52 Short Stories

After completing the reading assignment, the students avoided looking up at their teacher. Instead, they opted to make as many disgusted, eye-rolling, or otherwise disapproving glances that they knew of to each other. One student however, chose instead to stare at a point roughly eight to ten inches through the teacher's head. Increasingly uncomfortable, Mr. Keisher decided to turn the tables, but in then end it failed spectacularly. "And what do you think of the Halu-hawthi people?" he asked her. "Buncha savages." She shrugged and continued staring for no better reason than that making Mr. Keisher uncomfortable was a more interesting thing to do than acknowledge that around her existed smelly, sex-obsessed classmates who kept snickering about the naked photo of some Hello-whatever  women grinding food with rocks. "That's an extremely offensive thing to say," snapped Mr. Keisher.  "Doesn't make it less true." The girl smirked, and Mr....

To begin with, you must know that Virtual Reality didn't work out as planned. In fact, it went horribly wrong. Everyone started out very excited about their over-sized virtual reality goggles strapped to their heads. Eventually, someone was able to port the technology into more normal sized glasses. Then, came contact lens. And then came the day of the great fusing. No one is really sure quite what happened, but something went horribly wrong. By this point, basically everyone was using virtual reality contact lenses. So when they fused onto the corneas of the human population, on that day virtual reality became reality. It didn't take long for folks to forget what life was like not being an animated avatar running through a pixelated world that became increasingly more lifelike after every update. In fact, people began to worry that if they had children who didn't have "reality" lenses fused onto their corneas, the parents would not be able to relate ...