Summer 2026: The Heat is On

With Europe sweltering under a record-breaking summer, I’d say this is the perfect time to indulge in fantasies of places far away (both in space and time). What? Surprised to see me here? You didn’t really believe that I was sitting out the heatwave at some nameless beach, did you? On the contrary, I intend to do “my part” to crank up the heat even further. How? By announcing two new stories, of course, both of which will take place in the not-so-distant dystopia of Middle Modernity:

• Support
• Quantified

I won’t reveal too much at this point. Instead, I’ll leave it to one of our nascent AI overlords to set the stage (not that I’m particularly fond of Big Tech’s toys, but it always feels good wasting CPU cycles in someone else’s data center rather than my own). Here’s what Gemini spat out after having digested the first draft of Support:

Indeed, it’s gonna be all about the JVC, the fabled corporate military industrial complex that laid the foundation for the far future of Jimmy King’s world. Some of you might wonder why the C is missing from the logo. I’ve been wondering that myself, to be honest, but my best guess is that the AI forgot about it.

As for the second story, the manuscript triggered a bit of an artistic fit in the machine’s circuitry. This is what it hallucinated:

Certainly a weird image. Granted, the story (situated in the years leading up to the crash of Sandra V) and its protagonist exhibit a high degree of weirdness as well, so perhaps the AI has a point.

That’s all for now. More details shall be revealed in due time …