Short Stories of a Frustrated Author

Story Summary (≈300 words) Working Title: The Last Reservoir The world did not end with fire, plague, or nuclear war. It died of thirst. Decades of competition for artificial intelligence supremacy drove governments and technology giants to construct millions of increasingly powerful AI data centers across the globe. Each facility consumed staggering amounts of electricity and freshwater for cooling. Individually, their impact seemed manageable. Together, they quietly drained rivers, emptied aquifers, and accelerated drought beyond recovery. Scientists warned of the growing crisis, but profits, politics, and the promise of technological dominance drowned out every alarm. Now, nearly ninety-eight percent of humanity is dead. The novel opens more than three years after civilization has collapsed. Former data center systems engineer Ethan Cole travels across the desiccated American Southwest with sixteen-year-old Emma Ruiz, whose parents died during the famine. They belong to a small resi...

Chapter 1 — Election Night By the time Pennsylvania began to turn, Elias Ward had been sitting in the same chair for nearly six hours, long enough for the muscles at the base of his neck to harden and for the room around him to lose the ordinary comfort of a room. The apartment still held the shapes of his life—the half-stocked kitchen, the narrow hallway, the shelves of books he had bought during a more hopeful decade, the framed photograph of his sister’s family turned slightly toward the wall after their last argument—but election night had reduced all of it to background. The only real light came from the three monitors on his desk and the television mounted over the cold fireplace, where a panel of exhausted commentators talked over one another beneath a banner that had changed three times in twenty minutes. Rain moved down the windows in wavering lines, bending the lights of lower Manhattan until the city looked less like a place than a system under stress. Elias had watched elec...

The Voter Index Story Summary Elias Ward never trusted crowds, politicians, or movements. After twenty years as a senior data architect for a private intelligence contractor tied to federal election analytics, he understood something most Americans never did: privacy in the digital age was largely an illusion. Every purchase, every location ping, every social media interaction, every donation, every streaming preference, and every search query could be fused into predictive behavioral models with terrifying accuracy. Then President Jonah Reed won. Reed was charismatic, combative, and wildly popular. A political insurgent who shattered both parties, he swept the Electoral College and won the popular vote on promises to dismantle entrenched federal power, prosecute corruption, secure the border, and expose collusion between government agencies and corporate influence networks. Half the country celebrated him as a savior. The other half viewed him as a budding dictator. When Reed actually...

 Chapter 1 The rain had started before dark and settled in with the patience of a debt collector. By seven it was riding the windows hard, flattening itself against the glass and sliding down in crooked silver lines that caught the streetlamps and broke them into pieces. Halsted below looked like a strip of black ribbon dragged through oil. Tires hissed. A streetcar clanged somewhere south. The bells from St. Brigid’s drifted over the rooftops and through the wet air, slow and deliberate, like somebody taking inventory of the dead. My office sat above a barber shop that smelled of talcum, bay rum, and old talk. The place below closed late and opened early, which suited me. Men who spend all day trimming sideburns hear more truth than priests and fewer lies than aldermen. The stairs to my door were narrow, with paint worn off the middle by years of feet going up worried and coming down disappointed. Rent stayed cheap because the pipes complained in winter and the floor tilted ha...

  Rules of Engagement   Chapter 1 The clock in the upper-right corner of the primary display did not blink. It didn’t need to. It simply existed—cold, absolute, and indifferent—counting down in bright white digits against a black strip like a hospital monitor announcing life in the language of numbers. T–12:00 Captain Evan Cole sat with his spine straight and his hands lightly resting on the controls, as if he were waiting for a weather report instead of deciding whether someone would stop breathing on the far side of the world. The operations floor at Creech Air Force Base was a windowless warren of fluorescent light and recycled air, the kind that never smelled like anything except filtered dust and warmed plastic. Rows of consoles faced forward in disciplined symmetry, each manned by airmen and officers with headsets clamped on, faces lit by monitor glow, shoulders hunched in the quiet posture of concentrated work. There were no raised voices, no dramatic gestur...