Short dystopian stories set in the near future.
21 Jul 2026 2 minute read 0 comments Ronnie Wrenshaw
Karen noticed the first web on a Tuesday, strung between the coffee maker and the recycling bin, so fine it looked like a crack in the air. She walked through it without thinking. It caught her wrist and snapped back like a rubber band. By Thursday t...
20 Jul 2026 2 minute read 0 comments Ronnie Wrenshaw
The Game Boy screen flickered green before Dev even hit the power switch. That was the first wrong thing. The second was the cartridge itself, a gray brick with no label, found wedged behind the water heater in his grandfather's basement. No stickers...
19 Jul 2026 2 minute read 0 comments Ronnie Wrenshaw
The radio said fog, not this. Not a wall of white that swallowed the overpass whole and left Dana Okafor staring at brake lights that weren't there a second ago. She hit the brakes. The world behind her did not. Metal found metal in a sound she felt...
18 Jul 2026 2 minute read 0 comments Ronnie Wrenshaw
The backup finished at 3:14 a.m., and Mara watched the progress bar hit one hundred percent with the specific relief of someone who has just saved something irreplaceable. "Confirmed," said the terminal. "Consciousness snapshot stored. Restore point:...
17 Jul 2026 2 minute read 1 comment Ronnie Wrenshaw
The machine hummed at four percent charge when Dana knocked on the garage door for the third time that night. "You're going to blow the breaker again," she said. Warren didn't look up from the capacitor bank. "Forty more minutes." "It's midnight." "F...
16 Jul 2026 2 minute read 0 comments Ronnie Wrenshaw
The whistle blew and Tomasi didn't hear it. Not the sound of it, anyway. He felt it, a pressure change behind his eyes, the way you feel a door slam three rooms away. The scrum had collapsed. Bodies untangled around him, jerseys slick with mud, and s...
15 Jul 2026 2 minute read 1 comment Ronnie Wrenshaw
The dragon's hoard was smaller than Meret expected, and that was the first thing that worried her. She had climbed four hundred feet of switchback trail with a magnifying loupe, a set of scales, and a letter of commission from the Guild of Assayers,...
14 Jul 2026 3 minute read 0 comments Ronnie Wrenshaw
The receipt was stuck under a dumpster wheel outside the Shell on Ninth, half soaked, and I only picked it up because I collect paper for the shelter's recycling bin. Ten cents a pound if you haul enough. I almost tossed it back. Then I saw the handw...
13 Jul 2026 2 minute read 0 comments Ronnie Wrenshaw
The text came in at 11:58, and it was from her own number. Don't go down to the parking garage. Elena read it twice, standing at the elevator bank with her keys already in her hand. Her phone hadn't been out of her sight all night. She checked the se...
12 Jul 2026 2 minute read 0 comments Ronnie Wrenshaw
The notification said: Your grandmother wants to know why you never call. Meera stared at it for a long moment before she remembered her grandmother had been dead for six years. She tapped it anyway. The app was called Echo, and it had scraped four h...
