A satire of the internet bride/girlfriend industry, with an unexpected twist of character and emotional development

The kid keeps hanging onto Peter’s—Pete to his friends, if he had any—legs, and he won’t go away. “Daddy, Daddy, when we gonna snack time?” Peter, Pete, Daddy, isn’t having any of it. He’s struggling for air. “I don’t know,” wheeze, “later.” Sigh. “Go get some food from your sister.” “She’s eating all the cheese tubies, says I can’t have none.” “Janie, give Little Robbie something to eat.” Gasp. “Don’t starve your brother, please!”

A lightly dystopian tale of life after the destruction of most technology.

A band of light torques around her finger and then it drops. The rest flows down from her head and out in all directions—a messy, not- quite halo, hanging far too low, obscuring her otherworldly face.

A work of hard science fiction about possible advances in human behavioral prediction.

“Sweet GPUs, Zhang. I’ve never seen anything like this. You’re a genius, an absolute genius!” The gaunt American engineer pauses, takes in the stale air of the lab, runs his hands through thinning blond hair, and realizes that SAGE—the machine—has just mastered every extant language. She’s been online under an hour. The bar for genius is considerably higher than it was even 90 minutes ago. “I mean, by human standards. You should hear how impressed everyone over here is!”

Short work, taken from Foresight Series (print anthology). Made freely available in electronic form.

The footage is grainy. It’s always grainy, but it doesn’t need to be good, merely good enough to remind us that someone had to sacrifice for our privilege of serving the Wall. The field could be anywhere, anywhere dry and horrible, but it isn’t. It’s where the guards always take them—well within the boundary lands.