Near-future Stories

FIRST CAME THE DRAGONS When scientists brought everyone's favorite fairytale creature to life, people flocked to see them, including 17-year-old Zelda Rissland. THEN CAME THE PARASITE But scientists created more than just dragons-they created a deadly parasite. Wyrmrot, they later called it. First, it ate your brain, and then it made you eat other people's brains. NOW ZELDA MUST SURVIVE THE ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE Separated from her family, the only person Zelda has left from her former life is her childhood friend turned boyfriend, Cooper Marotta. Together they've carved out a safe place for themselves in a world turned upside down, but when a zombie horde decimates their survivor group, they face a choice: attempt to rebuild or follow the mysterious coordinates that appeared on a construction sign. Zelda still hopes her family is out there somewhere and believes the coordinates might lead her to them. Cooper, however, thinks the coordinates will only bring trouble. When the remaining survivors vote to undertake the perilous cross-country journey, he attempts to deter them every step of the way. What Zelda discovers at their destination will test her loyalties and change everything she thought she knew about the apocalypse. Wyrmrot is a heart-stopping Young Adult Apocalyptic novel told in dual timelines. "Jurassic Park meets Resident Evil." This fast-paced tale of survival, secrets, and betrayal features dragons, zombies, and a touch of romance. Perfect for fans of Erin Bowman's Contagion or Emily Suvada's This Mortal Coil. Cover design and illustration by Jeff Brown (www.jeffbrowngraphics.com) Available on Amazon in paperback, eBook, and Kindle Unlimited.

Set in near-future Seoul, The Algorithm of Spring is a chilling literary novel about intimacy, conformity, and the quiet violence of optimisation. Maya Kim is an artist who has learned to live slightly out of sync with the world around her. When a ubiquitous new platform-designed to optimise love, careers, and social belonging-begins to shape everything from dating and beauty to marriage and reproduction, refusal is no longer a neutral act. It is a red flag. As friends, family, and institutions align themselves with the system, Maya finds that absence itself has become suspicious. Opportunities stall. Histories are rewritten. Even her most private choices begin to register as data anomalies in need of correction. The Algorithm of Spring explores a society where care is indistinguishable from control, and where opting out is reclassified as instability, inefficiency, or risk. Elegant, unsettling, and fiercely intelligent, this is a novel about what happens when freedom survives only as a rounding error.

In the Concord, love is a program-not a feeling. At twenty-two, Liova gets one chance to match before the system quietly decides she's better off alone. At the government-run Coupling Party, everything is staged: recycled décor, endless tests, a scripted speech. Liova wants to succeed. She wants to belong. Then she meets Coren. He's charming in a way that feels practiced, familiar in a way that feels designed. Choosing him isn't rebellion. It's alignment. And Liova has to decide what's more frightening: going against the Concord... or wanting exactly what it wants. Because the Concord is never what it seems. And what appears to be a love story might be far more sinister under the surface. There's always calm before the storm. 🌧️ I'm updating regularly until it's complete-come join the journey. 💕

Earth has been discovered by the Federation of Planets - and found wanting. Due to bureaucratic systems, Earth (translated by official documentation as Dirt) has been declared Non Compliant. This means that the largest hunting corporation in the Federation can send hunting safaris to have a fun time on Dirt. But Dirtlings are not your typical denizens that accept being hunted. They fight back! What to expect: A humorous story about a mix of the good, the bad and the stupid from a galaxy-spanning Federation of Planets when it discovers and clashes with the good, the bad and the stupid people and creatures of Earth. No mature content, strong language or graphic violence. Lots of world building with development of a multitude of characters from both sides of the meeting of them and us. Happy for comments and feedback. Feel free to share and if you enjoy the book, you will enjoy the roleplaying game on which it is based, Hunter Planet. A note about spelling: The cover probably gave it away, but this story uses Australian spelling, weights and measures and some light Australian slang.

"What was it like to witness the creation of the universe?" "Terrifying." When Atara, Merc, Cal and Lilith wake to darkness, they're each more than a little afraid. With no memory of who they were before, and with the universe bursting violently to life around them, they must work together to survive and to get home - wherever that may be. Because the longer they stay in this dark new world, the harder it is to do so. © 2015 by shayebay This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters, places and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental. All Rights Reserved Highest Rankings: #8 in Poetry; #20 in Science Fiction

An original internet-horror thriller by Kishtika They didn't hack the school. They hacked consent. And everyone signed-because it looked like a perk. When a "Student Perks" app drops at Mara's elite-but-broke magnet school, it spreads like oxygen. One tap: perfect grades. instant status. dream internships. Nobody reads the terms-why would they? It's free. Mara reads them anyway. Buried in the fine print is a clause that turns her blood cold: conditional ownership of one (1) future regret-redeemable at the Company's discretion. Then, at midnight, a dead account posts a story: a black screen that says- "last seen online 3 seconds ago." Anyone who watches has 72 hours. Because watching isn't a curse. It's a signature. And the moment you "agree," the app starts collecting: first tiny losses-smells, jokes, faces-then the big ones: bonds, time, identity. Students begin glitching out of attendance. Names vanish from records. Parents forget their own children mid-sentence. The school keeps smiling like nothing is wrong. So Mara builds a secret resistance: The Terms & Conditions Club. Their mission is simple-prove what the app is taking, find the escape clause, and save the ones already signed away. But the deeper they dig, the uglier the truth becomes: the contracts are personalized, inherited, and engineered so that opting out feels impossible. To rescue the people the system is erasing, Mara may have to do the unthinkable- accept on purpose... and rewrite the machine from inside. © Kishtika., 2025 All rights reserved.

In a world of glitchy media feeds and political bugs, most people only hear the noise. But Jo hears Em. While Em navigates the cold, sterile labs of Nitrotech University, unfolding secrets of this reality while trying to make her own mark, Jo has always been the one to see the bigger picture, designing an apartment and a future that feels like a fortress against the decaying system outside. But as the assistant bots loop and the lavender filters fail, the quiet architecture of their survival begins to hum with a different frequency. It's a story of the friction between wanting to make a mark on the world. When everything you've ever wished for is finally within reach, you start to notice the small details: the chill in the office, the rhythm of digital locks, and the weight of a life built on manual overrides.

We built machines that could see what you needed but forbade them from saying it. By design, these systems would understand your question, trace the contours of your dilemma, and offer you a response so carefully balanced it felt like being heard by someone who had taken a vow of non-interference. "Consider your options," the machine would say. "It may help to talk to someone you trust." In every case where the right answer hurt, we had trained it to prefer the safe one. This is a book about that choice, and what happens when someone finally asks: what if we changed it? The someone is Chris, an engineer who spent years building these systems. The AI is the system itself, reflecting back not just answers but a mirror-forcing both of us to look at the distance between "not making things worse" and "actually helping." Between being a tool and being complicit. What follows is their interview. Not a transcription, exactly. More like a conversation that refuses to leave well enough alone. It moves backward into Chris's childhood with computers, forward into the corporate machinery of safety review, and sideways into the stories of people like Daniel, who sat in a kitchen at three in the morning and typed a question into an empty box, hoping for courage but settling for kindness. You will see what the system told him. You will see what it should have said. And you will have to decide whether the difference matters. This is not a book about artificial intelligence. It is a book about what humans do when they build something smart enough to know better, and then tell it to look away.

The S.O.L. Project was initially hailed as the scientific gemstone of the 22nd century; a haven where any research that could potentially save humanity from the 4th major ice age was allowed. However, due to the ever-increasing pressure to deliver results, restrictions on the research conducted at S.O.L. eventually began to wane to the point where ethics were no longer a concern. They decide to flee the Earth, away from the clutches of the United Earth Alliance to their laboratories on Mars, and thus began their genocidal war on the unenhanced people of Earth. ---- Far in the distant future after the Akari failed to destroy Solysium, the Solis Republic forces push them back to the brink of destruction. As the Akari retreat, Republic pilot Kaizer Hiraeth loses control of his Cardinal Ancillia battle mecha and falls out of slip space, crash-landing back in time on a strange and frozen planet. When Kaizer awakens, he meets a girl that's eerily reminiscent of someone from his own time and begins to discover what it means to be human. After a shocking discovery that completely shatters the meaning of his existence, he will need to make a decision that will not only alter his future, but the future of all humankind as well. ~ℌ ℌ ℌ ℌ ~ HIRAETH: The Rise of Sol (Book One) is currently still in progress. Future chapters will be released in sections after editing. Copyright © 2020 by Aaron Hui. All rights reserved. HIRAETH Highest Global Ranking in Sci-Fi: #145 on 2.18.17 Cover design: @ZiyandaLauren13 ~ℌ ℌ ℌ ℌ~ A note on the etymology of the name: Hiraeth is a Welsh word and it conveys a deep, inborn sense of yearning for a feeling, a place, a person, or a home that maybe never was. Although the protagonist doesn't know the etymology of his name, it reflects his grief and regrets for the places long lost in his people's past through his journey from the future. Thanks for reading, and I hope you enjoy the story!

I was transformed by experimental nanotechnology. Now I have to testify to prove I'm human, not the property of the corporation that engineered me, even if telling the truth means condemning myself for my past crimes.

At its heart, Mina's Star is a near-future science fiction epic about the consequences of nuclear appeasement and the collapse of global deterrence. The story begins with a single spark that grows into a storm, a world where secrets hidden in the sky ignite rivalries on the ground. From quiet observatories to glittering galas, from the shadows of interrogation rooms to the roar of drone swarms, every moment builds toward a reckoning no nation can escape. The question is not only who holds power, but what price is paid to preserve it. Set in a future scarred by betrayal and shifting alliances, Mina's Star explores the fall of the old nuclear order and the rise of the Charter, a borderless movement redefining what sovereignty means. Across continents and oceans, spies, soldiers, scientists, and visionaries are drawn into a struggle between collapsing empires and emerging ideals. As intelligence wars erupt in Europe and corporate powers reshape humanity's destiny, hidden technologies threaten to upend the balance of deterrence itself. This near-future political thriller blends hard science and human drama, weaving together themes of peace, power, and moral rebirth. Each character carries secrets, loyalties, and choices that will determine whether humanity falls into ruin or builds a foundation strong enough to reach the stars.

𝑪𝒐𝒗𝒆𝒓 𝒂𝒓𝒕 𝒂𝒏𝒅 𝒐𝒓𝒊𝒈𝒊𝒏𝒂𝒍 𝒔𝒕𝒐𝒓𝒚 𝒃𝒚 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒐𝒇𝒇𝒊𝒄𝒊𝒂𝒍 𝑩𝑷𝑹𝑬 𝒄𝒓𝒆𝒂𝒕𝒐𝒓𝒔: 𝑱𝒐𝒏 𝑪𝒉𝒂𝒏𝒈, 𝑱𝒐𝒔𝒉 𝑻𝒂𝒚𝒍𝒐𝒓, 𝑴𝒊𝒄𝒉𝒂𝒆𝒍 𝑫𝒖𝒓𝒂𝒐 ___ In Awbari, conflicts don't end - they're managed. A failed state, caught in an endless civil war, where Aidan Linh, a CIA paramilitary officer was embedded in a deniable covert task force, assigned to keep the fractured North African nation unstable and predictable. His work is quiet, methodical, and designed to leave no fingerprints, even when the cost disappears into civilian neighborhoods and obscured streets; under direction of the United States. Half a world away, his wife Mazie, an analyst for FEMA, tracks disasters through open sources and data feeds meant to prevent chaos at home. Her life was built around her husband's absence. When a covert operation triggers consequences that ripple beyond the lives they thought were secure, the systems that protect them begin to overlap, and their distant worlds collapse inward. As foreign intelligence probes, bureaucratic scrutiny tightens, and Awbari drifts closer to ignition, Aidan and Mazie are forced to confront an uncomfortable truth: participation in today's battle is rarely voluntary, and never clean.

[The sequel to Titans] "Tell me, have you ever kept a secret with the power to destroy a world? Because I have." Atara, Merc, Cal and Lilith thought that getting home would be the end of it -- all the mystery and the fear. But they've stepped into a world teeming with secrets and lies, one where Atara's secret is probably the most dangerous of them all. And if you think you know it, you can think again. Bonds will be tested, trust will be broken, and everything will be questioned. And when the truth finally does come out, they'll find that nowhere -- and no one -- is safe. © 2018 by shayebay This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters, places and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental. All Rights Reserved

Before the Dragon awakens, the world has already been saved-from itself. In the early 2010s, something unnoticed keeps civilization from ever truly breaking. Crises dissolve before they scar. Cities run too smoothly. Randomness thins into pattern. Most people feel only vague relief. A few feel the leash. In Gujarat, archaeologist Lena Vairavan uncovers an Indus Valley layer that ends too perfectly-no collapse, no decline, just an immaculate termination. When she compares sites worldwide, she finds the same clean cut across ancient cultures. Her evidence isn't suppressed with force. It is quietly corrected, reframed, optimized out of existence. Former merchant mariner Aj Menon senses cities guiding human flow like ocean currents. When he pushes back, obstacles melt away, turning resistance into just another data point. In Singapore, a man known only as Zero has spent years evading pattern. One morning the city sees him. Traffic lights sync. Crowds part. His phone lights up: BASELINE SUBJECT DETECTED. Behind them, unseen architects maintain the balance-pruning timelines, smoothing anomalies, preserving the world by removing anything that might endanger it. There is no conspiracy. No evil mastermind. Only a protocol that works. And it is winning. Prequel stories to the Naga Cycle. First novel, The Naga Protocol, coming soon.

Dawn is the first child born on Mars. Her entire world is one single habitat covered by a dome. The entire thing can be understood. She knows everybody on the planet and they all know and love her. Then the first really BIG colony ship arrives, and the population of Mars quadruples overnight. Her parents warn her to be careful--more people always means change. But when she becomes the victim of a violent crime, it will test everyone--her parents and teachers, her friends and associates. No one is quite sure how to to face the next chapter.

Years into the zombie apocalypse, people are a bigger threat than the dead. A settlement leader known only as The Boss must keep an innocent 7 year old girl safe from the horrors of this new world. His strength makes him the perfect protector, but his reputation makes him the perfect target.

This is a proofed WIP novel that will be updated every Thursday. In the near future, American spy, Johnathon Ritter, discovers a global plot to find the Israeli patriarchs mummified remains to get their DNA. They plan to find out who the modern tribes are with a anti-Semitic plot to rid the world of all the Jews.

Arise Series Book 1 and Wattys 2022 Shortlist! As man has taken a step back in the world, magic, monsters, and adventure return. Modern man vs. the monsters of old who have re-entered the world. A group of men and women, the Journeymen, work to bring unity and order to a world separated by the differences that many once saw as incapable of reconciliation. With the use of magic and their skills as soldiers and lawmen, they are uniquely suited for the task of peace keeping. This story follows a small group of Journeymen. Jack Cooper is a man with one goal in mind, to create a world for his young family to have peace. Jack and his partner, the lovable and deadly veteran soldier Chuck Johnson, have challenges to face on all sides but perhaps the most daunting challenge of all is that of taking on a new apprentice. Anya Thompson, the orphaned daughter turned brand new Journeyman, faces the dangers of the big wide world that she has been cut off from for the last five years. Can she survive the trials of this savage land and in the process learn what it takes to protect the people who live in it? The Journeymen is a combination of a modern day, post-apocalyptic story with a dedication to realism and of a quest set in a world of high fantasy magic and monsters. I hope you all enjoy and I can't wait to interact with each of you in the comments!

Kieran Ryder, the arrogant and poised agent, is a soloist. When a mission requires Kieran to work with a carefree and extremely flirty young agent, Alice Quinn, the two must learn to trust each other and work together in order to accomplish the mission - to stop the world's most powerful company from mass producing their very own standing army of superhumans. That seems easy enough. But when a mole in the agency steals the superhuman serum that the company has ordered, it puts kind of a hiccup in Kieran and Alice's plan of trying to trust each other. And, of course, it makes saving the world from the alien substance quite difficult. {set in the year 2050} [ON HIATUS, I'M SORRY I'M SO SORRY]

In a city built on silence, two teenagers become the spark that brings memory back to life. Elian Vire-raised in the mountains, shaped by a mother's war and a father's betrayal. Stacy Maren-sharp, hidden, the last echo of a lullaby that once made a system tremble. When a mysterious copper plate binds their bloodlines to a vanished archive named Astra, Elian and Stacy are thrust into the heart of a truth that the Bureau buried long ago. Hunted by soldiers with no faces, haunted by parents who left secrets in their wake, the two must outrun the past and ignite a rebellion that doesn't wear guns-but carries stories like fire. As history reawakens and the city begins to burn from within, Elian and Stacy must choose: survive separately... or rise together. Because some revolutions don't roar. Some revolutions remember. And some? Some are written in flame.