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The Vessel

Gabriele Micozzi

The voice came back half a second late, and that was how I learned I was someone else. I was saying "Consent is not the absence of resistance, it is the engineered welcome of submission," and I heard the sentence twice. Once from my mouth. Once, a fraction later, from somewhere just behind my left ear. As though someone were translating me, in real time, into the same language.

Beneficial Insects

VM Harrigan

Emma held the rose in the palm of her hand and saw versions of it spread out across time. Ghostly layers in exploded view. The old rose and the young rose and the rose that had not yet existed.

Jump Cut

Lauren C. Teffeau

Eisenstein defined montage as the psychological effect that results from the collision of two or more shots. That's what Ari was after with the chains. A sustained emotional effect, fearlessness, euphoria, grim determination, sometimes all of it at once, to heighten our perception during races as our brains try to resolve conflicting visual information. And when it works, nothing else in this world can compare.

The Weaver's Thicket

Suvajeet Duttagupta

Then the horror came for me, fully and completely. I stumbled and looked up at the shimmering tangle of threads. My sister. Her wedding. She was planning to wear her grandmother's sari… The data was missing. Then the truth struck me, worse than a physical wound: The wedding hasn't happened yet! The Weaver had already archived a completed version of her life. Our future was a settled, indexed file, already recorded in the Weaver's eternal database.

My Monster & Density

Greg Lehman