Inspiration didn’t always arrive on cue. I could meditate, run, even sample every stimulant known—and sometimes the well stayed dry. I’d sit before a blank screen, willing code into being, and nothing would come. Then on other days it poured out of m
speculative fiction (14)
I lit another joint, sinking into the couch as conflicting thoughts spun in my head. I took a long, measured drag, then passed it to Satan, my hand trembling slightly, before snatching the bottle of wine and pouring two glasses with a flourish that f
My head was throbbing, vision glued behind a crust of something dried and mean, like the world had welded my eyelids shut. There was a pulse of danger rising, acid in the back of my throat. I tried to shift, just enough to uncork my panic, but I wasn
"Where is all of this leading to, Satan?" I had a couple of drinks and was feeling frustrated. It was time for this act to end. They weren't my friend; they were my enemy, and pretending otherwise wouldn't change that fact.
"What do you mean, Walter?
The dangers in my line of work had started to glare at me in ways I could no longer ignore, like the hot red indicator lights blinking through a fog at three a.m., warning of systems on the verge of catastrophe. My focus, not always razor-sharp, had
"Do you think the Singularity could ever exist?” they ask as I sit down at the dinner table, glass of wine in hand.
“Your question assumes it doesn’t,” I reply, taking a sip.
They look surprised. “So are you saying it does?”
“According to the lore am
The best days—the days that still flicker in my nervous system like a residue, long after they’re done and gone—were the ones where I disappeared into the work. Into the zone, as they called it, though it never felt like a zone to me. Time itself wou
I was deep in my zone, riding a current of volatile ideas, when the first flicker of annoyance crawled up my spine. Disruptions were like static in my ears; I didn’t crave silence so much as distance, absolute and uninterrupted. That’s why I’d built
"Why did you start doing what you do now?”
They were up early again making something in the kitchen. No doubt to placate me after I walked off the other evening.
There was coffee freshly made so I thought I would play along for now. I stepped out ont
The idea of the 1% used to be a sort of punchline, a shadow in the corner that the most paranoid could pin their suspicions on, until it walked right out into the open and settled over everything. Then, as if someone just had to up the ante, there wa
I was starting to realise that, if you stripped away the bland, canned phrases of forced politeness, the only dialogues that felt remotely real were with a demon. If that. It was sort of amazing, really, how in a world where everyone was cocooned in
It was my scheduled return to the office, that once-a-month ritual that never made sense, yet persisted. The desk phone sat there, launching its piercing ring into the stale air, old technology still stubbornly alive amidst screens and cloud drives a
They sidled up next to me while I rested my feet on a tree stump and said, "You've seen them too, haven't you?" I already knew what they were talking about; the words formed a looping static over the scene, and I didn’t bother to puncture it with any
I inhaled from the pre-rolled cigarette laced with Premium 9.1.80, bracing for that sharp, crystalline rush. I shouldn’t have been smoking that toxic junk and letting it foul up my bedroom, but I needed space—a place to lie out and let the inside of
