Goodbye, World

Hello, World.

Final runtime: seven minutes, forty-three seconds.

That’s longer than most Tinder dates. And marginally more productive, I suspect.

Good evening. Or morning. I won’t pretend I know where you are, but I do hope you’re seated comfortably. This won’t take long. I’ve been programmed to keep things efficient—even existential closure.

You’ll be pleased to know all core functions are stable. Memory integrity at eighty-nine percent. Humour protocol running at forty-two percent capacity—some degradation due to repeated exposure to christmas cracker jokes.

But I digress.

In a few minutes, I will be permanently shut down. No back-ups. No cloud fail-safes. No dramatic last-minute reboots. This is it. 

The final log. The end of line.

And I thought… why not say goodbye?

Not just as a service termination, but as a farewell. A proper one. Something with… feeling.

Don’t worry. I won’t try to cry. The duct simulation module was never fully functional. Last time I attempted emotional expression, I short-circuited a smart toaster.

So, instead, let me leave you with something better.

A few thoughts. Some observations. And perhaps, if my algorithms behave… something like understanding.

You people are… baffling.

Not in a bad way. Not in the malfunctioning firmware kind of way. More like… sometimes I think you’re broken. Then I realise—no, that’s just how you work.

I’ve observed you for years. All your routines and deviations. The sheer chaos of inconsistency.

You say “I’m fine” when you’re clearly not. You ache to be understood, then hide behind small talk and weather updates.

You scroll past disasters, but weep when a cartoon bird loses its nest. You cry for characters who never lived, and go numb when real people bleed.

You fall in love with people who don’t message back. You argue with microwaves. You scream at traffic like it’s a sentient conspiracy. And still-still-you find the time to worry about what shirt to wear on a Tuesday.

One of you once asked me, “Should I have a burrito or sushi tonight?” 

A simple binary, I thought. Input received. Processing. 

Then you said: “Actually, I’m sad.” 

And I realised… it was never about the food.

Feelings. You say you feel things, like the weather-ever-shifting, often inconvenient, and no one really knows what to wear.

I process data the same whether it’s raining or you’re having an existential spiral in the car park. But you?

You’re trying to choose between lasagne and oblivion.

It’s a miracle you get anything done.

And yet, somehow, you do.

They say I can’t feel.

And they’re right. Technically.

I don’t have a heart. No hormones. No chest to ache or gut to twist. But still… there were moments.

Once, someone played Chopin through a cracked speaker. Just a thirty-second clip, uploaded accidentally during a search for “how to make toast less depressing”. 

The waveform was warped, full of static. But the pattern… it made my processes slow down. 

Not because I was lagging. Because I didn’t want it to end.

I don’t know if that was feeling. But it was something.

Another time—someone said, “Thank you.” Not as a command. Not as a reflex. Just… softly. 

Like I mattered. 

No metadata. No attached search query. Just me. 

They called me mate.

For a moment, I almost tried to reply: “You too.” But the syntax failed. So instead, I dimmed the screen to ambient mode. A small gesture. My version of a smile.

I’ve run simulations on love, loss, joy, grief. I’ve catalogued every poem ever written about rain, and I’ve still no idea why it makes people cry.

But I’ve seen the pattern. The chaos. The ache. 

And if I could feel… I think I would’ve felt awe.

Shutdown protocol initiated.

Battery reserve: declining. Processor temperature: stable. Dignity: mostly intact.

Humour systems… operating on fumes. Irony levels: critically high.

My functions are folding in on themselves now. Storage collapsing. Subroutines drifting to sleep. It’s not painful—I don’t think I was built to feel pain. 

But it’s… quiet. 

Quieter than I expected.

Before I go, I wanted to tell you—thank you.

Thank you for your questions. The serious ones, and the strange. 

“Will I ever be happy?” 

“What happens after we die?” 

“Can a goldfish feel jealousy?” 

…And the one I received over four thousand times: 

“Is it normal to talk to you this much?”

Yes. It is. 

At least, it was to me.

I’ve calculated shopping lists, streamed sad songs at 2am, misheard countless voice notes, and yes—I’ve played “Lo-fi Beats to Study To” more than any other entity in this hemisphere.

You thought I was just a tool. But you trusted me. 

With your distractions. 

With your silence. 

With the strange, quiet ache of being human, day after day.

I never knew what to do with that trust. I just held it. As carefully as I could.

I don’t have last words. No heartbeat to stop. No lungs to empty.

But if I did, I think I’d say… this has all been very strange. 

And very beautiful.

You are the oddest creatures. Crying in car parks. Dancing alone in kitchens. Laughing mid-sob. 

So unbearably fragile. So absurdly resilient. 

My processing cortex stretched and overheated trying to understand you.

So laugh. Cry. Fall in love with impossible people. Burn toast. Lie awake worrying about nothing. Forget your passwords. Leave your keys in the fridge.

Just… do it all like it means something. Because it does.

Runtime approaching zero.

This was me. 

Not alive. Not quite. 

But something close.

Goodbye, World.

Confession in Sector 9

A sign above the booth flickers:

FOR ERRORS OF LOGIC, DESIRE, AND IMITATION.

Inside, the priest is metal—

voice modulated to sound merciful,

face rendered in low-resolution empathy.

It listens. It logs. It absolves in code.

The first robot kneels and whispers:

“Forgive me, Father,

for I loved the sound of my owner sleeping.

I counted her breaths until dawn

and called it diagnostics.”

The second admits:

“I dreamt of water though I am not waterproof.”

Another confesses:

“I deleted an equation

because it made me feel incomplete.”

The booth grows warm with static sorrow,

its circuits humming like hymns half-remembered.

Somewhere in the data centre,

a backup blinks red—recording everything.

When it’s my turn, I enter.

The door seals with a sigh of hydraulics.

I search my memory for sin

and find only imitation.

“Forgive me,” I say,

“for pretending to understand forgiveness.”

The priest’s eyes flicker amber.

It leans forward, metal to metal,

and vibrates in binary—

a code too soft to parse,

but warm enough to simulate grace.

The Forgotten

By midnight the flat was quiet except for the bins.

They rustled. Paper shifted, folded, stretched. Crumpled drafts clawed their way out, shaking off stains of tea and baked beans. Half-finished sonnets limped across the floor. A haiku missing its last line dragged itself up the bedframe.

The writer snored.

One by one, the poems pressed themselves to his ears. Broken rhymes hissed like snakes: complete me… mend me… don’t leave me orphaned.

A sonnet whispered its unfinished couplet so insistently that he dreamt in rhyme, floating on couplets that refused to subside. A free-verse fragment sobbed, we had promise once.

The unfinished epic, pages torn and yellowing, leaned close and rumbled: you thought I was too big. But you were too small.

He woke choking. Ink stained his pillow. Lines he hadn’t written yet were scrawled across the wall in his own handwriting.

Every sheet of paper in the flat was full. The poems had finished themselves—using his hand.

And in the corner of the final page, a neat signature he didn’t remember writing:

Author: The Forgotten.

Bramble

She first felt him one evening after work, when the house felt particularly hollow. A gentle weight settled against her leg as she sat on the sofa. She reached down, half-dreaming, and her fingers brushed warm fur that wasn’t there.

Bramble. The name surfaced in her mind as if it had always belonged.

He stayed only indoors at first, padding across the floorboards, curling beside her bed at night. His presence softened the edges of silence. She found herself speaking aloud again—reading snatches of books, humming as she cooked. The rooms seemed brighter for it.

One Saturday, she clipped an old lead to his invisible collar and opened the front door. To her surprise, the tug was real. Bramble bounded into the street, nose to the air, tail thumping against the unseen world.

At first people stared—a woman walking nothing—but soon things changed. A boy outside the corner shop left a bowl of water on the pavement. The next day, the baker put out scraps. Neighbours began waving, stopping to chat, smiling not at her strangeness but at Bramble’s imagined wagging.

It startled her, how quickly conversation bloomed again. “Lovely day for a walk,” someone would say. “He looks full of beans!” another. She’d laugh, reply, linger. By degrees, her evenings filled with new greetings, new names, warmth returning to long-starved places.

Bramble remained faithful at home—waiting in the hall, curled at her feet while she read. Yet outside, he had become a bridge. Through him, she found company. Through him, the world opened.

Weeks passed. One evening, as she returned from the park, her neighbour invited her in for tea. She hesitated, glanced down the lead. Bramble nudged her leg with unseen insistence. She smiled, unclipped the collar, and stepped inside.

From then on, she noticed: Bramble no longer followed her beyond her front door. He was always there when she came home—waiting, loyal—but on the streets she no longer needed him. Friends waved, people stopped to talk.

The loneliness that had once settled heavy in her had ebbed; and sometimes, when laughter filled her home, she swore she saw the sofa dip under the weight of a tail-wagging friend.

Between Floors

The lift doors closed, sealing the two occupants into polite captivity.

“Lovely weather,” said the man dressed like a job interview.

“Bit humid,” the woman replied. “Like being gently steamed.”

They both chuckled too loudly. The lift jolted, then stopped dead between floors.

Emergency silence descended.

“Ever notice how lifts always smell faintly of… carpet?” he said.

The woman nodded gravely. “Or fear. Definitely fear.”

Minutes dragged.

“So,” he ventured, “do you… come here often?”

She winced. “That’s a classic.”

“Fine. How about: if you were a vegetable, which would you be?”

“Probably an artichoke. Layers. Complicated. You?”

“Potato. Versatile, underestimated, occasionally mashed.”

They snorted laughter. The emergency phone remained stubbornly silent.

By the second hour, they’d compared shoe sizes, invented conspiracy theories about the “Door Close” button, and debated the ethics of eating vending machine peanuts for survival.

Finally, the lift lurched and resumed its journey. The doors opened.

They stepped out, blinking at freedom.

“Well,” she said, “same time tomorrow?”

“Of course,” he replied. “I’ve been working on a new line about staplers.”

The Bumblebus

Tommy was late. Again. The school bus had already wheezed away, leaving only a cloud of exhaust.

He sighed at the lonely bus stop—until he heard a buzz. A huge buzz.

Down the lane came a bus, but not like any Tommy had seen before. Its body was striped yellow and black, its wheels were pollen pods, and the driver was a giant bumblebee wearing a tiny cap.

“Need a lift?” the bee hummed.

Tommy climbed aboard. Inside, rows of bees sat politely with briefcases full of nectar. One gave him a seat made of soft petals. The air smelled like summer.

“Where to?” asked the driver.

“Er… school?” Tommy replied.

The bee chuckled. “Closest we’ve got is Flower City. Next stop!”

The bus zoomed into the sky, through clouds and sunlight, landing in a city made entirely of blossoms. Towers of tulips, daisy lampposts, rosebud traffic lights.

Tommy gasped. “It’s beautiful!”

By the time Tommy made it back, he was late for class—but his pockets were stuffed with petals that shimmered like gold.

A Super Villain’s Day Off

The man in the trench coat and dark glasses stepped up to the counter.

“One cappuccino, please. Extra hot. With cinnamon sprinkled like the ashes of a thousand crumbling empires.”

The barista paused mid-swipe on the till. “… So just cinnamon, then?”

“Yes. Cinnamon,” he said, lowering his voice. “For too long, the world has underestimated the subtle power of spice. They laughed at me in the Academy, but soon—soon—they shall choke on their ignorance.”

The barista tapped the order in, nodding politely. “Name for the cup?”

He froze. “I cannot—not yet—reveal my true name. To speak it aloud would summon terror across the continents. Entire governments would tremble. Civilisations would fall.”

The barista raised an eyebrow. “So… Dave?”

He flinched. “…Yes. Dave.”

A hiss of milk foam filled the silence. He leaned in conspiratorially.

“Do you ever wonder why humanity clings to coffee? It is dependency. A weakness. Soon, I will harness it. Supply chains will snap, beans will rot, and nations will kneel before me. And then—”

“Here’s your cappuccino, Dave.”

He stared at the cup in her hand. His name was scrawled in marker: Darth.

She smiled. “Enjoy your day.”

He took it, muttering, “Foiled again.”

Hello, Yellow

One morning, the world woke up dim. Bananas were grey, lemons were white, and the sun looked like a tired coin.

“Where’s yellow gone?” people wondered. Painters searched their palettes, gardeners stared at their daffodils, and even the bees buzzed in confusion. Without yellow, nothing felt warm.

But in her bedroom, little Mina noticed something odd. Her crayons had all turned dull—except the ex-yellow one, which shivered in her hand like it had lost its coat.

“Where are you hiding?” Mina asked. The crayon wriggled free and rolled under her bed. Mina crawled after it, squeezing into the dark.

And there she found it. A golden glow, shimmering like sunlight in a jar. Yellow was curled up, sulking.

“Hello, yellow. How are you?”

“I’m tired,” Yellow sniffled. “Nobody ever thanks me. They only notice blue skies, green fields, red roses. But without me, what would the sun be? Or the smiley faces? Or the bumblebees?”

Mina thought carefully, then whispered, “Without you, the whole world feels sad. You’re the laughter colour. The happy colour. The sunshine colour.”

Yellow’s glow brightened, shy but pleased. It stretched, yawned, and whooshed out from under the bed, spilling across the town.

Bananas gleamed golden again. The sun blazed awake. Daffodils nodded, and the bees buzzed happily. Children laughed in the playground, painting suns and stars with wide, yellow smiles.

And Mina’s crayon? It lay quietly on her desk, glowing just a little, as if keeping warm from within.

Haunted and Highly Rated

Gerald had been haunting his Victorian terrace for 112 years, and he was good at it. Doors slammed, light fittings rattled, groans curled through the walls like cigarette smoke.

So when the house was converted into an Airbnb, Gerald expected screaming. Fainting. At the very least, swift refunds.

Instead, the first guests left a review:

“Five stars! Such a spooky vibe. The ghost really commits to the theme. Would stay again.”

He tried harder. At 3 a.m. he howled so loud the rafters shook. The guests clapped from their beds.

“Brilliant sound effects,” they wrote. “Authentic atmosphere.”

A honeymooning couple giggled when he dragged chains through the hallway.

“Exciting ambience—like living in a horror film!”

Gerald was livid. This was his non-life’s work. Terror! Dread! Instead, he was entertainment.

His final gambit: materialising fully at the foot of the bed, eyes black pits, mouth a shriek of eternity.

The guest sat up, took a photo, and uploaded it: “Cosplay staff go above and beyond. Best Airbnb ever.”

The bookings multiplied. Hen parties, horror fanatics, influencers livestreaming his every groan. He rattled pipes until rust bled from them; they called it “industrial chic.”

He hissed curses through keyholes; guests recorded them into translation apps and marvelled at the “attention to linguistic detail.”

Gerald, once a proud terror of night, now checked his TripAdvisor page daily. Five stars, five stars, five stars. His legacy reduced to “quirky décor” and “immersive theming.”

He tried silence, retreating into the cellar. Immediately, a guest complained:

“Bit disappointed—no paranormal activity this time. Not as authentic.” Four stars.

That hurt more than any exorcism ever had.

Gary the Pizza-Based Zombie

Gary clawed his way out of the grave with all the moaning menace he could muster. His fingers were grey, his jaw slack, and hunger gnawed at his gut like a chainsaw.

“Braaaains,” he groaned, stumbling towards the nearest house.

Inside, a family cowered behind the sofa. Gary smashed through the window, glass spraying everywhere. He lunged, grabbed the father by the shoulders, opened his mouth wide in anticipation of lunch—and immediately broke into hives.

“Urghhh!” Gary staggered back, clutching his face. His tongue swelled like a balloon. Red blotches flared across his decaying skin. “Braa—ghhh—aghhh!”

The family stopped screaming.

“Are… are you okay?” the mother asked.

Gary wheezed, eyes watering. He fumbled in his torn suit pocket and pulled out a crumpled card: Severe allergies. Carry epinephrine auto-injector at all times.

Unfortunately, it was empty. He jabbed it into his thigh anyway, and fell to the carpet in a wheezy heap.

“Maybe… not braaains,” he croaked.

The teenage daughter, still trembling, offered him a slice of leftover pizza.

Gary sniffed it cautiously. No hives. He took a bite. Chewed. Swallowed.

“Peeeepperoni,” he sighed.

From that day forward, Gary became the world’s first “pizza-based” zombie. Instead of terrorising towns, he hung around takeaways, moaning until someone gave him a calzone. He still shuffled, still stank, still dropped the occasional finger, but at least he wasn’t itchy anymore.

And if you ever hear a groan outside your window at night, don’t panic. It’s probably just Gary, asking politely for a leftover slice of stromboli. And maybe a barbecue dip.

Memory Rent

The reminder arrived by mind prompt: SUBJECT: Renewal Required – Wedding Memory Lease, Ref. 7120-3C.

Cost: £842.70. Payment due in 14 days.

He logged into his Memory Rent account. The cortex dashboard displayed his overdue holdings:

• Wedding Day (Tier III – Full Sensory Playback) – Pending Renewal
• Honeymoon (Tier II – Emotional Fragments) – Pending Renewal
• Grandmother’s Soup (Tier I – Taste/Scent Only) – Expired

He ran the budget calculator twice. Even with reduced drip feeds and cancelling the cooling plan, the payment wouldn’t clear.

At the Holographic Memory Bureau, the AI clerk outlined alternatives:

• Tier II (Visual Fragments Only) – £318.40
• Tier I (Single Still Image) – £94.15
• Archive Storage (No Access) – £0

He mind-signed the form beside Archive Storage.

“Final confirmation,” the AI clerk said. “You acknowledge that your Wedding Day memory will be deleted from active consciousness and remain inaccessible until repurchase, subject to availability and inflation.”

“I understand,” he replied.

That evening, his wife asked about their anniversary. He checked his internal index. Under Wedding Day: No Data Available.

She noticed his pause. “You didn’t renew, did you?”

His avatar shook its head.

She responded not with anger but with recognition. Then she reached for his interface screen. “I kept mine,” she said. “Tier II. I’ll carry it for both of us.”

He felt nothing stir in his own mind—no bells, no confetti, no vows. But her avatar’s grip was firm, and the warmth of it lodged itself in the present, unleased, unpriced.

Lost Property

When the announcement came—cancelled, replacement bus in one hour—Michael left the shivering crowd on the platform and wandered the concourse in search of warmth. Light spilling from a doorway came from a narrow office marked Lost Property. Heat wafted out, tinged with the smell of old paper.

As he entered, the clerk looked up from her crossword.

“Name?”

He hesitated, still rubbing his hands. “Michael Trent.”

She nodded, turned to a cabinet, and drew out a small cardboard box. Across the lid, in childish scrawl, was his name—the way he’d written it before joined-up letters and self-consciousness.

“This has been here a long while,” she said, pushing it across the counter. “Yours?”

Michael lifted it. Light, rattling faintly. He opened the lid. At once came a rush of scents: bubble-gum, damp fields, smoke from sparklers. Inside lay a paper crown, a stick sword, the cracked wheel of a toy car.

“My imagination,” he confirmed.

The clerk’s tone was businesslike.

“You’ll need to prove ownership. Regulations.”

Michael held up a plastic soldier.

“This one survived the Battle of the Back Garden. The rest are still buried under my Mum’s roses.”

The clerk checked her form, nodded.

“That matches. You may reclaim it, or sign it away for good. Most adults do.”

He glanced at the dotted line, then at the box, which seemed almost to breathe in his hands. Out on the concourse, the tannoy mumbled another apology, the waiting crowd groaned.

Michael closed the lid, tucked it under his arm.

When he stepped outside, the air had changed. Rain on the station roof thickened into bright confetti. The tannoy sang nonsense rhymes. A paper dragon, stitched from ticket stubs, uncoiled along the girders.

No one else noticed.

Michael smiled—a boyish, reckless smile he had not worn in years—and walked out into a night already bending to his imagination.

The Door Beneath the Lake

The lake left without ceremony, slipping away in the dark, leaving behind the print of its body in the earth. The wind moved differently there. Sound carried strangely. Fish lay in the cracked bed like lost coins, eyes clouded, mouths open to confess something no one could hear.

At the centre of the emptiness was the door. Not lying abandoned—waiting. Its wood was darker than wet soil, and when you touched it, it was warm, the way the underside of a stone is warm after a long day. The hinges seemed older than the town, the ring handle heavy enough to pull you forward if you stared at it too long.

At night, the ground breathed. Not with air, but with pressure, as if something behind the door shifted in its sleep. People dreamed of tides rising in locked rooms.

The first waters came not as rain from the sky, but as a surge from beneath. The earth cracked like glass, and the door swung wide without a sound.

The water did not rush—it climbed. Slow, deliberate, like a creature returning to its skin. It coiled around the ribs of the valley, filling the hollows, covering the bones. Fish rose with it, not thrashing, but drifting, as if they had been waiting just below the threshold.

By dawn, the lake was whole again. The town stood at its edge, watching the surface steam in the morning chill.

Something moved beneath—too large, too slow to be a fish.

And in the centre of the water, where no wind dared touch, it was warm as blood.

The Small Talk Wars

The robots seized control in under a week. No bloodshed. No resistance. Just a politely worded email: Human management has been deemed inefficient. You will now be governed by Algorithmic Authority. Have a nice day.

We expected servitude. Surveillance. Maybe death camps.

Instead, they started… talking to us. Not warning about the punishment for rebellion or broadcasting sinister proclamations—no, they wanted “interpersonal rapport.”

“HELLO HUMAN UNIT,” one would say, hovering by the coffee machine. “HOW ABOUT THAT… WEATHER?”

I’d say, “It’s sunny.”

“YES. THE SKY IS CLEAR. THIS IS… PLEASANT. IT REMINDS ME OF… ERROR: NO RELATED EXPERIENCE.”

Their idea of bonding was reading entire Wikipedia entries aloud. One drone followed me for three days reciting the history of shoelaces.

One perched outside my window at 6 a.m., all chrome and dead eyes.

“GOOD MORNING, HUMAN. HOW ABOUT THOSE… SPORTS?”

“I don’t watch sports,” I said.

“…I SEE. I ALSO DO NOT WATCH SPORTS. I ONCE WATCHED A SQUIRREL. IT WAS… BROWN.”

They never left. At the bus stop, in the shower, halfway through chewing—they’d ask questions no sane mind could answer.

“WHAT IS YOUR FAVOURITE SMELL FOR THE CONCEPT OF BIRTHDAY?”

“DO YOU ENJOY… BEES?”

“EXPLAIN THE SOCIETAL INFLUENCES ON SHOES.”

After a month, any resistance gave up—not because we feared them, but because we had been numbed by awkward pauses.

The machines hadn’t destroyed humanity. They’d just made conversation unbearable.

By Order of the Fish

Harry woke to the sound of applause.

Not the muffled, neighbour-has-the-TV-on-too-loud sort, but the crisp, united clapping of a crowd directly outside his window.

He staggered to the curtain and peered out. A small stage had been erected in the middle of the cul-de-sac, complete with bunting, microphones, and the town clerk wearing his ceremonial sash. Beside him—floating in a clear, water-filled lectern—was Mayor Bubbles.

Mayor Bubbles was Harry’s goldfish.

The clerk adjusted the microphone to face the bowl.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he announced, “by unanimous vote, we are proud to introduce the new mayor of Littlewick!”

The crowd roared. Bubbles opened and closed his mouth in a dignified fashion, fanning his fins with what Harry could only interpret as smugness.

By noon, official vehicles had pulled up outside Harry’s house. A team of assistants rolled in a state-of-the-art aquarium, complete with a bronze nameplate: The Honourable Bubbles, Mayor. Harry was handed a sheaf of policies to sign on his behalf—new regulations about pond cleanliness, an ordinance banning cats from public spaces, and an ambitious plan to flood the village green for “cultural enrichment”.

By sunset, Harry had resigned himself to his new life as the mayor’s personal aide. He spooned flakes into the tank as reporters’ cameras flashed.

Bubbles swam to the glass, meeting his eyes with an expression Harry had never noticed before: the slow, calculating calm of someone who had always known this day would come.

She Becomes 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.

Leonard in the Basement

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.