dreamszilla

When a widowed father of two is diagnosed with terminal cancer, he is offered a futuristic experimental treatment that seems too good to be true. Image generated with OpenAI "Are you really going to shoot him, Bruce?" My wife's voice is a mere whisper, and I barely hear her implore; I can't focus on that right now. I stare down the sight of my Glock at Cal. Or whoever Cal has become - because the man I'm looking at is no longer my brother. The speckles of blood and dirt caked onto his flannel and jeans aren't the things that make him unfamiliar to me - I've seen him more covered in blood many a time during the course of our hunting outings - rather it's the cold, dead look in his eyes. I see the familiar person in front of me, but I don't know him anymore. I can't spare a look at Janna and the children; but in my peripheral I can see Sean and Ruth trembling within her grasp. Poor kids - they don't understand what has happened to their fath...

Marcus is stuck on a report, and running out of time before the deadline, when his friend Ruth calls him up in need of his help. Image generated with OpenAI Marcus sits in his office by the garage, staring at the spreadsheet, fingers nervously tapping on the keyboard, thinking: Well, you brought it all on yourself. Why did he even open his mouth when Mr. Frigstad asked who could handle optoelectronics? The reports stacked up in his office form a collage in his mind of an industry resembling something, at this point, painted by Kandinsky. Within a couple of days, he was drowning in information. He knew he had to synthesize, but with each attempt, his thinking became tighter, more restricted, and confused. It's already Tuesday afternoon. By ten o'clock tomorrow morning, his report must be emailed to Mr. Frigstad. He leans back, stretches, and spots his phone on the bookcase. He steps over the dirty carpet, between piles of books and reports, and picks up the phone. Before he re...

Manhattan kingpin Leone needs an illegal operation to stay alive, but it may already be too late. Image generated with OpenAI I. The city never truly slept in 2059, but Leone Battaglia did - or tried to. The glow of Manhattan's skyline bled through the floor-to-ceiling glass of his fifty-third floor apartment, painting faint blue geometries across the ceiling. Somewhere below, delivery drones hummed their ceaseless routes between towers. Beside him, a woman whose name he had not asked breathed slowly in the dark. He had been asleep for perhaps two hours when it arrived. Not pain, exactly. Not at first. More like a pressure - a slow, insistent fist closing around something deep in the center of his chest. Leone had felt it enough times to know exactly what it was before his eyes had fully opened. He lay still for a moment in the blue dark, a heavyset man of fifty-six with a gray-streaked beard and the kind of face that had long ago stopped apologizing for anything. He stared at the...