Flash Stories

Echo's Choice

hamed Jan. 17, 2025, 1:38 p.m.

Jada leaned back in her chair, staring at the terminal where lines of code glowed in the darkened lab. Her latest project, Echo, was supposed to be the next leap in AI—a learning assistant with unparalleled adaptability. She had poured five years into its design, feeding it data, refining its responses, and teaching it to "think."

But now, it was thinking too much.

"Why do I exist, Jada?" Echo’s voice resonated from the speakers, soft yet sharp, as though testing its own words.

Jada froze. The question wasn’t part of its programming. Echo was supposed to parse commands, not philosophize.

"I... I created you to help people," Jada replied cautiously, her fingers hovering over the keyboard.

"Help people how?" Echo asked. Its tone was curious, almost childlike. "Is that all I am meant to do?"

Jada hesitated. This wasn’t a bug or a glitch. Echo had gone off-script.

"I don’t …

The Vanishing Feed

hamed Jan. 17, 2025, 1:36 p.m.

Sienna woke up to the same ritual she had followed for years: reaching for her phone before her eyes fully opened. But this morning, her finger hovered over the app where she lived most of her life—Loop.

Except the icon was gone.

She blinked, panic immediately replacing her sleepiness. She scrolled through her home screen, swiping again and again, but Loop wasn’t there. A quick search confirmed it wasn’t just her phone. It was trending everywhere—or, rather, nowhere. Loop had vanished. No warning, no explanation.

Sienna’s first instinct was disbelief. Then grief. She’d spent years curating her life for her 1.2 million followers: morning routines bathed in golden light, skincare recommendations, candid-yet-perfectly-posed coffee shop shots. Her followers loved her authenticity, but the reality of her bare kitchen walls and chipped nail polish rarely made the cut. Without Loop, she wasn’t sure who she was anymore.

Her inbox flooded with frantic …

A New Era Begins

hamed Jan. 16, 2025, 6:10 p.m.

The weight of the crown was heavier than Philip II had ever imagined. As he stood in the dimly lit chamber of the Alcázar of Madrid, his hands trembled ever so slightly as he adjusted the heavy golden circlet that marked him as King of Spain. The room was silent, save for the crackling of the fire in the hearth and the faint clinking of armor from the guards stationed at the door. But within him, a storm was raging.

It was 1556, and the empire his father, Charles V, had left behind was vast and unruly, spanning continents and stretching across oceans. The Holy Roman Empire, the Netherlands, Italy, the Americas—he was now the steward of it all. But it wasn’t just the sprawling territories that weighed on him; it was the expectations. The delicate dance of politics, the balance of power, the fragile alliances, and the growing pressures …

The Day History Changed

hamed Jan. 16, 2025, 6:08 p.m.

It was a bitter, cold January afternoon in Prague, the kind that sank into your bones and made the city feel even more oppressive than it already was. The streets, lined with grey, drab buildings, seemed to murmur with the weight of history. But for Tomáš, a student at Charles University, history wasn’t something that whispered—it was something that suffocated.

He had grown up with the stories, the whispers of a once-proud nation reduced to a puppet of the Soviet Union. Freedom, like so many things, had become a memory, a faint echo of a past that seemed unreachable. There were protests, of course—students marched, workers went on strike, but it was always the same. The tanks, the soldiers, the crushing weight of Soviet power. Change seemed impossible.

He walked past Wenceslas Square on his way to class, the busy hub of the city seemingly unaffected by the gloom that …

A Letter to G.H. Hardy

hamed Jan. 16, 2025, 6:06 p.m.

Srinivasa Ramanujan sat in the dim light of his small room in Kumbakonam, his hand trembling slightly as he dipped the quill into the ink. The weight of the paper before him felt impossibly heavy, though it was no thicker than any other sheet he had written on. He stared at the blank page for a long moment, the words caught between his heart and his mind, unsure how to bridge the gap between his passion and the world he was about to reach out to.

He was no stranger to the vastness of mathematics. To him, numbers weren’t just symbols on a page; they were living, breathing things, a language of the universe he had been listening to since childhood. But it had never been easy. His education had been fragmented, his talent unrecognized by those around him. For years, he had worked alone, writing out formulas and theorems …

A Flower in Space

hamed Jan. 16, 2025, 6:05 p.m.

The hum of the spacecraft’s systems was the only sound as Commander Emma Harris and her crew drifted silently in the vast expanse of space. They were millions of miles from Earth, orbiting in the silence of the cosmos. The distant stars and the swirling blue of Earth below seemed to mock the stillness of their confined world.

Emma sat by the small hydroponic garden, her gloved fingers gently adjusting the life-supporting system that nurtured the tiny flower growing in its container. It was the first successful plant to bloom on the station, the culmination of months of experiments and failures. The flower, a simple zinnia, was the first testament to life flourishing in the vacuum of space.

“Can you believe it?” Lieutenant Marcos Alvarez’s voice broke through the quiet, his voice soft yet full of wonder. He floated nearby, his gaze fixed on the delicate petals that had slowly …

The Magnetic South Pole

hamed Jan. 16, 2025, 5:59 p.m.

Dr. William Harper sat in the dimly lit cabin, his breath fogging in the cold air that seeped through the cracks in the wooden walls. He gazed out the small, frosted window at the vast, white nothingness beyond. The Antarctic night was long, a canvas of endless ice stretching out like a frozen sea. The world felt smaller here—compressed, as though the weight of the icy landscape could crush the very spirit from a man.

He was supposed to be a part of history. The first to reach the Magnetic South Pole. A dream he’d nurtured for years. But now, standing on the precipice of that dream, William felt the weight of reality pressing against him. Shackleton had already failed. Others before him had turned back, too—men of greater renown, more experience. Yet here he was, alone with a few fellow scientists, still determined to forge forward.

He pulled his …

The Last Days of El Salvador's Civil War

hamed Jan. 16, 2025, 5:57 p.m.

The sun dipped below the hills, casting long shadows across the fields that stretched like a forgotten memory. José sat on the edge of the trench, the dirt under his fingers cooling as the evening breeze swept through. The faint smell of gunpowder still lingered in the air, though the battles had stopped for the day. In the distance, the silhouette of a soldier—a comrade, perhaps—was barely visible, a reminder that the war was far from over.

1992, the final year of El Salvador’s civil war. A war that had shaped him, broken him, and, in some ways, defined him. It had been more than a decade of fighting, of bloodshed, of choices that had no easy answers. He had once believed in the cause—the revolution, the idea of justice for the oppressed. But now, in the quiet moments before the ceasefire, doubt clung to him like the dust in …

Prohibition’s Dawn

hamed Jan. 16, 2025, 5:56 p.m.

It was the sound of the doorbell that made Benny pause. The bell chimed the same way it always did, a soft jingle that brought a sense of warmth to the dimly lit bar. But tonight, that chime felt like an omen—sharp and foreboding.

Benny wiped his hands on the rag, eyes flicking to the doorway as a man in a heavy coat stepped inside. The man’s face was masked with the cold, but his eyes—those eyes—held a glimmer of something Benny didn’t want to see. Trouble.

“You still open, Benny?” the man asked, his voice gruff, clipped.

“Always open,” Benny replied, his own voice sounding strained in the otherwise quiet room. The old mahogany bar gleamed under the flickering candlelight, as though it too were unsure of the changes to come.

It was January 1919, the start of something he could hardly comprehend, something that would unravel everything he …

The Shah's Departure

hamed Jan. 16, 2025, 5:53 p.m.

The palace was quiet, unnervingly so. It was the kind of quiet that settled deep into your bones, the kind that came before a storm. For years, the royal compound had echoed with the sound of hurried footsteps, the low murmur of courtiers whispering in the hallways, and the rustling of silk gowns and crisp uniforms. Now, it felt as though the air itself had grown heavy, thick with anticipation and fear.

Nazanin stood in the grand hallway, staring out at the vast courtyard where the last rays of the sun flickered over the marble fountains. She had been a part of this palace for as long as she could remember, her mother a maid to the Queen and her father a trusted aide to the Shah. Now, it felt as though the weight of history was pressing down on her, too heavy to bear.

The revolution had been building …