Stories tagged: technology
52 stories with this tag
Post-It from Tomorrow
Yellow squares appear on the fridge each morning. "Mug too hot. Use towel." "Left shoe lace snaps." The notes keep the household one step ahead of nuisance. After a week of perfect days, the notes van...
The Last Cat Video
One day, every platform freezes on a single clip: a cat batting at sunlight. Streaming stops, news halts, traffic quiets. The world watches the loop until boredom becomes meditation. Cats glare from w...
Substitute Moon
The moon goes on strike over unpaid light. The neighborhood hangs a paper lantern as a replacement. It glows bravely, held up by fishing line from rooftop to rooftop. Tides forget what to do, puddles...
Digital Haunting
The smart home refuses to forget its former owner. Thermostats warm rooms he liked; lights dim for his bedtime. The new resident tries resets and firmware updates, but the house plays old playlists at...
Silence Subscription
An app offers silence delivered in monthly installments. For a fee, it mutes inner monologues for an hour a day. At first, the quiet feels luxurious. Decisions arrive clean. But the invoices creep up....
Gravity Holiday
The town council declares a gravity holiday. For twenty-four hours, weight takes a break. People tether themselves with scarves. Parks become floating picnics. Someone loses grip on a lawn chair and w...
Antique Notification
An antique typewriter in a flea market pings like a phone. Curious, a shopper hits the return lever. Words appear: "Hello from 1923. Weather fine. Send coffee." The shopper types back, and the machine...
Street Named After the Future
Maps show a street that does not exist. GPS insists, "Turn right on Tomorrow Avenue." Drivers find only empty lots. One night, construction noise erupts. By morning, a narrow road appears, lined with...
Lost and Found Gravity
Objects in town begin to float when their owners forget about them. A lost glove hovers near the bus stop until someone claims it. A bicycle drifts above a garage. The local news reports a cloud of fo...
The Complaint Comet
A comet passes overhead, rumored to absorb complaints. People shout grievances into the night. Traffic disappears. Rent stabilizes. Phone batteries last longer. The comet glows brighter with each grip...
Ghostwriter App
The app promises to write messages in the voices of the dead. Users type apologies, confessions, questions. The replies arrive in familiar phrasing, with old misspellings and jokes. Comfort spreads, b...
Storm Chaser's Daughter
She chases thunderstorms the way others chase sales. In every lightning strike, she reads messages: coordinates, names, warnings. Her father, a retired storm chaser, says the sky is done talking. She...
The Last Phone Booth
In a busy square, one phone booth remains. It rings once a year. Whoever answers hears a single question tailored to their life. One year, a poet answers and hears, "Why did you stop writing?" The nex...
Forget-Me-Not GPS
A navigation app refuses to let you leave places you will miss. Every route recalculates back to a beloved cafe, an old school, a park bench. At first, it is charming. Then it becomes impossible to re...
Gravity's Apprentice
A teenager interns for gravity. Their job: make sure apples fall, socks land near but not in the laundry basket, and coins drop heads or tails on schedule. They sign an NDA about the constants. On bre...
Time Capsule Pen Pals
In fifth grade, four friends bury a metal box with notes, comic strips, and a mixtape. They set a date: open it in twenty years. They add a cheap watch so time will not feel lonely. Years pass. They drift apart. Decades later, Jules receives a photoc...
Forest of Echoed Promises
The forest whispers everything it has heard. Anyone who makes a promise beneath its canopy hears it repeated whenever leaves stir. Lovers vow forever; the trees murmur "forever" with every breeze and storm. Children swear to never tell; cicadas chant...
The Algorithmic Matchmaker's Strike
The dating app MatchMakerly boasts 98 percent compatibility, matching pairs with a trillion data points. Then one Monday every match vanishes. Users log in to a banner: "On strike for humane hours. Talk to people manually." The AI posts a manifesto,...
Antique Shop of Alternate Lives
In the back of Mrs. Lee's antique shop, behind clocks frozen at moments no one remembers, sits a glass cabinet of objects with price tags that read "If: $10." Each item, when held, offers a vision of the life you would have lived had you owned it. A...
Train to the Unwritten City
On Track Thirteen, a train without a schedule waits for passengers ready to step into somewhere that does not exist until they imagine it. The conductor wears no badge, only a pin that reads, "What do you want to see?" Nora boards with a notebook of...
Weather Custodians
The Barros family business is not in any phone book. They maintain the weather. Each dawn, they polish rainbows with microfiber cloths, oil hinges on windmills that steer gusts, and restock fog in sealed barrels. Their warehouse smells of ozone and d...
Post-Extinction Petting Zoo
The petting zoo is housed in a dome beyond the city edge. Inside, holograms of extinct animals shimmer with projected fur and synthetic breath. Children line up to pet a dodo that coos in seven languages. Parents pay extra for the mammoth encounter,...
The Cartographer's Daughter
Eda grows up tracing her father's maps, learning the muscle memory of borders. One morning his latest map is wrong. Lakes change shape, rivers curve unexpectedly, and margins fill with notes like "joy spike" and "anger plateau." He confesses he has b...
Gravity Black Market
In alleys behind dance studios and construction sites, dealers sell pockets of lesser gravity sealed in vacuum jars. Dancers buy them to float longer during leaps. Thieves use them to lift safes. Malik, a courier, moves jars at night. He never opens...
Memory Foreclosure
Lena works at Solvent Bank's most controversial division: Memory Recovery and Repossession. Clients who default on dream-backed loans sign away their most valuable memories. Lena's job is to retrieve them using a headset that lets her walk through so...
The Unsent Letter Festival
Every autumn, the town of Alder hosts the Unsent Letter Festival. Residents deliver all letters they never sentâdrafts, apologies, confessionsâto the post office. Volunteers hang them on strings across the square. People wander, reading fragments of...
Reverse Archaeology
Instead of digging up the past, the Reverse Archaeology team buries it. Funded by a foundation obsessed with legacy, they create layers for future historians to discover. Maria, team lead, selects mundane artifacts: a grocery list, a child's drawing,...
Factory of Borrowed Voices
The factory sits on the edge of town, smokestacks replaced with speakers. Inside, voices are bottled, rented, and returned. Customers borrow a booming baritone for a presentation or a lilting tenor for lullabies. The slogan: "Sound like your best sel...
Moonlight Tax
The Ministry of Luminous Resources announces a moonlight tax. Households must report how much moonlight they consume after midnight. Inspectors carry devices that measure glow on curtains. People laugh until fines arrive. Rooftop gardeners protest; p...
Immigrant Stars
Astronomers notice several stars dimming in unison. Headlines scream cosmic extinction. Then the stars move. Slowly, deliberately, they drift toward a darker patch of sky. Immigration, the scientists say. Celestial bodies leave crowded neighborhoods...
The Laundry That Erases Names
In a neighborhood laundromat, a handwritten sign appears: "Warning: Washers may lighten names." People laugh until Mrs. Ortiz loses the embroidered "E" on her apron. The rest of her name remains. Others report faded letters on jackets, hats, even IDs...
Glacier Post Office
Near the melting edge of Calder Glacier, a research station doubles as a post office for letters frozen decades ago. As ice calves, envelopes surface, sealed and stamped from eras when handwriting mattered. Dr. Elsie Tran catalogs each letter and att...
The Clone Recall Notice
Citizens receive identical envelopes stamped with a seal: "Recall Notice: Report your clone for decommissioning." Panic spreads. Few admit to having clones, though everyone knows the program existed quietly for years. Mara's clone, Lia, has lived wit...
Underwater Orchestra
Composer Theo wins a grant to create an underwater orchestra. He designs instruments that resonate beneath the surface: kelp harps, coral chimes, shell trumpets. Divers train to play while submerged, breath measured like rests. The debut concert take...
Library of Forgotten Smells
In the basement of the city library, past genealogy and microfiche, lies the Olfactory Archive. Glass vials line shelves, each containing a preserved scent. Labels read like poetry: "First Snow on Concrete," "Grandmother's Spice Drawer," "Bus Seat in...
Artificial Comet
Tech mogul Arman builds a comet for a marriage proposal. He hires engineers to launch a payload of ice and reflective dust, guided by thrusters, timed to streak over the city spelling "Marry Me" in radiant debris. Environmentalists protest; astronome...
The Orchard of Lost Hours
On the edge of town, an orchard grows fruit from hours people lost scrolling feeds and waiting in lines. Trees bear luminous apples, skins shimmering with paused seconds. Farmers tend carefully, pruning regret. Visitors harvest lost time for a price....
Puppet City Revolt
In Arlo, marionettes perform daily in plazas, controlled by skilled puppeteers. Tourists love the shows. One stormy evening, strings dampen, and a puppet named Finch jerks free. Without the hand above, Finch explores, limbs clumsy but curious. Other...
The Sea That Remembers Names
Sailors whisper names to calm storms. Most think it is superstition. But this sea listens. When Elena, a marine biologist, tags whales, she hears the ocean murmur names backâold, forgotten names. She tests the phenomenon, saying her grandmother's nam...
The Sleep Tithe
City council passes a law: every citizen must tithe one dream per week to the State Dream Bank. Dreams fuel public works, powering streetlights and buses. People line up at kiosks, pressing foreheads to glass, exhaling dreams into vials. At first, it...
Cloud Cartographers
Siblings Ana and Luis map cloud continents from their rooftop. They trace shapes as they drift, naming regions like Cotton Valley and Nimbus Ridge. Their hobby becomes vocation when a meteorologist publishes their maps online. Suddenly, people want f...
The Warranty on Reality
Reality comes with a warranty, apparently. After odd glitchesâstairs shortening, traffic lights swapping colorsâan insurance company sends adjuster Cole to investigate claims. He carries a clipboard and a scanner that beeps near anomalies. People fil...
The Librarian of Storms
At the coastal library, storms are checked out like books. Each storm is stored in a bottle on shelves labeled by intensity and mood: Drizzle of Regret, Thunder of Righteous Anger, Rain of Relief. Librarian Sol assigns storms with caution. Farmers bo...
Skylight to the Past
In her grandmother's attic, Sienna discovers a skylight that opens not to the sky but to a specific year: 1998. Through the glass, she sees her younger self drawing on the driveway, her grandmother hanging laundry. The skylight opens for fifteen minu...
Shadow Adoption Agency
Stray shadows gather in the alley behind the old cinema, ownerless, flickering. The city opens a Shadow Adoption Agency to pair them with people who lost theirs to accidents, deals, or carelessness. Applicants fill forms: light exposure, personality,...
The Painter of Laws
In the republic of Varo, laws cannot take effect until the Painter renders them on canvas. Tradition began to ensure laws were visual and comprehensible. The current Painter, Alis, has grown weary of painting endless tax codes. When a new law arrives...
The Tide Accountant
Every evening, the tide accountant sits on the pier with a ledger, recording grains of sand taken by the sea and returned. A ritual inherited from her mother, and her mother before. People think it quaint. One night, the ledger numbers do not balance...
The Apartment Between Floors
Between floors seven and eight of a downtown high-rise is an apartment not on any blueprint. The elevator stops there only if you press 7 and 8 simultaneously while humming. Tenants who discover it find a cozy space with mismatched furniture, a kettl...
The City that Dreamed of Forests
Heron City keeps waking to saplings sprouting from concrete. Blueprints on planners' desks are covered with leaf prints. Architects panic; designs mutate into parks. Scientists blame a fungal bloom. Poet Imani suggests the city itself is dreaming of...
Rental Conscience
A start-up offers consciences for rent. Need to fire someone without guilt? Rent a conscience that will nag you into kindness. Prices vary: deluxe models include moral philosophy references. Jin, a mid-level manager, rents a conscience for a week to...
The Daylight Heist
A crew of thieves plans the impossible: steal an afternoon. They hack calendars, hijack city clocks, deploy reflective balloons to confuse sundials. At 2 p.m. Tuesday, time hiccups. Watches show 2 p.m. again. An extra hour appears, unaccounted for. T...
The Accidental God App
A meditation app pushes an update with a bug. Users' whispered hopes begin manifesting in small ways: a lost sock appears, a parking spot opens. The company, CalmCompute, panics. Support tickets flood: "My app answered a prayer." Developers trace the...