Satisfactory
A genetically optimized biodiversity technician completes her quarterly wellness compliance diary with warmth, precision, and genuine contentment — until a dream about rain she has never felt leaves a blank field the system does not require her to explain.
Unadjusted
A government statistician maintaining the Consumer Sentiment Index begins a parallel, unadjusted index on her personal laptop. Told through methodology memos, revision histories, and footnotes, the gap between the official numbers and hers widens into something she can document but never say.
Parish of No One
A parish clerk maintains the register of births, marriages, and deaths thirty years after the last child was born. His entries begin in proper order and end somewhere between prayer and hallucination.
Halima's Algorithm
When a woman dies after algorithmic triage deprioritizes her case, five people who each operated one piece of the machine reckon with the fact that none of them did anything wrong.
Residue
A happiness auditor visits a man three units short on his quarterly contentment metrics. His answers are too honest for the form. Her report, pursuing precision over protocol, becomes something the system was never designed to receive.
Sufficient Engagement
A librarian runs an AI content wellness center by day and a dwindling Tuesday reading group by night. The AI is good. The group is shrinking. She cannot explain why Tuesday matters.
Bright Compliance
A records auditor in a regime of compulsory brightness discovers a discrepancy, joins the resistance, and learns too late that her clear-eyed rebellion was the state's instrument all along.
Pavement and Vow
A municipal archivist in a glass city keeps her daily record with model transparency, until old diaries, cracked pavement, and the pressure of repeated words begin to open pauses she cannot name.
Kindness Engine
Through intake forms, compliance reports, and appeal transcripts, a Community Wellness Liaison documents the human cost of a predictive kindness algorithm — until the system's gaze turns on her.
Loyal Ground
A transit coordinator walks a six-mile corridor between sectors, smuggling insulin she believes the regime doesn't know about. Fourteen months of risk. Fourteen months of believing it matters.
Transparent
In a school system where every student earns points, levels up, and can see every metric, fifteen-year-old Sable notices one number that doesn't add up — and discovers the transparent system was never meant to be looked at, only looked through.
Graft Bed
In a world where genomes are corporate property requiring paid maintenance, a compliance herbalist stops taking her supplements and begins growing something unauthorized inside her body — something the patent system cannot read, cannot own, and cannot forgive.
Feral Compliance
In a society where mandatory hormonal modification dampens women's aggression and appetite, a woman in her thirties begins experiencing the treatment's failure — sensations returning that she was never supposed to feel. Her partner watches, afraid.
Atmospherically Insufficient
An employee's badge photo fades, her calendar fills with meetings she may or may not be the subject of, and HR assures her that everything is part of a normal transition process. She cooperates fully. She has no idea with what.
Resonance and Ash
A cellist walks north through the ruins of the Pacific Northwest, carrying a cracked instrument toward a settlement she may never reach, learning what it costs to keep beauty alive in a world that only rewards the practical.
Ogechi Misspelled
In a managed district called Block Nine, a teenager named Ogechi chronicles the lives of her neighbors through vignettes — their laughter, rivalries, first loves — while the system that owns their futures presses in from every side, unnamed and absolute.
Seawall Liturgies
A census-taker from the walled city crosses into the flooded zone to count the living, and finds herself counting something else entirely.
Burn Protocols for a Cooling World
A displaced girl in a climate-ravaged America discovers the government is burning old books and climate records for fuel, and learns that fire can destroy evidence and illuminate truth.
Your Annual Contribution Summary
An employee at a tech wellness company receives increasingly surreal memos celebrating the automation of her own job, and discovers that gratitude is the last thing the company will require of her.
The Keeping Season
At a lakeside school for young women chosen for the Keeping Program, Lena recalls her years of preparation with calm precision — never quite naming what she and the others were kept for, or what it cost them.