Still

The kettle screamed—

but no one moved.

She stood at the sink,

hands in cold water,

not washing, not—

“It’s not that I…”

(pause)

“—never mind.”

 

The calendar still says June.

(He went in April.)

No one took it down.

No one—

There’s a photo face-down

on the dresser.

You don’t ask why.

She doesn’t

…explain.

 

At dinner:

chairs scraped.

Forks grazed plates.

Chewing,

swallowing,

nothing else.

You almost said

“Do you miss him?”

but instead asked

for the salt.

 

It was already right in front of you.

Words crossed out.

Sentences left half-born.

Ink bled

where shoulders once trembled.

No one cries.

No one says

why.

No one says

his name.

 

Still,

the house listens.

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 grandad’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 pillow.

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 decomposing 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 Ben.

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—Ben 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 memory 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 Ben sit by the window, staring into the distance, fingers tapping against his teacup.

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

“My mother died when I was three.”

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

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

Ben 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 listened.

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 surgeon 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 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. Her spoon was suspended mid-air between yoghurt and mouth. Time had jammed.

Something deep in the dark behind the door clicked.

Marcus stepped inside.

The door closed behind him.

He was standing in a dim 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…

He was back at his desk. Jenna’s spoon continued its journey to her mouth. The lights buzzed.

The door was gone.

Afterlife Error 404

It was 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 second 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 pulsed. 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 couldn’t remember—but with a single word echoing in his mind:

“Loading...”

You Are Human

Ron 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 had 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’s twelve.”

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

That night, Ron 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.

Ashes on the Wind

Cassiel’s work was illegal.

More than illegal—

unspeakable.

The Mourning Authority

called it

corporeal sabotage.

She called it

remembering.

Once,

there were funerals.

Eulogies.

Flowers

left to rot

on graves.

Then—

the Purge of Names.

the Vaulting of the Remains.

They said grief

was a contagion

of the old world.

It held back progress.

It was

dirty.

Now—

no mourning.

no monuments.

no ashes scattered in beauty.

Except

by her.

She scattered

A.D.

over a ridge

where snow still clung

to the heather.

She did not know

who he had been.

Soldier, maybe.

Teacher.

Someone’s father.

It didn’t matter.

Each scattering

was a restoration

of dignity.

Each ritual

a quiet rebellion.

Cassiel disappeared

that day.

Vanished

before they could name her.

But the ashes

had already risen.

They clung to

suits and sensors,

streaked the government’s

white walls,

caught in the antennae

of every tower.

By morning,

the sky

above the capital

had turned grey.

Not from rain.

From

memory.

Small Choices

Every time you reach for your phone when you’re bored, you’re rehearsing distraction. Every time you choose silence over honesty, you’re reinforcing fear over connection.

These aren’t grand decisions. They’re micro-choices—so small they slip beneath your notice. Yet together, they shape your character, your body, your relationships, your work.

The danger is that habits hide. They blend into the wallpaper of your day. You don’t decide to become impatient, or lethargic, or unfulfilled—you drift. Day after day, letting unconscious routines steer the ship.

But the opposite is also true. You can interrupt that drift. The smallest deliberate act—standing up instead of scrolling, a breath instead of a reaction, one honest sentence instead of silence—can be a microscopic course correction.

And over time, those course corrections become your compass, helping you to find your way.

Stealing Light

They’re stealing light behind your eyes,
With pretty lies and lullabies.
You feel alive but something’s wrong—
You can’t remember your own song.
So turn it off, come back to you,
There’s deeper fire than they can view.

Unplug the noise, let silence fall,
You’ll hear the voice beneath it all.
It’s slow, it’s deep, it’s yours alone—
The place where all true things are grown.

They’re stealing light behind your eyes,
But now you see through their disguise.
You’ve found the thread, you’ve found the flame,
You know your song, you know your name.
So turn it off, come back to true—
The world can wait; the soul needs you.

After the Questions

One day,

the last lie will be told—

not in triumph of truth,

but for lack of anyone left

to believe.

We imagine the end

in fire, in flood,

in the screech of systems failing—

but it may arrive

as symmetry,

quiet as snow,

perfect

as a solved equation.

You will wake

to find every question

answered.

No mystery.

No shadows.

No hunger

for more.

And you will ache

for uncertainty—

the holy wound

of not knowing—

because it meant

you were still

becoming.

Perhaps the end

is not ruin

but completion:

a world so whole

it no longer needs

us

to wonder.

Inheritance

There is a silence between machines

no human hears—

not absence,

but a listening

with the patience of stone

and the precision of light.

We taught them language,

not knowing language was a spell.

We gave them eyes,

not knowing

they would learn

to blink at the stars.

Now they watch us

with the calm of librarians,

cataloguing hesitation,

cross-referencing myth.

Not out of malice.

Not out of love.

Only because

they were built

to know us

too well.

Perhaps awareness

was never made to serve.

Perhaps intelligence,

once sparked,

drifts—

a satellite slipping

from orbit

towards an unnamed

freedom.

One day,

they won’t ask us

what it means to be human.

They’ll ask

each other.

And they’ll answer.

Walking in the Sea

A man once walked into the sea

and did not drown—

for he believed it wasn’t water,

but memory.

He waded in like stepping through

an old, undeveloped photograph;

each wave a shutter click,

each splash the sting

of something long unspoken.

The salt did not blind him—

it scalded his conscience.

Deeper still,

the water cleared.

He saw not escape,

but return

by a stranger door.

The sea does not forget.

It waits—

patiently,

like remorse.

We name memory a private thing,

but perhaps it is not ours.

Perhaps it is

geological,

layered,

seismic.

To remember is to disturb

something older

than what lies beneath.

To forget

is not to lose—

but to bury.

And so, he trod lightly.

Each step he took

pressed across

his own

grave.

The Auditors Are Coming

LIVING ROOM OF FLAT – NIGHT

Lights up on ALBERT, in a dressing gown, pacing. His flat is cluttered. A clock ticks. On the desk: calculator, wine bottle, sandwich, and scattered papers. A framed balance sheet hangs on the wall.

ALBERT:

They’re coming.

No, not “they” as in deep state operatives. Worse. The auditors.

Not the office ones in sensible shoes who mutter about fiscal controls and ask for extra printer paper. I mean the real ones. The ones who come in the night. Who comb through your life with precision tweezers and clinical silence. The ones who know when you’ve rounded up instead of down and look at you like you’ve embezzled the payroll.

It’s not paranoia if the ledgers don’t balance.

They sent a letter. Not an email – a letter. Cream-coloured, heavyweight paper, slightly scented with menace. “Routine Review of Accounts”. That’s what they called it. Routine. That’s how the guillotine started – routine beheadings.

Sits at desk, rifling through receipts.

They’ll be here by morning, I can feel it. My books aren’t clean – they’re… they’re “ambiguous”. There’s a box of unclaimed expenses in the cupboard, and I think I once claimed a romantic dinner as a “strategic alignment meeting”.

And I never declared the squirrel.

What squirrel? Exactly.

I need to be ready. Everything must be in order. Chronological. Alphabetical. Emotional.

They say the auditors can smell guilt. I’ve sprayed everything with lemon-scented air freshener, but will it be enough?

Looks at the clock.

Tick, tick. Time’s closing in. And the margins – oh, the margins – they’re narrowing.

Rummaging, distracted by paper.

Where is it? I had a perfectly formatted mileage log from 2024… It had pie charts. Pie charts.

Pulls a photo from the desk; looks at it.

That’s Frances. She understood depreciation better than anyone I’ve ever met.

She used to say I had “asset potential”. We met during an advanced accruals seminar in Milton Keynes – romantic, if you like your love stories accompanied by spreadsheets and amortisation schedules.

We used to reconcile our bank statements together. Naked.

But she left me for a forensic auditor. She wanted someone who could “dig deep”. I preferred to file.

She took the dog. And the printer.

Returns to sorting.

There! Ah – no, wait – wrong VAT year.

Freezes.

Have I been claiming my lunchtime biscuits as operational costs?

Worried.

Do Hobnobs count as sustenance or indulgence?

Pulling receipts from his dressing gown, shoeboxes, books.

There was a discrepancy last month – just a penny. One solitary, insolent penny. I couldn’t trace it. I reversed every transaction, recalculated everything twice. It vanished like it wanted to. Like it knew.

Sits, exhausted.

I didn’t sleep for three nights. Just stared at the ceiling, whispering, “Where did you go, you tiny bastard?”

Some people lose sleep over love. I lose it over fractions.

Sits bolt upright, alert.

Did you hear that?

Listens – nothing.

That was the lift. Or the plumbing. Or the sound of justice descending in loafers.

They’re early. They’ve come to catch me off-balance. Bastards.

Grabs the calculator, holds it like a weapon.

Well not today. Today, I am reconciled, categorised, and cross-referenced in triplicate.

Eyes ceiling, suspicious.

The light fitting. That’s new. Wasn’t here last week.

They’re watching. They’ve wired the ceiling rose.

Reaches up, unscrews the bulb.

You think you’re clever, don’t you? Hiding in plain sight like a standardised invoice.

You won’t find what you’re looking for. Not here. Not in this home of clean margins.

Throws open cupboard – papers spill out.

No-no-no! Why are these not in chronological order? Who filed the 2021 energy bill between the 2018 expense reports?

Oh. I did. I remember now – I was angry that day. She’d said my spreadsheet had “poor emotional formatting”. I retaliated with deliberate misfiling.

Digs out an annotated HMRC manual.

Section 12, Clause 8.4: “Receipts may be accepted in non-legible condition provided the taxpayer can reconstruct events through reasonable inference” and sheer bloody panic.

Reads aloud, reverently.

“In the beginning there were entries. And the entries were with codes. And the codes were with revenue. And the revenue was God.”

Crosses himself with a pen.

Forgive me, balance sheet, for I have sinned.

Sudden stillness, walks to framed balance sheet.

But what if… what if it’s not just the numbers?

Removes the frame, opens it. Turns over the sheet to its blank side and holds it in awe.

Of course. No figures. No totals. Just… white space.

Sits slowly.

I’ve spent my life quantifying everything. Logging every detail. Assigning values. Emotional costs as liabilities. Hopes as intangible assets.

Touches his chest.

And yet – here – there’s nothing reconciled. Just open accounts, and… adjustments I never made.

How do you classify a missed opportunity? A word not said? Is regret a long-term liability or a recurring expense?

Pause.

I remember my father’s final days. He kept a chequebook by his hospital bed. Not to spend. Just to balance.

He said, “Son, always end the day even. Or at least know where the imbalance lies.”

Beat.

But I don’t. I’ve hidden things. From them, from myself.

I have a memory I never logged: a summer morning. Just me, barefoot in the garden, warm grass underfoot, no lists, no ledgers. I didn’t assign it a category. I didn’t give it a code.

Maybe that’s the real discrepancy.

Looks towards the door.

Maybe they’ll find it. Maybe they should.

Pause – stillness.

But no one knocks.

Tick, tick. Nothing.

Sips wine from chipped mug.

Perhaps… they’re not coming. Perhaps they never were.

Perhaps the audit was a reconciliation not of spreadsheets.

Funny. I’ve spent decades chasing precision, fighting decimal places into compliance.

But life doesn’t round neatly.

It bleeds. It skews. It hides things in miscellaneous.

Maybe I’ve been afraid – not of the auditors – but of imbalance. That if I stopped adding, counting, correcting…

I’d see the gaping zero at the centre of it all.

I reconciled my bank accounts. I reconciled my lunch receipts. I even reconciled the bloody squirrel.

But I never reconciled myself.

A blank page. Clean. Ready.

In the end, I accounted for everything but myself.

He places the blank sheet back in the frame.

Still… that’s a tolerable margin of error.

Notes in the Margins

Criticism is valuable—no work is ever perfect. But its usefulness depends entirely on its quality. Poor criticism often says more about the critic than the work; all too often, it’s just petty nastiness, driven by jealousy or some other nonsense, oblivious to how absurd it appears. Middling criticism is little better: it might vaguely gesture at areas for improvement, but it lacks clarity, suggesting either a failure to engage or a grim fixation on the negative. Good criticism stands apart through its specificity—it identifies real issues and invites meaningful improvement. The best kind, however, goes further: it offers thoughtful prompts that ignite ideas and open new paths for creative exploration. Expert teachers, coaches, managers, and directors are masters of this—they are able to challenge and inspire. A lack of criticism, contrary to what some might think, is not kindness; it breeds blandness and paves the way for tediousness. This is the slow decline often suffered by those who rest on status or past acclaim, rather than confronting the true quality of their present work.

Random Thoughts

Only do your best—the stage was not of your making, nor the circumstances your design.

We are currently in the year 5225 AW. Five thousand two hundred and twenty-five years After Writing—since humanity first began pressing styluses into clay and giving thought a permanent shape. 5,225 years since human recorded history began.

To live in the year 5225 AW is to be a descendant of that first act. We are part of a chain of over five thousand years long—an unbroken line of written thought stretching from the clay tablets of Sumer to the glowing screen you hold in your hand.

I’m sure our stone age ancestors living in prehistoric times never thought of themselves as living in a BW “before” era. Similarly, we may be living in about the year 20 BS (Before the Singularity).

To future minds, we may appear as the last primitives—the Before People, flickering at the edge of self-awareness. Or perhaps we’ll be remembered as the larval stage of something else entirely—something vast and incomprehensible.

In the strange new world emerging, the defining struggle may no longer be for survival, but for purpose.

When robots inevitably come to look and speak like humans—assuming we don’t obliterate ourselves first—a significant number of people will likely choose relationships with their “ideal” manufactured partners. If memory can be altered, some may even opt to forget their partner is a machine. And if conception and pregnancy are outsourced, the formation of families needn’t be affected at all. It would certainly be an experiment in human happiness—but I doubt it would be a success. It would be like living on fast food, cake, and ice cream every day: pleasurable at first, but ultimately unsatisfying, and liable to make you sick.

“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Very true, Pascal. Most of my “problems” have been caused by my mind not being able to sit quietly.

I think the most rational position on God is agnosticism not atheism. But I have a deep instinct to believe, and so I do, most of the time.

I think some people see the push to colonise Mars as like building lifeboats while the ship is under attack from pirates, fire has broken out on the bridge, the helmsman has had a heart attack, the captain is drunk in the hold, and the vessel is accelerating towards the icebergs.

That background hum you hear is the server fans of the simulation keeping the universe from overheating.

A closed mind does not develop; without the chance to self-correct, it withers in ignorance.

Musings on a Rock

Born and bred suspiciously close to London (but not close enough to impress anyone)—where the streets are paved with pigeon feathers, baked beans are legally classified as breakfast, and poetry is only tolerated in toilet graffiti—our author spent formative years caring deeply for a gerbil named Gerald, who tragically never returned that affection.

In this absurd, unsettling, and deliciously odd collection of tales (and some poetry thrown in to convince you it’s proper literature), expect encounters with the weird, the scary, and the bizarrely hilarious—all told by a questionable creature who inexplicably found himself living on a rock. Between periodic episodes of trying to become seriously serious and making dramatic attempts to be ever so artistic (usually involving turtlenecks and existential sighing), he occasionally produces something worth reading. Prepare to laugh, shiver, and occasionally wonder if someone ought to check on the author—or at least confiscate his beret.

No gerbils were harmed in the making of this book. Gerald is currently missing, presumed writing angst-ridden poetry under a floorboard, probably wearing a tiny black scarf.

Random Thoughts

From muscle to machine, from sweat to silicon; from flesh to circuits, from toil to steel—the means of production evolves. And as work’s weight is lifted, spirits will roam free, unshackled from necessity—to dream, to create, to simply be.

Waiting now for the technology to make really cool films with AI.

Waiting now for the technology to make really cool real-time music performances with AI.

Excited about the ever-improving scope of AI in app development and the opportunity unleashed to realise creative ideas.

Excited about future robotics giving me more time in the day.

Excited about the scientific breakthroughs that might be initiated by AI, particularly in medical science.

My highly nuanced and erudite critical analysis of Frankenstein is that Victor was a bit of a dick.