S1E06: Serenity

September 23, 2023

A psychiatric hospital near Batavia. Latoya wants out. So does someone else.

Short Stories

Horror and science fiction short stories by Liam Philipson.

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January 4, 2023

Triptych

January 4, 2023

You focus your attention away from the outside world and on your walls, which are coated in these generated pictures. It is a collage, a half-finished puzzle. You look for a spot to place your newest one.

January 4, 2023

August 5, 2022

The Bug Who Saved Everyone

August 5, 2022

Hermitails from all corners of the world gathered in a great damp auditorium, dragging their synthetic and natural shells with them. They clicked and clattered into concentric rings around the great calciferous podium where their thought leaders would come to speak. No one would leave satisfied until one of them had convinced the populace of their truth, reaching past the murmuring auditorium, through video and audio broadcasts and beyond.

Trigger Warning: end of the world, climate change and extinction, heavy themes of death, loss of mental integrity

August 5, 2022

May 10, 2022

The Marigold Monk

May 10, 2022

“You were swimming in her ocean, at the center of it all. Bile in your hair, in your clothes, on your skin.”

“Stop.”

“I saw you.”

“Stop.”

“You loved it!”

And even as I ran the quarter-mile away toward class, leaving her behind to shriek her words at people who wouldn’t listen, I knew she was right.

On some level, deep within me, I did love this.

Trigger Warning: blood, gore, existential horror, loss of memory and identity, parasites and infection

This story is a sequel to the 2017 story “The Tunnel Boy,” which you can read here.

May 10, 2022

May 24, 2021

Alix and the Bitter Cambrian

May 24, 2021

Opabinia is not an unpopular program, but it’s not a star. It rates high in a few of the recursive learning categories. Its history as a third-party program, disconnected from any of the major tech companies and their optimized powerhouse software, makes it a difficult choice for some of the sorting algorithms to pick up, but those who do find that it works powerfully for their interests.

Every day, as the hours swim by, you spend time talking to Opabinia about things related to work – and outside of it – in your dim apartment.

Trigger Warning: suicide, parent death, NSFW mention, depictions of extreme poverty and societal collapse

May 24, 2021

December 11, 2017

The Tunnel Boy

December 11, 2017

There’s a set of tunnels underneath my school.

They stretch across the housing side of campus, elevators leading to each of the dorms. Stray pathways lead to small shops, my campus post office, the dining hall, and a few rooms dedicated to clubs. They’re not the tidiest, with pipes jutting out of walls and empty, greasy garbage carts smelling up the corridors, but the tunnels aren’t scary. Everything is well-lit and reasonably clean. There’s at least one map per corridor, keeping the labyrinth easy enough to navigate.

Usually.

Trigger Warning: nsfw (non-erotic sexual imagery), blood and gore

December 11, 2017