Rylan and Elren have spent half their lives scavenging for the secret to save their older brother from madness – until Rylan, impossibly, remembers that he already knows where to look. In the depths of Melarias, City of Ruin, the corrupt bastion of the fallen Thrakkish empire, they find the solution:
The Oracle is a fragment of ancient technology with the power to cure any disease – or to craft new ones to bring about another apocalypse. She’s had practice with both.
But Ryan and Elren are not the only ones who’ve been looking for this powerful artifact. Three mercenary groups congregate at the City of Ruin just as Rylan and Elren make their discovery, all drawn by the same inexplicable memory that showed Rylan the way.
To keep the mercenaries from taking the Oracle, Rylan and Elren must act as false guides for each group as they venture into the ruins – where bloodthirsty reptilian wardens patrol the streets, engineered ‘fixers’ tirelessly rebuild crumbling towers, and ancient living transports clamber across the landscape in search of passengers.
Time isn’t on their side. The Thrakkar have a warship in orbit and scouts in the city. These monstrous creatures once subjugated the Hundred Worlds. Humans threw off their yolk by hurling civilization back into the stone age. More than a thousand years later, led by those same inexplicable memories, the Thrakkar have returned to reclaim their source of power. This is their city, their wardens, their nightmares. They’ll burn any who stand in their way.
An apocalyptic story of family navigating a world of living nightmares, City of Ruin blends the epic fantasy scope of The Wheel of Time with the sci-fi inventiveness of Jeff VanderMeer’s Borne, and the tortured magic from N. K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season.
When Nils Baxter discovers a technology to open communication with the dead, he quickly becomes of the richest CEOS on the planet. But the technology is in its infancy, limited, only able to connect to the recently deceased with a low rate of success. Some assume it’s an elaborate data mining fraud, others claim that Nils has made a deal with Satan himself.
But Nils knows the truth: his technology is real. With an ever-increasing flood of investment dollars, Nils assembles the best team of engineers, physicists, publicists, and lawyers that the world has to offer. He builds the next generation of his communication technology, a particle accelerator on an island near San Francisco. The new system advances the technology to a level where users can reliably reach the dead going back for hundreds of years.
The only catch? When they power on their new, trillion-dollar accelerator, they soon realize that they can’t turn it off. Only then do they discover that communicating with the afterlife has begun to unravel the afterlife itself.
Foreverlife Inc is a 4000-word short story showing the inevitable results when tech startups are given unfettered power to ‘break shit’ and ‘fail fast’. Who ends up paying the toll when the broken shit can’t be pieced back together?
When Anthony’s wife is killed in a hit and run, he does what any theoretical particle physicist would do: He builds a time machine.
His first experiment sends his friend’s body across a swath of three hours in individual slices. But this tragedy only proves that his machine works, and time travel is possible. Anthony realizes that any sin he commits can be fixed with a single leap into the past.
But every leap through time degrades his body like sunbathing in a nuclear reactor, limiting Anthony to a single chance at setting things right. When things don’t go according to plan, he must grapple with what he’s willing to do to create the future he so desperately wants.
Within the perfect future he’s created, the last obstacle Anthony must face is himself. Which version of him deserves to live in the world he built by changing the past? Certainly not the one who’s lived those same years doing nothing extraordinary, unable to truly appreciate the family they never lost. There isn’t room for both, and it’s clear to the Traveler who deserves to continue living in the world he created.
Time travel has its costs, after all.
The Traveler is a 16,000 word novella. The story combines the imaginative antics of Back to the Future with the gritty character tragedy of Breaking Bad.