Dime Novels From Oblivion

Like any of the gods from the lost pantheons of the human race, Henry existed on an unseen but omnipresent plane. From the remote subterranean facility that was Henry’s place of employment, he could use the infrastructure of global communications to be anywhere on the planet. He was a phantom that could slip in and out of people’s pockets through their phones; he peered into people's bedrooms through their laptops. Every lens, every microphone connected to the digital realm served as the eyes and ears of the omnipotent Henry. Not only could Henry see all and hear all like the defunct gods of the bygone world, he knew the darkest secrets carried in the heart and stored on the digital mediums of anyone connected to him through the web. The machines people live through create a digital timeline that can now not only spanned but often exceeded an individual's limited biological lifetime. Starting from the birth announcement and the first baby pictures, Henry could reach back in

I was given the option to receive a digital boarding pass for my flight tomorrow that can be scanned right from my phone. People should probably be more wary about letting government computer networks scan their phones. I have heard people speculate the existence of some pretty outlandish and elaborate global conspiracies and yet this seems to have escaped their collective attention. I’m flying for work, so this is going to be like my commute for the day. Getting up before six to make it to an airport at the other end of the city so I can get on a four-hour flight that’s going to cross into a time zone that efficacy adds two hours back to my work.

The airfield was paved in the center of the field at the edge of the city.  Unlike the bomb blasted ruins where the dead rotted underneath the layers of rubble the plane was untouched by the war and alive with the new generations born from the spring. The meadow’s flowers blossomed among the green glades that sprang up as if reaching for the sun in the unblemished blue expanse. The airstrip was used by the armies that had just conquered the country. Their planes flew uncontested in the skies, the long shadows of the bomber and cargo planes cast themselves over the crumbling skeletal remains of the centuries-old cathedrals and houses of culture as they passed above their vanquished foes. Dozens of children dispersed throughout the field sprang up like prairie dogs in the tall grass at the sound of the approaching engines. The massive bombers that only recently dropped payloads of fire and death on the city were now jettisoning chocolate. The aircraft became a silhouette as it pa

After the generators burnt the last drops of diesel what was left of modernity went up in a poof of black exhaust. The medical facility once a sprawling compound where the lost arts of chemical and atomic medicine was now a candle lit derelict where nuns and priests tended to the sick with prayer. As pain killers and antibiotics were depleted, holy sacrament took their place. Mary was the last registered nurse left in her wing of the hospital and as far as knew the last medical professional on the grounds. When the tools of medicine she was trained to use vanished she found herself being replaced more and more by the clergy. They still consulted her now and then but for the most part, she didn’t have any solutions beyond a cool damp rag on the head and maintaining a positive outlook. Hope and prayer were the only feasible treatments given what they had. For some that made the outlook much bleaker than it had been but for those who had been deemed terminal before the death of modern