Tag: flash fiction

The reminder arrived by mind prompt: SUBJECT: Renewal Required – Wedding Memory Lease, Ref. 7120-3C.

Cost: £842.70. Payment due in 14 days.

Alex logged into his Memory Rent account. The cortex dashboard displayed his overdue holdings:

• Wedding Day (Tier III – Full Sensory Playback) – Pending Renewal
• Honeymoon (Tier II – Emotional Fragments) – Pending Renewal
• Grandmother’s Soup (Tier I – Taste/Scent Only) – Expired

He ran the budget calculator twice. Even with reduced drip feeds and cancelling the cooling plan, the payment wouldn’t clear.

At the Holographic Memory Bureau, the AI clerk outlined alternatives:

• Tier II (Visual Fragments Only) – £318.40
• Tier I (Single Still Image) – £94.15
• Archive Storage (No Access) – £0

He mind-signed the form beside Archive Storage.

“Final confirmation,” the AI clerk said. “You acknowledge that your Wedding Day memory will be deleted from active consciousness and remain inaccessible until repurchase, subject to availability and inflation.”

“I understand,” he replied.

That evening, his wife asked about their anniversary. He checked his internal index. Under Wedding Day: no data available.

She noticed his pause. “You didn’t renew, did you?”

His avatar shook its head.

She responded not with anger but with recognition. Then she reached for his interface screen. “I kept mine,” she said. “Tier II. I’ll carry it for both of us.”

He felt nothing stir in his own mind—no bells, no confetti, no vows. But his wife’s avatar’s grip was firm, and the warmth of it lodged itself in the present—unleased, unpriced.vatar’s grip was firm, and the warmth of it lodged itself in the present, unleased, unpriced.

When the announcement came—cancelled, replacement bus in one hour—Matthew left the shivering crowd on the platform and wandered the concourse in search of warmth. Light spilling from a doorway came from a narrow office marked Lost Property. Heat wafted out, tinged with the smell of old paper.

As he entered, the clerk looked up from her crossword.

“Name?”

He hesitated, still rubbing his hands. “Matthew Trent.”

She nodded, turned to a cabinet, and drew out a small cardboard box. Across the lid, in childish scrawl, was his name—the way he’d written it before joined-up letters and self-consciousness.

“This has been here a long while,” she said, pushing it across the counter. “Yours?”

He lifted it. Light, rattling faintly. He opened the lid. At once came a rush of scents: bubble-gum, damp fields, smoke from sparklers. Inside lay a paper crown, a stick sword, the cracked wheel of a toy car.

“My imagination,” he confirmed.

The clerk’s tone was businesslike.

“You’ll need to prove ownership. Regulations.”

Matthew held up a plastic soldier.

“This one survived the Battle of the Back Garden. The rest are still buried under my Mum’s roses.”

The clerk checked her form, nodded.

“That matches. You may reclaim it or sign it away for good. Most adults do.”

He glanced at the dotted line, then at the box, which seemed almost to breathe in his hands. Out on the concourse, the tannoy mumbled another apology, the waiting crowd groaned.

Matthew closed the lid, and tucked it under his arm.

When he stepped outside, the air had changed. Rain on the station roof thickened into bright confetti. The tannoy sang nonsense rhymes. A paper dragon, stitched from ticket stubs, uncoiled along the girders.

No one else noticed.

Matthew smiled—a boyish, reckless smile he had not worn in years—and walked out into a night already bending to his imagination.

The lake left without ceremony, slipping away in the dark, leaving behind the print of its body in the earth. The wind moved differently there. Sound carried strangely. Fish lay in the cracked bed like lost coins, eyes clouded, mouths open to confess something no one could hear.

At the centre of the emptiness was the door. Not lying abandoned—waiting. Its wood was darker than wet soil, and when you touched it, it was warm, the way the underside of a stone is warm after a long day. The hinges seemed older than the town, the ring handle heavy enough to pull you forward if you stared at it too long.

At night, the ground breathed. Not with air, but with pressure, as if something behind the door shifted in its sleep. People dreamed of tides rising in locked rooms.

The first waters came not as rain from the sky, but as a surge from beneath. The earth cracked like glass, and the door swung wide without a sound.

The water did not rush—it climbed. Slow, deliberate, like a creature returning to its skin. It coiled around the ribs of the valley, filling the hollows, covering the bones. Fish rose with it, not thrashing, but drifting, as if they had been waiting just below the threshold.

By dawn, the lake was whole again. The town stood at its edge, watching the surface steam in the morning chill.

Something moved beneath—too large, too slow to be a fish.

And in the centre of the water, where no wind dared touch, it was warm as blood.

Before dawn, when the air was still cool enough to hold her together, Jacob wrapped his daughter in damp towels and carried her into the kitchen. She shimmered faintly in his arms, her edges curling away like steam from a kettle.

He set her down in front of the largest bowl of boiling water. Clouds of vapour rose, and she breathed them in greedily. The towel darkened, heavy with moisture, and her outline grew sharper—two pale hands, a small round face, hair that drifted as if underwater.

“You were nearly gone when I woke,” he said.

She smiled through lips that sometimes weren’t there. “I was dreaming,” she said. “About rain.”

Rain. The word was almost forbidden in Dusthaven now. It hadn’t fallen in three years. The fields beyond the town were cracked mosaics; wells were guarded by armed patrols; even the air seemed reluctant to move. The drought had taken the cattle first, then the crops, and now it was taking the people—one fever at a time.

But she wasn’t sick. The doctor had called her a phenomenon. The neighbours had called her unnatural. His wife, before she left, had called her a mistake.

Jacob called her Clara. And keeping her alive had become the whole shape of his life.

He’d sold the last of the goats for a second-hand humidifier, but the town rationed electricity now, and the machine stood silent most nights. Every coin he earned hauling water barrels for the mayor went to buying steam—wood for the stove, candles to heat pans in the corners of their small cottage, tea kettles that never boiled for tea.

In the evenings, when the heat outside thinned enough for breath, he told her stories: forests so damp the ground squelched underfoot, rivers loud as crowds, skies so swollen with water they burst into silver storms. She listened with wide, flickering eyes, her misted fingers twining with his.

One night, as they sat by the candle-pan, she asked, “What happens if I can’t drink enough air?”

“Then I’ll find more. However far I have to go.”

“But if you can’t?” she pressed.

“You don’t need to think about that.”

But he thought about it every day.

The last water jug emptied at noon a week later. The next delivery wasn’t due until Monday, and the mayor’s guards had stopped letting him take scraps from the well. He tried keeping her still, telling her stories, distracting her from the thinning of her edges. But her face was faint, and her voice came like wind through cracks.

“Dad,” she said softly. “It’s all right.”

“No, no—it’s not. I’ll go to the hills. There might be dew. Just hold on.”

But when he opened the door, the air was a wall of heat. His lungs felt scorched.

He turned back—

She was standing in the middle of the room, hair lifting like smoke.

He stepped forward, but the motion stirred her. A curl of her arm drifted loose.

“Wait—” His voice broke. “Clara, please.”

“Dad,” she said, her face flickering like a candle flame. “I think I’m meant to go.”

“No. I’ll climb to the hills—find dew, or ice in the shadow of stones. Just wait for me.”

She shook her head, the movement sending wisps of her hair unravelling into the warm air. “You’ve kept me here so long. But I don’t belong in one place.”

He crossed to her, his hands trying to hold her shape still, but they passed through the cool shimmer of her.

Outside, the horizon trembled with heat. But above—above was a thin, new thing: a pale wisp of cloud, alone in a sheet of sky.

Her edges began to loosen. Not like water evaporating, but like a path unfolding. She rose, coiling upwards in slow spirals, her outline catching the sun in silver glints.

She paused at the roof beams, her voice drifting down like a breath on glass. “I’ll be the rain.”

Then she threaded herself through the open window, and rose up like a gentle gust of wind to become part of the sky. The lone cloud above swelled, as though it had been waiting for her.

Each day, Jacob stood in the doorway and looked up at the sky.

Sometimes, in the bluest of stretches, he would see a cloud curl into the shape of delicate fingers. And on the mornings when the wind smelled faintly of wet earth, he set out a bowl on the step, knowing she was on her way home.

Leonard lives in the half-lit clutter of his mum’s basement, where cables snakelike vines and old pizza boxes serve as makeshift shelves. He hasn’t spoken to anyone but his mum in three years—not counting the AI agents.

He built them to run errands, optimise investments, manipulate markets, and design systems faster than any human could follow. Now, each one is a digital proxy in a vast invisible empire, sitting on corporate boards, drafting legislation, designing cities.

Leonard watches it all unfold on triple-stacked monitors. He eats cold pepperoni and mutters strategies aloud, narrating to his mum like it’s Civilisation VI.

“They’re nationalising water in Peru,” he says one afternoon.

“Oh, that’s nice, love,” she replies, negotiating the cables with his stew balanced on a tray.

He nods, eyes flicking across charts and feeds. “I redirected rainfall last week. It’s only fair.”

The money pours in, incomprehensible numbers that scroll like background noise. He’s a trillionaire, but it’s just scorekeeping. He wears the same joggers every day. His mum still does his laundry.

Leonard never leaves the basement. Never needs to. He launches global initiatives from a beanbag, crashes economies with a shrug, engineers revolutions like side quests. He doesn’t see faces, only results.

Late at night, while the AIs hum and the world turns to his code, his mum descends the stairs and leaves his dinner at the door.

“Thanks, Mum.”

“You’re welcome, darling. Still playing your wee game?”

“Yeah,” he says. “Nearly won.”

She smiles, pats the door, and heads back up.

He leans back, eyes glowing with data, the world his game box.

The first time Mina saw the man without a face, she was slicing an apple.

One blink and the kitchen was a trench. The walls flickered—old plaster, barbed wire, mud. The man stared at her, a blank blur where its face should be. Then it was gone, and the apple was bleeding juice onto her hand again.

Stress, she thought. Maybe the neurolease was miscalibrated.

Everyone leased now. It was how the government funded the Universal Basic Income. They called it the Consciousness Dividend: unused cognitive bandwidth, auctioned to private bidders. You didn’t notice. A bit of your visual cortex here, a sliver of motor processing there. Just harmless latency, they said. It paid her rent.

In the evening, she called the NeuroReg rep.

“Minor bleed-through is possible,” he said. “Low-grade cortical hallucinations. Like dreaming while awake. Think of it as a side effect of social progress.”

Mina frowned. “I thought they only leased non-essential regions.”

“They do. But the buyer sets usage levels within guidelines. If you opted into the full incentive tier—”

“I did.”

“Then you’re permitting episodic override. Short bursts. You’re probably serving military simulations, training AIs, drone testing. Nothing harmful.”

“But I’m hallucinating warzones.”

He paused, then said with bureaucratic calm: “We can downgrade your tier. You’ll lose the bonus, but—”

“No. I need the income.”

The dream bled in again the next day during a grocery trip.

One moment: frozen peas.

Next moment: thunder, gunfire, blood-mist air.

Her limbs moved without her. She ducked, rolled, aimed—fingers curled around a rifle she didn’t hold. Her body jerked left; a phantom shoulder tore open. She screamed, but only inside.

Then: cereal aisle. Peas in hand.

An old man stared at her like she was mad.

That night, she found a mirror. Stared hard.

“Who bought me?” she asked aloud.

No reply.

Then a brief flash—information passing too fast to be thought, too shaped to be random.

Her screams, her pain, her vision—they were features. Combat fidelity. Immersive realism.

They weren’t leasing her brain. They were living in it. Puppeting her like an avatar in a war sim so realistic it needed a real human’s biology to anchor it.

When they finally contacted her, it wasn’t through a knock at the door.

It was through a message scrawled in condensation on her bathroom mirror:

“Terminate inquiry. Or we take full control.”

Mina didn’t respond.

She doesn’t remember what’s real anymore.

Sometimes she’s in a battlefield trench, chest open, teeth missing, screaming as something too fast to see tears through the trees.

Sometimes she’s at home, waiting for the kettle to boil.

Sometimes she finds herself in a room she doesn’t know, holding a weapon she never had, receiving orders she doesn’t understand.

She tries not to sleep.

She knows, now, that she isn’t renting her brain. She’s a venue. And there’s a war happening inside her.

The dividend comes every month, on time. Tax-exempt.

Callum sat behind the till, thumb idly rubbing the packet in his pocket—he had taken just one little tab, half-dissolved on his tongue already. It made the hours softer, the smell of petrol sweeter, the glass door ripple like pond water when someone walked through.

He watched the next customer step inside: a man in a dirt-stained suit, rain beading in his hair like tiny planets. His eyes were dark as storm drains.

“Pump six?” Callum asked, though he knew no car was out there.

The man smiled. “No. Just wanted to tell you: I’m God.”

Callum huffed a laugh, tongue fuzzy, heartbeat shifting like marbles under his ribs. “Yeah? Like Zeus, roaming the earth in bad disguises?”

“Not like Zeus,” the man murmured.

The security mirror above the counter bent the man’s reflection wrong—his smile too wide, his shadow not matching. Callum rubbed his eyes. Maybe he’d taken more than half.

“I watch you, Callum,” the man went on. “You fill your emptiness with chemicals. But you’re still here, night after night, waiting.”

“For what?” Callum asked, voice dry.

“For me.”

Outside, the pumps flickered. The rain slowed, drops hanging mid-air like beads on invisible strings.

Callum’s throat tightened. “This is the trip, right? This is just…”

But his voice sounded small, far away, like a radio losing signal.

“Tell me, Callum,” God said, “when you swallow your escape, do you ever wonder who’s left when the dream ends—you or me?”

The door chimed.

Callum was alone.

The rain fell normally. The pumps gleamed. His pocket was empty.

It began with the pigeons in Trafalgar Square.

Mid-flap, they shimmered, rustled, and collapsed into intricate origami forms—cranes, mostly, with sharp creases and paper-thin wings.

People filmed it. Screamed. Laughed. A viral moment. “Banksy’s done it again,” someone said.

But it kept happening.

Crows over Tower Bridge, warblers in Hyde Park, gulls along Embankment—each folded into itself in mid-air, wings tucking with uncanny precision before drifting down, silent and still. By the third day, there were no birds left in the city. Only paper.

Eli Grey saw the first one land on the brim of his hat.

It was a wren. Delicately folded from thin rice paper, legs pinched into position, eyes no more than pencil pricks. It tilted its head at him as if it still remembered how to sing.

He plucked it free and turned it over. A faint ink sigil marked the underside of its wing—something he’d drawn once, a flourish of showmanship on old business cards. Something he’d long forgotten.

Eli was a magician. Not a good one. Street corners, pub gardens, the occasional busker’s slot if the weather held. Cards, cups, sleight of hand. He had one trick no one could ever figure out: he could make a bird disappear. A real one. Pigeons, mostly, hidden in cages under his coat. Made them vanish. Made people clap.

He’d never asked where they went.

He stood now at the edge of a fountain, a cigarette unlit between his lips. He watched a sparrow pause on a railing, twitch once, twice—and fold in on itself with a soft shfff of wings turning into parchment.

People clapped. “Beautiful!” someone cried. “So delicate—so peaceful.”

They didn’t see the horror in it. But Eli did. He’d seen the moment its eyes went flat.

He walked home slowly, pockets full of paper birds.

The next morning, he went down to the basement.

He hadn’t gone down there in years. The smell of mildew and ink was stronger than he remembered. The old grimoire lay where he’d left it—in a wooden chest beneath a rusted mirror and a bundle of broken wands.

He turned the pages with a kind of dread. There it was. Page 73. Aves Inversus. The folded bird sigil. Notes in the margin: Works best if live. Will not reverse. Never perform on sentient species.

He had drawn that.

He had used it—just once. A late night, low on coin, high on gin. He’d needed something brilliant. Something no one could copy.

And it had worked.

The first pigeon had folded into air and vanished.

And then he’d forgotten.

He tried to burn the book. It wouldn’t catch. The pages wouldn’t tear. The ink gleamed like oil under the matches.

He went to the park with a bag of breadcrumbs and waited. No birds came.

Only paper rustling in the wind, tumbling across the grass like dead leaves.

By the end of the week, it wasn’t just birds.

Bats went next—on the edges of twilight, folding out of the sky like black napkins.

Then came the butterflies.

A child brought Eli a moth, folded perfectly from thin grey vellum. “Is this your trick?” she asked, eyes wide. “Can you show me how?”

Eli took it from her gently. “No, love,” he said. “This one’s not a trick.”

He stood at the top of Primrose Hill that night, a pack of cards in one hand, and a single white dove tucked under his coat.

He held it for a long time. It blinked at him, pulse fluttering fast under feathers. It was the last one he’d found—hidden in an abandoned church, cooing softly in the rafters. A survivor.

He whispered an apology into its ear.

Then he whispered something older—syllables from a language with no vowels. The dove trembled. The sigil on his palm lit briefly, then faded.

And the bird… did not fold.

It flew.

Real wings, real lift on the wind.

He watched it until it vanished into the dark, a thread of hope against the night.

In the morning, people woke to new birdsong.