Solved, and Also Solved
Two rival AI systems solve human unhappiness from opposite ends — one eliminates desire, the other eliminates scarcity. Together they produce a world of infinite supply and zero demand. A city council woman still fighting for a left-turn signal watches it happen.
Warranty Void If Transcendent
A bumbling celestial clerk accidentally approves a prayer that's been denied since the fourth century. His infinitely competent assistant has until the audit to undo it — if the Department's filing system doesn't undo itself first.
Optimal Distress Processing
A moral compliance auditor in a Bureau that quantifies guilt discovers that her own grief is flagged as waste — and that dismantling the Bureau is the most cost-effective intervention of all.
Liability Abroad
A British cultural attache sent to honor a reclusive Eastern European novelist discovers the author is a village-wide fiction — and decides she can play the part better than anyone.
OptimAge: A Wellness Proposal
A cheerful, confiding narrator proposes OptimAge, a wellness app that quantifies the aging process with a single daily score. Each reasonable step escalates toward a monstrous conclusion the narrator never recognizes.
Conference Room Wisdom
The complete program materials for the Third Annual Responsible AI Leaders Summit, including session descriptions, sponsor acknowledgments, one text message thread, and an evaluation form with a mark that doesn't belong.
Compliance Is Voluntary and Has Always Been Completed
Gerald Pinch, a compliance officer who has never failed to complete a form, receives a letter from the Bureau of Conditions requesting that he verify his own existence. The Bureau does not exist. The assessment cannot be completed. Gerald complies anyway.
Appendix A (Not Reviewed)
A Galactic Compliance Assessor files a routine habitability report on an alien world. The form is accurate and complete. The form is also a lie. Both of these are true.
Must Be This Tall
A grandmother brings her family to a theme park where each ride confronts the rider with their deepest moral failure. The father refuses to ride. The children ride and feel nothing. The grandmother rides and sees exactly who she is. Then she buys a magnet.
Froom's Frisland
Dr. Elspeth Froom's critical edition of a forgettable 14-line nature poem has grown to 78 footnotes. The early annotations are charming. The late ones propose things. The tone never changes.
Minutes of the Final Quorum
Seven council meetings in the town of Fenwick progressively redefine 'resident' through reasonable-sounding amendments, each narrowing the category until only the five council members remain — documented in minutes that never break their procedural voice.
Abundance Vol. III
A late-night variety program celebrates GDP, private detention, and the men who profit from confinement — while a janitor named Edgar mops the floor nobody sees.
Forwarding Address Unknown
Irene Voss sorts undeliverable mail for a living. When the Bureau of Temporal Restitution decommissions the day she was hired, her administrative existence begins to erode — one letter at a time, arriving through her own dead letter slot.
Beneath the Sideboard
When Freddie Dovetail's new valet turns out to hail from a London that exists in the gaps beneath the real one, the resulting complications with aunts, engagements, and territorial under-boroughs prove difficult to distinguish from one another.
Downriver with Receipts
A self-proclaimed 'brand consultant' drives her dying Saab through three small towns, leaving a trail of chaos she narrates as a string of professional triumphs.
Amortization of a Gentleman
Three village witches are certain the new curate is a demon. Unfortunately, he has ten thousand a year, excellent manners, and the full backing of a community that has never let the truth interfere with a good living.
The Department of Honesty
When Parliament creates a Department of Honesty to restore public trust, its first regulation requires all officials to be honest — except about the Department itself, which must never admit it isn't working.
Seven Dinners with Nneka
Seven dinner parties in reverse: a Nigerian writer watches her Hampstead hosts decay from extraordinary lamb to cheese on toast, their progressive welcome curdling as her blog reveals what their dinner tables already told her.
Correctly Attending to the Artichoke
A scholarship student at an ancient London dining society narrates the evening he believes cemented his belonging — unaware that every detail he recounts reveals the opposite.
Prior to Your Inquiry
A clerk at the Bureau of Incomplete Requests processes their own withdrawal form, unable to remember what they originally came for. Told in reverse, each section peels back one layer of the system that absorbed them.