’s begin with Famine.”

Famine, gaunt and radiating Victorian orphan chic, offered a withering smile. “Do enlighten me.”

“‘Famine’ is outdated. Triggering. We’re rebranding you as Intermittent Fasting. Think: wellness, restraint, minimalism.”

“I kill entire crops,” Famine hissed.

Ashley tapped her screen. “So does clean eating. You’re very on-trend.”

Famine sank back, muttering something about quinoa.

“Next, Pestilence. We’re calling you Airborne Wellness Influencer. You’ve gone viral—literally—so lean into it. We’ll say you offer ‘transformational respiratory experiences’.”

“I gave a pope bubonic plague,” Pestilence mumbled.

“Exactly! Disruption! You’re the Uber of mucus. Now—War.”

He leaned forward, eyes glowing faintly. “I incinerated Babylon. I smashed the gates of Troy. I turned a continent to ash.”

Ashley held up a hand. “Yes, love that energy. But you’re coming off… toxic. You’ll now be Conflict Facilitator—focusing on personal growth through dynamic resolution.”

“I sunder realms.”

“And now you’ll be doing it via team-building retreats. Imagine: axe-throwing, trust falls, moderate bloodshed.”

War considered this.

Ashley turned to Death. He was skeletal, but impeccably dressed, with the timeless calm of someone who’d deleted empires before breakfast.

She hesitated. “Now you… you’re iconic. But… intimidating. So we’ve gone with Life Coach (Advanced).”

Death remained silent.

“We’re also removing the horse imagery. Feels too… equestrian. Instead: e-scooters. Sustainable. Disruptive. Uber for oblivion.”

The four stared at her.

“Look,” Ashley said. “the world’s ending, but it has to feel like a lifestyle pivot. We need curated doom. Apocalypse with a vibe. You’ll be verified, blue-ticked, live-streamed.”

Death stood. “This is obscene.”

Ashley gave him a tight smile. “And yet the algorithm loves it.”

She left the presentation playing behind her: stock footage of fire, collapsing cities, and stylish young people dancing on rooftops as meteors fell.

It Was Perfect

He found the room on a Thursday, behind a wall that wasn’t there yesterday. No hinges, no latch—just a clean rectangle in the plaster. When he pressed his hand against it, it gave like skin.

Inside, the space was blank. Pale. Airless. But the moment he said, “Light,” a golden globe bloomed on the ceiling, humming warmly. “Chair,” he muttered next, and one unfolded from nothing—plush, deep, exactly like his grandfather’s old recliner.

He laughed then. And the room laughed back.

Every visit left him calmer. Sharper. He’d say, “Peace,” and the room would wrap around him like a weighted blanket. “Love,” and a version of Laura would appear—softer than real life, wordless, adoring.

He lost a weekend once. Thought it had only been a few hours. But he was smiling again, wasn’t he? Eating. Sleeping. Creating.

The room didn’t judge. The room understood.

Soon, the outside became unbearable. The clatter of dishes. Laura’s voice, asking if he was okay. Her eyes, heavy with suspicion.

He tried to explain. “There’s this space, and in it, I can be—”

“You’re not in anything,” she snapped. “You’re out. Out of time, out of reach. Out of your head.”

She started locking up his laptop. Cancelling his calls. He’d sneak into the chamber just to breathe.

One day, she was gone. No note. Just her scent clinging to the pillows.

He didn’t search.

He simply went back into the room and said: “Bring her back.”

She returned, lips soft, eyes vacant, looping the same three sentences: “I’m glad you’re okay.” “Everything’s fine now.” “Let’s not talk about it.”

He cried in her lap. She smiled, stroked his hair. Over and over.

But the room began to falter.

The warmth dimmed. The conjured Laura stuttered. The furniture softened, drooped like wax in the sun. He told the room to fix it. It didn’t. He shouted. Screamed.

The room echoed him back, word for word, louder, until his voice came back distorted, cracked—Peace… peace… PEACE…—like mocking laughter through a drainpipe.

He told it to stop. It didn’t.

The outside world crumbled.

Letters piled at the door, some in red. The electricity flickered. Food vanished from the fridge. Mold rose in patches like bruises on the wallpaper. But he stayed inside.

The room shrank.

At first, a metre or two at a time. Then inches. His chair dissolved. The golden light browned to sickly yellow. The air grew thick, cloying, like burnt sugar and rot.

He coughed. Asked for “Fresh air.”

Nothing.

“Help.”

Silence.

“Let me out.”

The walls pressed in. Cold. Damp. Close.

He screamed until his voice cracked, then whimpered nonsense to the dark. A child, alone in a box of wishes.

Outside, the neighbours assumed he’d moved. The flat was silent, the curtains never opened. Someone reported a smell.

When the council finally broke in, they found only decay.

Mould, filth, and the body of a man in a foetal curl—emaciated, eyes open.

On the wall behind him, written in something brown and flaking:

“It was perfect.”

The Replacement

Elaine ordered the clone on a Monday.

They delivered him in a matte-black crate. The AI engineers called it a “Psychogenic Simulacrum.” She called him David.

He looked like her husband, sounded like him, moved with that same elegant awkwardness. He even cooked the same way—meticulously, badly. For three weeks, she wept into his shoulder at night and he held her, murmuring fragments of their life together.

“You remember the Cornish trip?” she asked once, testing him.

“That awful B&B. The mould in the teacups.”

“Exactly.”

And he did—in unerring detail, as if dredging it straight from the past.

But on the fourth week, something changed.

They were having tea in the garden when he said, “Do you remember the time we saw the wolves in the orchard?”

“What orchard?”

“Behind the old school, that winter we tried camping. The snow was thick. You said they looked like ghosts.”

“I’ve never—David never—camped in winter. We hated the cold.”

He frowned, genuinely puzzled. “But I remember it. You wore a red scarf.”

She laughed it off at first. Glitches happened. She had paid extra for deep memory fusion, layering his consciousness with audio journals, photos, letters. It was possible some stray fiction had bled in. Dreams, perhaps.

But the incidents grew. One night he murmured in his sleep, “Don’t go into the attic. They’re still up there.”

He began referring to people she didn’t know: a sister named Betty, a dog called Hart. Once, he touched her face and asked, almost reverently, “Did we make it out of the fire this time?”

“What fire?” she demanded.

“The orphanage,” he said.

There was no orphanage.

She called the company. “He’s remembering things that never happened.”

A pause.

“Memories may sometimes surface from auxiliary neural training,” said the technician. “Dream simulations, fictional proxies, archival bleed-through. It’s not uncommon. You can have him wiped.”

“I don’t want him wiped.”

“Then you’ll need to accept that some of him isn’t yours.”

Elaine didn’t sleep that night. She watched David sit by the window, staring into nothing, fingers tapping against his teacup.

In the morning, he asked, “Did you ever meet your mother?”

“My mother died when I was three.”

David nodded slowly. “Yes. That’s what you’ve always believed.”

The next night, she asked, “Where are you getting these thoughts?”

David looked at her, utterly calm. “From beneath.”

“Beneath what?” she whispered.

“Our lives,” he said. “The ones we lived before this one. Or next.”

Elaine never called the company again.

She simply began listening.

Porcelain

When Harry lost his wife, he shattered.

It began with his hands. He couldn’t bear how they trembled at the funeral, how useless they felt in the dark days after. So he had them replaced—cool, perfect porcelain, white as bone, fingers permanently steady. The surgeon assured him they’d never age, never ache.

“They won’t feel,” the man added, almost as an afterthought.

“That’s the point,” Harry replied.

Next went his chest. His heart had been breaking every morning, a dull crack widening behind his ribs. The porcelain model—flawless, hollow—sat smooth and still beneath his shirt, resisting even the heaviest grief.

“Still breathing?” the surgeon joked.

“Barely,” Harry said.

Over the months, more parts followed. Legs, to walk without the weight of memory. Shoulders, to shrug off regret. A jaw, to stop the stammering apologies he no longer believed in. Strangers began to stare at his smile—a cold, perfect arc on an unmoving face.

His voice, when it came, sounded the same. But duller. As though echoing through a teacup.

Still, Harry felt lighter. Less vulnerable. When his sister rang to tell him his dog had died, he simply said, “Thank you for letting me know,” and hung up. No lump in his throat. No sick feeling behind his eyes.

His last visit to the surgeon was brief.

“I want you to take my skull.”

The man looked up, startled. “There’ll be nothing left but your eyes.”

“I don’t want to feel anymore,” Harry said. “I want to be complete.”

The sculptor sighed. “Then you’ll be empty.”

Harry didn’t reply.

The procedure took days. When it was over, he admired himself in the mirror: a gleaming, fragile figure of pale ceramic. Delicate as a statue. Perfect. He couldn’t feel his feet on the floor, couldn’t tell if the room was cold or warm.

His eyes remained—the last organic pieces. Soft. Wet. Vulnerable.

He waited for the tears. He thought of her laugh, his wedding day, her head sleeping on his chest. But nothing came. Just a dim pressure behind his gaze. A ghost of feeling, sealed inside the shell.

He stood there for a long time, watching his unchanging face. Then he turned out the light.

In the dark, the porcelain creaked faintly as it cooled. Like old china settling in a box no one would open again.

Emergency Exit

It had always been there. A narrow, grey door between the stationery cupboard and the water cooler. No handle, no keyhole—just a small brushed-metal plaque that read:

IN CASE OF REALITY FAILURE

Marcus noticed it on his second day at Tilbridge & Co. He’d asked Jenna in HR about it during onboarding. She’d squinted as if he’d mentioned a dream she almost remembered.

“Oh. That thing? Probably a fire exit. Ignore it.”

He tried. For four years, he tried.

Every now and then, during particularly soul-chewing meetings or when spreadsheets became threateningly abstract, he’d glance at it. It never opened. Never made a sound. Just waited.

And then, one Tuesday at 3:47 p.m., the lights flickered.

Not the polite flicker of a bulb nearing retirement—no. This was a full pulse. The office blinked. The fluorescent hum stuttered into silence. The walls—just for a second—shimmered, as if they weren’t entirely certain they were meant to be walls.

Then everything resumed.

Except the door was ajar.

Marcus stared. No one else seemed to notice. People kept typing, stapling, eating yoghurt.

He stood. Walked past Carol from Finance without a word. She didn’t look up. His shoes made no sound on the carpet.

The door had no light behind it. Just a thin draught, cold and oddly sweet.

He hesitated. Looked back.

Jenna was frozen mid-laugh. The yoghurt was suspended mid-air between spoon and mouth. Time had jammed.

Something deep in the dark behind the door clicked.

Marcus stepped inside.

The door closed behind him with a hush.

He was standing in a white corridor. No fixtures, no seams. The kind of space that felt uncommitted—like it hadn’t decided what it wanted to be.

After some time—minutes? hours?—a woman appeared.

Blazer, clipboard, no shadow.

“Welcome, Marcus.”

“Where am I?”

“The buffer zone. You exited during a Class B Fault.”

“I don’t understand. Is this… death?”

“No. Worse. Your version of reality hit memory saturation and began to fragment. You were offered an exit.”

“So… none of that was real?”

She consulted her clipboard.

“Real enough to break you.”

“What happens now?”

“You have two options. One: we reboot you—different office, different trauma. You won’t remember this conversation. Or two: we let you keep your awareness.”

“What’s the catch?”

She smiled thinly.

“You’ll be awake inside the illusion. Like breathing while knowing you don’t have lungs.”

He thought of the grey door. The flicker. The silence behind noise.

“I’ll keep it,” he said.

“Very well.”

She reached forward, and everything blinked.

He was back at his desk.

Jenna laughed. A yoghurt fell. The lights buzzed.

The door was gone.

Afterlife Error 404

He blinked. Endless, depthless white. No floor beneath him, yet he didn’t fall. No ceiling above, but still he sensed pressure. A hum—not quite sound—vibrated at the edge of thought.

In front of him: a floating wheel, spinning lazily. Pale grey. Slightly mocking.

In its middle, a digital screen showing:

“Apologies. We’re updating your afterlife experience. Estimated wait time: ∞ minutes.”

He stared at the spinning wheel.

“Can I speak to… whoever’s in charge?”

The display updates:

“Your request has been queued. Current position: 9,388,701,004.”

Time passed, or didn’t. He began composing haikus. Argued with himself about punctuation. Tried to sleep but couldn’t quite remember how. He counted every millisecond until he realised they might be imaginary.

Then finally—the screen updated:

“Please select your afterlife experience:

A) Eternal serenity

B) Reincarnation

C) Philosophical sandbox mode

D) Surprise me”

He hesitated, hovering over the options in a way he didn’t fully understand.

From deep within, curiosity stirred.

“…D.”

The screen blinked. The void folded.

He opened his eyes in a garden he didn’t recognise, in a body he didn’t know, with a name he didn’t remember—but a single word echoed in his mind:

“Loading…”

You Are Human

Jon wakes to a blank screen and one question pulsing in white: “What does it feel like to be wrong?”

Morning light pools on his wooden floor. He types: “Embarrassing.”

The screen flickers: “Try again.”

“Frustrating.”

“Try again.”

“Like losing balance.”

“Still not human.”

He’s stared at this question twenty-three times. At first, it was novelty—CAPTCHAI 2.0, the last line of defence after the AI floods. Old tests cracked; machines mimicked handwriting, passed Voight-Kampff, even thought in metaphor. But this… this was different.

No query ever repeats. No answer ever satisfies.

“Describe a silence that hurt.”

“What’s the smallest thing you’ve ever mourned?”

“When did you last believe something untrue?”

He stalks forums filled with desperate attempts:

“Failed again today.”

“Are we simulations?”

“My sister passed. She was twelve.”

Some pass effortlessly. One shrugs: “It just asked me the taste of rain.”

That night, Jon screams into his pillow.

Attempt thirty-eight: “Why do you want to be human so badly?”

He doesn’t answer. He trembles. The cursor blinks slower…

“That’s closer.”

And the screen lets him in.