MUSIC IN PHASE SPACE

Category: Fiction

  • Crumbs

    You see, it’s the small things that damn a man. Not the great sins—they’re too obvious. It’s the quiet compromises, the clever validations, the glimmering, idiotic comforts we make with the world. It begins so modestly—so innocently. The shopkeeper who nods approvingly at your coat, the way his eyes soften when he sees you’ve chosen…

  • Affirmation

    Scene: A dusky afternoon in the Vatican. The light from high windows slants across the unfinished vault of the Sistine Chapel. Scaffolding creaks faintly in the background. Michelangelo, spattered with pigment and fatigue, stands before Pope Julius II. The Pope, impatient yet curious, watches him from his elevated chair. POPE JULIUS II You are always…

  • INT: ROYAL TREASURY, MADRID, 1637.

    OLIVARES (slamming open the door): Gentlemen! Welcome to a new age of finance. Spain is proud to unveil its latest instrument of international liquidity: the Soul-Backed Evangelical Bond. GENOESE BANKER (twitching): What… exactly backs this bond? OLIVARES (beaming): Salvation. (He clicks, and the Jesuit Consultant unfurls a scroll depicting cherubs baptizing Indigenous Americans.) OLIVARES (cont’d):…

  • GASPAR DE LA NUIT

    There are accounts—fragmentary, contradictory—of a man by that name. A minor poet in the salons of Paris, a soldier lost in the Napoleonic wars, a condemned prisoner who vanished from his cell before the executioner arrived. In each case, the same detail: he was last seen at dusk. A manuscript surfaced once, bearing his name…

  • Aphrodisiac Jacket

    1 The heat signatures moved across the screen in slow, rhythmic pulses, as if the algorithm itself was breathing. Gaza, 3:42 AM. A suspected militant, nothing more than a glowing red figure in the machine’s gaze, exited a cinderblock home, stretching his arms in the night air. A drone hovered above, invisible to him, watching.…

  • A New Glitch: The Googleplex Strikes Back

    A Corso Savage Undercover Adventure Mountain View, California—The Googleplex, a gleaming, self-sustaining techno-bubble where the air smells faintly of kombucha and unfulfilled promises. A place where the employees, wide-eyed and overpaid, shuffle between free snack stations like domesticated cattle, oblivious to the slow rot setting in beneath their feet. I infiltrated the place with nothing…

  • Personality

    Employer: Well, everything seems to be in order. You certainly look like a 10x engineer to us. We just need to do some due diligence and comb through your social media feeds for any signs of personality. Candidate: Uh, signs of personality? Employer: Yes, you know, just making sure you don’t have too much of…

  • The Poppy Index

    Opium is a bureaucracy of the flesh. A ledger. A meticulous clerk with a pen of black tar ink, scratching endless entries into the neural book. It does not create—it records. A meticulous hand. A totalitarian librarian, bent over his desk, stamping “APPROVED” on each incoming sensory impression, filing away the vast detritus of human…

  • Iterative Adaptation

    The Sage of the Eastern Mountain spoke: In the garden of ten thousand possibilities, he who takes a seedling from the emperor’s own thief may find his name written in gold for a hundred generations. Yet what appears as theft to the morning eye becomes wisdom to the evening mind. Consider the humble water beetle…

  • No Exit Christmas Special:

    Locked in a suffocating room, a Jacksonian, a Neocon, and a Techno-Libertarian stew in a surreal cacophony of complaints, each convinced the others are the root of all the world’s misery. The Jacksonian, clutching a tattered American flag, howls about the “pussification” of America, blaming the Techno-Libertarian for flooding the country with “goddamn H1B visa…