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.
Stories tagged “dystopia”
36 stories found
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.
Other Weight
You are six years old the first time you tell your mother there is a woman standing in the refrigerator. Not a woman, exactly. A woman-shape. A density.
The Wrong Paper
The newspaper had the wrong date. Not the wrong date in the sense of being behind or ahead — it was dated correctly, April 17, 2028 — but the masthead said The Oakland Tribune, and the Tribune had ceased publication in 2007.
The Dust of Unread Words
The library smelled of autumn, even in June. Miriam Zhao had worked at the Blackwood Public Library for forty-three years, and in all that time, the smell had never changed.
Inherited Light
Zara woke up remembering a kitchen she had never entered. It was warm — that was the first thing.