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It was a beautiful summer evening on the day when I learned how to see inside. I had to go back into work, even though it was a Friday and already past 7PM. An alarm had tripped on the monitoring system for a rack of backup servers we run, which are used by several different clients. It’s a tertiary backup, so there was no immediate danger, but the point of backups is redundancy. So, we treat every problem as a potential emergency. It’s a good system. We have an on-call rota for weekends, which…
For several years, I’ve been writing weekly flash fiction: ultra-brief tales of 1,000 words or more, usually in genres including science fiction, horror, and the supernatural. Those stories collectively are called Once Upon A Time. You can receive a new story each Monday morning via email, if you like, or you can read the story archive online. I’m pleased to announce that now there’s another option: get the entire collection of stories as a set of epub files for your favourite reader device,…
All software has bugs, the sign says. I walk past it every morning on my way into the building where I work. Sometimes the sign makes me smile, albeit in a slightly preoccupied way. Sometimes it makes me frown. It just depends how I’m feeling. It’s a strange thing to always start the day not knowing what your job is. I know that it’s normal for me. I know that someone — my boss, that’s right; it was my boss — who told me I’d always start each day like this. I’ll probably see him in a few…
One hundred and four seconds. Not a long time. Or is it? It’s less than two minutes, but it could be an eternity under the right circumstances. Press your hand to a hot stove for a minute, and it’ll seem like an hour, as Einstein noted. But one hundred and four seconds is only the blink of an eye within a human lifetime. It was a cyclist who found me, so I’m told. It wasn’t like in the news, where a passerby rescues someone and then they have a tearful meeting later on. My passerby made the…
Wednesday, 11th April, 1821 My dear friend William, I hope this letter finds you in both good spirits and rude health, and I must convey my most sincere apologies for the unavoidable delay in sending it. I find myself at last back on the mainland, and have dispatched this letter from a small town but scant miles from the port where I spent last night. Our ordeal in reaching it was considerable, and it is on that topic that I wished immediately to write to you, lest with the passing of further…
The younger man looked nervous, and his supervisor was only marginally less so. Their visitor passes read ESA, and bore a small holographic mark which they had both assumed was standard, but it had drawn expressions of quickly-concealed surprise from more than one person they’d passed on their way from the building’s grand entrance to the office on the sixth floor. There was no plaque on the door, but there had been two secretaries and three armed guards in the outer chamber. The office was…
The service was humanist instead of religious, which surprised no-one who was present. The young couple were just that — young — and for them, religion’s trappings seemed as faintly disquieting as they were ridiculous. The couple themselves had attended three other weddings in the last eighteen months, of their mutual friends from university, and not one had taken place in a church. Lavish venues in converted but still listed buildings were now the norm, which suited the parents’ pride and the…
In London, only a few minutes’ walk from the Ministry of Defence, Downing Street, and the Foreign & Commonwealth Office, there is a building which blends in perfectly with those around it. The same white stone and grand but anonymous frontage. The same brass railings, polished periodically but not obsessively, framing the four wide stairs up from the pavement. The same windows mostly obscured by blinds. The same secured entrance. Those who work there are divided into two groups. The first group…
The brain surgery was experimental, they said, and I laughed. Surely all brain surgery is experimental, I said, and they laughed, but their laughter was the uncomfortable kind. I told them to go right ahead, and I signed all the forms, because what the hell else was I going to do? They talked to me about the risks, but none seemed — in my layman’s understanding — to even remotely compete with death. They told me that some degree of minor damage was unavoidable. They told me about…
When the doors of the lift opened, Darren Grey stepped out, walked for about ten feet, and then stopped. The ground floor of the shopping centre was almost indistinguishable from either of the two levels above, except that the shops were a little more noticeably low-rent. In this particular area, he had three possible destinations within sight: the exit, a chain coffee shop, or a pretzel stand. Choices, he thought. Lots of little choices. Life was full of them. He’d made many today already. The…
The evening sky was as purple as the heather that stretched out before me, but it had bands of red and gold too. I’d hiked almost ten miles that day, in a long loop that would eventually bring me back to the car in another forty-five minutes or so. The light was fading, but I’d have more than enough time to make the trip safely. I’d even done plenty of night hikes before, though I’d never been so far north. The Cairngorms were far behind, and I was now well into the Highlands proper, moving…
Everything has to happen sometime. I mean, not everything that could happen actually comes to pass, but the stuff that does happen always has its time and place. It’s easy to forget that, in retrospect. The biggest events of human history were also just somebody’s Monday morning, or their Friday afternoon. Or somewhere in the middle. It was a little after 8:30 PM on a Wednesday night when they arrived. At least, that’s what time it was for me. I was just walking back into the living room, but…
The first thing that surprised me was that she smoked. Not a vape, or an e-cig. I see those all the time, but generally Edinburgh isn’t really a smokers’ sort of place. No, I mean that she smoked like a European tourist — actual cigarettes, in the little box. A lighter, too. Pretty rare sight in 2018, unless you’re walking past a pub somewhere outside the city centre. That was the first thing, but by no means the last. It’s hard to explain how I reacted, because usually I don’t trust strangers…
The Reverend Jim Miller was a blessed man, in every sense of the word. He had dedicated his life to his divine calling: ministering to those in need, spreading the good word of God, and serving both the community and the Lord tirelessly and in any way that he could. He was the reverend of St. Brigid’s in the same small town that he’d grown up in himself, and though he had travelled to many places in the world, the arrival of his fifty-fourth year found him wholly content to preach and serve…
Some deaths are someone else’s fault, and they’re probably the easiest because at least you can assign blame. That was the thought that had fastened itself onto Scott Russell’s mind, going round and round like a mantra, or a stuck record. He took another sip of the vodka and coke he’d been nursing for the past hour, wondering when the day would end. He didn’t usually add mixers to his drinks, but his sister-in-law had brought it to him and said that the sugar would help. To her credit, she’d…
Toby Collins bought the house against his wife’s advice, but then he’d done a lot of things against his wife’s advice already. That was why Anne would very soon be his ex-wife, and had gone to live with her sister after sixteen years of marriage. Collins still wore his wedding ring, and made a point of calling Anne once a week with the intent of begging her to take him back, but she never answered the phone. He couldn’t blame her. He’d been a distant and disappointing husband, by his own ad...
I look up from below, at the patchwork of shapes above me. They come in all forms, and all geometries, some moving and some perfectly still. Many have a human shape, or the shape of a tree, or a building, all with skewed angles that shallow and then deepen as each day dawns and passes. To me, they’re like clouds; black clouds on a negative sky, far above me but all within reach. I need only look to one, or fasten my attention upon it, to go there — and then I can be in the real world too. ...
She was a tobacco blonde, and she wasn’t getting younger. Thomson watched her from across the way, sitting in a soulless coffee place but drinking mint tea instead. He found the spectacle fascinating, glimpsed through the steam coming off the mug he held to warm his hands. There was an alley where she was standing, and she would back into it a bit if a police vehicle rolled by. Thomson thought it was a questionable move; too conspicuous. She would have been better just checking her phone, o...
It was an obnoxiously beautiful day, trite and insulting. Blue, hazy skies in a complex and fading gradient. A few streaks of lazy cloud dusted in for visual interest. Birds desperate to tell anyone and everyone who would listen. Heat making the tarmac seem to writhe. The kind of day where nature gives the middle finger to all human affairs, and people are still grateful for it. The analogue clock on the dashboard of the old grey Mercedes Benz pretended that elegance compensated for inaccur...
