(Short stories)

My published short stories (including flash fiction)

Computer with magazine on screen

What Matters

Not actually published; available only by signing up for my email list.

Hul was willing to risk his sanity and his life to maintain power, but the result dragged him onto another path. Pain shouts louder than politics.

Shahn Ka’s hand paused above the “Enter” key, as if some other hand restrained his from that final drop. “We are the Seekers of Truth,” he said softly. “We shouldn’t be fabricating and disseminating a lie.”

Power to Power

Appeared in Triangulation: Energy in the summer of 2022. Triangulation is the series of annual anthologies from Parsec, the Pittsburgh, PA science fiction club. (https://parsec-sff.org/)

Letting the world’s richest people solve the energy crisis seemed like a good idea. But controlling physical power can grant other kinds of power.

Now I’m living in hiding, in–well, you don’t need to know where, and my signal is going through enough fake IDs and VPNs to keep anyone from tracing it, I hope. All because I single-handedly saved the world. Oh, and caused the biggest energy crisis the world has ever seen.

WANT GOLD

Appeared as Daily Science Fiction’s story for November 15, 2022. One of the last stories they published before going on indefinite hiatus. (dailysciencefiction.com)

Technical ability can grow faster than wisdom. What if this is true for an alien species with technology significantly beyond ours? How could Earth people defeat even simple pirates with such a technological advantage? Perhaps with a battle of wits instead of weapons.

Illiterate extraterrestrial extortionists! Not the way we’d hoped our first contact with an alien race would go.