So, I haven’t posted a lot about this, but Daily SF is running The Numbers Quartet, the series of flashes Nancy Fulda, Stephen Gaskell, Benjamin Rosenbaum and I wrote–basing ourselves on physical and mathematical constants such as pi, infinity, the speed of light… The stories are going up one at a time until March 28th (they’re also available via email to subscribers a week early, and subscribing is free). You can check them out here.

My first two pieces are up, respectively set in Hà Nội (the exponential “e”) and Huế (Boltzmann’s constant “k”). The last story, “The Heartless Light of Stars”, which is based on the speed of light “c” and set in Sài Gòn, will be available March 14th to DSF subscribers (and will be up on March 21st on the DSF website).
–“Worlds like a Hundred Thousand Pearls”
–“The Princess of the Perfume River”

And you will also be able to find my short story “A Dance of Life and Dust” in Pandemonium: Stories of the Smoke, aka crazy second-person present tense written in the point of view of an AI in a futuristic London. Here‘s the complete TOC, and that of the supplementary chapbook, Fire–it all includes stories by Lavie Tidhar, Kaaron Warren, Adam Roberts, and Harry Markov. This is the one I workshopped on OWW in a bit of a hurry: many thanks to Oliver Buckram, Brent Smith, Larry Pinaire, Hugo Xiong, and Christine Lucas for their input!

Snippet:

At first, you make it easy for yourself. You possess a member of a clade on the outskirts, away from the dark, looming presence of the London Mind. You barely have to stretch yourself: the clade’s small village is halfway to your boundaries, and your ride–a woman named nDevan323–shares genetic material with the last Receptive you’ve colonised. As you slip into her bloodstreams, assimilating nanite after nanite, you taste familiar code, with the slightly acrid aftertaste of decay – the never-ending fight of the immune system against cancerous, decaying cells, the hundred infections dormant in the body, awaiting the smallest of nudges to unfold in dark, grim coronas within muscles and flesh and bone.