The city hummed outside Elena’s apartment, a restless pulse of neon and noise that never quite slept. Her windows, sealed against the futuristic sprawl of holographic billboards and drone traffic, let in only slivers of the dawn’s synthetic glow. She stirred in bed, the sheets tangled around her legs, her […]Read more »

The main lab of the NeuroTech Institute buzzed with a frenetic energy Elena hadn’t felt since her early days as a researcher. Holo-displays flickered with data streams—global maps dotted with red markers, video feeds of impossible phenomena, and brainwave graphs pulsing like erratic heartbeats. Scientists darted between workstations, their voices […]Read more »

“You home?” Aisha’s voice crackled through the comm, her holo-projection flickering to life. Elena  sat cross-legged on her apartment floor, surrounded by the playful turmoil of her dream-born cats. The cream-colored one—whom she’d started calling Pippin—nuzzled her knee, purring like a tiny engine, while the black cat, Shadow, batted at […]Read more »

The lab was a fortress of light and sound, its walls lined with humming machines and glowing holo-displays. Elena  leaned over a workstation, her eyes fixed on a spectral analysis of Lukas Varn’s CD, the twelve-song cycle that had turned her dreams into reality. The screen pulsed with jagged peaks—frequencies […]Read more »