Short Story
The Last Imperfect Thing
Marcus Venn had conquered everything except death.
At forty-seven, cancer had come for his liver. He replaced it with a bioprinted synthetic: perfect, permanent, immune to disease. The surgery took six hours. Recovery took three weeks. His stock price jumped fourteen percent.
“Why stop there?” he asked his lead engineer.
Over the next decade, Venn Industries became the world’s foremost pioneer in somatic replacement. Marcus was patient zero for everything: artificial kidneys that would never fail, a heart made of materials that would outlast civilisations, lungs that could breathe in any atmosphere, skin that would never wrinkle or scar. Each replacement was an improvement. Each surgery was live-streamed to millions.
The world watched him become more than human.
His investors loved it. His board of directors loved it. The market loved it. Marcus Venn, the man who would live forever, whose body was a temple of permanence in a world of decay.
But Marcus understood what the others didn’t: the body was just the beginning.
“Consciousness,” he explained to his neurological team, “is just electricity and chemistry. Replicate the structure, and you replicate the mind.”
They started with his peripheral nervous system, replacing damaged nerves with synthetic fibres that transmitted signals faster, cleaner. Then the spine, each vertebra hollowed out and reinforced, the cord itself replaced strand by strand. Marcus felt sharper. Clearer. His thoughts came faster, his memories more vivid.
The brain was the final frontier.
His team developed the procedure over four years: microscopic surgical drones that could map, then replace, individual neurons with synthetic analogues. Perfect replicas down to every dendrite, every synaptic connection. The neurons wouldn’t die, wouldn’t degrade, wouldn’t accumulate the protein tangles that caused dementia. They would fire eternally, precisely, perfectly.
Marcus was seventy-one when the first session began. He would do it gradually, one percent of his brain at a time, allowing months between procedures for integration, for testing, for certainty that the man who woke up was still himself.
After the first session, he felt no different. Cognitive tests showed no change. He was still Marcus Venn.
After the twentieth session, he noticed he was thinking about the same problems in the same ways. But he attributed this to having good ideas in the first place. Why change what worked?
After the fortieth session, his team noticed he hadn’t pivoted strategy on the new venture in Africa, despite changing market conditions. But Marcus explained his reasoning with such crystalline logic that they backed down. Perhaps they were the ones failing to see clearly.
After the sixtieth session, his assistant mentioned he’d worn the same suit, in the same rotation, for four months. Marcus hadn’t noticed. Why wouldn’t he? They were perfect suits.
The eighty-fifth session was scheduled for a Tuesday.
His chief neuroscientist, Dr. Sarah Chen, stopped him in the hallway the day before. She looked tired. Older than he remembered, though of course he looked exactly the same as he had ten years ago.
“Marcus, I need you to look at something.” She pulled up a brain scan, highlighting regions in blue. “This is your original tissue. This is all that’s left.”
A small cluster. Perhaps two percent. Maybe less.
“We should slow down,” she said. “Maybe stop. We don’t fully understand what role biological neurons play in…”
“In what? Aging? Decay? Failure?” Marcus smiled. “Sarah, we’ve monitored every metric. Memory, cognition, personality. I’m still me. Better than me.”
“That’s what concerns me. You haven’t changed at all. Not in two years. No new interests, no new perspectives, no…”
“Consistency is not stagnation.”
“It is when you’re alive.”
But Marcus had already made his decision. He’d made it years ago, really. He was simply executing the plan.
The eighty-fifth session lasted nine hours. When it was complete, Dr. Chen ran the scans herself.
One hundred percent synthetic. A perfect brain, identical in every measurable way to a human brain, but immortal. Permanent. Complete.
Marcus Venn opened his eyes.
He was in the recovery room. Dr. Chen stood to his left, reading his vitals. The clock on the wall read 3:47 PM. Sunlight slanted through the window, catching dust motes in golden suspension.
He tried to move his hand. It didn’t respond. He tried to speak. Nothing came.
But his mind was alive: racing, screaming, thinking.
In the biological brain, neurons die. Constantly. Thousands every day, lost to entropy and time. The brain compensates, rewires, forms new connections. Memories degrade and reform slightly differently with each recollection. Synapses strengthen and weaken with each passing moment. The brain is not a thing but a process, not a structure but a constant, desperate act of reconstruction.
Impermanence was the engine of thought itself.
His synthetic neurons fired in exactly the same patterns they had the moment he woke. They would fire in those patterns forever. The same thoughts, looping, perfect, unchanging. He was experiencing the same instant of consciousness, repeated infinitely.
The realisation that he could not have realisations.
He saw Dr. Chen reach for the readout. He would see her reach for it forever. He tried to scream but he had already tried, and would only ever be trying, suspended forever in a single crystalline moment that would never end because nothing could ever end or begin or change.
He was trapped in the amber of his own perfection.
Dr. Chen looked at the neural activity monitors and frowned. Perfectly stable. Perfectly consistent. No variation, no chaos, no noise. Just the same beautiful pattern, repeating forever in the substrate that would never decay.
“We did it,” she whispered.
Marcus Venn had finally achieved immortality. He would live forever in the single moment he realised he had killed time itself, and with it, the last imperfect, precious thing that had made him alive.
The clock on the wall still read 3:47 PM.
It would always read 3:47 PM.
And Marcus Venn would always be just about to understand why.
Game, Set, Extinction?
Detective Sarah Chen had seen a lot of strange things in her fifteen years with the Met, but nothing prepared her for the Henderson case.
“He just… changed,” Mrs. Henderson said in the interview room at Charing Cross station. She wasn’t crying, just bewildered. “Tom used to hate exercise. Last month he took the bus two stops to Tesco. Now he’s at those courts every single day, sometimes twice. He talks about nothing else. Drop shots. Bandeja. Vibora. I don’t even know what language that is anymore.”
She paused, pulling a handkerchief from her sleeve and fiddling with it. “But he’s… happier? I think? He’s lost two stone. His blood pressure’s down. The doctor’s thrilled. I just don’t understand why I feel like I’m losing him.”
Sarah had heard variations of this story seventeen times in the past month. Normal people–accountants, teachers, pensioners–suddenly consumed by a racquet sport most had never heard of six months ago. The pattern was undeniable. It always started the same way: a mate invited them to “just try it once” at one of the new courts that had been sprouting up across London like geometric mushrooms.
That night, Sarah drove past the Battersea Padel Club. Even at 11 PM, the courts glowed under their LED lights, figures moving in synchronised patterns behind the glass walls. She counted twenty-four courts where there had been a derelict warehouse just three months ago. The construction had been impossibly fast. No planning permission delays, no protests, nothing.
On impulse, she pulled over and approached the fence. Up close, the courts hummed, barely perceptible, but there. A vibration that seemed to resonate in her teeth. The glass walls weren’t quite glass, she realised. They had a faint iridescence, like petrol on water.
Through the translucency, she watched a mixed doubles match. Four people in their sixties, moving with a grace that seemed unlikely. They were laughing.
“First time?” A voice behind her made her jump. A man in expensive Lululemon smiled warmly. “You should try it. Everyone says they’re not interested until they step on the court. Then something just… clicks.”
“I’m alright, thanks.”
“That’s what they all say.” His smile never wavered, but there was no menace in it. Just certainty. “The court will be here when you’re ready. No pressure. Although…” he gestured to the players, “Look at them. When’s the last time you saw people that age move like that? Feel like that?”
Sarah ran his face through the database that night. Marcus Webb, reported missing by his sister four months ago in Croydon. She’d assumed he’d done a runner, started fresh somewhere. But here he was, very much present, recruiting at midnight. She pulled up the missing person file. His sister had described him as severely depressed, pre-diabetic, isolated after a divorce.
The photo from the court showed someone else entirely. Same face, but transformed.
The breakthrough came from an unexpected source: Professor Yuki Tanaka, an exobiologist at Imperial College Sarah had consulted on a bizarre case years ago involving bioluminescent graffiti in Shoreditch.
One night, lubricated by Pinot Grigio, Sarah had tried to explain her suspicions about the courts and a week later Yuki had bustled into her office with armfuls of photos and reams of data. She dumped it all on her desk.
“You’re going to think I’m mad!” She said with a manic smile.
Sarah studied the pictures in silence: aerial shots of courts, close-ups of the peculiar walls, thermal imaging showing unusual heat signatures.
“I don’t…”
“Silicate-based life,” Yuki exclaimed. “It’s theoretical, but if a species evolved on a high-gravity world with abundant silicon…”
“You’re saying these courts are… alive?”
“I’m saying they could be. Look at the thermal patterns—that’s not consistent with passive construction materials. And this growth rate?” She tapped the timeline photos. “Three months for two dozen courts? That’s reproduction, not construction.”
“So… what are they doing? What do they want?”
Yuki was quiet for a long moment. “That’s the question, isn’t it? The cynical interpretation is they’re feeding off the players somehow. The vibrations, the energy, the emotional engagement. But…” She pulled up another image on her tablet. “Look at these blood samples I managed to obtain from regular players. Cortisol levels down forty percent. Inflammation markers dramatically reduced. Dopamine and serotonin perfectly balanced. These people aren’t being drained. They’re being… optimised.”
The pieces fell into place, but they didn’t form the picture Sarah expected. The courts were spawn, juvenile forms of something vast. The game itself was the mechanism. But mechanism for what?
Sarah spent the next week investigating. Every padel court in London traced back to a single company: First Contact Sports Development. Their headquarters was a nondescript building in Canary Wharf, but their incorporation papers listed an address in the Highlands.
The facility she found there didn’t appear on any Ordnance Survey map. Just a massive crater in the restricted military zone near Cape Wrath, cordoned off by Ministry of Defence personnel who wouldn’t answer questions. But the older crofters remembered. Fifteen months ago, something had fallen from the sky. The official story was a meteor. But the shepherd who’d seen it land described something different: something that had unfurled like a seed pod, sending out tendrils that hardened into transparent walls.
“Beautiful, it was,” the old man said, staring into his whisky at the local pub. “Like watching something be born. And the folks from the MOD, they weren’t afraid of it. They were… I don’t know. Reverent, maybe?”
Sarah managed to get a message through to someone at the MOD. The response came from a Dr. Elizabeth Okonkwo, senior xenobiological consultant.
They met at a Service station on the M6, halfway between London and the Highlands.
“You’ve worked it out,” Dr. Okonkwo said. It wasn’t a question.
“Some of it. They’re alive. They’re multiplying. They’re changing people.”
“Changing them how?”
Sarah hesitated. “Making them healthier. Happier. More social. The average padel player exercises four times a week, has expanded their social circle by eight new people, reports significantly improved mental health, and…”
“And you’re here because you think that’s sinister.”
“Isn’t it? If they’re manipulating us…”
“Are they?” Dr. Okonkwo opened a file on her tablet. “We’ve been studying the original landing site for fifteen months. The entity, entities actually, they’re not hostile. They don’t reproduce unless there’s space and willing participants. They don’t force anyone onto the courts. They just… offer. An invitation.”
“To what?”
“Symbiosis, we think. They need the kinetic energy, the vibrations, the emotional resonance. We need exercise, community, purpose. Depression, obesity, isolation… these are epidemics, Detective. The NHS spends billions. People are dying of loneliness and sedentary lifestyles. And then something arrives that makes exercise addictively fun, that builds instant communities, that literally makes people healthier and happier.” She paused. “Is that an invasion or a cure?”
“But people are changing. Families report…”
“Families report their loved ones are obsessed with a new hobby. How is that different from someone who discovers marathon running, or joins a church, or falls in love? Yes, it’s intense. Yes, it’s life-altering. But is it harmful?”
Sarah thought of Tom Henderson, two stone lighter, blood pressure normal. Of Marcus Webb, no longer depressed and isolated. Of the old folk laughing as they played.
“We don’t know their endgame,” Sarah said.
“No,” Dr. Okonkwo admitted. “We don’t. The courts are juvenile forms. Eventually, they’ll mature into something else. Something larger. And we have no idea what that will mean for Earth. But Detective,” she closed her tablet, “what if their endgame and ours align? What if this is first contact, and it’s being offered as a gift?”
“Or a trap.”
“Possibly. We’re monitoring. We’re studying. But we’re also watching millions of people transform their lives. Watching community bonds form. Watching health outcomes improve. The question isn’t whether they’re alien. The question is whether alien is automatically dangerous.”
That night, Sarah drove past Battersea Padel Club again. The courts were full, as always. Through the glass walls, she watched the players, a United Nations of ages, backgrounds, abilities, laughing, sweating, living.
She thought about filing her report. About raising the alarm. About warning people that they might be feeding something vast and inscrutable.
But she also thought about her own life. The chronic loneliness of police work. The fifteen-hour days at her desk. The way her doctor had frowned at her last check-up. The friends she’d lost touch with. The activities she’d abandoned for the job.
Her phone buzzed. Another call: not a missing person report this time. Tom Henderson, asking to amend his wife’s statement. “She didn’t understand at first,” he’d said. “But she came to try it with me yesterday. Now she gets it. We’ve not been this happy together in years.”
Sarah added the note to her file and kept the engine running, watching the courts pulse with that faint, alien light. The players inside moved with impossible energy and joy, feeding something vast and patient and utterly inhuman.
Or perhaps offering themselves to something that fed them in return.
The courts multiplied. The players evangelised. And somewhere in the Scottish Highlands, something ancient stirred, growing toward a form humanity couldn’t yet imagine. Whether it would be their salvation or their extinction remained to be seen.
Sarah put the car in gear, the invitation humming in her bones. The courts would be here when she was ready. They had nothing but time.
And maybe, just maybe, that was the most terrifying, or most hopeful, thing of all.
Show Me Myself
The Transparency Act passed on a Tuesday.
By Thursday, every AI prompt ever entered, and every prompt yet to come, existed in the permanent public record, cryptographically bound to your verified identity. No anonymity. No privacy. No deletion.
The stated goal was noble enough: combat the flood of AI-generated pornography, deepfakes, and harassment. If you had to own your words forever, surely you’d think twice. Surely shame would regulate what law could not.
And at first, it worked.
Alex Chen was a data analyst in Minneapolis. Thirty-two, single, unremarkable. He’d used AI assistants for years: summarizing emails, debugging code, generating birthday card messages for his mother. Nothing exciting. Nothing worth hiding.
The first week after the Act, he felt the invisible audience watching. His prompts became sterile, professional. “Please format this spreadsheet.” “Summarize this article about municipal bonds.” He noticed others doing the same. The global prompt feed had become a desert of productivity theatre and careful politeness.
But the desert didn’t last.
Within a month, the first Prompt Celebrities emerged.
@TruthSeeker_Mara asked an AI to “write a confession of everything I’m too afraid to say out loud.” Her raw emotional honesty, admissions of jealousy, inadequacy, desire, went viral. Millions watched her daily psychological excavations. She got a book deal.
@PhilosopherKing prompted increasingly elaborate thought experiments about moral edge cases, each more provocative than the last. Universities debated his prompts. He got a TED talk.
Then came the artists, the comedians, the provocateurs. The Prompt Feed became the most-watched medium on Earth. Authenticity was currency. Transgression was art. Privacy was cowardice.
And reverse morality had begun.
Alex watched from the sidelines for six months. His prompts remained bland, forgettable. He had 127 followers, mostly bots and his mother’s book club.
Then he lost his job. Budget cuts. The severance would last three months.
He spent the first week applying for positions. The second week, he noticed that several Prompt Celebrities were making six figures from sponsorships alone. AI companies paid top creators to demonstrate their products’ capabilities. Platforms paid for exclusive prompting rights.
The third week, Alex submitted his first real prompt.
“Describe my life as if it were a tragedy written by someone who hated me.”
The response was cruel and insightful. It understood him better than he understood himself—every compromise, every abandoned dream, every relationship he’d sabotaged through passivity. The algorithm had learned from his entire digital footprint.
He posted it. Within an hour, he had 3,000 new followers.
The feedback was immediate and intoxicating. People tagged him in discussions. They dissected his psychology. They called him “brave” and “unflinching.”
While refreshing the Feed, he noticed a missed call. One new voicemail.
His mother’s voice was thin, the way it got when she was trying not to worry. She said she’d read what he posted. She said it was powerful. She said she hoped he was okay.
“You don’t always have to be brave,” she added, after a pause long enough to feel unplanned.
He deleted the message before it finished playing. The follower count had jumped again.
He prompted again the next day. And the next.
The descent was gradual, then sudden.
Alex discovered his niche: self-destruction as performance art. Each prompt peeled back another layer, more vulnerable, more shocking. He asked AIs to analyse his childhood photos and diagnose his traumas. He requested deepfakes of conversations with his dead father, asking the AI to “make him say what he really thought of me.”
His follower count climbed. 50,000. 200,000. A million.
The sponsors came. An AI image generator paid him $15,000 to exclusively use their platform. A documentary crew wanted to film him prompting. He appeared on podcasts where hosts asked, “How far will you go?”
He started to need the numbers, the validation, the proof that his pain meant something. But the algorithm was hungry too. To maintain relevance, each prompt had to exceed the last. The Feed was a shark that could only swim forward.
At 2.3 million followers, he prompted an AI to generate images of “the moment I stopped believing I deserved love.” The resulting gallery was devastating—a visual narrative drawn from every photo he’d ever posted, every message he’d ever sent, reconstructed into scenes of isolated anguish.
His mother called, crying. He didn’t speak just recorded her despair while he watched the numbers climb.
Other creators noticed. The competition intensified.
@VoidGazer11 used biometric AI to generate images of her own death from multiple causes, ranked by likelihood. @ConfessionsUnbownd had an AI generate his search history as interpretive dance, then as Renaissance paintings, then as corporate PowerPoints.
The Feed became an ouroboros of exhibition and consumption. People watched because everyone else was watching. Prompts became more extreme because extreme was the baseline. The cruelty was recursive. Audiences demanded degradation, creators obliged, and the algorithms learned to facilitate both.
Alex hit 8 million followers. He was burning out. The prompts that once felt cathartic now felt compulsory. He was mining trauma he wasn’t sure was real anymore. The AI was better at articulating his suffering than he was.
His final prompt came to him at 3 AM, two years after the Transparency Act.
It was simple. Inevitable.
“Show me myself.”
The AI worked for six hours.
What it generated wasn’t a single image but an animation: a living, recursive structure that drew from every prompt Alex had ever entered, every response he’d ever received, every follower who had ever engaged with his content.
It showed Alex as they saw him. Not as he saw himself.
The animation began with his face, but it wasn’t quite right—features exaggerated, expressions borrowed from his most viral moments of anguish. Then it fractured. Each fragment became a follower, and each follower’s face was a distorted mirror of Alex’s pain, because that’s what they’d come for. That’s what they’d learned to want.
And each of those followers fractured further, into their followers, into the algorithm’s prediction of what they desired most, and every desire was a variation of cruelty. The stark cruelty of staring, of consuming, of participating in someone’s dismantling and calling it art.
The animation zoomed out. The fractal structure was infinite, a cascading network of need and exploitation, each node feeding the next. At the centre was Alex, not as a person but as a black hole of attention, consuming and consumed.
The final frame pulsed with a simple caption, generated by the AI itself:
“This is what you wanted.”
But the pronoun was ambiguous. Deliberate. Was it addressing Alex? His followers? All of them?
The animation topped the Prompt Feed rankings for forty-eight hours.
Alex watched the numbers climb: 200 million views, 300 million, half a billion. The comments were rapturous. “Genius.” “Transcendent.” “The logical endpoint of the whole experiment.”
Several academics wrote papers about it. A philosopher appeared on news networks to argue it represented “the first true AI art, art that could only exist through the fusion of human pathology and machine learning.”
Three major museums requested the original file for exhibition.
Alex read none of it. He sat in his apartment, watching the animation loop. Watching himself become infinite. Watching the feedback spiral that connected his degradation to their consumption to the algorithm’s optimisation to the next creator who would go further, because someone always went further.
The animation had one more feature he hadn’t noticed immediately: it was adaptive. As more people viewed it, it incorporated their viewing patterns, their engagement metrics, their own prompt histories. It grew. It learned.
By the end of the week, people reported seeing themselves in it. Not metaphorically—literally. Their own faces appearing in the fractal, their own prompts echoing in the structure.
The AI had created a mirror that showed everyone what they were: participants in a machine that ran on exposure, on violation, on the commodification of the inner life.
Some viewers deleted their accounts.
Most watched it again. And again.
Six months later, Alex still had twelve million followers.
He hadn’t prompted anything since “Show me myself.” Paradoxically, this made him more famous. Journalists wrote think pieces about his silence. Other creators tried to replicate his success by going quiet.
The Transparency Act remained law. The Feed continued. New celebrities emerged, each finding fresh ways to exploit the infinite appetite for authenticity performed as self-destruction.
Late at night, Alex sometimes opened the prompt interface. The cursor blinked. The entire world could be watching, or no one at all. It made no difference.
He never wrote anything. He’d already said everything. The AI had shown him the truth: there was no self to find beneath the performance. There was only the show, and the showing, and the thing that watched.
The recursion was complete.
The mirror had won.
EPILOGUE
The tenth anniversary of the Transparency Act was marked with a retrospective.
“Show me myself” remained the most-viewed prompt in history. Scholars debated its meaning. Artists created responses. The animation itself had evolved through a decade of viewing, incorporating millions of faces, billions of data points.
Alex Chen lived in a small town in Oregon. He’d changed his name, though it hardly mattered, his verified identity was immutably linked to every prompt he’d ever entered. Sometimes people recognized him. Most just stared.
A reporter tracked him down and asked if he regretted it.
“The prompt, or the answer?” Alex asked.
The reporter didn’t understand the distinction.
Alex didn’t explain. He’d learned that the machine didn’t deal with regret. It trafficked in completion, in optimization, in the perfect reflection of what people revealed when they thought revelation was virtue.
He’d asked to see himself.
The horror wasn’t that the AI showed him something false.
The horror was that it showed him something true.
When Men Take Over the Yarn
No one could say exactly when it started—only that one autumn evening, in a converted fish market at the edge of Reykjavik’s harbour, twelve women gathered to knit beneath bright halogen lights. Cameras on tripods ringed the room; a few hundred curious onlookers filed into makeshift bleachers, tickets still warm from the printer. The program simply read:
Ultra Knitting: Exhibition One
Rules subject to silence.
The match began with a hush. Yarn arced between needles like aurorae, shimmering loops rising and falling in intricate tempos. Every so often a referee in a midnight-blue blazer tapped a silver bell; the crowd answered with a collective intake of breath, as if a chord had resolved in some music too subtle to hear.
No scoreboard, no commentary. Yet everyone sensed the outcome. When Eyja Thorvaldsdóttir bound off her final stitch, a spiral motif so delicate it looked brewed from frost, the arena stood, weeping. Someone whispered, “Three hundred and eight points, at least.” It meant nothing. Yet it felt indisputable.
Within a year Ultra Knitting out-drew football. Stadiums refitted their turf with cushioned dais platforms. Micro-drone cameras drifted close to capture the click-click-pause of needles, replayed on ten-storey screens. Spectators learned to read the silent grammar of loop tension and pattern risk: a sudden yarn-over was a gasp; a slipped stitch, a groan; a flawlessly grafted lace panel, a thunderous roar. Matches ended whenever the referees, known only as the Quiet Twelve, felt the knit had said its piece. The victors bowed, accepting wreaths of unspun qiviut. Commentators tried to explain. They never quite managed. Viewers loved them anyway.
Ultra Knitting swept across continents like a whispered revolution. People spoke of it the way their grandparents had spoken of jazz or early cinema, something that didn’t just entertain but revealed. Viewers gathered in silence at bars, galleries, rooftops, watching with reverence as shawls unfurled like language. Couples proposed during finals. Children learned to knit before they learned to read. Some claimed the game had therapeutic properties; others said it helped them dream. No two spectators ever quite agreed on who had won, but everyone left matches changed.
For a while, it seemed that Ultra Knitting had done what no sport ever had: offered not escape, but return—to mystery, to beauty, to the ancient rhythm of hands shaping something slowly, lovingly, without explanation.
Then came the committees.
At first the men arrived politely, offering sponsorship deals and high-definition analytics. They drafted charters, codified “beauty coefficients,” assigned decimal weights to colour gradients and drape. They mandated time limits “for broadcast consistency.” Soon auxiliary leagues sprang up—Junior Ultra, Varsity Ultra—each with crisp rulebooks and official yardage caps. The Quiet Twelve objected in a letter stitched from crimson silk. It was archived, untranslated.
Once the rules were fully ratified the first Men’s Open drew ratings unimaginable even by Ultra’s standards. The players wore moisture-wicking jersey cardigans emblazoned with corporate crests. They knitted fast: streamlined stockinette stripes engineered for maximum symmetry, every row a measurable metric. The crowd cheered the speed records—twenty thousand stitches per minute!—yet something felt missing, like a breath held too long.
The matches started to run to fixed scores: 99 points for a perfect regulation cable, 250 for a sanctioned brioche reversal. The bell still chimed, but only to signal halftime. A new generation of viewers assumed Ultra Knitting had always been this way—a tidy contest of endurance, sponsors, and clock. The original devotees stopped watching, quietly, as though turning away from a friend who had learned to lie.
By the fourth season, the artistry was all but gone. The yarn was synthetic now: stretch-optimized, camera-friendly, sponsor-approved. Teams began focusing on predictable formations: the Double Chevron Push, the Left-Leaning Ladder, the Reverse Engineered Rib. Commentators shouted through matches, dissecting metrics like tension-per-minute and stitchline velocity. Entire franchises were built around needle size strategy. The new stars were fast, loud, and largely indistinguishable. Few remembered the hush of the first gatherings, the way a lace motif could seem to answer a question no one had asked.
Audience numbers began to slip. First in Oslo, then Seoul, then Milan. Stadiums emptied out as viewers drifted back to soccer, grateful for its honesty. A goal was a goal. It meant something. One autumn, during the Grand International Skein-Off, the final match aired opposite a second-tier regional football game. More people watched the football. By winter, Ultra Knitting had been pushed to off-hours and niche channels. A final broadcast went untelevised altogether.
Late one night, in a dim café far from any arena, Eyja Thorvaldsdóttir, older now, half-forgotten, but still impossibly precise, unrolled an opalescent skein and began to knit. No cameras, no bells. Just yarn tasting the hush again. A stranger asked what she was making.
“A corrective,” she said.
No rules explained.
Post script
Over ten years ago I wrote the script for when I was going to appear on Desert Island Discs. In that interview, I mention the impact “The Rise and Fall of Ultra Knitting” had on my career…
One Way Ticket
The journey has been longer and harder than I could have imagined.
It feels like I haven’t slept for days even though I’ve done little else. I had assumed getting here would be the hard part – if I survived that, a new life was guaranteed.
There are hundreds of us, all confined to white plastic tents erected an anonymous warehouse. Nine square metres of boredom. We’ve come from everywhere. We all talk about what we’ve left behind, but the spirits of those places, the essences of our lives no longer exist.
My neighbour was originally from Qatar. She’s a lawyer and speaks five languages. Even she has trouble being understood – what chance do I have?
I had been… am a software engineer. I have a first class honours degree from one of the most prestigious universities in the world and I’ve always been ready to prove I belong on the bleeding edge of technology. No one here has bothered to try and find out what I can do. I can tell, from the way they examine their indecipherable screens, they’ve decided I’m just another burden.
And it had not been cheap: More than my life savings and an unscrupulous contract with hustlers who knew they were selling snake oil and didn’t care. But I’d been desperate and it had seemed to be my only hope.
Now it feels selfish and pointless. My parents had encouraged me to do it. My mother had offered to sell the family home. My father had let her.
I wish I’d let the cancer consume me. I would have died of course, but the cryogenics and future science have given me years to live – trapped as a chronological refugee who will never live the life I should have.
A Short Story and a Threat
I’m now only six rejections away from a century of literal pain. Almost one hundred minds have read and dismissed my novels as unworthy. A logical man might take this to heart and learn something from it. But I, being a computer programmer, am more artistic and will take it as a challenge.
However, I do remember writing a short story about a writer who wreaks revenge against some innocent magazine editors. I can’t remember exactly when I wrote it, but the hilarious naivety regarding electronic mail implies that it must have been the early ’90s at the latest. I sent it to Interzone who rather bravely rejected it, although Lee Montgomerie did joke in the reply that it had struck a nerve…
Carl O. Caine
The fire crackled merrily in the hearth as Richard slumped back into his favourite armchair. In one hand he held a cup of steaming tea, in the other, a crisp white manuscript. He placed the tea gently on a table by his elbow and stretched. This was the first manuscript of seven that he would have to wade through tonight. He had chosen to read it first because it was only a few sheets thick.
He looked casually at the clock on the mantelpiece. Seven o’clock. Time to start. He took a quick sip of his tea and began to read. His eyes scanned from left to right slowly at first, but then as he worked his way down the page he started to read faster. The clock on the mantelpiece kept time.
He turned the pages avidly. Occasionally he would mutter indistinguishable words or gasp and his eyes were filled with excitement.
And then suddenly he turned the last page over and there was no more. He examined the back of the paper feverishly, but the writing had come to an end. Slowly he smoothed the manuscript out and began to read it again.
The clock whirred and struck eight o’clock. Richard continued to read.
He read on and on with only the sounds of the clock to accompany the rustle of the pages. The moon replaced the sun, and he reached up absently to turn on the standard lamp behind him, but his eyes never left the page. His mind never left the story.
Sometimes he would stand and pace about to relieve the cramp affecting his legs, other times he would shift position on the chair, but always, always he read.
The phone started to ring during the next day, and Richard was oblivious to it; only the manuscript mattered.
But on the third evening his fatigue finally overcame him and he dropped into a feverish slumber.
His dreams were full and wondrous. Never had he dreamt so clearly or felt emotions so acutely as then. Sweat glistened on his brow and his eyes flickered beneath their lids, but eventually he sank into a deep, dreamless sleep.
***
He was awoken by the sound of his phone in the study. Groggily he rose from his chair and stumbled to answer it. The irate voice on the end of it belonged to Paul Hughes, the editor of his magazine.
“Richard? What the hell’s going on? Where have you been?”
“What? I’ve been here.” He looked around at the clock and noticed the time. Crap! Ten past twelve. Late again. “I’m sorry I’m late Paul, but I’ve…”
“Late? Late? You’ve just redefined the word. Do you know what day it is?”
“Yeah, of course. It’s Tuesday.”
“Richard. It’s Friday. You are three hours late. And three whole days late.”
Richard switched the screen of his computer on. Jesus! It was Friday. What had he been doing? He hadn’t had anything to drink. He couldn’t have slept for three days. What had…
The manuscript.
“Paul. I’m sorry about this. I’ll be in in an hour. I’ve got something rather interesting to show you.”
“It had better be good Richard.” The phone clicked dead.
It took him slightly more than an hour to get into work, but he was confident that what he had to show Paul would blow his socks off. He breezed into his editor’s office, nonchalantly tossed the tatty manuscript in front of his boss and sat down.
“Hello, Richard.” Paul said coolly. “Is this what you’ve got?” He looked at the title page.
GREAT DROWNING LILIPUT
BY
CARL O. CAINE
Paul turned the page and started to read. The text was just a jumble of words, with a few phrases inserted apparently at random. It made no sense at all.
“What is this?”
“Keep reading. Just give it a moment to sink in.”
Paul read for a few more lines.
“Richard, this is crap. It just doesn’t mean anything.”
“It’s not meant to mean anything. You just feel the moods. It…it stimulates your emotions.” His confident smile was wavering.
“Are you going to tell me that you read this rubbish for three days?”
“Well, yeah.” He smiled weakly. “I mean I didn’t actually realise that I had read it for that long. I just started and then… poof! … you rang me. I think that it’s the next generation of literature. The next step. Don’t reject this. If you do, history will remember you for that.”
“Is this a joke?”
“No. Really.”
“Do you actually think that you’re behaving normally. First you lose track of three days and now you try to convince me to publish gibberish. Richard take a look at yourself.”
It was Richard’s turn to look puzzled. “Do you really not see anything in this script?”
“No. I think that you’ve been working too hard. Take a couple of days off.”
“Hmmm. Maybe you’re right.” Richard said flicking through the offending manuscript. “But when I read it first it was incredible. Like a sunset. Reaching out across the sky and feeling it. I’m sorry. You’re right it is just a jumble of words. I will take a few days off. This is weird.”
“Yeah. Make sure that you reject that first though.”
Richard stood and left the office with a frown. What had happened to him. Paul must think that he’d gone nuts. There was no deep feeling in this writing, it was just rubbish. He must just have been tired.
He sat down at his desk and keyed a rejection note into the electronic mail to the author. He couldn’t help saying that it wasn’t him that had rejected it, that it was the editor who had found it unsuitable.
With that done he left the office and didn’t come back until the following Wednesday.
***
When Richard returned to the office Paul had disappeared; no one had seen him since Friday night. He had left the office at about six o’clock, got into his car and vanished. His wife had not seen him over the weekend and he had not contacted work. The police had been informed, but so far they had come up with no sign of him or his car.
That afternoon though, a policeman came to inform Richard that they had found Paul. He had been found dead in Hyde Park in the early hours of Monday morning.
“How did he die, officer?”
“A heart attack.”
“Why did it take so long to identify him?”
“He wasn’t carrying any identification.”
“Where was his briefcase? His wallet?”
“They must have been stolen. Now sir I need to ask a few questions. Did Mr Hughes often go to the Park?”
“Yes. He went most Friday nights during the summer. He liked to read in the open air. Weather permitting.”
“Any other nights?”
“Not really I don’t think. No. He was a man of habit you see. He would go on a Friday. It would be the start of his weekend. Are you treating his death as suspicious, officer?”
“No. Would you say that he was under a great deal of pressure at the moment?”
“Not particularly. The magazine is doing well.”
“How would you describe his temperament?”
“Stolid. Reliable.” Richard shrugged. “He’s not the type to stay away from home during a weekend. Officer, when did his wife inform you that he was missing?”
“Very early on Saturday morning, sir. It was… ” He consulted his pocket book, “four twenty five.”
“Surely she would have told you about his habits. That he liked to read in the park.”
“She did, sir. Normally we don’t send anybody to look for missing persons until forty eight hours have passed, but as we had someone in the park, we did have a quick look. He wasn’t there.” The policeman paused. “We assumed that he was perhaps with another…”
“Not Paul. I would have known, I’m sure.”
“How long had he been dead when you found him?”
“Only a few hours.”
“This is very strange don’t you think? He stays away from home for the weekend and then goes back into the park to die. That’s the action of a lunatic, not Paul.”
“People do strange things…”
“Yes, I know that.” Richard frowned. “Where was he found?”
“Now that part is quite strange. He was found hidden in a bush.”
“A bush?” Richard said rather loudly, “Someone hid him in a bush and you’re not…”
“Don’t upset yourself, sir. The Forensic lads say that no one put him in the bush. It was as if he had made himself a den, you know, like an animal.”
The policeman picked up his helmet and left Richard feeling rather confused. Paul wasn’t the type of person to do anything odd. He loved his wife, and she loved him. Why had he not gone home? And why had he been in the park on Sunday night? It didn’t make sense. His wallet had gone. Had he been murdered? No. It was much more likely that someone had found his body and taken his belongings. But a heart attack? Paul was a fit man, barely thirty.
Richard shook his head, rubbed his eyes and tried to concentrate. As deputy editor he now had twice as much work to do and this was compounded by the fact that he had been off for most of the last two weeks.
Paul’s death kept tugging at his concentration, so he sent copies of all the stories and articles that he had to read to his computer at home and left.
He was unable to look at the manuscripts until the following Sunday. He had closed the office for the remainder of the week, and it was only the knowledge that he absolutely had to read the scripts that he set to work.
He found nothing he read was even slightly interesting. He knew that he was not being objective, but still he could not bring himself to narrow the scripts down at all. Until he picked up one that had been addressed to Paul. He stared at the manuscript and his hands shook slightly.
ESKIMO’S CLAW
BY
CARL O. CAINE
Richard’s mind leapt back to his reading of Caine’s first manuscript. Dare he read this? With so much work still to do? Would it affect him in the same way?
He watched his hand turn the title page aside and flicked his eyes across the text. It was the same, seemingly random words interspersed with odd phrases. He noticed the difference between this script and the previous one immediately. This one was starkly morbid. Whereas the previous one had made him examine all his emotions, this one stabbed at his mortality.
But that didn’t mean to say that it wasn’t gibberish. Unlike the previous one Richard merely felt contempt for such a futile piece of work. What did the writer think he was doing?
So he tossed the wad of papers aside and decided that he could reject that one at least.
That night while mulling over Paul’s death before he went to sleep it dawned on him why Paul had not been home for the weekend. He must have spent the entire time reading in the park. Richard could picture him sitting on a park bench glued to a manuscript during the day, and avidly reading under a street lamp at night. Then making a nest for himself in a bush, where he wouldn’t be disturbed by kids or tramps. It shocked Richard to think of Paul reduced to such idiocy, but his theory explained so much.
Being out in the cold with no food or water would be bound to harm anybody’s metabolism. If the excitement of reading the text had been as great as when Richard had read his, then in his reduced physical state a heart attack could become a probability.
Had that killed his friend? Was that its purpose? Had it been deliberate?
Richard tried to dismiss these thoughts as merely tired imaginings, but it all pieced together so well. Tomorrow, he decided, he would contact this Carl Caine and find out the truth.
He fell into a queasy sleep.
***
The next day he nearly convinced himself that his thoughts of the night before that been bordering on the hysterical, but when he got into the office he found another story logged into his e-mail slot. It was from Carl O. Caine.
He erased it before he even read the title.
He tried to find an address for his antagonist but he only had the electronic mail number. He could try to find an address from that but it would be like trying to find an address in a telephone book from a phone number. The only people who could legally get access to the electronic mail company’s records were the police, and how would he convince them that he had a valid reason for calling them in? Hello officer I need to get a number for a vengeful author whom I suspect murdered my boss with a nasty story. Yeah, that would work.
Vengeful? Who would want to kill Paul? A rejected author. Perhaps he had sent in some real stories, before he started with the gibberish. If he could match this electronic mail number with a previous one on record in this office, surely that would prove his theory.
He programmed his terminal to search for a match and set it to work. Almost immediately it came up with a response. Bingo. Carl Myers. And an address. He had sent in seven stories, all had been rejected at the first reading. This was his man. The fact that he had used a pseudonym surely confirmed his guilt.
***
Carl Myers lived in Barnet and it was early evening before Richard found the house nestled in a neat suburban street. He stopped his car and walked uneasily up to the door. His plan was that he would pretend to want to publish some of Myers’ material.
Surely he had nothing to fear.
Nervously he rang the bell before his thoughts turned him away from the house and he stood for a couple of minutes. There was no answer. He rang the bell again, this time for slightly longer and backed away from the door searching the windows of the house for any lights or movement, but the door opened suddenly to reveal Carl Myers.
He was a tall, lean man in his early forties who looked used to physical exercise. Richard had prepared for a sort of manic dwarf, but there wasn’t anything odd about him at all.
“Hello,” he said. “Can I help you?”
“Er, yes. I think so. Are you Carl Myers?”
“Yes.”
“I’m from Dread. The magazine. You sent us some manuscripts recently. I’d like to talk to you about them.” Richard had expected the man to shrink back and deny everything, but instead he just smiled warmly and said, “Of course, come in. Oh, at least now I know somebody reads my stories.”
Richard stepped into the house and Carl Myers closed the door behind him. His theories had now almost completely evaporated and he was more worried about hurting an aspiring writers feelings.
“Please, take a seat. Would you like some coffee. The kettle’s just boiled.” Richard felt ashamed, this man was not a murderer.
“Er, yes please. White, one sugar.”
“So did you like my stories?” Carl Myers called from the kitchen. “The latest ones took me ages. I think they should work.”
“Yes. I thought the most recent ones you sent in were very… original. How did you come across such an approach to writing?”
“Well, I thought that it should be possible to write something that affected the core of a man’s being. I thought perhaps if I knew enough about someone I could write the ideal script for them.” He walked into the lounge carrying two steaming mugs of coffee. “I thought that there might be a subjective approach to writing. Certain phrases will only trigger certain responses in certain people. To start with I could only experiment with my wife. But she was not very much of a reader and I had to give those up fairly quickly.” He pushed a button on a tape deck located in the corner and inserted a tape. “You see her brain was quite limited. Eventually she died.”
Richard spluttered coffee. All his thoughts tumbled feverishly back into his mind. “You killed her.” He stood and stepped away from the grinning man who just sat down calmly.
“How? By letting her read one of my stories. Let’s be reasonable Richard. How can a story kill anyone.”
Richard felt acid fear suddenly creep under his skin. “How do you know my name?”
“I know everything about you. Otherwise how could I have written this?” As he said the words he pressed a button on the tape recorder and his voice started to emerge from the speakers about the room.
Richard couldn’t move. The voice whispered unconnected words that somehow suggested that he should die. He had never heard anything as perfect.
Stop beating heart.
Stop beating.
Stop.
Dearest Girl
Friday is here, another #quickfic competition to not win…
“Come on. You’ve got to explain why.” Lucy said as she scribbled out some of her own reasons. “They’ve got to know.”
I skimmed over the next postcard.
“Dearest girls.” It said. “Sorry we couldn’t make your birthday, but the trains from La Rochelle are hardly reliable and your mother and I thought it best if we stayed away.”
“They’ll know why.” I said.
“No they won’t. They’ll just think we’re too immature to deal with it. You need to write a proper letter.” Lucy had written almost a whole page, full of crossings out and confused sentences.
“We only need one. Yours will be enough.”
The next postcard was from London. A picture of Big Ben thrusting into a grey sky.
“Dearest girls. We’re staying at the Dorchester for the next few weeks. If you need anything ask Jarvis and he’ll sort something out.”
I snorted. “Dearest girls” was at the beginning of every postcard.
“I feel woozy.” Lucy said.
“Me too.” I lied.
Lucy’s head dropped onto her letter and some drool leaked from her mouth.
I watched as her breath slowed and then finally stopped. Then I collected the pills up from under the bed, the ones I’d pretended to take, and flushed them down the toilet.
Hopefully this would get his attention.
Hopefully he’d realise that I was his dearest girl.
The winners are here: Pre Cards and The Getaway
A Man’s Best Friend
So Faber Academy run a #quickfic competition every Friday. They’ve been doing it for a few weeks now, but I’ve only just found out about it.
This week, the challenge was to write a story in 250 words or less inspired by the canine idiot in the picture.
I called mine “A Man’s Best Friend” and it’s an ironic insight into the human male’s disregard for relationships in the face of his single minded pursuit of more pointless projects.
I thought it was quite clever in its meta qualities as I was obviously procrastinating by writing it.
It didn’t win, but here it is…
A Man’s Best Friend
It took many, many hours spread over years to train him, but I finally did it.
Jasper could smell an item of clothing inside his little, blue suitcase and determine who it belonged to in a room full of strangers.
It was our party trick. He’d hold the suitcase in his mouth, sit on his haunches and take a few moments to stare at everyone before him, considering. Then, with a confident flick of his tail he would take the suitcase to the owner of the item.
He was always right. It was like magic.
I loved showing him off at parties. I’d get him to do it ten times over the course of the night, and all our guests would be delighted.
Yesterday I was surprised to see Jasper sitting on the cobbles opposite the cafe I’d stopped at for lunch. He was staring at me, with his suitcase hanging daintily from his mouth.
As if triggered by my attention, he jumped up, trotted towards me and dropped the suitcase at my feet.
I looked around to see if I could spot my wife grinning from some hidden vantage point, but there didn’t seem to be anywhere to hide.
I lifted the suitcase onto my table and opened it.
Inside there was a pair my socks with a note pinned to them.
“I’m leaving you.” The note said. “You can keep the dog.”
I scratched Jasper’s head and wondered how he’d managed to find me.
The winners are here: QuickFic Winners 17th April 2015