The bell above the door did not ring; it sang. It was a vintage brass wind chime Leo had tuned himself using a file, a guitar tuner, and an embarrassing amount of free time during the Great Sriracha Shortage of last winter. It chimed in a perfect G-major chord, designed to trigger a subconscious release of dopamine in anyone crossing the threshold. Today, however, the dopamine was strictly one-way. Nobody was crossing. Leo Bridger, twenty-four years old, self-appointed Empero

The ticket had been purchased at a Sunoco station just off Route 208, outside of New Wilmington, Pennsylvania. It was an impulse buy, the product of a weekly five-dollar pool managed by the faculty secretary of Allegheny State College’s Division of Natural Sciences. There were twenty-four of them in total. They represented every corner of the natural sciences: four biologists, three chemists, three physicists, two geologists, two meteorologists, two botanists, two zoologists,

In the city of Mirage Creek, the sun never quite seemed to break through the smog of the Central Processing Ward. Wyatt Ketcham stood at his workstation, his hands stained with the graphite dust of the state-mandated assembly line. Above him, a holographic banner flickered with the city’s motto: “From Each According to Ability, For All According to Need.” Wyatt was seventeen, and like everyone else in the Third Sector, he was a cog in a machine that claimed to serve him. His