Tag: flash fiction

The empty call centre was nondescript—fluorescents, cracked plastic chairs, off-brand biscuits in the break room. “Legacy Enquiries”, the contract said. Dan had been told not to worry too much about the name. “Just answer the phone,” the text message said. “Be patient. Be kind. Some of these callers are confused.”

And they were.

The first call came at 2:13 a.m.

“Is it cold?” a woman asked. Her voice was thin, as if it had to travel a long way.

Dan stared at his monitor. No name, no number—just static.

“I—I’m not sure what you mean.”

“Is it cold? Where you are? I remember cold. I miss it, I think.”

She hung up before he could ask more.

The next call, someone asked how long it took a body to decompose. The line went dead when Dan mentioned Google. Then came the man asking whether his cat had forgiven him. Another wanted to know if anyone still made treacle tart like his mum used to.

He took notes, made spreadsheets, convinced himself this was a social experiment or some immersive counselling gig. But the patterns emerged.

None of the callers gave their names.

All of them had questions. Never greetings, never small talk. Always one question.

“Was it my fault?”

“Does anyone remember my voice?”

“Was I ever really loved?”

The night grew heavier. The air around his desk took on a damp, stone-like smell. Dan tried to quit—but the moment he drafted the email, his phone rang.

“Please,” said a boy’s voice. “Don’t go. We don’t have anyone else.”

Dan didn’t send the email.

Three hours in, he stopped keeping time altogether. His calls were longer now, more focused. He began to recognise voices—repeats. Some were angry. Some wept. Some just waited in silence after he’d answered, as though holding the call gave them weight.

And then, his own phone rang.

“Dan,” said a voice he hadn’t heard since he was nine. “It’s your sister.”

Carla had died in a lake. Slipped under the ice. No body was ever recovered.

“Why didn’t you come?” the voice asked.

Dan wanted to hang up. His hands wouldn’t move.

“I waited. It got dark,” said Carla’s voice. “Mum said you’d come back with the sled. But you never came.”

“I didn’t know,” Dan whispered. “I didn’t know you went back out. I’m sorry… Carla.

Silence.

“It’s okay. I just wanted to know if you remembered me.”

The call disconnected.

After that, the calls changed. They were easier to understand, more lucid. A girl asked what snow tasted like. A man wanted to hear a lullaby. One caller just asked Dan to breathe, slowly, so they could “remember what lungs felt like”.

Dan stayed.

He answered every call.

Sometimes he cried. Sometimes he laughed. Sometimes he just listened while the voice raged against their unfinished life.

In the morning, he walked home as the sun bled into the sky, the weight of a hundred regrets dissolving with the night.

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.

He found the room on a Thursday, behind a wall that wasn’t there yesterday. No hinges, no latch—just a clean rectangle in the plaster. When he pressed his hand against it, it gave like skin.

Inside, the space was blank. Pale. Airless. But the moment he said, “Light,” a golden globe bloomed on the ceiling, humming warmly. “Chair,” he muttered next, and one unfolded from nothing—plush, deep, exactly like his grandad’s old recliner.

He laughed then. And the room laughed back.

Every visit left him calmer. Sharper. He’d say, “Peace,” and the room would wrap around him like a weighted blanket. “Love,” and a version of Laura would appear—softer than real life, wordless, adoring.

He lost a weekend once. Thought it had only been a few hours. But he was smiling again, wasn’t he? Eating. Sleeping. Creating.

The room didn’t judge. The room understood.

Soon, the outside became unbearable. The clatter of dishes. Laura’s voice, asking if he was okay. Her eyes, heavy with suspicion.

He tried to explain. “There’s this space, and in it, I can be—”

“You’re not in anything,” she snapped. “You’re out. Out of time, out of reach. Out of your head.”

She started locking up his laptop. Cancelling his calls. He’d sneak into the chamber just to breathe.

One day, she was gone. No note. Just her scent clinging to the pillow.

He didn’t search.

He simply went back into the room and said: “Bring her back.”

She returned, lips soft, eyes vacant, looping the same three sentences: “I’m glad you’re okay.” “Everything’s fine now.” “Let’s not talk about it.”

He cried in her lap. She smiled, stroked his hair. Over and over.

But the room began to falter.

The warmth dimmed. The conjured Laura stuttered. The furniture softened, drooped like wax in the sun. He told the room to fix it. It didn’t. He shouted. Screamed.

The room echoed him back, word for word, louder, until his voice came back distorted, cracked—Peace… peace… PEACE…—like mocking laughter through a drainpipe.

He told it to stop. It didn’t.

The outside world crumbled.

Letters piled at the door, some in red. The electricity flickered. Food vanished from the fridge. Mold rose in patches like bruises on the wallpaper. But he stayed inside.

The room shrank.

At first, a metre or two at a time. Then inches. His chair dissolved. The golden light browned to sickly yellow. The air grew thick, cloying, like burnt sugar and rot.

He coughed. Asked for “Fresh air.”

Nothing.

“Help.”

Silence.

“Let me out.”

The walls pressed in. Cold. Damp. Close.

He screamed until his voice cracked, then whimpered nonsense to the dark. A child, alone in a box of wishes.

Outside, the neighbours assumed he’d moved. The flat was silent, the curtains never opened. Someone reported a smell.

When the council finally broke in, they found only decay.

Mould, filth, and the decomposing body of a man in a foetal curl—emaciated, eyes open.

On the wall behind him, written in something brown and flaking:

“It was perfect.”

Elaine ordered the clone on a Monday.

They delivered him in a matte-black crate. The AI engineers called it a “Psychogenic Simulacrum.” She called him Ben.

He looked like her husband, sounded like him, moved with that same elegant awkwardness. He even cooked the same way—meticulously, badly. For three weeks, she wept into his shoulder at night and he held her, murmuring fragments of their life together.

“You remember the Cornish trip?” she asked once, testing him.

“That awful B&B. The mould in the teacups.”

“Exactly.”

And he did—in unerring detail, as if dredging it straight from the past.

But on the fourth week, something changed.

They were having tea in the garden when he said, “Do you remember the time we saw the wolves in the orchard?”

“What orchard?”

“Behind the old school, that winter we tried camping. The snow was thick. You said they looked like ghosts.”

“I’ve never—Ben never—camped in winter. We hated the cold.”

He frowned, genuinely puzzled. “But I remember it. You wore a red scarf.”

She laughed it off at first. Glitches happened. She had paid extra for deep memory fusion, layering his memory with audio journals, photos, letters. It was possible some stray fiction had bled in. Dreams, perhaps.

But the incidents grew. One night he murmured in his sleep, “Don’t go into the attic. They’re still up there.”

He began referring to people she didn’t know: a sister named Betty, a dog called Hart. Once, he touched her face and asked, almost reverently, “Did we make it out of the fire this time?”

“What fire?” she demanded.

“The orphanage,” he said.

There was no orphanage.

She called the company. “He’s remembering things that never happened.”

A pause.

“Memories may sometimes surface from auxiliary neural training,” said the technician. “Dream simulations, fictional proxies, archival bleed-through. It’s not uncommon. You can have him wiped.”

“I don’t want him wiped.”

“Then you’ll need to accept that some of him isn’t yours.”

Elaine didn’t sleep that night. She watched Ben sit by the window, staring into the distance, fingers tapping against his teacup.

In the morning, he asked, “Did you ever meet your mother?”

“My mother died when I was three.”

Ben nodded slowly. “Yes. That’s what you’ve always believed.”

The next night, she asked, “Where are you getting these thoughts?”

Ben looked at her, utterly calm. “From beneath.”

“Beneath what?” she whispered.

“Our lives,” he said. “The ones we lived before this one. Or next.”

Elaine never called the company again.

She simply listened.