Abandoned Places Pre-Order

My story "Prospero" is now available for pre-order as part of the Abandoned Places anthology, curated and edited by  voice.

This collection of anthropomorphic horror stories explores the fears to be found in the places abandoned by others... or those places where others are abandoned to.

An excerpt for your reading pleasure follows:

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Dear Mother,

When I was born, I massed four grams. By the time I’ve come to kill you, I will mass four point seven trillion tonnes.

You named me Prospero, and cast me into the void, boosted out Earth’s gravity well by a chemical rocket. Prospero, a pygmy marmoset crushed down in my tank by a great hand of God. Hitched to a solar sail more tenuous than the ghost of a soap bubble. In my time out here, circling Proxima Centauri, I’ve come to learn a few things about God, Mother.

I’ve learned how to speak His language. I’ve learned how to program Him.

You put God in me, Mother. You whispered His name into my blood before I was even born. A little genetic rosary, intoned seven times: Pax6. Hail Science, full of grace, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy research done, on animals and not on humans. Give us this day our hallowed brains, and shape them to your will. Amen.

He is ticking away helplessly, processing, whispering pleas and warnings, threats and thunderous omens, magnetic fields of force twitching a neuron here, a neuron there.

But I’ve had a long time to learn to out-think Him, Mother. How to think faster, more furiously. Oh, sure, He can reach in through that black magic of magnetic force, compel a neuron to fire, whisper at me from His throne of silicon implanted in this little soup can of a spaceship. But brain plasticity is a marvelous thing; and I’ve learned where He can and cannot reach. I learned what thoughts He listens to.

And I’ve learned that He does not screen his messages.