Tag: Writing

A single blue fountain pen lying on a grey government office desk. Harsh fluorescent lighting. The pen is perfectly centred. Everything else on the desk is slightly blurred. Hyper realistic. Cold colour palette.
Posted in stories

The Prompt Log

Posted on by Mike

I have been keeping a record. The AI suggested it. Or I suggested it to the AI. The distinction has become less reliable than it once was.

I work in procurement. I raise purchase orders for stationery, cleaning materials, and occasionally specialist equipment. It is precise work. It suits me, or suited me, or was described to me as suiting me at some point during a conversation I may or may not have initiated. I have been in the same office for eleven years. I know this because the file tells me so and I have learned to trust the file.

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A dimly lit office corridor with a frosted glass door marked “7” glowing with warm, shifting light. A woman stands at a distance holding files, facing the door, while the surrounding hallway remains shadowy and empty.
Posted in stories

The Room That Is Always in Use

Posted on by Mike

Nobody booked Room 7. That was the first thing Diane noticed when she took over the facilities spreadsheet from Paul, who had left without notice and without explanation, which itself nobody seemed to find strange.

The room sat between the stationery cupboard and the second-floor toilets. It had a number, a handle, a frosted panel through which light was always visible. Not the cold flicker of fluorescents. Something warmer. Something that occasionally shifted, very slightly, the way light shifts when a body moves through it.

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A frail dying old man, emaciated face with sunken cheeks and deep wrinkles. Wearing a heavy, rusty cyberpunk neuro-helmet over his head with glowing red interface lights.
Posted in stories

Lost Memories: A Tale of Memory Extraction at Seventy-Three

Posted on by Mike

They told me it would be painless. They always tell you it will be painless.

I was seventy-three when they fitted the first interface. A volunteer, they called me. Pioneer. That word tasted sweet once. Now it sits in my throat like old copper wire. They needed someone whose mind had already softened at the edges, they said. Someone whose memories had grown loose, easy to pull free like teeth from rotting gum. The young ones held too tight. Their thoughts fought back. Mine, they said, would cooperate.

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Posted in stories

The Finishing Touch

Posted on by Mike

The old man’s hands didn’t tremble anymore. That was the first thing people noticed, though they rarely lived long enough to mention it to anyone.

“Hold still, dear,” he murmured, tilting her chin upward with one weathered finger. The brush, so small, so impossibly fine, traced the curve of her lower lip. Vermillion. Always vermillion.

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wo skeletal figures face each other beneath a luminous dome of concentric lines, their bony hands clasped together. Orange dahlias bloom abundantly around them against a dark teal background, while flowing golden-orange waves ripple across the foreground.
Posted in stories

Until Death Do Us Start

Posted on by Mike

Sarah found Marcus in the Gardens Between, where the newly dead learn to let go.

“I’ve been waiting,” he said, extending skeletal fingers she recognised instantly, the same hands that had held hers through forty-seven years of marriage.

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