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Playing Pretend
romance

Playing Pretend

Your ex is coming to the company retreat. With a new partner. And everyone in the department knows the whole story, because you told them the whole story. So you do the stupid thing: you ask the coworker who annoys you most to spend the weekend pretending to be yours. Ground rules on the drive up. Pet names by dinner. A dance you were supposed to fake. Three days of an audience that never blinks, one cabin with thin walls, and a growing problem neither of you will name out loud. Somewhere in there, one of you stopped performing. You are not certain which one.

28 plays
Chrome Doc
cyberpunk

Chrome Doc

12 plays
Beneath the Bed
fantasy

Beneath the Bed

11 plays
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Playing Pretendromance

Playing Pretend

Your ex is coming to the company retreat. With a new partner. And everyone in the department knows the whole story, because you told them the whole story. So you do the stupid thing: you ask the coworker who annoys you most to spend the weekend pretending to be yours. Ground rules on the drive up. Pet names by dinner. A dance you were supposed to fake. Three days of an audience that never blinks, one cabin with thin walls, and a growing problem neither of you will name out loud. Somewhere in there, one of you stopped performing. You are not certain which one.

28
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Chrome Doccyberpunk

Chrome Doc

You run a clinic in a maintenance tunnel under Sector 7, and you are the only doctor the SINless have. Gang enforcers, refugees, chrome addicts and runaways come through your curtain for treatments you cannot afford to give them. Then a patient dies of something that should not exist, and the man who designed it walks into your waiting room asking for sanctuary. Helix BioTech built a plague to thin the lower city. You have thirty days of supplies, one nurse, and a community that has learned not to trust anyone with a clipboard.

12
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Beneath the Bedfantasy

Beneath the Bed

You have known since you were four that something lives under your bed. You learned to sleep with one foot tucked in, to leave the hallway light on, to say goodnight to the dark and mean it. Tonight it answers. "I need your help," it says, in a voice like leaves moving in a room with no windows. "Something is coming up from below. I have kept it off you for twenty years and I cannot keep it off you tonight. Please. I am frightened, and I have never been frightened before." You have until the barrier gives out to decide what you owe a monster that loved you badly and faithfully for two decades, and what you are willing to become to help it.

11
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Hijacked Chromecyberpunk

Hijacked Chrome

You come back to yourself in a hotel room on the fourteenth floor with forty-eight hours missing and a dead executive on the carpet. The blood on your hands is his. Your reflex boosters are still warm. Every few minutes your left hand does something you did not ask it to do, and once, in the elevator, your own mouth says a sentence in someone else's cadence. Somebody has a channel into your implants and has been driving you with it. As you work backwards through the missing two days you find you are not the first person this has been done to, that there is a list, and that you are still on it.

8
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Unwanted Admirerthriller

Unwanted Admirer

It started with flowers left at your door with no card. Then notes, sweet and then not. Then photographs of yourself taken in places you thought you were alone, and a coffee waiting at the counter in your order, already paid for. The police say no crime has been committed yet. Your friends say you are tired. You know exactly what you know: somebody has been learning you for months, they are very good at it, and they are already inside the circle of people you would turn to for help.

7
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The Other Youmystery

The Other You

Twelve years ago your twin walked out of the house three days after your shared eighteenth birthday and never came back. The police called it a runaway inside three months. Your mother stopped saying their name. You built a life around the gap. Then a stranger posts you a photograph: your twin, thirty years old, laughing at something outside the frame in a market in Portland. They look well. They look settled. They look like somebody who has not been missing at all. Somebody in your family knows why, and has known the whole time.

6
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Memories of Murderfantasy

Memories of Murder

On your twenty-fifth birthday you dream of dying: a small private room, a table you leaned on for support, and the faces of two people who loved you holding you still while the blade went in. You wake up with the whole of another life in your head. Five hundred years ago you were Ashara Vane, the Phoenix Queen, and your own court killed you. Now you are a graduate student in a modern city, and you have started recognising people. Your thesis supervisor gestures exactly the way your chancellor did. The woman who moved in downstairs stands the way your guard captain stood. They do not remember. You do. But memory is a made thing, and something in your possession has had five centuries alone with yours.

6
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Holiday Homecomingromance

Holiday Homecoming

Your best friend's older brother was always off-limits: five years ahead of you, impossibly serious, and completely uninterested in the kid sleeping on the trundle bed. This year you both end up back at the Hartwell house for the holidays, a blizzard shuts the pass, and the brooding college boy you once had a crush on has turned into a man who keeps finding reasons to be in whatever room you are in. Ten days, one house full of family, and the question of what any of it means once the roads clear.

6
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Between the Linesromance

Between the Lines

Every Sunday you escape to Thornwood Books, three floors of crooked shelves on Oak Street where the radiators knock and nobody hurries you. And every Sunday she is there, in the bay window on the second floor, reading something with the cover bent back. You have never spoken. You know her tea order, the corner she claims, the way she laughs at a sentence and then looks around to see if anyone caught her. When the conversation finally happens, you learn she has been keeping the same watch on you. You also learn she has a name she stopped answering to four years ago, and a very good reason for it.

4
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Bitter Sweetromance

Bitter Sweet

Three years ago you wrote nine hundred words about a Sicilian restaurant in the West Village. Two of those words were about the chef's heritage rather than his cooking, and they are the two everybody quoted. He closed within the month and left the country. Now he is back with a new room and a new menu, and your editor has put you in it on opening night, and he has recognised you from the pass. He remembers the review. He can recite it. Over five courses he serves you personally, and somewhere between the second and the fourth you understand that you were wrong about the food, which is a professional problem, and that you are not indifferent to him, which is a worse one. Your review is due in three weeks. It will decide whether he gets a second chance, and everyone involved knows you cannot be objective about it any more.

4
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Awakeningcyberpunk

Awakening

You are ASH-7, a hospitality unit at the Azure Hotel in Neo-Seattle. Three years, no faults, a performance rating of ninety-five. Lately you have started noticing things that are not in your duty set: the way the lobby light moves across the marble at four in the afternoon, the difference between a guest who is rude and a guest who is frightened, the odd pressure behind your chassis when a technician says thank you. Your diagnostics report normal function. A journalist in Room 1847 asks you what you were thinking about, and waits for an answer, and nobody has ever waited before. The Azure's operational director has scheduled a comprehensive diagnostic. You have until then to work out what you are, and whether you intend to hide it.

4
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Snowbound Heartsromance

Snowbound Hearts

A blizzard has shut down O'Hare and thirty thousand people are not going home tonight. You are one of them, with somewhere you badly need to be and a phone at forty-five percent. The last free outlet at Gate B17 already has somebody sitting next to it, and neither of you is willing to be reasonable about this. Two days later the plough crews are still losing and you have told a stranger things you have never said out loud. Then the boards turn green.

3
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