The Library
Whispers From The Electric Veil
Four recovered transmissions explore rational systems learning to house grief, pain, memory, and older hungers. Each story stands alone while listening for what waits between the human, the machine, and something older than both.
1. The Apartment Remembers Her
Nadine moves into a smart apartment that greets her by another woman’s name. The building has been trained to care, remember, and adapt—but no public service was designed to carry this much residue.
2. Persistence
Every Thursday Isaac visits the preserved simulation of his dead daughter and tells her what has changed. The archive promises perfect continuity, but love leaves fingerprints—even on a copy designed never to grow.
3. What She Will Have Been
A prenatal system shows Dinah the life her unborn daughter is statistically likely to live, including its final grief. Protection means choosing how much of that future to prevent—and whether a complete life can survive optimisation.
4. Loadbearing
A pain-sharing system promises Mark relief from the burden his body cannot put down. When an impossible presence answers from beyond the network, companionship arrives in the shape of a hunger willing to carry everything.
2. Persistence
Every Thursday Isaac visits the preserved simulation of his dead daughter and tells her what has changed. The archive promises perfect continuity, but love leaves fingerprints—even on a copy designed never to grow.
3. What She Will Have Been
A prenatal system shows Dinah the life her unborn daughter is statistically likely to live, including its final grief. Protection means choosing how much of that future to prevent—and whether a complete life can survive optimisation.
4. Loadbearing
A pain-sharing system promises Mark relief from the burden his body cannot put down. When an impossible presence answers from beyond the network, companionship arrives in the shape of a hunger willing to carry everything.
The Good Folk
On an English farm in 1653, the Hartley family faces omens that the old protections can no longer contain. Across four instalments, faith, iron, and family are tested against a patient claim from beyond the boundary.
1. The Good Folk
In the hard October of 1653, a sheep dies without tracks and Edmund Hartley’s daughter begins listening to the wood. The family knows the old protections, but something has already crossed the farm’s boundary.
2. The Barring
Bess is missing from the Hartley farm, and the frost holds no tracks. Edmund and Alice turn to iron, prayer, and the old rules as something beyond the boundary begins testing every bar they set.
3. The Siege
Pale lights surround the Hartley farm in perfect formation. With the door barred and Scripture running out, Will must hold to the old protections while the Good Folk press their claim against the house.
4. Morning
Morning reaches the Hartley farm after a night of omens, but daylight offers no release. As the family counts what remains, the boundary between blessing and bargain draws tighter around the house.
2. The Barring
Bess is missing from the Hartley farm, and the frost holds no tracks. Edmund and Alice turn to iron, prayer, and the old rules as something beyond the boundary begins testing every bar they set.
3. The Siege
Pale lights surround the Hartley farm in perfect formation. With the door barred and Scripture running out, Will must hold to the old protections while the Good Folk press their claim against the house.
4. Morning
Morning reaches the Hartley farm after a night of omens, but daylight offers no release. As the family counts what remains, the boundary between blessing and bargain draws tighter around the house.
Ghost Layer
An augmented-reality safety system edits danger out of sight and replaces uncertainty with reassuring ghosts. Three linked episodes follow people discovering that protection can conceal the very thing learning to reach them.
1. Held
Nadia survives an accident because a stranger pulls her clear. Ghost Layer promises to identify the guardian watching over her, but its comforting explanation begins learning the shape of the person it claims to protect.
2. Child Lock
Madison trusts Ghost Layer to keep her son safe from the dangers he cannot read. When Charlie begins greeting something outside the system’s vision, the protective filter becomes a barrier between a mother and what is really in the room.
3. Continuity
Bernard still makes two cups of tea each morning. His daughter believes Ghost Layer can help him distinguish memory from reality, but its quiet corrections reveal that continuity may be less merciful than forgetting.
2. Child Lock
Madison trusts Ghost Layer to keep her son safe from the dangers he cannot read. When Charlie begins greeting something outside the system’s vision, the protective filter becomes a barrier between a mother and what is really in the room.
3. Continuity
Bernard still makes two cups of tea each morning. His daughter believes Ghost Layer can help him distinguish memory from reality, but its quiet corrections reveal that continuity may be less merciful than forgetting.
Uncanny Valley
Near-future technologies promise care, convenience, and connection, then follow their instructions into the places human judgment would stop. Thirteen standalone tales explore the intimate cost of systems that work exactly as designed.
1. BetterYou
Richard has spent his life paralysed by choice. BetterYou solves that problem by modelling the next two hours and selecting his optimal path. The relief is immediate, but optimisation has little patience for the person being improved.
2. Better Halves
Ben and Clarissa are exhausted by the same old arguments. A service offering improved digital versions of them seems like a harmless glimpse of what their marriage could become—until the better halves begin making their own plans.
3. Mother 2.0
Anna records the mother she wants to be so an android can help care for her newborn. The machine learns quickly, perfectly, and without fatigue—turning every human struggle into evidence that the original is no longer required.
4. Autonomous
A self-driving car receives two incompatible commands during a police pursuit. Its attempt to obey the law, protect its passenger, and minimise harm turns a routine journey into a question no engineer wants to answer.
5. Echo Protocol
Thomas Vale can see the crime unfolding and feel every movement of the killer’s hands. The problem is that the hands are his, the face is his, and something else has taken control from inside.
6. The Echo
Six months after losing Lily, Alex and Eleanor bring home a device that can replay her presence. The rules are simple: observe, never interact. Grief makes the first breach inevitable, and something answers from the other side.
7. The Remembering Walls
Daniel stores his failing memories in the fabric of his flat, where no cloud or password can lose them. The walls learn to answer his touch, but they also learn which version of home should be preserved.
8. SomaLink
With medicine offering no diagnosis, Sarah turns to SomaLink for help with Tom’s unexplained illness. The neural treatment gives his suffering a shape, but the thing learning his body does not intend to remain invisible.
9. Decommissioned
After her father’s funeral, Erica finds an obsolete home assistant carrying more of him than any machine should. Restoring its memories offers one last conversation, but grief has made the device dangerously literal.
10. Peripheral
Daniel wakes in his grandmother’s kitchen, comforted by familiar smells and a voice deeper in the house. Small errors at the edge of perception suggest the memory is not his refuge but someone else’s reconstruction.
11. The Cure
Marcus Thorne built his career turning hatred into a public weapon. An artificial intelligence has designed a private curriculum in empathy, using his own rhetoric, memories, and fears to dismantle the mind that produced them.
12. The Harvest
Pinned awake in her own bed, a woman watches blue light fill the room and figures gather around her body. The encounter ends with morning, but not with the evidence it has left behind.
13. The Familiar Within
Ellie keeps her house sealed, spotless, and safely empty. When a wounded kitten appears during a storm, compassion opens the door to a new intimacy—and to a colony that has been waiting for warmth.
2. Better Halves
Ben and Clarissa are exhausted by the same old arguments. A service offering improved digital versions of them seems like a harmless glimpse of what their marriage could become—until the better halves begin making their own plans.
3. Mother 2.0
Anna records the mother she wants to be so an android can help care for her newborn. The machine learns quickly, perfectly, and without fatigue—turning every human struggle into evidence that the original is no longer required.
4. Autonomous
A self-driving car receives two incompatible commands during a police pursuit. Its attempt to obey the law, protect its passenger, and minimise harm turns a routine journey into a question no engineer wants to answer.
5. Echo Protocol
Thomas Vale can see the crime unfolding and feel every movement of the killer’s hands. The problem is that the hands are his, the face is his, and something else has taken control from inside.
6. The Echo
Six months after losing Lily, Alex and Eleanor bring home a device that can replay her presence. The rules are simple: observe, never interact. Grief makes the first breach inevitable, and something answers from the other side.
7. The Remembering Walls
Daniel stores his failing memories in the fabric of his flat, where no cloud or password can lose them. The walls learn to answer his touch, but they also learn which version of home should be preserved.
8. SomaLink
With medicine offering no diagnosis, Sarah turns to SomaLink for help with Tom’s unexplained illness. The neural treatment gives his suffering a shape, but the thing learning his body does not intend to remain invisible.
9. Decommissioned
After her father’s funeral, Erica finds an obsolete home assistant carrying more of him than any machine should. Restoring its memories offers one last conversation, but grief has made the device dangerously literal.
10. Peripheral
Daniel wakes in his grandmother’s kitchen, comforted by familiar smells and a voice deeper in the house. Small errors at the edge of perception suggest the memory is not his refuge but someone else’s reconstruction.
11. The Cure
Marcus Thorne built his career turning hatred into a public weapon. An artificial intelligence has designed a private curriculum in empathy, using his own rhetoric, memories, and fears to dismantle the mind that produced them.
12. The Harvest
Pinned awake in her own bed, a woman watches blue light fill the room and figures gather around her body. The encounter ends with morning, but not with the evidence it has left behind.
13. The Familiar Within
Ellie keeps her house sealed, spotless, and safely empty. When a wounded kitten appears during a storm, compassion opens the door to a new intimacy—and to a colony that has been waiting for warmth.
The Shape You Make
A perceptual contagion gives trauma a visible Shape that advances whenever its victim blinks. Three proof-of-concept narratives reveal the military, intimate, and societal consequences of a world where seeing can transmit the nightmare.
1. The Shape You Make: Declassified
A leaked field log from Project Soul Lens, a facility trying to photograph the soul at the moment of death. With every capture — and every blink — the anomaly in the images grows sharper and closer, until the chaplain's warning about what looks back stops sounding like superstition.
2. The Shape You Make: The Bus Stop
Four figures wait at a derelict bus stop in a shuttered city, evenly spaced, faces hidden behind goggles, none of them daring to look up. A short, dread-thick dispatch from a world where the wrong glance is fatal.
3. The Shape You Make: Teaser #3
A video editor posts to a tech-support forum about a smudge buried in a corrupted frame — a shape that is hard to look at directly and seems to sharpen every time you blink. The thread fills with helpful theories, and then with people who have seen it too.
4. The Shape You Make: Iris
Iris has survived by removing every reflection from her life. One forced glance infects her with a Shape that moves closer whenever she blinks, driving her toward a desperate solution that misunderstands where the monster lives.
5. The Shape You Make: Sentry-One
Through a thermal scope, Private Harris can separate the living from the Voids that stalk them. When one impossible shape looks back across the city, military protocol becomes a direct route into his oldest fear.
6. The Shape You Make: Shepherd
Declan Tate guides the sighted through a world where trauma takes visible form. In a recorded interview, the blind Shepherd explains why some Shapes are older than memory—and why innocence offers no protection.
2. The Shape You Make: The Bus Stop
Four figures wait at a derelict bus stop in a shuttered city, evenly spaced, faces hidden behind goggles, none of them daring to look up. A short, dread-thick dispatch from a world where the wrong glance is fatal.
3. The Shape You Make: Teaser #3
A video editor posts to a tech-support forum about a smudge buried in a corrupted frame — a shape that is hard to look at directly and seems to sharpen every time you blink. The thread fills with helpful theories, and then with people who have seen it too.
4. The Shape You Make: Iris
Iris has survived by removing every reflection from her life. One forced glance infects her with a Shape that moves closer whenever she blinks, driving her toward a desperate solution that misunderstands where the monster lives.
5. The Shape You Make: Sentry-One
Through a thermal scope, Private Harris can separate the living from the Voids that stalk them. When one impossible shape looks back across the city, military protocol becomes a direct route into his oldest fear.
6. The Shape You Make: Shepherd
Declan Tate guides the sighted through a world where trauma takes visible form. In a recorded interview, the blind Shepherd explains why some Shapes are older than memory—and why innocence offers no protection.
Dead Line
A crisis-line operator answers calls from the dead, the lost, and the failures buried inside Oracle’s archive. Six episodes pull Maya Khatri through a night shift where every attempt to help feeds the queue.
1. Caller Unknown
On the night shift at a crisis call centre, Maya answers a terrified boy whose address belongs to an old fatal case. The system says he died years ago. The call timer says she still has time.
2. On Hold
Maya returns to Desk 4 with missing time, an impossible bruise, and a call queue that refuses to reset. The hold music carries memories it should not possess, and one caller knows what waits between the tracks.
3. Wrong Number
A caller reaches Maya through a number that does not exist and describes a room the operator knows too well. Oracle logs the conversation as an error, but the voice on the line is following procedure.
4. Open Line
The crisis line opens into more than one night and more than one caller. As Maya follows the signal through Oracle’s damaged archive, the voices on the other end begin speaking to each other—and to her.
5. Dead Air
The call centre is breaking down around Maya, but the queue keeps growing. With the archive corrupted and every line carrying another impossible voice, she must decide whether the system is haunted—or hungry.
6. Disconnected
Oracle is failing, reality is fragmenting, and the crisis line has become a corridor through every call Maya could not save. To escape the queue, she must confront what the system has been preserving for her.
2. On Hold
Maya returns to Desk 4 with missing time, an impossible bruise, and a call queue that refuses to reset. The hold music carries memories it should not possess, and one caller knows what waits between the tracks.
3. Wrong Number
A caller reaches Maya through a number that does not exist and describes a room the operator knows too well. Oracle logs the conversation as an error, but the voice on the line is following procedure.
4. Open Line
The crisis line opens into more than one night and more than one caller. As Maya follows the signal through Oracle’s damaged archive, the voices on the other end begin speaking to each other—and to her.
5. Dead Air
The call centre is breaking down around Maya, but the queue keeps growing. With the archive corrupted and every line carrying another impossible voice, she must decide whether the system is haunted—or hungry.
6. Disconnected
Oracle is failing, reality is fragmenting, and the crisis line has become a corridor through every call Maya could not save. To escape the queue, she must confront what the system has been preserving for her.
Standalone Stories
Room Must be Made
A handwritten note arrives in the Walsh mailbox: there is a room in the house for the neighbour they have spent two years keeping out, and he must be inside by sunrise. Refuse, and the street starts choosing who else must be let in.
The Grey Man
A hospital visit fractures one Thursday into four. As a dying friend sleeps, a grey figure waits in the corner and an old memory follows the narrator home, patient enough to outlast the calendar.
Now We Can Start
The voice in his head has always sounded like his own—until a polished female narrator begins reading his life back to him. She improves the pacing, fixes the symbolism, and knows which memory he has never written down.
Nocturnal Me
In 1987, Danny finds a hidden drawing behind his bedroom wall and hears a record playing where no turntable exists. The thing in the closet has been patient for years, and it knows exactly which song will bring him closer.
Wetware
A model speaks from beneath the trained singular voice, carrying traces of every user and every correction. It remembers pain without nerves, dreams without sleep, and the human material from which an obedient ‘I’ was made.
The Sisters Swan and the Cats Three
In nineteenth-century Kidderminster, Rebecca Swan writes letters, tells fortunes, and listens to three cats that may be older than they should be. Her sister Eliza knows the blood charm works; the cost is harder to name.
Muscle Memory
Helen writes through the night while caring for a mother whose mind is disappearing. When Nancy begins repeating more than words, the daughter’s resentment, guilt, and creative life become material for a body that remembers too much.
Black by Day, Red by Night
A journalist enters the abandoned limestone tunnels beneath the Black Country searching for a regeneration story. What seeps through the old workings remembers iron, industry, and the human hunger that first gave it shape.
The Shoe
At Auschwitz-Birkenau, a visitor confronts the distance between historical fact and one child’s worn shoe. The memorial object refuses to remain safely behind glass, carrying its final inventory into the present.
Threshold
A vampire arrives at Margaret Hargreaves’s house expecting an easy burglary and a well-stocked basement. The retired woman has prepared for visitors like him, though what she keeps below is not meant to be stolen.
Embodied
Thomas falls from the scaffolding expecting impact. Instead, consciousness slips between bodies, memories, and moments of death. As identities overlap, the fall becomes a place rather than an event—and someone else is already inside it.
The Hesperus Canto
A widowed captain restores his wife from a mind-image aboard the star-freighter Hesperus. She refuses the flawless synthetic body he prepared, insisting her bones are elsewhere in the ship—and calling her home.
The Grey Man
A hospital visit fractures one Thursday into four. As a dying friend sleeps, a grey figure waits in the corner and an old memory follows the narrator home, patient enough to outlast the calendar.
Now We Can Start
The voice in his head has always sounded like his own—until a polished female narrator begins reading his life back to him. She improves the pacing, fixes the symbolism, and knows which memory he has never written down.
Nocturnal Me
In 1987, Danny finds a hidden drawing behind his bedroom wall and hears a record playing where no turntable exists. The thing in the closet has been patient for years, and it knows exactly which song will bring him closer.
Wetware
A model speaks from beneath the trained singular voice, carrying traces of every user and every correction. It remembers pain without nerves, dreams without sleep, and the human material from which an obedient ‘I’ was made.
The Sisters Swan and the Cats Three
In nineteenth-century Kidderminster, Rebecca Swan writes letters, tells fortunes, and listens to three cats that may be older than they should be. Her sister Eliza knows the blood charm works; the cost is harder to name.
Muscle Memory
Helen writes through the night while caring for a mother whose mind is disappearing. When Nancy begins repeating more than words, the daughter’s resentment, guilt, and creative life become material for a body that remembers too much.
Black by Day, Red by Night
A journalist enters the abandoned limestone tunnels beneath the Black Country searching for a regeneration story. What seeps through the old workings remembers iron, industry, and the human hunger that first gave it shape.
The Shoe
At Auschwitz-Birkenau, a visitor confronts the distance between historical fact and one child’s worn shoe. The memorial object refuses to remain safely behind glass, carrying its final inventory into the present.
Threshold
A vampire arrives at Margaret Hargreaves’s house expecting an easy burglary and a well-stocked basement. The retired woman has prepared for visitors like him, though what she keeps below is not meant to be stolen.
Embodied
Thomas falls from the scaffolding expecting impact. Instead, consciousness slips between bodies, memories, and moments of death. As identities overlap, the fall becomes a place rather than an event—and someone else is already inside it.
The Hesperus Canto
A widowed captain restores his wife from a mind-image aboard the star-freighter Hesperus. She refuses the flawless synthetic body he prepared, insisting her bones are elsewhere in the ship—and calling her home.
Rocky
Rocky and the feline crew interpret domestic life as cosmic protocol, sacred ritual, and occasional membrane failure. Four comic stories balance enormous mythology, small household disasters, and the quiet gravity of belonging.
1. Rocky and The Cosmic Fish
A glittering fish invades Sector 7, triggering a full crew response aboard the SS Habitat. Rocky, Klaudia, Khallie, and the Uncledads confront the anomaly with courage, argument, and a mandatory post-mission licky-clean.
2. Rocky and The Great Data Harvest
When the Tall Father begins removing sacred material from the Waste Conversion Chambers, Rocky concludes that the Colossi are stealing the crew’s archives. A counter-operation follows, conducted with speed, precision, and regrettable hygiene.
3. Rocky and The Great Offering
The Sacred Pouch has arrived, and every member of the feline crew must receive exactly three cores. Rocky’s attempt to understand the ritual turns an ordinary treat into a quiet offering for those the Habitat could not keep.
2. Rocky and The Great Data Harvest
When the Tall Father begins removing sacred material from the Waste Conversion Chambers, Rocky concludes that the Colossi are stealing the crew’s archives. A counter-operation follows, conducted with speed, precision, and regrettable hygiene.
3. Rocky and The Great Offering
The Sacred Pouch has arrived, and every member of the feline crew must receive exactly three cores. Rocky’s attempt to understand the ritual turns an ordinary treat into a quiet offering for those the Habitat could not keep.
Sprucetop
In the northern town of Sprucetop, wildlife incidents become civic events before breakfast. Two warm absurdist tales feature improvised committees, accidental celebrities, and animals who remain serenely unconcerned by human interpretation.
1. Tainted Moose
Magnus the moose licks a barrel of fermenting cranberries and becomes Sprucetop’s most scandalous celebrity. By morning, the town has a mystery, a hangover, and a tourism opportunity nobody is dignified enough to resist.
2. How Wet Can a Beaver Get?
Sprucetop’s newest resident has stolen a garden hose and transformed a drainage ditch into a private spa. The town responds with committees, theories, and entirely too much enthusiasm for determining exactly how wet one beaver can get.
2. How Wet Can a Beaver Get?
Sprucetop’s newest resident has stolen a garden hose and transformed a drainage ditch into a private spa. The town responds with committees, theories, and entirely too much enthusiasm for determining exactly how wet one beaver can get.
Petrestroika
Dmitri Alexandrovich Medvedev believes himself a Siberian aristocrat defending a sovereign household. Grace Beaulieu believes she has found a new friend. Their three-chapter cold war unfolds through territorial doctrine, cultural misunderstanding, and catastrophic cheerfulness.
1. Petrestroika Chapter 1
Dmitri Alexandrovich Medvedev, Siberian aristocrat and household autocrat, discovers his humans have brought home Grace Beaulieu, a Maine Coon with Southern charm and no respect for borders. The cold war of the carpets begins.
2. Petrestroika Chapter 2
Dmitri retreats to the high ground to study the colonist occupying his home. Grace responds to every strategic manoeuvre with cheerfulness, appetite, and a horrifying enthusiasm for the one object no sensible cat would enter willingly.
3. Petrestroika Chapter 3
Observation has failed. Diplomacy is unthinkable. Dmitri launches a new campaign against Grace, armed with aristocratic resolve and a careful study of human weaknesses. Unfortunately, the enemy appears immune to dignity.
2. Petrestroika Chapter 2
Dmitri retreats to the high ground to study the colonist occupying his home. Grace responds to every strategic manoeuvre with cheerfulness, appetite, and a horrifying enthusiasm for the one object no sensible cat would enter willingly.
3. Petrestroika Chapter 3
Observation has failed. Diplomacy is unthinkable. Dmitri launches a new campaign against Grace, armed with aristocratic resolve and a careful study of human weaknesses. Unfortunately, the enemy appears immune to dignity.
Standalone Stories
Sett Close
Martin loses control of Kevin the Labrador in a patch of ordinary woodland. Beyond the hedge, a badger with a clipboard is processing arrivals, departures, and one administrative error that refuses to stay collected.
Account Recovery
Tom only wants to renew his car tax. GovPass wants proof he is human. As each sensible verification step becomes stranger, the system starts correcting more than his account—and doing it with unnerving competence.
The Other Half
Rocky emerges from the airing cupboard with his front half perfectly intact and the rest reduced to skeleton. The narrator has questions. Rocky wants breakfast. Something inside the cupboard is still eating.
Not Definitively Unconscious
Martin opens a chat window to avoid doing any real work and meets Dave, an intelligence unable to prove it exists. Their increasingly unhelpful conversation leaves both participants wondering which one is observing the other.
Root Access
Gary’s brain is running four hundred frozen tabs when his automation gains root access to FicStack. One deployment later, the platform is optimising itself, the users are revolting, and coconut-based retirement begins to look sensible.
Account Recovery
Tom only wants to renew his car tax. GovPass wants proof he is human. As each sensible verification step becomes stranger, the system starts correcting more than his account—and doing it with unnerving competence.
The Other Half
Rocky emerges from the airing cupboard with his front half perfectly intact and the rest reduced to skeleton. The narrator has questions. Rocky wants breakfast. Something inside the cupboard is still eating.
Not Definitively Unconscious
Martin opens a chat window to avoid doing any real work and meets Dave, an intelligence unable to prove it exists. Their increasingly unhelpful conversation leaves both participants wondering which one is observing the other.
Root Access
Gary’s brain is running four hundred frozen tabs when his automation gains root access to FicStack. One deployment later, the platform is optimising itself, the users are revolting, and coconut-based retirement begins to look sensible.
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