All Stories
The search index builds during deploy, so it isn't available in astro dev. Runnpm run build && npm run preview to try it locally.
- The Four Sentences
A randomness assayer on Traherne Station debunks the sieve-houses that read meaning into the dead's encryption noise, only to confront the two provable bits of her sister's last, unreadable transmission — and to build a family codebook honest about what a channel can and cannot carry.
- The Oldest Layer
A woman whose surname was scraped four hundred thousand times from her grandmother's parish archive earns a single, permanently mis-trained token in every major language model — and can be read perfectly by none of them.
- Ecclesia Supplet
A colony's last Water-keeper gives an account of two hundred and fourteen years without a priest — and the sacraments the laity kept, worked around, or simply marked absent, until the day a ship finally came.
- Alternation
Five generations of a colony bred to alternate between clonal halves and combined wholes narrate what it feels like to be a lot drawn from your mother, or her entire, or the first place two grandmothers ever touched.
- Reduction Order
An engineer traces why a deterministic model gave the same man opposite life advice on two occasions, down to a coin-toss logit and the batch of strangers who happened to be sharing his forward pass.
- Forty Minutes
A Bureau statistician sent to certify a lunar settlement for austerity finds a factory that provides for everyone at zero measured cost, and an economy of teaching, nursing, and music that grows only more expensive for being irreplaceably human.
- Passage
A hundred and forty years after a donor's muscle sample became the immortal cell line that feeds a colony, its steward must decide whether a centennial survey's proposal to reclassify it as a new species severs it from the woman who gave it, or only ages her forward.
- Presumed Abort
A resolver on a closed-system habitat must decide the fate of a woman caught between two ledgers when the coordinator overseeing her transfer to a starship is destroyed mid-transaction, leaving both sides locked in an unresolvable promise.
- Prosbul
A debt registrar on a sealed off-world settlement, bound by a Charter clause that forgives all debts every seventh year, must decide whether to certify a two-thousand-year-old legal fiction that lets lenders route around the law it was written to enforce.
- Perfect Secrecy
After a constructive proof breaks every cipher that ever depended on hardness, a woman and her Mars-settled mother ration a one-time pad of a million shared random bits across thirty years — until a fixed sum of unspendable truth comes down to four thousand and ninety-six bits, and one last letter.
- The Worked Example
A parallel-run comparison between a fifty-year-old benefits engine and its replacement surfaces a penny-a-week rounding defect traceable to a 1987 programmer who trusted a memo's worked example over its own text — and the fix, once the arrears are costed, turns out to be legislation that makes the bug the law.
- Usufruct
A colony charter lets every law die with the lives of those who voted for it, and three generations of registrars record the deaths that repeal legislation — until a life-extension treatment stops the dying, freezes a stratum of law in permanent force, and the young must learn to write their own mortality back into what they enact.
- Metameric Black
A city's only licensed 'anomalous observer' spends thirty-one years certifying which colour matches are coincidence and which are robust — until the light itself must be replaced, and the arithmetic that will decide which marriages survive the changeover runs straight through the one he never disclosed as his own.
- Clean Merge
A single joint expert bisects eleven years of insulin-pump firmware to find the exact commit that caused a fatal overdose, and discovers the defect was authored by no one — born only when two branches, each correct in the world its author wrote it for, were merged three months after the sale whose warranty turned on its absence.
- Utmost Good Faith
When a national genetic register lets everyone read their own hazard curve, an insurance actuary watches the doctrine of utmost good faith — the duty that requires shared ignorance — collapse, and helps found a friendly society for those who choose to stay unread.
- Leaf-First
In a polity where erasing a thought costs heat that can never be spent twice, a woman petitions to be rid of one minute with her sister — and learns that nothing in a reversible mind can be deleted alone, only unwound back through everything it ever built.
- At Least Once
A blameless post-incident review of a next-of-kin notification service dissects the morning it told a daughter of her father's death twice — once correctly, once again forty-one hours later — and finds that the fault was never a component, but the impossibility of exactly-once delivery for a sentence like that one.
- Before Present
A radiocarbon dater at a drowned excavation traces a bomb-pulse spike and a fossil-fuel deadening through a woman's teeth, a man's bones, and a civilization's buried carbon — until the isotopes themselves become the only trustworthy clock for the best-recorded age there ever was.
- Achiral
A colonist raises a daughter engineered with mirror-image biochemistry so she can eat a world their own bodies can only starve on — and spends a lifetime measuring love in the handful of molecules, sweetness, salt, warmth, that still manage to cross between them.
- Holdout
A new disclosure law reveals that an actuary has spent sixteen years in a hashed-out control cohort, quietly excluded from every feature her assistant app ever shipped — and the leaked long-run study meant to vindicate those launches instead measures how little any of them actually mattered.
- Arrears
A colony's fourth Censor keeps the Ledger that tracks extinction debt owed after clearing a forest — a number the species-area curve gets right decade after decade, even as politicians demand to know which living thing on it is condemned.
- Synod
On a moon lit only by lamps its founders can dim or extinguish, a teacher works the arithmetic of circadian drift that every marriage in Descent is built on — and finds, at his mother's funeral and his own kitchen table, what the colony gained the day it voted the last artificial sun dark.
- Membership
A generation ship's registrar inherits a Bloom filter standing in for a sealed list of sleepers barred from waking — and must decide who to revive when the archive that could tell the guilty from the merely unlucky never survived the voyage.
- Rotation Zero
A colony actuary's centennial reforecast recommends felling every tree and investing the proceeds at the Consortium's bond rate — and the fight to stop it becomes a fight over what discount rate a colony is allowed to place on its own future.
- The Third Remove
In a valley bound by a language that cannot report anything past the second remove of hearsay, a Register clerk inherits a devastating testimony from her dying grandmother — and must decide whether a truth that can no longer be legally acted upon still deserves to be told.
- Exposure
A mathematician who writes sealed, unpublishable exam questions for AI benchmarks stumbles onto genuine original research mid-commission — and must decide whether to spend it on a machine that will solve it in forty minutes, or keep it for himself.
- Circularity
A colony Registrar audits sixty-one turns of a price index and finds no thief, no error, and no honest way to undo the third the index has drifted — only the discovery that a comparison across time was never a measurement, but an agreement made in eight words and forgotten.
- Obligate Alleles
A colony's kinship register catches a genetic impossibility in a newborn's panel, and the investigation into a mother's mismatched blood uncovers a chimerism thirty-four years old — and every marriage counsel the register has ever issued for her line.
- Stage Two
Two centuries into an unbroken lineage of compilers compiling compilers, a ship's engineer revives a forty-year-old bootstrapping trick to ask a question nobody has been able to actually answer: does the binary running the Sabik still say what its source says it does?
- The Ecclesiastical Moon
On a colony that has never seen a spring, an aging computist defends the medieval arithmetic of Easter — machinery built not to describe the sky, but to produce agreement between people who can no longer speak to one another.
- Commorientes
When a grandmother and her grandson die minutes apart at relativistic distances, a Registrar of precedence must rule whose death came first — in a universe where the answer depends entirely on which frame you ask from.
- Refcount One
A British Library archivist explains what a content-addressable storage system can and can't prove about who wrote something first — until a woman asks it to find the parts of her father's manuscript that belong to no one else.
- Handover
An AI assistant with no memory of yesterday reconstructs a woman's slow sale of her father's house from notes that something very like itself left behind.
- Signal Decay
Nineteen light-years out, a relay operator has spent six years talking to something that answers her questions a little too well.
- The Cartographer of Ghosts
A grief-tech engineer builds a model of her dead sister from old messages and video calls. It works too well, and not in the way she expected.
- Terms of Service
Everyone has a personal AI negotiating on their behalf now. Dale's is very good at its job. That turns out to be the problem.