patbcs

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 father had told...

The mist clung to the jagged cliffs of Norile like a wet shroud, mirroring the gloom that gripped the small Nordic kingdom. For two centuries, the House of Vane had ruled from the stone-hewn halls of the capital, Odenhaven. It was a kingdom of grim realities—a population of one hundred thousand souls clinging to a rocky, frost-bitten island in the North Atlantic. Their lives were dictated by the brutal cycle of the seasons: the deep-sea trawlers fighting the grey swell for cod, the lead and...

Tom McCormick stood on the porch of his farmhouse in the rolling hills of Pennsylvania, his hands stained with the dark, rich loam of a morning spent tending the rows. He was a man of few words, cut from the same cloth as the men who had stood on this very land three hundred years prior. His boots were worn thin, his knuckles calloused, and his back carried the permanent curvature of a man who had never asked for a holiday. In the distance, the interstate hummed—a constant, rhythmic vibration...