Microfiction

Yesterday filed incorrectly: access denied. Future copyrighted, requires licensing. Present moment in perpetual loading state. Time zones replaced by time permissions. Time itself bureaucratized. Temporal access controlled by paperwork and fees.

Cameras that show what you're hiding, not what you're doing. Algorithms that know when you'll die. Buildings that rearrange when unwatched. Mirrors that show other people's reflections. Observation as control. Privacy inverted. Reality contingent on being watched.

Touch becomes audible. Sight only works backward. Smell as the sole archive of memory. Taste replaced by color. The senses rewired, inverted, fundamentally wrong and humanity adapting anyway. Stories where perception itself breaks and we keep living in the wreckage.

Everyone forgot how to sleep. Silence spreading like weather. The sky slowly lowering. Clocks running backward, just slightly. Endings without explosions. Catastrophes so gradual they become infrastructure. The world doesn't end; it quietly transforms into something unlivable.

Reflections practicing expressions independently. Baby monitors observing parents. Shadows arriving home exhausted. Family photos revealing someone cropping themselves in for decades. Horror derived from closeness. The familiar watching back. Domestic spaces where observation reverses.

A parent ages prematurely to keep loved ones young. A child erases their parent's wish to die. A spouse replaces failing parts without consent. A commuter slows the city for personal efficiency. Monsters convinced of righteousness. Atrocity rationalized as inevitable, loving, optimal.

Photographs where people slowly disappear. Towns where everyone remembers you differently. Words vanishing from all books simultaneously. Futures remembered perfectly while pasts fade. Memory as unstable substrate. Identity contingent on recall that can't be trusted or preserved.

Empty airports at 3 AM. Subway platforms that appear only sometimes. Hotel floors between 12 and 13. Highway exits to unchanged childhoods. The in-between places where reality thins. Thresholds that lead nowhere and everywhere simultaneously.

Nursing homes for retired time travelers. Hospice for obsolete AI. Dementia across multiple timelines. Science fiction about endings, not beginnings. The travelers who went too far to ever come home. Elegies, not adventures.

Debt inherited backward through time. Consciousness as currency. Jobs that exist only while observed. Markets trading years for experience. Economic systems made metaphysically strange. Capitalism's logic followed to impossible conclusions.