Three tales of unintended consequences today. Enjoy.
Echoes in Space and Time
The broken light sizzled, the snap reverberating down the empty hall. Sparks bounced off the wall, landing on the paper-littered floor and smouldering into oblivion. Shadows flickered along the hallway, coalescing into silhouettes; ash drifted in the air, mingling with a faint trace of smoke.
The temperature dropped, chill enough to frost the window edges and seep down into the marrow of the building. The cold stirred the silhouette shades, and they moaned, their indistinct, garbled sounds morphing into harsh whispers, releasing an invasive fear and a warning.
They are coming. It begins again.
Then, in the distance, screams echoed…
Consequence of Conceit
Severed, scattered limbs and the stench of blood. Bodies stacked on tables, the floor, piled like discarded trash. Recalls of a flawed system of cyber implants that weren’t tested properly.
Just a glitch.
We can fix it.
Fix the people maimed and murdered by their technology, these glitches, unfortunate sacrifices in the name of progress. They tried, sure in the smug belief, but there was no progress, no breakthroughs, no solutions. The flawed system remained a failure. In the end, there was only death.
This is the aftermath of their hubris. The lingering rooms of decaying flesh and forgotten victims.
Bring Him Home
A pair of scavengers enter the building, which used to be a tech facility before the Fall. They scrounge for metal scraps: bits of copper wire, steel, anything that might help their community outpost. They search room after room, taking what is useful.
“Hey, look at this. Somebody’s journal.” The scavenger flips a page and reads…
We’re sorry, we never meant harm. How could we know what would happen, the consequences of the time experiment, the catastrophe? When we realised, we tried to stop it, to bring him home. But we failed.
Why did he have to end the world?
Be Afraid of the Dark 
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