Matt Gemmell

“Would you agree that human translators are becoming less important as technology evolves?” The man asking the question was wearing what seemed to be his only expression: blank, emotionless curiosity. Boone didn’t like him very much, nor did he particularly like the woman who sat to the man’s left, but Boone kept a faint smile on his face. It was a job interview, after all, and he needed the work. Their initial approach to him had been conventional enough, via an email reply to the ad that…

My symptoms had been getting steadily worse for almost a year by the time I was brought in for questioning. I’d been in denial for at least eighteen months at that point. It was easy to hide from other people because my profession is an extremely solitary one. The very few people that I do meet invariably don’t have the chance to even see my face — and if they do, and I do my job right, it’s the last thing they ever see. My reputation precedes me, you might say. My clients all come via word of…

Today marks the three-hundredth short story I’ve published, one per week, over the last (almost) six years. I haven’t missed a week yet, even when my son was born. I write extra stories ahead of time if there’s something coming up, like a trip, or indeed a pregnancy due date. A new story is published each Monday and sent out via email for free. You can also buy the full e-book compendium, if you like. There are 380,000 or so words in those stories collectively, and you can’t write that amount…

By the time we realised, it was obvious that we were too late. For decades at least, philosophers — and scientists, latterly — had been warning us. You can’t have one thing without the other, they said; no upside without downside. They were of the opinion that there was a single trajectory, inevitable due to the nature of human beings and by extension their work, that would lead inexorably to a single outcome. They were wrong. About the outcome, but not the process. We ought to have seen it…

“At least I have a job,” he said. “There’s a lot of unemployment these days.” “That’s true, but it doesn’t mean you have to pretend that your job is perfect,” the therapist replied. Her name was Dr. Weston, and she’d had her own practice for just over eleven years. She helped patients from all walks of life with any number of issues, including substance abuse, grief, marriage counselling, emotional trauma, stress and depression, and considerably more. Her approach was always bespoke, making no…

“Is anyone familiar with the concept of the Dao?” The man stood at the front of the makeshift classroom, its high windows looking out on a grey afternoon somewhere in the city, transparent from within but opaque from the outside. His face was constantly pensive — distracted, almost — but he was clearly focusing on what he was saying. Anwen knew him only as Faine, and she had met him just that morning. He was one of those men with a vaguely academic air; dark eyes, and darker hair that was a…

It was raining in Edinburgh, but that was nothing unusual — except that it had been too cold for rain since the weekend, and didn’t feel much warmer on this grey morning. Glancey tapped her forefinger rhythmically against her lips as she looked out of the car’s water-beaded side window. The adjacent building was a grand old townhouse of the kind found all throughout the city. This one was a little dilapidated now, but it would still sell for well over a million even if it was a complete…

I’d been sitting in the small room for more than an hour, and I knew that I should be getting annoyed by now. But, strangely, I wasn’t. The lights were fluorescent strips, all working perfectly, and the walls were a plain and even slightly dull white. Nothing was particularly old or worn, but nothing was brand new either. I was vaguely aware that there were notices pinned to a cork board near the door, but I had no interest in reading them. They had brought me here directly from the highway,…

The curfew starts earlier in winter. They begin to extend it once September arrives, by an hour every few weeks, so that once the end of the year approaches we’re all indoors well before full dark. On its own, it’s not so much of a burden. The big pandemics taught us how to isolate for long periods, so a simple curfew during the hours of darkness is easy by comparison. We quickly learned the routine of closing and locking our doors, obscuring our windows with curtains, blinds, or (for the lucky…

Their first attempt to contact us went unnoticed. Apparently we had evolved in an unusual way, at least from a technological perspective. There were many commonalities with the other intelligent civilisations they’d encountered, but there were also gaps; areas that we’d somehow skipped over. We’d missed, for example, the quirk of magnetism that allowed for unlimited power generation given the correct high-atomic-number elements. We’d also missed the shortcut to synthesising arbitrary elements…

Widowed at thirty-three years old, she thought. As if her age mattered. As if anything did. Her name was Rebecca Haugen, née Parry and perhaps now Parry again. Her husband’s name was — or had been — Daniel. He had lived for thirty-seven years, fourteen of them with her, before his life ended on a Wednesday evening as he took his regular jog through their neighbourhood. The man driving the flashy SUV had the unlikely name of Taylor Walker the Third, which was two last names plus a number if you…

“Welcome to the history section,” the librarian said. “Is there something I can help you find?” Anne smiled, allowing herself to lean against the polished wooden counter. It was a cold day outside, and she was tired from the walk — not that she was complaining, mind you. There was so much beauty in the world, even when you were in your seventy-eighth year on Earth. Her walking stick was her trusty companion. “I’m looking for books on the Second World War,” she replied. The librarian nodded, and…

The knock came late in the evening. The weather was calm and clear, and the sky was already dark. The house was quiet. The child’s parents were downstairs — two storeys below, not just one, because the house was old and cold and vast, with too many rooms — and they didn’t hear anything at all. The knock was restrained, and polite. The knock came from the cupboard door. The child opened her eyes, and after a moment she sat up in bed. Her room was dimly lit, but not quite dark. The door to the…

Somewhere overhead, a fluorescent light was buzzing. The irregular pattern of light and dark was visible even through his closed eyelids. An image chased through his mind, too quickly to grab hold of, and then it was gone. Something he ought to remember. He opened his eyes, and there was pain. The lights were too bright, even though one of them flickered on and off. The pain was in his head, on the right side towards the back. He gingerly touched the hair there, and, yes, there was a bump. The…

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...