What do a cyberpunk dystopia and zombie apocalypse have in common? They might have a lot in common. Desolation, destitution, violence, to name a few. But similarities will depend largely on setting. The zombie apocalypse in Bus Driver takes place in a future not long from now, where the tech isn’t much different than what we’re presently accustomed to. Connect this with a health system that fails its members more often than helps them, and you have a recipe for disaster.

Murder City, on the other hand, takes place in a future distant enough to see some major technological differences, and to see the consequences of current corporate greed exercised in corporate fashion: regulation, proving to be of little consequence now, will have in its impotence severe consequences in the future.

So what do the two really have in common? That aside from some of the more obvious fantasy aspects of Bus Driver, both stories illustrate a future extrapolated from the current course our society is locked into. We can alter the course, of course, but this require a great deal of popular effort, and the dismissal of complacency.

In other areas Backstage, you can climb into a tunnel with Isabelle and Edgar to uncover what the Beings so hungrily search for in A Vampire’s Vengeance, and we feature another entry in the body of cosmic horror in The Hounds of Tindalos.

As a final thought, I want to point out that not a single word of this edition—nor any prior—whether expository or narrative (read: editorial content or stories) has been written with the use of AI. I now feel it entirely necessary to state this fact since AI has become prevalent in a number of ways across society, and I want to reassure you, my dearest guest, that what you consume here is all dreamed up by a human—me—and created by hand, the old fashioned way. Enjoy it as you like, though if you are inclined to attempt to feed my work to any AI model or platform, then I curse you with coffee that will always be either not hot enough, or not cold enough, nothing but red lights when you are in a hurry, and as miserable a death as can be called down upon you. If you don’t feed my work to AI, you can ignore all of that.

Let’s get into it →

So here’s a bit of interest: Murder City, featured below, is a prototype of Cyberpvnk Cvnt from the Children of the Damned universe! The narrator may or not be CVNT, though if, in the process of clearly defining that character when it comes to write her stories, the narrator turns out to not be CVNT, she will have provided some details regarding the world CVNT will be in the midst of, struggling to survive. This was a very exciting write, and I’m thrilled to be sharing this piece here, as a Brief Attraction. However, I am most excited about its potential in the greater body of work I am producing.

Stay tuned. More on this as we get closer to serializing CVNT’s story.