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16 – Echoes and Silence
Requiring a chair so I can sit down probably wouldn’t be a good look, would it? I’m not going to dignify that with a response. ‘I see Agency at my door. Do you people ever call first?’ Dorian’s voice said through the speaker. ‘Spyder, delighted to see you, you know the way.’ There was a buzz, and the gates began to slide open. ‘Spyder?’ Curt asked as they started to walk up the drive. ‘Is that what you’d prefer to be called?’ She shook her head, then realised that he was in front of her. ‘No,’ she said, ‘Stef’s fine. Just- Never the full version of the name, I hate…
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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…
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03 – Keeping Time, Losing Time
‘You should come out of your room.’ ‘Huh?’ Stef looked up at Dorian, playing the part of doorway lurker again, for the umpteenth million time since her arrival at the mansion. She looked back down at the pages of code spread in a messy, haphazard circle on the floor around her. ‘No thanks.’ ‘The rest of the team think you’re entirely more mysterious and interesting than they are.’ ‘I’m always a disappointment,’ she said as she circled a large section of gibberish with a red marker. ‘Let them live with the mystery for a while.’ ‘You’re reusing ideas they’ve already rejected,’ he said as he took a step into the…
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02 – The Best of Stories, The Worst of Stories
The world around Stef had ceased to exist. The only things still tangible in the smoky limbo were her screen and her keyboard. The latter was less real, existing only as an abstract, a tool through which algorithms and codes took shape. From somewhere in the smoke, a beep reminded her to breathe. Stef took a breath but didn’t dare to blink, lest the fragile connection she had to her task be lost. Losing concentration would mean losing the battle with consciousness, and she’d only been awake for twenty-three hours. ‘I’m awake,’ she said, unconvinced. ‘I am awake.’ A knock from somewhere out in the smoke made her hands slip…
