Compendium of Nightly Stories

#INITIATING DISTRESS BROADCAST# ::RECALIBRATING:: -CHANNEL CONNECTED- To those that can hear me, under Paris, under the view of the tyrants that roam above us, I am Vin Ires, and I have a confession for this world which I've betrayed. Like some of you, I was born here, in what used to be the beating heart of France. I'm sure some of you still remember the lively streets and the pulsating movement of tourists under the warm summer sky... Some of you, lucky few, that still remember the sky. I lived most of my childhood in the backstreets of Paris, constantly on the move, always three steps ahead of the law. And like that I survived for many years, until I met a lonely priest in a beautiful yet humble cathedral lost between the endless marble buildings. This man... He used to be someone, he told me. But for as long as I knew him I never got to know his name or his soul, if he even had any of the two. He taught me that the world was more than it seemed. He showed me first hand how ...

The attendant could not give her a satisfying answer. -You are not on the list, miss- he insisted. Lira Crass was not enthusiastic that the attendant kept regurgitating the same response to her cries of confusion. -I ought to be on the list, I paid for the damn ticket. Two hundred koopons, nothing more, nothing less-. The attendant did not seem to budge, and after much complaining, Lira only managed to get a free meal at Spaceport Aweland from the whole affair.  It had been an exhausting day for renowned Lira Crass. Pluri-planetary and multi-solar diplomat Lira Crass. More accurately, publicly humiliated and currently out-of-a-job Lira Crass.  Lira had been going up and down the desert wasteland that was the planet Hume, where days are 50 hours long and the star threatens to erode the thinly terraformed atmosphere apart. Thank the gods for the hovercraft and public space-transports, possibly humanity's greatest innovation- Lira thought -if they ever came on time. But in Hume, ...

Dr. Elias Monroe watches on as the defeated grey building gets torn down, piece by piece, into a pulp of concrete. The structure in question is none other than the now defunct Research Institute of AI, facing the Atlantic coast of Port Saint Lucie. -Fuck- Monroe whispered to himself. Perhaps it was the pent up frustration of watching the building in which his mentors taught him to be a researcher get demolished right in front of his eyes that made Monroe curse into the void. Or, perhaps, he remembered that he forgot his broken violin at home. Two strings had gotten loose on his favourite instrument, and such a travesty would not stand in his eyes. Then again, the Institute wasn't doing much better. -Nevermind- he says to himself aloud. Saying stuff like this for the world to hear did help in calming his nerves... At least for a while. But the word "fuck" still ping-ponged across his brain, like a neural echo. -Monroe, you bastard! Dr. Elias Monroe looks to his left in sea...

The worn down pocket watch marked midnight, despite its cracked glass and rusty case frame, it still managed to keep Maeve Harlow grounded in the present. Sometimes it felt like the tick tack-ing of the clock was the only thing that made sense, at least in her line of "work". The cold managed to overtake her in the dark, unfiltered night of the Alps. She stayed still, though she knew she shouldn't, she couldn't . At this altitude, and in such solitude, frostbite was the Grim Reaper himself, ready to poach on unsuspecting visitors of these snowy peaks. She had found refuge from the unfavourable conditions outside in an abandoned observatory. But that was not the only thing she was after. She also brought with her a notebook that was as well-travelled as it was degraded -more like a collection of rugged and overused pages of a centuries old novel-, an unsharpened pocket knife and a decent sized bag of salt. But so far, in the last 5 days at least, she hasn't had the...