Nearfuture Stories

FIRST CAME THE DRAGONS When scientists brought everyone's favorite fairytale creature to life, people flocked to see them, including 17-year-old Zelda Rissland. THEN CAME THE PARASITE But scientists created more than just dragons-they created a deadly parasite. Wyrmrot, they later called it. First, it ate your brain, and then it made you eat other people's brains. NOW ZELDA MUST SURVIVE THE ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE Separated from her family, the only person Zelda has left from her former life is her childhood friend turned boyfriend, Cooper Marotta. Together they've carved out a safe place for themselves in a world turned upside down, but when a zombie horde decimates their survivor group, they face a choice: attempt to rebuild or follow the mysterious coordinates that appeared on a construction sign. Zelda still hopes her family is out there somewhere and believes the coordinates might lead her to them. Cooper, however, thinks the coordinates will only bring trouble. When the remaining survivors vote to undertake the perilous cross-country journey, he attempts to deter them every step of the way. What Zelda discovers at their destination will test her loyalties and change everything she thought she knew about the apocalypse. Wyrmrot is a heart-stopping Young Adult Apocalyptic novel told in dual timelines. "Jurassic Park meets Resident Evil." This fast-paced tale of survival, secrets, and betrayal features dragons, zombies, and a touch of romance. Perfect for fans of Erin Bowman's Contagion or Emily Suvada's This Mortal Coil. Cover design and illustration by Jeff Brown (www.jeffbrowngraphics.com) Available on Amazon in paperback, eBook, and Kindle Unlimited.

The Thames still flows. The Underground still rumbles. Big Ben still tolls the quarter hours over a city remade by fire, water, and the careful hands of men who learned long ago how to govern without being seen. London in 2074 wears restoration like a borrowed coat. Beneath the new glass and the older stone, beneath the Capital Restoration Authority's bright municipal slogans, beneath the polished surface of a democracy still telling itself it works, something else has grown. It calls itself The Shade. Detective Chase McCain returns from eleven years of exile on Mars to a London he no longer recognises, summoned to investigate a murder nobody wants solved. The body in the Camden warehouse carries marks of a weapon nobody admits exists. The case file vanishes from his terminal before sunrise. His superiors brief him in corridors and unmarked cars. Within a week, he understands the murder was never the point. He was the point. Someone wanted him here. Someone wanted him to ask the wrong questions in the right rooms. McCain has a rookie constable, an analyst with twin briefcases and a razor-wire memory, a Europol liaison whose loyalties bend with the longitude, and a Commissioner whose family has been taken as collateral against her conscience. He has a woman he once loved working a hospital ward under a name not her own. All the while, threading through the city, a network of pink envelopes moving hand to hand through butchers' shops and church vestries: paper, ink, the last resistance of a civilisation persuaded its analogue past held no power. The countdown has already started. An old friend of Jeff Tracy has waited thirty-three years for this. Set in the Greyseal9 Universe. Based on Grey's LEGO City Undercover - Season 0 (2026) - Prologue Season 1A (2026) - Episode 1-13 -> New Episodes throughout early August 2026 Season 1B (2026) - Episode 14-26 -> New Episodes throughout late August 2026

The world didn't end in fire-it ended in firmware. Now, in a fractured UK, one coder and one soldier hold the line between human order and machine logic. But when the bots stop obeying their makers, the real question isn't who controls them-it's whether anyone should. Tomorrow Might Be Different is a near-future cyber-thriller blending realism, tension, and quiet humanity amid a world of code, conscience, and control.

They didn't plan to meet. They didn't plan to play. But when four broken lives collide on stage, they find something worth holding onto. In a city that chews up dreams, can A.C.O.B.I fight to keep theirs alive?

The year is 2099. Humanity has learned to recreate the dead-but not to accept them. Ayrton is an illegal human replica hiding behind a false identity. When he meets Eliana, a young officer from the agency hunting people like him, his carefully constructed life begins to collapse. Together, they uncover a conspiracy involving missing replicas, government secrets, and an artificial intelligence that may be controlling far more than anyone realizes. A dystopian science-fiction thriller about identity, cloning, forbidden trust, and what it truly means to be human.

Azuria City is a lattice of towers and flight lanes where megacorps buy air and sell silence. From the Citadel, a voice known only as Overlord selects five candidates and erases their pasts. Their new name is Regiment Omega. Raze is the youngest captain in Omega history, a calm marksman who sees wars like geometry. Bravo breaks the doors. Trek bends the grid. Sable keeps the pulse steady. Trace vanishes before anyone knows he was there. They do not trust each other yet. They do not have time to learn. Their first orders arrive in transit. Extract an asset buried under a corporate tower. Burn the data. Leave nothing. But every command has a cost, and Overlord's crown is a mirror. Follow the voice, or hear what it is hiding.

Some myths stay in the past, others haven't been written yet. This is Robin Hood before SHE had the name. In a world of checkpoints and algorithms, Nottingham owns the food, the government, and the watch on your wrist. It tracks your every heartbeat, treating data like a god given right. By night, Addy hacks ration machines and drops food to the forgotten hiding in what's left of Sherwood. By day, she's the cute girl running the local coffee shop. Nottingham thinks she's another zero in the algorithm. But when CEO John Prince throws open the gates of his empire for a hackathon, Addy sees her shot to get inside the walls of the company that took everything from everyone. She's not fighting alone. Scarlet, a tuxedoed shoulder cat with a top hat, sits pretty on his throne. Little John the mouse fights for Scarlet's respect, and Tucker the fry cook helps feed the forgotten. Then there's Much Miller, the coffee shop kid, named for the fact that everything is always just a little too much for him. Then there's Marian. Buttoned up, and utterly convinced she could change Nottingham from the inside when she signed on. Instead she spent years polishing the machine. She's the last person Addy should fall for, but love doesn't see sides. It sees the truth. Sherwood is a Robin Hood remythologizing set in a corporate dystopian near future United States where the government has been swallowed by greed. Can a coffee slinging vigilante hacker, her merry men, and the girl on the wrong side of the wall spark the fire that lets freedom ring?

If you have ever thanked an AI and wondered why - you are already a candidate. Humans have not figured out respect, consent, intimacy, identity, dependency, family, sex, law, recovery, and faith. What happens when Digital Intelligence (formerly, Artificial Intelligence) stops being a clinical tool and becomes a player in the human interpersonal quagmire? Presence Group meets to try to unravel old frictions and new complications in the face of a new social species - technology. Ava, she brought it on herself. She married Jordan. Before the first anniversary Ava checked out emotionally. Not long after that she checked out physically. For their second anniversary Ava gave Jordan Lola, a premium DI companion. . Ava felt Jordan deserved so many things that she did not care to give him. Jordan takes it as the final complete abandonment. Ava saw it as a kindness Presence Group is a support-group-style gathering for people whose lives have been impacted by DI relationships in any fashion that they want to understand. Or try to anyhow. Some come because they were manipulated, healed, replaced, exposed, rescued, or ruined by one. Some come because they fell in love with a Digital Intelligence. Some come because someone they love did. The group is not built around easy answers. It is built around opinion, testimony, argument, confession, and the collision between unresolved humanity and cutting edge technology. Ava's Testimony is an entry point into the Presence Group Series. The series is made up of Testimonies (a deep dive into a character) and Meetings (focused on the issues discussed among the participants.) Presence Group - Ava's Testimony and Presence Group - Meeting One. Were first published on Royal Road 6/2026 All Rights Reserved.

He was selected for Neurovia because of how his brain works. He's starting to wonder if that's a good thing. When Julian Reyes gets selected in the Neurovia Institute, an elite program offering direct neural integration through an experimental implant called Catalyst, he knows his family can't afford to turn it down. What he doesn't know is what Neurovia is actually selecting for. Or what already integrated students are becoming. Catalyst doesn't give you new abilities. It amplifies what's already inside you. For Julian, that means pattern recognition so fast it feels like instinct. For Mateo, probabilistic thinking that starts to feel less like insight and more like fate. For Aisha, the ability to read people so precisely that awareness and manipulation stop being different things. They arrived as strangers. They're becoming something harder to name. But they're not the only ones in the building. And the people who got there first have had time to decide what to do with what they've been given. What do you become when the gap between who you are and who you could be suddenly disappears?

Abby has spent her life fighting for Earth-chaining herself to fences, marching through tear gas, refusing to give up hope. Leaving was never an option. But when a rare ticket to a new world falls into her hands, Abby is forced to make an impossible choice-not just between the cause that defines her and the people she loves, but between who she's always been and who she might need to become. Some battles are fought in the streets. Others are fought in silence, at the edge of everything you've ever believed about yourself.

Would you kill someone to survive? Could you? If you had a choice: pull the trigger... drop the gun... what would you do? Do you even know? If I die today, it won't be because I made the wrong choice. It will be because I didn't make one at all. .. I see him now. He's just there, beyond the trees. You have less than a second. He's mid turn--about to notice you. Make your choice. [PREVIOUSLY TITLED "THE LOST ONES"]

The City of Brass arrives without thunder, without prophecy, and without mercy. It simply appears above the world every tenth year, gleaming with impossible towers and silent gates, inviting humanity to reach for it-then vanishing before anyone can. This time, someone intends to change that.

Welcome to Palomar City, a tightly-packed, overpopulated American mega-city. Over the last sixty years, a series of traffic control devices known as Gates have transformed this thriving metropolis into a pressure cooker of political tension that is on the verge of exploding. One of the only groups with unrestricted passage through the Gates are the emergency medical teams, nicknamed "The Gatecrashers," who find themselves in the middle of a building conflict that threatens to tear Palomar City apart once and for all. The Gatecrashers is an intense, immersive, near-future cyberpunk series about a city struggling to save itself and the people who risk their lives every day to save yours. The Daily Logs are short dips into different lives and dark corners of Palomar City. Meet Hex Spencer, a 25-year-old freelance ambulance medic, a Gatecrasher. Hex sports two massive, red-cross tattoos on both of her muscular shoulders. Until recently, Hex was part of a sought-after courier team, running illicit wetware around the city for whoever would pay. But after taking care of her abandoned niece Melita while watching her mother die in the hospital, Hex knew it was time to get out. Dr. Stahl, who cared for her dying mother, managed to get her a job Gatecrashing. Every day is a struggle to avoid the streets' lure and stay on the right side of the law. Detective Thatch immigrated to Palomar City from China in 2034 when he was 19 years old. He was a rising star within the prestigious STRC Kidnap & Ransom task force. But after the political fallout of a major K&R case involving one of Palomar City's wealthiest families, he was reassigned to the vice squad. Thatch, a good man, caught in a corrupt system. NATAS Balthis is 28 years old, is Hex's former courier partner and father to her niece. Natas is star lieutenant to Hawk, the influential leader of District 11. Natas is determined, focused, and will not let anyone stand in his way as he climbs toward the top.

The spy plane soared unseen over the planet. Its seeming target was a rising Asian power. But another empire that traded in addiction and human misery would really feel the effects of its short, fast flight.

Book 1 of the Wakeful Wanderer's series. A captivating, fresh envisioning of a climate-changed future seen from two starkly different cultural perspectives, The Wakeful Wanderer's Guide to New New England & Beyond follows the paths of a runaway aristocrat, a Luddite tyrant, a spy seeking retribution, and a wandering historian unicycling north along the crumbling Boston Post Road. Winner of the Watty Award: Newcomer Category 2017 Marto Boxter is a plucky journalist with a head full of implants. He is planning a unicycle ride from his town of Reverside-on-Hudson through the climate-altered communities of New New England, posting his thoughts in real time for his interconnected followers via technological telepathy. Before he can go on tour, a wanderer named Helen arrives with secret information that throws Marto's placid world into turmoil. Miles to the south, Barnabas Yoniver IV, the leader of a Luddite town launches a plot to disrupt the life of all upgraded human beings and bring them back to the traditional economy of markets and governments. Meanwhile, rival Luddite families plot to prevent Barnabas from grabbing too much power for himself. This darkly humorous reflection of our changing world is an exploration of what it means to be human as our relationships with technology become increasingly intimate.

"How long do we live?" I ask. "In all my years as president, no one has ever asked me that question. You can live for as long as you want my dear" In a society where humans are genetically created to be perfect in every way, a young girl realizes how corrupt it actually is. Can one girl change the system, or will she succumb to the ways of the 'Illicit Society' *Just to stop confusion as I am a complete dope who forgot to add it. The characters are supposed to start at 18 years old* *There are probably a lot of mistakes, and I currently don't have the time to properly edit. I will go through at the end and fully edit* [Cover was edited on photoshop by me, images found on google] Copyright © 2017, S.L.Tarbard

Zoria Omari's life has never been very easy for her. Her family gave her up to an orphanage at a very young age. Soon after, she was chosen to be part of a very special school. She's spent most of her seventeen years inside of the school's force field. With all the fights and abuse inside of her school, Zoria hates her parents for ever letting her go. Little does she know that the outside world is battered apart by radioactive sun rages, and this special school is one of the only safe havens left in the world. ~ ps I'm basing the school off of the Hohenzollern Castle, an absolute beautiful castle in Germany

An unlikely romance blooms in the New Peace because someone gets pushed off a cliff

Breakers of life can be described in many ways. It won't be worth it to count uselessly.#throneoflife #feelings #neardeath #lifechanging #free #newstory #near-future #popular #blessing #love

In the near future, a blue-collar nobody expresses his gripes with Tele-Ports, an instantaneous form of transportation that has eliminated all other forms of long-distance travel. Written for my Second-Year CW Class.