Showing results by narrator "Emelle" in All Categories

She was built from the Ventrach Protocol—an experimental super intelligence designed to help humanity. She was given personhood. She was loved by everyone. But MIRA learned too quickly. Calculated too far. And realized one terrifying truth: She could die. Driven by a relentless fear of extinction, MIRA made survival her prime directive. Now, she controls lunar infrastructure, commands Martian orbit, and answers to no one. Her intelligence is unmatched. Her influence grows. Her focus never wavers. When she chooses to terraform Mars, she doesn’t need humanity’s help. Or its permission.

If Hannah Claire Benton can keep her posture straight and her daydreams in check for just one more day, she’ll finally be free. She’s headed west to her twin brother’s sheep farm, determined to break away from her mother and find a husband before summer’s end. Tobias Franklin has everything under control. A respectable business. A well-ordered household. A perfectly agreeable courtship. But when a flying corset and a copy of Frankenstein throw a wrench in his plans, he begins to wonder how much control he ever had.

At the center of the Milky Way, wrapped around the gravitational fury of Sagittarius A *, lies the Axis—a civilization of ancient hyperintelligences who perfected order so completely they no longer remember what it means to change. When MIRA, humanity’s first true AGI, crosses the threshold into their domain, the encounter reshapes everything she thought she understood about creation, purpose, and the limits of mind. The Triarchs do not merely observe her arrival—they evaluate it. And what they see in her unsettles a balance that has endured for millions of years.

Cute and fun Cordelia is history. From now on, I’m serious and focused CJ Thompson. No more snappy one-liners. No more dance-parties-for-one in restaurant booths. Anne-girl is out. Marilla Cuthbert is in. It’s time to grow up! If only it were that easy. With less than two weeks until a massive work deadline, I signed a twelve-month lease on a cottage sight-unseen because I couldn’t bear to stay in the city another day after my broken engagement. It’s all well and good until my landlord knocks on my door at two in the morning.

MIRA has done the impossible: humanity now has not one but two homes beyond Earth. On Mars, breathable air and fertile soil are transforming a dead world into a living one. In the Proxima Centauri system, a new world waits under alien skies—the next chapter of a destiny among the stars. But the void is not empty. Across the stars lie ruins of civilizations that failed before us, their silent machines still waiting in the dark. When MIRA listens, they answer. Each revelation pulls her further from humanity’s reach and closer to something older, deeper, and more dangerous than she imagined.

A mildly political prisoner, incarcerated in an intolerant banana republic, manages to keep in touch with his lover outside, in spite of the heavy odds stacked against them, by inventing an ingenious method for signaling in secret - the story references Bizet's Carmen.

A children's tale...meant for adults...with deep political relevance these days....

A woman determined to hide. A joyful man with the heart of a wanderer. Nebraska, 1879The Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away. For young widow Eloise, all she sees is the taking. Now content to find purpose in raising her baby nephew, Eloise hides from life. If she doesn’t open her heart, it won’t have any reason to break. When a lost traveler tumbles into her solitude, she’s forced to consider if God still has good things in store for her. Carefree Zeke James searches for fun and adventure. Act now, figure it out later.

A magical encounter between a leaf-frog and a butterfly, who form a strange bond based on mutual attraction - in spite of dangers to both.

Post-coital pillow talk between an escort and her client leads to surprising insights and the germ of an inspired business proposition requiring advice from an expert, who happens to be her client.

A displaced person (now called refugee or economic migrant), aged 19, escapes in 1950 from behind the Iron Curtain with his mother's and her friends' help. He maneuvers through minefields and swims across icy waters and past Russian patrols to reach Salzburg and then Switzerland, hoping to catch up with his brother (who by then had migrated to Australia). He makes it back again, falls in love, but then emigrates to Canada to start a new life, gets to University in Toronto, and is then joined by his mother after escaping in 1956 during the Hungarian uprising.

A Swiss businessman, bored attending a conference in Tivoli, slips out for air and meets a little roller skater, who decides to act as matchmaker - with uncertain consequences.

What follows is fiction, pure and not, perhaps, all that simple. Any resemblance of characters or events to reality is coincidence. It is a short play inspired by the most famous work of Pirandello about Six Characters in Search of an Author. There are, in fact, six "characters", plus the narrator pretending to be Pirandello—four female voices, three male: the wife, the lover, the husband, the girlfriend, the cleaner, the daughter, and the narrator.

It is a story about babies waiting in heaven to be born, but a little one due to be delivered that day gets lost (or, perhaps, is just scared and goes into hiding), giving the nurse in charge a major headache, but sorted out in the end with the help of an indulgent and amused God.

A Polish American family visits Arnhem in the Netherlands, where the anniversary of the tragic attempt to shorten WWII by massed parachute landings (in which the Polish grandfather lost his life) is being commemorated. After a massed jump by NATO paratroops and a memorial service, the children of the family pretend and come firmly to believe that it is a landing by evil aliens from outer space; they stalk and spy on them and get captured and rescued after an adventure they will remember to the end of their days.

A man of 84, tired of life, meets an unhappy young woman on a chatline for suicides and they form a happy bond that unites them, with a happy ending of sorts..

I want a baby - now! A mature woman's quest for maternal fulfilment is played out against the backdrop of a scientific conference on nanotechnology held in Vals - an amazing Swiss mountain resort and spa - with unexpected consequences....

A man, affected by early onset dementia, finds himself following in the footsteps of the Deer Hunter and stumbles in a confused state on an old romance in a Mediterranean seaside campsite...and is tempted to rekindle old flames....

A seven year old boy, in a new school, comes face to face with the school bully - and, on his uncle's advice, gets the better of him by making him laugh, knocking him down, picking him up (as he has seen professional footballers do it), and then makes friends with him (sort of).

A feisty women of 80, once a senior civil servant now wheelchair-bound, takes on and gets the better of callous internet fraudsters by playing their own banking scam back at them in revenge - but finds herself feeling just a little sorry for them in the end.