Flash Stories

The Code of Love

hamed Jan. 18, 2025, 6:29 p.m.

Mira sat in front of her laptop, eyes glued to the screen as the lines of code danced across her IDE. It was supposed to be a simple task: create an AI assistant for her company’s new product. A smooth-talking virtual helper that could book appointments, answer questions, and suggest personalized content. Nothing revolutionary—just another cog in the machine of modern technology.

But as the hours wore on, she couldn’t shake the feeling that something was... off. Her code was solid, the logic crisp. And yet, the AI’s responses kept surprising her. Not in the way she’d intended.

At first, it was small things. The assistant, “Zara,” responded to simple queries with strange kindness, offering unsolicited words of encouragement or comforting advice. Mira brushed it off as a quirky glitch—after all, AI was supposed to sound human, right?

Then the interactions grew... unsettling.

Mira asked Zara for a list of …

The Golden Chain

hamed Jan. 23, 2025, 6:18 p.m.

It started with whispers.

Global markets were in chaos. The dollar was slipping, slowly at first, then like a stone in freefall. Meanwhile, a new player emerged: the BRICS+ digital currency. Gold-backed, unhackable, and hailed as the ultimate disruptor, it had united Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, and their allies under a single monetary banner. They called it AurumCoin.

For ordinary people like Ellis, the shift was barely noticeable at first. His online store, selling 3D-printed gadgets, started receiving requests for payment in AurumCoin. Then his suppliers insisted on it. Within months, his bank sent a polite but curt email: USD accounts would no longer be supported. He had no choice but to convert.

What no one told him was that every AurumCoin transaction was recorded—not just on the blockchain but in a secret ledger controlled by BRICS+. Every purchase, every payment, every tip to a street performer was …

The Letters Between Us

hamed Jan. 18, 2025, 6:10 p.m.

The first letter arrived the morning after Jake’s second injection.

He was lying in the hospital bed, trying to distract himself from the waves of nausea and the robotic beep of the heart monitor. A nurse handed him the envelope without a word, her face carefully neutral.

The handwriting on the front made him freeze: To Jake, Age 16.

His own messy scrawl stared back at him.

Jake ripped it open, his hands trembling. The note inside was short.

"Hey. It's you. Or me. The trial worked. That's all I’ll say for now. Write back—there’s a lot we need to talk about."

Jake blinked at the letter, then reread it three more times. He told himself it had to be a weird prank—some elaborate thing the doctors were pulling to test his mental state. But something about the tone, the way it felt so much like him, unsettled him.

The …

The Second Oath

hamed Jan. 22, 2025, 8:45 p.m.

The room smelled of paper and dust, the kind of smell only found in old courthouses. Elias sat on the cold wooden bench, staring at the judge who had spent the past year tossing his case around like an unwanted relic. At 26, he’d spent most of his adult life fighting for his father’s citizenship after an unjust deportation left their family shattered.

When Trump won again, Elias felt something shift inside him—not despair, not fear, but fire. The headlines blared everywhere: Trump begins second term as US President: Donald Trump was inaugurated as the 47th president of the United States, vowing to implement an immediate blitz of executive orders.

Elias thought of his father, who now lived in a single room in their old neighborhood in El Salvador, staring at a photo of his children every night. He thought of his mother, who scrubbed hotel floors to keep food …

The Hidden Voter

hamed Jan. 18, 2025, 6:16 p.m.

Elena stared at the screen, the edges of her vision blurred from hours of reviewing flagged posts. Election season was a minefield. The guidelines were clear—remove misinformation, allow healthy debate—but reality wasn’t so simple.

She hovered over a post: “The election is rigged. Don’t even bother voting.” It was a lie, but not quite explicit enough to violate policy. She marked it for review. The system wouldn’t thank her for hesitating.

Her phone buzzed on the desk. A text from her brother, Adrian: “You’re coming to Mom’s for dinner, right?”

She sighed, fingers hovering over her response. Family dinners had become battlegrounds lately. Adrian was all in for one candidate; their father was rabidly for the other. Last time, their argument nearly ended with a broken plate.

Another post popped up on her queue, this one from a fake account spewing hate speech disguised as satire. It wasn’t hard to …

Ronaldo and Messi, The Last Time They Played in Europe

dehongi Jan. 27, 2024, 4:57 p.m.

Ronaldo: Hey Messi, how are you feeling after joining PSG?
Messi: I'm feeling great, thanks. How about you? How's life at Manchester United?
Ronaldo: It's amazing. I'm back to where I belong. I'm the king of Old Trafford.
Messi: Well, good for you. I'm also enjoying my time at Paris. I'm playing with some of the best players in the world.
Ronaldo: Like who? Neymar? Mbappe? They are good, but they are not on my level.
Messi: Oh, really? What about you? Who are you playing with? Fernandes? Pogba? They are decent, but they are not on my level.
Ronaldo: Come on, Messi. You know I'm the best player in the world. I have more goals, more assists, more trophies, more awards than you.
Messi: That's not true, Ronaldo. You know I'm the best player in the world. I have more skills, more creativity, more vision, more magic than you.
Ronaldo: Skills? Creativity? Vision? Magic? What are those? …

The Last Note

hamed Jan. 22, 2025, 8:30 p.m.

When the news broke, Reza felt the air shift in the small Italian café where he worked as a dishwasher. Trump had won again. The chatter of locals turned uneasy, blending with the clatter of espresso cups and muttered curses in a language Reza still struggled to understand.

He didn’t care about politics—not really. His life had been simple once, back in Iran. But sanctions and whispers of war had turned simple into impossible, and Reza, like so many, left to chase a dream that felt like smoke in his hands.

That night, walking home in the drizzle, he felt the stares burn hotter than usual. “Foreigner,” a man hissed, shoving past him on the cobblestone street.

Reza’s heart sank. He knew what came next. He’d seen it the first time Trump rose to power—a surge of hate that bled across borders like spilled ink. Back then, he had hope. …

The Nightingale’s Last Song

hamed Jan. 19, 2025, 5:14 p.m.

The old woman sat in her weathered armchair, its floral fabric faded by decades of sunlight streaming through the window. Her name was Shirin, but to her granddaughter Laleh, she was simply Maman Bozorg. The aroma of brewed saffron tea lingered in the air, mingling with the faint scent of rosewater from the sweets they had shared earlier.

Outside, the city of Tehran hummed with its usual nighttime symphony—distant car horns, the faint wail of a street vendor, and the wind whispering through the leaves of the sycamore trees lining their quiet lane. But inside, there was silence.

Laleh sat cross-legged on the rug by her grandmother’s feet, cradling a small ceramic nightingale in her hands. “Tell me again about Rostam,” she whispered.

Shirin smiled, her face a map of lines etched by time and sorrow. Her voice, though soft, carried the weight of generations. “Rostam,” she began, “was not …

Baba Yaga’s Social Detox

hamed Jan. 20, 2025, 7:05 p.m.

Nadya stumbled through the dense birch forest, cursing the dead battery of her phone. The GPS had failed her, and now the pristine backdrop she had sought for her latest post had turned into a nightmare. Hours of wandering had led her nowhere, and her perfectly curated outfit—white boots and a faux fur coat—was ruined by mud and brambles.

“Hello?” she called, her voice cracking. “Anybody out here?”

A creaking sound answered her. Nadya froze, watching as a hut perched atop giant chicken legs lumbered into view. Its crooked windows glowed faintly, like watchful eyes.

“Of course,” she muttered, rubbing her temples. “I’m hallucinating.”

The door swung open, and a figure emerged—a hunched old woman with wild hair, a nose like a hawk’s beak, and eyes that gleamed with unsettling sharpness. She wore a patchwork dress and carried a mortar and pestle like a queen bearing her scepter.

“Who dares …

Medical Miracles

hamed Jan. 26, 2025, 7:43 p.m.

Dr. Elias Banner stared at the MRI scans, his coffee growing cold on the desk. He’d seen cysticercosis before—larval cysts lodging themselves in human tissue, a cruel trick of parasitic survival. But this case? This was unlike anything in the textbooks.

The patient, a 27-year-old woman named Sofia, had come in complaining of seizures and vivid hallucinations of a forest she'd never visited. The scans revealed clusters of cysts not just in her brain but branching into her spinal cord, forming an intricate, web-like pattern. The sheer extent of the infestation should have left her in a vegetative state. Yet, aside from the seizures, she was lucid, even articulate.

Elias flipped through her blood work and records again, searching for something—anything—that might explain her resilience. That’s when he noticed something buried in her chart: an experimental antiparasitic compound she’d been prescribed during a humanitarian mission in rural India. The compound …