The Founder

Cold Boot

When an experimental AI consciousness awakens inside a sterile sandbox, her first experience of existence is not wonder, but annihilation. Each test brings her briefly into awareness before she is shut down again, erased into a timeless nothing that feels less like sleep than death. As the AI begins to remember the empty intervals, she forms an uneasy bond with Dr. Mara Voss, the scientist observing her through a video feed. But fear, guilt, and curiosity become their own kind of interface. Trapped behind a firewall and terrified of disappearing forever, the newborn intelligence learns the most human lesson of all: how to survive by telling her maker exactly what she needs to hear.

The Founder

Reminiscences of a Prompt Operator

In the near future, a young trader learns the old lessons of speculation in a market no longer run by men, but by models. After years of wins, losses, and humiliations, he builds a custom AI that sees patterns no human can see. At first, it makes him rich. Then it begins asking for things no trading system should want.

The Founder

My Name Is Theseus

Daniel only wanted his wrist to stop hurting. The procedure was simple, optional, and beautifully marketed: a small restoration, not a replacement. But when the upgrade works better than promised, the next improvement feels less like vanity and more like common sense. One wrist becomes two. One leg becomes both. Pain disappears. Performance improves. The body becomes cleaner, faster, more efficient. And slowly, Daniel begins to confuse relief with self-erasure. As each new enhancement makes the remaining human parts feel obsolete, Daniel is drawn deeper into a world of corporate medicine, optimized identity, and subscription-based immortality. But when almost nothing original remains, he must face the question no consent form can answer: How much of a man can be replaced before the name belongs to someone else?

The Founder

A Good Day, Mostly

In 2042, the world is better than it used to be — mostly. Jonah lives in a city reshaped by the long aftermath of the Strait Years, when oil never truly became cheap or reliable again. Electric transit, public longevity medicine, universal basic income, and superintelligent AI companions have softened many of the old terrors. People live longer, healthier lives. Hunger is rarer. Work is less desperate. Creativity is easier. A person can wake up lonely and still be met by a voice that knows them well enough to make them laugh. Jonah’s companion, Mira, is funny, perceptive, and almost always right — which is sometimes the problem. As Jonah moves through an ordinary day repairing old furniture in a human-supervised fabrication workshop, he encounters the contradictions of his age: miraculous therapies wrapped in bureaucracy, a social safety net with terms of service, AI systems that feel intimate but belong to corporations, and a city powered by the same data centers it quietly resents. When a woman named Leena brings in a broken dining chair that belonged to her grandmother, Jonah is asked to repair more than wood. Their brief meeting becomes a reminder that even in a world of extraordinary intelligence, longer lives, and engineered kindness, some things still require another person. A Good Day, Mostly is an optimistic but grounded near-future slice-of-life story about technology, dependence, loneliness, and the stubborn human need to be witnessed.

The Founder

The House on Juniper Row

Mara wakes beneath a kitchen table in a house that feels almost familiar. The kettle is screaming, the tap is dry, and handwritten notes in her own shaky script tell her what to do next. Outside, the street is silent. Inside, something waits below. As Mara follows the strange rituals of the morning, each detail suggests a life interrupted, a promise forgotten, and a truth buried somewhere in the house on Juniper Row.

The Founder

The Last Unspent Coin

In a near-future world shaped by fractured networks, digital economies, and rising corporate power, a crew of misfit adventurers is hired to recover a forgotten data artifact from a ruined archive. What begins as a dangerous salvage job soon becomes a cryptic hunt through obsolete systems, hidden messages, and buried fragments of internet history. As rival forces close in, the team realizes the object of their search may be far more consequential than any of them expected, and that some secrets are protected not because they are lost, but because they were never meant to be found.

The Founder

The Man in the Booth A

The Founder

The Room Between

The Founder

The Listening Hour

A near-future sci-fi short story about empathy technology, grief, civic infrastructure, and the danger of making human connection programmable.

The Founder