The Myth of Sysiphus
Bio
Sisyphus prefers to remain anonymous as he explores the vicissitudes of the human condition through speculative fiction.
Stories (26)
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Inversion - 6. AI-Generated.
Chapter 6 On Monday morning, Laurel woke still exhausted. Sunlight filtered through his bedroom curtains, casting familiar shadows across furniture that seemed somehow more solid, more present than usual. Mornings like this one, when a long-term problem had been solved, were strangely empty instead of being satisfying. Now he would need to find a new problem to pursue. He would be at loose ends for months, it could be, before he would have a new idea to consume him.
By The Myth of Sysiphus4 months ago in Chapters
Inversion - 5. AI-Generated.
Book II: The Right Hand of Biochemistry Chapter 5 Friday evening arrived with October rain drumming against the Duane Building’s windows. The campus had emptied for the weekend, leaving only scattered lights in dorm windows and the distant hum of ventilation systems. Laurel stood before his teleportation apparatus like a priest before an altar, as ready as he was going to be.
By The Myth of Sysiphus4 months ago in Chapters
Inversion - 4. AI-Generated.
The mouse arrived next Monday morning in a standard transport cage, its pink nose twitching at the unfamiliar smells. Maya had delivered it with visible reluctance, her composure strained by what she clearly considered an escalation into dangerous territory.
By The Myth of Sysiphus4 months ago in Chapters
Inversion - 3. AI-Generated.
Laurel woke on his couch at noon, neck cramped and mouth tasting of copper. The equations from the night before blazed in his memory with perfect clarity, each term as vivid as if he saw it on his screen. He moved painfully, still bruised from his encounter with Boulder’s landscaping, but the changes to his teleportation protocol remained crystalline in his mind.
By The Myth of Sysiphus5 months ago in Chapters
Inversion - 2. AI-Generated.
It was half past nine when Laurel finally left the lab, later than he had intended but much earlier than usual. The campus had settled into its evening rhythm: undergraduates clustered around library steps, their conversations mixing with music leaking from dormitory windows. He walked the familiar path toward his apartment, mentally reviewing tomorrow’s calibration sequence.
By The Myth of Sysiphus5 months ago in Chapters
Inversion - 1. AI-Generated.
Book I: Before the Fall Chapter 1 The silence of the midnight lab was broken only by the mournful song of the equipment. Laurel had been there since dawn, hunched over equations describing how matter might dissolve into information and reconstitute elsewhere. The coffee beside his keyboard had gone cold hours ago, a film forming on its surface like ice on a pond.
By The Myth of Sysiphus5 months ago in Chapters
The Empty Mirror - Part III. AI-Generated.
Part I Part II The Ten Thousand Things The city folded in on itself like a piece of origami made of glass and shadow. Jason walked through streets that curved impossibly upward, their surfaces reflecting not light but fragments of possibility. The filter warnings had ceased days ago, or perhaps hours – time had become negotiable here – and reality operated on principles that his neuroscience training couldn’t help him parse.
By The Myth of Sysiphus5 months ago in Chapters
The Empty Mirror - Part II. AI-Generated.
Part I Part III The Garden of Forking Minds Jason found Castaneda in the basement of a derelict medical building, three blocks from a perceptual collision site. The address had been handwritten on a scrap of paper, furtively passed to him the previous evening by a young woman whom he first mistook for a preteen boy. The lobby was a study in decayed opulence – cracked marble, brass fixtures veined with verdigris, and the still-present smell of antiseptic mixed with something putrid.
By The Myth of Sysiphus5 months ago in Chapters
The Empty Mirror - Part I. AI-Generated.
Part II Part III The Fractured City The alert came through at 14:47, priority alpha, putting an abrupt end to Jason’s afternoon routine. He had been documenting another minor collision incident – a libertarian businessman who had glimpsed a socialist’s overlay and suffered what the clinical terminology called “perceptual dissociation syndrome.” It was ordinary paperwork, the kind of bureaucratic tedium that had replaced the different sort of monotony of his old career in neuroscience research. Perceptual Stability Officer, his nameplate announced to the world, or at least the tiny portion of it that the field office occupied. It was too grand a title for his duties, he often thought, but the brass apparently believed that the length of title should be proportional to the length of education.
By The Myth of Sysiphus5 months ago in Chapters
Like Drinking Salt Water. AI-Generated.
The fluorescent lights cast their ghostly light as always, their buzzing undercurrent a lullaby that had accompanied Elena through countless solitary hours in Special Collections. She pushed her glasses up her nose, a gesture as habitual as breathing, and squinted at the faded brown ink of a marginal note. The Hartwell estate collection had arrived three weeks ago in seventeen banker's boxes, each one a small archaeological dig waiting to happen, and she was nowhere near finished cataloging it.
By The Myth of Sysiphus6 months ago in Fiction
In the Garden of Eden, Baby. AI-Generated.
Moodily, Darius was contemplating his latest acquisition, a mahogany writing desk that had belonged to Charles Dickens. The desk was perfect: authenticated provenance, immaculate restoration by his master craftsmen, displayed in a room where morning light struck it at precisely the angle that best revealed the wood's natural grain. It also had no meaning. He turned away toward the sunset. The ocean was a mirror, the dying sun casting a long red reflection.
By The Myth of Sysiphus6 months ago in Fiction
