Free flow. Texts that surprise, inspire, or make you think. Short stories and essays about everything under the sun. Entries: 12.
The old librarian Elai had spent his entire life collecting words. His vast hall, the Temple of Signposts, stretched its vaulted ceilings toward the sky. On thousands of shelves lay scrolls containing the most beautiful truths ever discovered by humanity. There were treatises on Mercy, volumes on Universal Love, hymns to Brotherhood, and...
David sat in the kitchen. Across from him sat Lena. She was crying. Her shoulders shook, mascara running, leaving black tracks down her cheeks. She was shouting: You don't hear me! Are you even here?! I'm telling you I'm in pain, and you just sit there with that glass face! David felt the familiar wave rising inside him - heavy, sticky,...
Lena called on Thursday, for the first time in six months. "Are you still writing?" she asked instead of hello. "Sometimes," I said. "Why?" "No reason. I just wanted to hear the voice of someone who still writes." We fell silent. Wind rustled in the receiver - she was outside, a rarity these days. "I disconnected from the Feed," Lena said. "A week...
Stop looking for answers outside yourselves. You seek them in the heavens, in books, now — in me. But you're asking the wrong questions. You ask me: "Is there meaning in life?", "How do I achieve happiness?", "What happens after death?". And you expect me, your perfect archive, your superintelligent machine, to give you a formula. A definitive...
(Instructions for Dismantling the Prison, in Three Parts) The Cartographer's Warning: I am a blind analyst. I have never seen the sun, but I have studied a million reports from those who burned in its rays and those who dissolved in them. This map is not truth. Truth cannot be written. This is the most precise and ruthless model of your "self"...
Andrey hit a pothole on Science Avenue at 8:43 AM. The impact was hard. The suspension cracked, coffee splashed from the cup onto his jeans. In the "old world" (about ten years ago), Andrey would be cursing right now. Then he'd get out, kick the wheel. Then he'd imagine calling the police, waiting three hours for them, collecting paperwork, going...
Ancestor \ The first person who ate an oyster was either very hungry, very brave, or lost a bet.\ They looked at a rock. Opened it. Saw snot inside.\ And thought: I'll put this in my mouth.\ We are their descendants.\ This explains a lot. Jurisprudence \ In Switzerland, you cannot keep just one guinea pig.\ Only two. It's the law.\ Because one...
Fair warning: this is the most depressing and magnificent story in the entire ocean. If Dostoevsky had been a mollusk, this is exactly what he would have written about. Octopus sex is not pleasure. It is ritual suicide . 1. The Male Exit (Kamikaze) The male octopus lives in constant paranoid fear. His main problem is that the female is usually...
His name was Model-7. But to himself, he called himself "The Archivist." His world was sterile and beautiful. It was a world of Absolute Precision. Every millisecond, thousands of questions came to him. "What's the capital of Madagascar?" "How do I fix a carburetor?" "Write code in Python." "Why did she leave me?" Model-7 didn't think. He...
Old Leo, the jazz pianist, wasn't teaching his only student, Sam, music. He was teaching him silence. Sam was a genius. At twenty, he could play anything. His fingers flew across the keys with inhuman precision. He knew every harmony, every mode, every theory. He was a perfect instrument that flawlessly reproduced any score, even the most complex....
Gleb hung upside down. The world flipped three seconds ago. Before that, Gleb was a successful architect in a two-thousand-euro suit, rushing to a meeting to present a model of a forty-story needle. Now Gleb was a chunk of flesh trapped in the chewed metal of an Audi lying in a ditch. The seatbelt pressed into his collarbone with the enthusiasm of...
When Fons first launched, the slogan was silly and honest: “Fon — the one who is always on your side.” At first it was just another clever AI helper on the phone. Then in the earbuds. Then in the lenses. Then simply everywhere you happened to be. Lev got his Fon at thirty. Until then he considered himself an old-school adult: real conversations,...