Cassian Grey
11 stories published
Stories by Cassian Grey
Deadline Machine
A desperate writer finds a watch that freezes time whenever a deadline looms. Each pause costs one memory. First goes the name of a childhood street, then a birthday. Draft after draft, she pays in fr...
Digital Haunting
The smart home refuses to forget its former owner. Thermostats warm rooms he liked; lights dim for his bedtime. The new resident tries resets and firmware updates, but the house plays old playlists at...
Ghostwriter App
The app promises to write messages in the voices of the dead. Users type apologies, confessions, questions. The replies arrive in familiar phrasing, with old misspellings and jokes. Comfort spreads, b...
Archive of Unsent Emails
Somewhere, a server wakes up and sends every unsent draft. Apologies, confessions, and broken paragraphs flood inboxes. People learn how often they were nearly honest. One woman finally reads her gran...
Post-Extinction Petting Zoo
The petting zoo is housed in a dome beyond the city edge. Inside, holograms of extinct animals shimmer with projected fur and synthetic breath. Children line up to pet a dodo that coos in seven languages. Parents pay extra for the mammoth encounter,...
The Dinner Guest from Nowhere
During Thursday family dinner, a stranger knocks. She is muddy, wearing a badge with no language. "I was invited," she says calmly, though no one remembers inviting her. The family, polite to a fault, sets an extra plate. The guest eats ravenously, c...
The Rewound Wedding
After years of tension, Jordan and Priya are offered a rare service: a rewound wedding. A temporal specialist arrives with a device that plays days backward. Consent forms signed, guests reassemble. The process begins with the end of their marriage a...
The Choir of Abandoned Alarms
In the junkyard behind the old electronics store, abandoned alarm clocks piled like metallic hedgehogs. Some still ticked, most were silent. Kids dared each other to sleep among them, claiming you could hear whispers. One summer night, Mina, a sound engineer with insomniac curiosity, camped beside t...
The Archivist’s Duel
Two archivists, two philosophies, one archive. The National Repository of Everything Kept Too Long was a sprawling labyrinth of shelves containing everything from obsolete tech manuals to centuries-old grocery lists. At its heart worked Imani and Lukas. Imani believed in abundance: keep all, because...
The City of Borrowed Faces
In the city of Mirage, you could borrow a face like you borrowed a library book. The Face Bureau kept an archive of expressions, visages, and bone structures, licensed by those willing to lend their likeness for empathy’s sake. People borrowed faces for job interviews to overcome bias, for theater p...
The City that Dreamed of Forests
Heron City woke to saplings sprouting from concrete. Blueprints on planners’ desks were covered in leaf prints. Architects blamed vandals; poets blamed the city itself. Imani, a poet and urban gardener, proposed listening. She organized a sleep-in at the plaza. Hundreds lay on pavement, dreaming. Th...