Humanity has left for the stars, but our origins on earth haunt us still.

It was summer—warm air nipped at my sunbaked skin, just the wrong side of unpleasant. My toes trailed through the biting water of the lake, ripples chasing my foot back and forth. The sky had just reached dusky twilight, promising reprieve from the heat of the day.

Kathy begins renovations on her new home,
but she’s not alone in the house.

Blink. Blink. Blink.

The cursor tormented Arthur with its persistence as it waited for a final command. One that would loose a new mind into the world: an artificial intelligence he had designed in order to create. To write. To redeem.

It was smaller than Ginny remembered; the wood turned dull gray with age. Nails protruded where they had worked themselves loose with decades of thawing and freezing. New trees had grown up, and old trees had fallen. And the path of the creek meandered a bit more to the left. But this was it, her wishing bridge.

"Faster." A word that haunted Viv for her whole life. Today, it came from her piano teacher. Ms. Briggs pressed her lips with apparent frustration. She was a fierce teacher but an exceptional one. "You picked this as your recital piece, and I'm going to make sure you do it justice. So again, but faster."

My dear Evangeline,

One or the other of us should burn these words, for some things cannot leave here. Nor can they be said aloud. But I must pour them from me, or I will drown.

"Goodnight." I turned off the lights and began closing the door. Then, in the dark, his voice trembled.

Chester Longfellow paused to let the warm morning sun wash over his face before he flipped the sign to "Open."

Whump-thwack. Whump-thwack. The boy barely noticed the wood as he split it into kindling, instead imagining he was slaying beasts and dragons with each swing of his axe.

In a world built by the mythological Fates, one child is born without a destiny.