My near future flash fiction story “BABY SHOES-HALF PRICE-NEVER WORN!” is out now at The Arcanist. Read it here for free.

This is one of those stories where I can pin down a singular inspiration. It was an article I read in the New York Times, “The Internet Thinks I’m Still Pregnant”, about a woman who was being haunted. Not by a ghost, by the spectre of her miscarried child, who followed her through life thanks to the internet and targeted advertising. I’d been noticing changes in ads targeted to me, too–ads following me from website to website, and things I’d googled showing up instantaneously in sidebars.

I don’t really think we will see a future where we are living in an entire ecology of drones. If we were going to see such a world, we’d already be seeing its emergence, and it would require a timeline without our current paranoia about national security. You can’t have competing fleets of battle-robots flying around public airspace in the same world where you have to take your shoes off to get on a plane.

(^Watch me eat my words on this in ten years)