Category: Prose

He lays his palm flat against the glass and is surprised for some reason that it sticks there – he thinks of tongues velcroed to icy lamp-posts, and freezerburn. He has been living in a warm climate until recently so he is…

They say that it was the event that galvanised the war, but later analysis proved conclusively that it never happened. It was labelled as being the largest false flag operation ever mounted by the joint US and UK Fiction Departments. They were…

The Rattleheads have been mainlining Tooth Fairy again, skirting around the edge of a Sanctity Zone, kicking out localised EMP blasts. A Signal Cop unholsters his interrupt gun and fires a heavy dose of shutdown at them and you seem them fritz…

He watched the beach inside the egg timer slow to a trickle and then he watched the last grain halt. Every particle invested with a meaning not obvious from a surface read. They called him and his kind Screens, because they occupied…

Chanticleer One sat down and looked at Chanticleer Two. ‘Are you a punk?’ ‘Yeah, hardcore.’ ‘How does that affect how you act as a time traveller?’ ‘I’m not sure. I mean, my brother Jeff is a straight edger, so he is careful…

Carlyle sat outside the Writing Recruitment Centre, known colloquially as Work Centres. They were giving spelling tests as a warm up for the National Spelling Bee. The Reality Corps had been put together not long after The Exquisite Corps was heard of,…

He’d been a drop-point for undercover Reality Engineers for a very long time. Sometimes they’d use very significant tomes to contain their ciphers, and sometimes he’d see them dropping off what seemed to be humorous asides. Everyone knew Bentham Holmes though –…

Strung between calendars and diaries. It was a lie that Reality Engineers had to first craft a mini-universe from a haiku, but they had to be able to full understand what was around them, so that they would notice when things had…

Zengler was an odd fish; Angler in the Typing Pools; liked to call books Reality Tablets. He thought of writers as con-artists – especially Immaculate Authors, who he called perpetrators of the longest con. Who was their mark? Anyone who picked up…