• 01 - Mirrorfall

    32 – Subscript

    There was a knock. Ryan opened his eyes, saw nothing but blue, and closed them again. There was peace. Weightlessness. Calm. Safety. Another knock. Thoughts started to become more clear. He breathed in and felt liquid blue rush across his tongue. He was in a tank – that meant he’d been injured. That meant- The feeling of serenity dropped away as recent memories crashed into his consciousness. He pressed a hand to his chest, feeling for where one of the exit wounds had been, and felt nothing but smooth skin. He was safe. He was- He wasn’t the only one who’d been injured. He focussed on his HUD, brought up…

  • 01 - Mirrorfall

    31 – Recovery.exe

    Ryan’s body hit the blue like a corpse. Despite himself, despite the numerous windows – both in his HUD and on the screens around him – telling him that the Director was still alive, Jones held his breath. The recovery tank was large – seven feet on each side and seven feet tall. Large enough for every standard agent to lay horizontal and spread their arms, taking in the peace and fulfilment that always came when fully submerged in blue. Blood spiralled away from Ryan’s body, riding the eddies towards the surface, before disappearing as the cleaning systems filtered it out. Unique amongst the agents in Queen Street, he was…

  • 01 - Mirrorfall

    24 – Tech Support

    The Tech department seemed so much more full of life than the Field floor. Large, flat-panel monitors streamed memes and videos. There were the standard emergency diagrams and such, but they were drowned out by schedules of a dozen different MMOs and P&P RPGs. Stef grimaced as she bumped into Curt. Warn me before stopping, next time. He pushed open a door but made a shushing motion. ‘This is the phone bank,’ he said, stepping aside to let her see a room with seven recruits at large desks, each containing at least three screens. ‘Some people can call us directly, but we also get a lot of triple-zero calls routed…

  • 01 - Mirrorfall

    11 – Crystal Laser Magic

    Stef slumped as the world became solid again, and moved to lean against the nearest wall – which was hard, almost every inch of wall space in this room was blocked by a cupboard, screen or set of cabinets. It wasn’t like shifting hurt, and if she took the time to think about it, it wasn’t particularly disorientating, but some part of her knew it was probably a wise idea to take breaths until the idea – the reality – of instant teleportation became something normal. Jones stood in the centre of the room, leaning on a long bench that looked like it belonged in a high school science room.…

  • 01 - Mirrorfall

    09 – Laughter in the Dark

    Stef looked back at the brick wall, sure of three things: First, that the sound of flesh against flesh was her buzz cut opponent slapping himself in the head as he sat atop the wall. Second, she wasn’t the ruler of the internets. Not yet. Third, the volcano-slash-agent was probably strong enough to push the wall down on her head and leave her as some sort of meaty hacker pancake. A delayed fourth thought slowly crawled into her brain, telling her that she couldn’t stay behind the wall forever – one way or another, she had to receive judgement for her maybe-brilliant method of fulfilling the task. Beside her, the…

  • 01 - Mirrorfall

    05 – The Third Path

    Ryan watched as ghosts drifted past the window-wall of his office. They weren’t ghosts in the traditional sense, these weren’t the less-than-cogent spectres that inhabited the in between and lost spaces of the world; these ghosts were echoes of memories. A mirrorfall’s parade of ghosts, one of the events that preceded the fall of the dying planet’s heart, seemed to him to be the most bittersweet – in the way of a wake, rather than a funeral. The ghosts, images of those swallowed by their dying planet, were always of the strongest memory that an individual had. It was always amazing to see how beautifully mundane some of those strong…

  • 2019 Short Stories,  Screen Saver

    05 – Screen Saver

    Someone kicked her. She moaned. ‘Get up!’ She could still taste blood and plastic. ‘Get up!’ Screen brought her hands up and felt disgusted when she found her face semi-glued to the carpet with blood. She hadn’t been out – if she’d been out at all, she could remember the passage of time, even though it was fuzzy – for long. ‘Your turn next, you’ve got to get up!’ A fairy shouted at her as he dragged her to her feet. She immediately went to the wall for balance, her head leaning against the window. The room was half empty, and her headache was three sizes too large. Redness filled…

  • 2019 Short Stories,  Screen Saver

    03 – Screen Saver

    After a few more reassurances from the agent, Jones had disappeared, the webcam feed replaced with what seemed to be a slideshow stream straight out of his memes folder. She watched the volley of pictures, grateful at his attempt to distract her. But it was barely working. There was only so much that cute pictures of kittens could do to combat the fact that she was one shitty hiding space away from being hogtied and shipped off to be sold to someone who – at best – would kill her before eating her. She looked down at her phone and tapped her thumb to keep the screen alive. The chat…

  • 2019 Short Stories,  Screen Saver

    02 – Screen Saver

    As tempting as it was to just head home from the new office, management was always less suspicious of her actions when they saw her at least a few times a day. She’d successfully managed to not do any work for three days, simply by walking past Manager Tom’s office a few times a day with a LAN cable around her neck. She called for a rideshare as she packed her laptop and accessories, then headed for the lift, functional, but still covered in plastic as befitted the work-in-progress building. The car pulled into the side street at the same time as she left the service exit, and she waved…