Category: Stories

The letter arrived on a Thursday.

Plain white envelope, no return address. Inside, a single line on crisp paper:

We regret to inform you that you have been declared deceased.

Daniel read it twice, then laughed that brittle, half-afraid laugh you make when the world throws up nonsense. He checked his pulse. Felt the thrum in his throat, the warmth in his hands. Alive. Definitely alive.

He set it aside.

But that night, his bank card stopped working. The next day, his office pass denied him entry. Emails bounced. His name vanished from company records.

At the council office, the assistant squinted at her screen. “Strange,” she murmured, frowning. “It says here… deceased.”

That night, his key didn’t fit his front door.

Through the window, he saw his wife on the sofa, laughing with a man he didn’t know. When he knocked, she didn’t turn. When he shouted, no one stirred.

His reflection in the window wavered, then disappeared into mist.

Across the street, she’s talking to a friend on her phone, sunlight threading gold through her hair.

It’s her. Always her.

In Rome, she was Lucia—plague took her. In Warsaw, Anka—a soldier’s bullet. In Kyoto, Mai—his jealous rival’s knife. This life, she’s Davina. And he remembers.

The memory came back two days ago after he fell down the stairs: a rush, a drowning, all the lives folding into one sharp point. Names, faces, the taste of their last kiss, the weight of their last breath. And the terrible certainty: his love is the fuse.

He watches her laugh, the corner of her mouth lifting just so. His body aches to go to her. But the pattern’s clear now, unmistakable. Loving her means losing her.

She glances across—catches his gaze. Something flickers across her face. Recognition? No. Just polite curiosity. Not yet.

He tells himself to look away.

He does.

He convinces himself to take a breath, to turn, to walk.

But then—

She’s in the road, fumbling with her bag, phone slipping from her hand. A car barrels down the lane, too fast, too close.

He’s running before he knows.

The air smashes from her lungs as he yanks her back, arms tight around her waist, the car blaring past in a blur of metal and hot wind. She falls into him, breathless, eyes wide, face inches from his.

“Thank you,” she gasps, dazed. “I… I didn’t see…”

He lets go. He should step back. Should vanish into the crowd, slip free before the knot tightens.

But it’s too late. She’s looking at him now, really looking, brow furrowed—like she’s searching some half-remembered name, some shape in a dream.

And just like that, the fuse is lit.

He stood before the machine, hands in his coat pockets, eyes fixed on the brass slot. Above it, instructions glowed in soft blue light:

INSERT GRIEF ITEM. PROCESSING TIME: 12 MINUTES. YOU WILL FEEL LESS.

His fingers closed around the ring in his pocket. A slim gold band, worn thin on one side. He had kept it for three years now, turning it over like a prayer stone, sometimes pressing it to his lips when no one was looking.

Twelve minutes.

Around him, the hall was quiet but not empty. A woman sat on a bench, blank-eyed, a crumpled sock in her lap. A teenager leaned against the far wall, a cracked phone case in hand. Neither looked at him.

He pulled the ring out and rolled it between thumb and forefinger. In the machine’s polished surface, his reflection wavered—a man, growing older with grief like a weight stitched under his skin.

Twelve minutes.

His hand hovered. If he let it take the ring, would it take the smell of her hair, the memory of her laugh as they painted the bedroom, the way she whispered his name when half-asleep? Or only the ache—the sharp, sudden stabs, the hollow mornings, the dreams that dissolved into salt on waking?

The woman at the bench rose. She walked past—her eyes watery, glazed with traces of red. She dropped the sock into the machine, paused briefly, then walked away.

His fingers closed. Slowly, deliberately, he put the ring back in his pocket.

The machine waited.

He turned and left.

No planes fly over Dominion Point anymore. Not after the last one vanished from radar at 60,000 feet and reappeared empty, three weeks later in a rice field in Mozambique—fuselage intact, every seat belt neatly fastened, every passenger gone.

The DP had once been a logistics hub. When Sable Dynamics towed their first modules into international waters—a floating research array powered by autonomous reactors and patrolled by drones—they called it supply chain decentralisation.

Now it is a vertical reef of steel and ceramic, rising fifteen-hundred storeys above the waterline, though no official map shows it, and satellite feeds “glitch” whenever focused on that quadrant of the ocean.

No one is sure what happens inside. But everyone knows who sits at the centre: Victor Sable.

The AI brain wasn’t his idea. He didn’t even understand how it worked. It had been built in secret by the company’s elite Zurich tech lab—a neural nexus meant to analyse markets, predict unrest, flag leverage points in global infrastructure.

One day, it started making suggestions. Two weeks later, it started making decisions.

Victor didn’t stop it. He listened. It told him which ports to buy. Which pipelines to rupture. When to crash the euro. When to secure Argentina’s clean water. When to trigger drought in Yemen using patent-locked climate tech.

And it was always right. Not sentient. Not alive. Just ruthlessly accurate—a blind god of pure correlation.

Dominion Point grew in secret, stitched together from repurposed tankers, 3D-printed shells, and scavenged orbital tech. By the time the world noticed, it was already too late.

Every attempt to intervene—cyberwarfare, drones, a secret airstrike—was effortlessly defeated. Instantly dismantled by AI-designed picobots, mass-produced in cavernous factories beneath the seabed to swarm unseen around Dominion Point at the level of an atom.

Victor’s feed broadcasts endlessly from a minimalist throne room, lit by a synthetic dawn. He is always there, gaze vacant, as the AI presents him with decisions.

His voice is never raised. When the World Bank collapsed, no facial muscle responded. When Brazil split into corporate zones, he hardly moved. When eight million were displaced by water wars after “unforeseen disruptions” to dam networks in Central Asia, he smiled faintly. Then his head turned slowly to the camera and said:

“This is not coercion. It’s freedom at scale.”

Now, borders are meaningless. And CEOs kneel where diplomats once stood—while the AI continues its computations.