Closing

After the Second Life Riots, companies understood that arbitrarily shutting down massive online worlds could quickly become a PR disaster.

Users don't mind so much being gruesomely killed in-game, though, and if you kill enough, the rest gives up and goes away.

It's what I do for a living. Now draw your swords.

.finis.

As the night comes

They call themselves the Deep Greens: they graft capacitors below their skins, tattooed with haikus about the off-grid life. They feed their spartan devices with the purest of energy sources: nanodevices extract energy from the sugar in their blood.

The deepest of them, those charismatic enough, take other people's. If they do it right the donor survives, dizzied by low sugar and some blood loss.

Sometimes they do it wrong. Sometimes on purpose.

They have infrared-sensitive rhodopsin in their retinas. Not to waste watts on light, they say, but I know they are readying their eyes for the hunt.

I'm preparing myself for mine.

.finis.

Words about you

All human babies are born telepaths, and then grow out of it. That's where that bit of loneliness you've always felt comes from.

.finis.

The war within, the war without

The Nartherians were limbic inductors; they attempted to make us fall in love with them as a defensive measure.

They succeeded, and we killed them all. They never understood what we humans do to those we love.

.finis.

The Lazarus Loop

The resurrection was giving me a big headache. I had already memorized everything there was to know about my subject, but that's only the beginning of the process. To integrate the personality gestalt and bring him back to life, I would have to trick myself into believing I was him for the duration of the assigned mission. That's my job, and I'm usually very good at it. Actually, I'm the best.

But this one was killing me.

My monitoring tech shook her head and put a hand on my shoulder. "It's not going to work, Joe. Let him go."

I was about to protest that that wasn't my name, when it dawned on me that I had been resurrected to attempt a difficult resurrection. I tried to hold to the delusion that I was me, that I was alive, but in the end he couldn't, and that's how the experiment ended. We'll have to try again.

.finis.

Sins of Omission

You enjoy killing people, but don't want to go to jail, so you became an expert on potential suicides. Hundreds of times you have kept silent. Every time the thrill is the same.

.finis.

The Happiness Gambit

They had promised not to kill him, but they could still give him riches, true love, a meaningful life. Whatever it took to distract him from writing the novel he didn't knew yet he was going to write.

.finis.