The Tea Shop's Electronic Heart
The first time the drone didn't leave, Keiko Tanaka thought nothing of it. Machines malfunction. Even the sleekest ones, the ones that slice through Tokyo's humid summer air like silver fish through water...
David Sterling is a master of philosophical fiction and speculative storytelling. His stories blend everyday life with unsettling glimpses of the future, forcing readers to consider humanity's place in a rapidly changing world. His work often explores themes of responsibility and the price of human choices.
Stories by this author (25)
The Memory of Hunger
The lightning came on a Tuesday, which Priya would later think was the worst possible day for one's life to fracture into before and after. Tuesdays were her busiest—double orders from the IT parks, their cafeterias closed for cleaning...
The Third Shift Symphony
The fluorescent lights hummed their familiar electric prayer as Esperanza Reyes pushed her cart down the seventh-floor corridor of St. Augustine Medical Center...
The Thursday Night Calls
The tablet arrived on a Tuesday, sleek and silver like a mirror that had forgotten how to reflect. Esther Makena held it the way she once held rare books in the library, with reverence and slight suspicion...
The Grace Machine
The first clue was the semicolons. Miriam Chen sat in the amber pool of her desk lamp, the library closed for three hours now, October wind rattling the windows like bones in a cup...
The Infinite Convenience
The first QR code appeared on Tuesday morning, black and white squares arranged like a tiny window on a jar of umeboshi...
The Cleaning of Infinite Rooms
The fluorescent lights hummed their familiar tune, that electronic mosquito whine that Khalil Madani had learned to love over three years of night shifts. Love, because it meant routine. Routine meant predictable. Predictable meant safe...
The Archaeology of Borrowed Rooms
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The Midnight Addresses
The third time the address disappeared, Adaeze knew she wasn't losing her mind. Not completely, anyway...
The Night Language
The first time Marcus Owusu noticed the building breathing, he was on the forty-second floor, pushing his mop bucket past the endless glass walls that looked out onto the sleeping Silicon Valley...
The Last Electrician
The aurora came on a Tuesday night, which Takeshi Yamamoto would later find appropriate, as Tuesday had always been his unlucky day...
The Midnight Algorithm
The building breathed differently after midnight. Esperanza Morales knew this the way she knew the weight of rain before it fell, the way her grandmother had known which herbs would cure sorrow and which would only deepen it...
The Night Shift Algorithm
The building breathed differently at night. Ismail Rashid knew this the way he knew the weight of his mop bucket or the particular squeak of the third-floor hallway when the fog rolled in from the Bay...
The Memory Merchants of Liberdade
The iPhone was dead the way only water-damaged phones can be dead—not just powered off but drowned, its circuits corroded with the green bloom of electronic decay...
The Corner Store at the End of the World
The fluorescent lights hummed their electric prayer above Sachiko's head, the same hymn they'd been singing for thirty years in this corner store that sat like a forgotten bookmark between Detroit's yesterday and tomorrow...
The Color of Tomorrow's Sound
The first message appeared on a Tuesday morning that smelled of jasmine and car exhaust, written in the margins of García Márquez like a whisper from another world...
The Three O'Clock Garden
The spreadsheet glowed ghost-white on Marcus Chen's laptop screen, its cells marching in perfect formation like soldiers of insomnia. Column A: Time observed. Column B: Duration of lights. Column C: Color spectrum (purple, green, occasionally amber)...
The Twilight Addresses
The heat in Phoenix that summer was a living thing, a creature with burning breath that crawled through the streets and pressed its weight against windows, searching for any crack, any weakness in the human defenses of air conditioning and shade...
The Night Frequency
The building breathed around Amara Okafor like a sleeping giant, its ventilation system sighing through the empty corridors of TechNova Industries. Three a. m...
The Taste of Tuesday Afternoon
The butter chicken tasted of heartbreak. Not the curry itself—that was sublime, all cream and tomato and garam masala singing together like old lovers—but something else, something that hit Samir's tongue like a memory of tears...
The Last Supper Algorithm
The fish curry was still warm when Meera found Mr. Fernandes. She'd climbed four flights of stairs in the Bandra building, the April heat making her QuickBite uniform stick to her spine like a second, unwanted skin...
The Memory Keepers
The snow fell like static across the Minneapolis strip mall, each flake a small interference in the greater signal of the night. Inside Golden Circuit Phone Repair, Mrs...
The Weight of Quiet Things
The first package arrived on a Tuesday morning that smelled of rain and expired milk...
The Harmony Capsule
The basement of the Harmony Community Center breathed dust and memory, each particle floating in the shaft of Miguel's flashlight like a constellation of forgotten years...
A Thousand Paper Suns
The community center smelled of lemon disinfectant and old coffee, the kind of smell that clung to your clothes and followed you home...