Matt Gemmell

For several years, I’ve been writing weekly flash fiction: ultra-brief tales of 1,000 words or more, usually in genres including science fiction, horror, and the supernatural. Those stories collectively are called Once Upon A Time.

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All software has bugs, the sign says.

I walk past it every morning on my way into the building where I work. Sometimes the sign makes me smile, albeit in a slightly preoccupied way. Sometimes it makes me frown. It just depends how I’m feeling.

It’s a strange thing to always start the day not knowing what your job is.

I know that it’s normal fo...

One hundred and four seconds.

Not a long time. Or is it? It’s less than two minutes, but it could be an eternity under the right circumstances. Press your hand to a hot stove for a minute, and it’ll seem like an hour, as Einstein noted. But one hundred and four seconds is only the blink of an eye within a human lifetime.

It was a cyclist who found me, so I’m t...

Wednesday, 11th April, 1821

My dear friend William,

I hope this letter finds you in both good spirits and rude health, and I must convey my most sincere apologies for the unavoidable delay in sending it.

I find myself at last back on the mainland, and have dispatched this letter from a small town but scant miles from the port where I spent las...

The younger man looked nervous, and his supervisor was only marginally less so.

Their visitor passes read ESA, and bore a small holographic mark which they had both assumed was standard, but it had drawn expressions of quickly-concealed surprise from more than one person they’d passed on their way from the building’s grand entrance to the office on the sixth ...