Sci-Fi

Writer’s Prompt: The Living Wake: A Sci-Fi Thriller of Betrayal

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He wanted to know who his real friends were. Now, he’s praying he never found out.

Writer’s Prompt

The Sensory Trap

The satin lining of the casket felt like cold marble against Mike’s skin. Thanks to the neuro-stasis cocktail coursing through his veins, his heart beat once every three minutes—a rhythm too slow for any standard monitor to catch. He was a statue with a front-row seat to his own eulogy.

He’d heard his boss complain about the “paperwork nightmare” of his passing. He’d heard his brother whisper about the classic Mustang in Mike’s garage. But then came Sarah.

Sarah, whose grief had seemed the most jagged. She stood over him, her perfume—vanilla and cedar—filling his dormant lungs. Beside her stood Leo, the resident intern who had pushed the syringe.

“Is it done?” Sarah whispered. Her voice wasn’t shaking. It was sharp.

“He’s locked in,” Leo replied, his voice hovering inches above Mike’s face. “Total sensory awareness, zero motor function. Just like we planned.”

Mike’s mind screamed, a silent explosion behind a frozen face. Planned?

“Why don’t you come over tonight?” Sarah said, her hand resting on Leo’s arm. “After they close the coffin. After they… finish.”

Leo looked down into Mike’s open, glassy eyes. He saw the microscopic tremor of a pupil trying to constrict—the drug was wearing off faster than the math predicted. Mike was coming back. If Leo reached for the second vial in his pocket, he could seal Mike’s consciousness forever before the lid was lowered. If he did nothing, Mike would wake up six feet under.

Leo looked at Sarah, then back at the man who used to be his best friend. He reached into his lab coat.

Finish the Story

Does Leo administer a second dose to hide their crime, or does he leave Mike to claw at the lid of a mahogany prison? The ending is in your hands.

Writer’s Prompt: When the Protagonist Becomes the Author: A Cyberpunk Noir

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What happens when your own fictional detective decides your plot is a death sentence?

Writer’s Prompt

The neon in Neo-Chicago didn’t glow; it bled.

I was staring at a blinking cursor—the digital heartbeat of a dead career—when the office air turned to ozone. My protagonist, Elias Thorne, didn’t just walk onto the page; he stepped over the bezel of my monitor. He looked exactly how I’d described him: trench coat smelling of cheap synthetic gin and a jawline sharp enough to cut glass.

“You’re making me soft, Jack,” Thorne growled. He grabbed my collar with a hand that felt like cold industrial steel. “The dame in Chapter Four? She’s a double agent. And you’re the one who’s going to help me find the kill-switch.”

Before I could remind him that I was the one with the keyboard, the room folded. The smell of my stale coffee was replaced by the stench of acid rain and rusted chrome. We were standing on a gravity-rail platform, suspended three hundred stories above a city that breathed smog.

Thorne shoved a heavy, chrome-plated pulse pistol into my trembling hands. Across the platform, a silhouette emerged from the fog—a woman holding a data-chip that contained the consciousness of the city’s last free AI. She looked like my ex-wife. That wasn’t in the outline.

“Shoot her, Jack,” Thorne hissed, his eyes reflecting the flickering blue of the holographic billboards. “Or she triggers the wipe, and we both become nothing more than unallocated sectors in a crashed hard drive.”

I leveled the gun. My finger hovered over the trigger. If I killed her, did I save myself, or did I just become another ghost in a machine I no longer controlled?

The woman smiled, a glitch flickering in her left eye. “He’s lying, Jack. Check the word count.”

Finish the Story

Is the woman a virus, or is Thorne the one trying to delete the truth? The digital safety of Neo-Chicago rests on your next sentence. How does Jack end the cycle?

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