The Abolition of Night
A city engineered sleep away to keep everyone content. Then an auditor of forbidden dreams begins, four seconds at a time, to remember what daylight erased.
Stories tagged “dystopia”
40 stories found
A Sound of Turning Pages
The last library in the world stood at the end of Cormorant Street, and Silas Vane opened it every morning at nine, though no one had crossed its threshold in eleven years. He unlocked the great doors anyway.
The Weight Between Stars
You are the only human alive who can see dark matter — the vast unseen weight that holds the stars in place. And the men who run the world want your map.
The Mending
They gave us the menders for free, and that should have been the first warning. Nobody hands the poor anything for free unless they have already found a way to take back something larger.
Mitigation
The defendant, Dr. Marigold Sayre, is charged with one (1) count of unauthorized retrocausal intervention, in contravention of Statute 42-A. The defendant has acknowledged the intervention. She has not acknowledged the harm.
The Same Hands
I was a corporal in the Eighth Pacification when I first held one of them. You have to understand: by then I had killed eleven of them. We had been told they were not human.
The Good News Desk
"Dr. Leung, please. Sit down. Would you like a refreshment? The coffee is excellent here. We have it flown in from a small estate in Kenya — a pleasure I think you will appreciate, though I confess I never drink it myself before evening. Old habits."
The Protocol
When you sign up for the trial, they give you a folder. The folder is blue. On the cover, in sans-serif type, it says: Hemisphere Therapeutics — Restorative Cellular Protocol (Phase III).
Tuesday
Listen. This is not the first time I have written this. It is possibly the ten-thousandth. I do not know.
Scraper
The commission came in just before dawn, through the usual encrypted channels. One memory. Specific parameters. March 2023, Manila, late afternoon, subject female, 44 years old, eating a mango on a balcony during a power outage.