Author's Note on False Return:
This story came out of nowhere. I was just daydreaming about the kinds of emergencies people might face in space, and my mind wandered to the concept of backup systems. What if a company, obsessed with productivity, took the idea of redundancy to the extreme? That's where the 'Gemini Protocol' popped into my head, an emergency backup, but for a person, not just a computer. And then I thought: what happens if the original survives? That's when things get weird, and human, and tragic all at once. I love stories where technology collides with messy, emotional human realities."
Writing this was both fun and unsettling. I got to explore questions I never really set out to ask: Who are you, if you can be replaced? What would it feel like to wake up and realize someone else has your face, your memories, your life and you both believe you're the real one? I didn't plan out the story in detail. It really did come together as I wrote, surprising me with each twist, and letting the characters argue about identity, morality, and the price of survival. It's a story that only works in a future where companies treat people as parts of a machine but the feelings are deeply personal and timeless."
"I think the best stories are the ones that catch you off guard, even as the writer. This one definitely did that for me.
Author's Note on Red Twin:
The idea for Red Twin (and the stories it's linked to) came unexpectedly, a random "what if" drifting through a sleepless night: What if a backup system for astronauts went too far? What if the future's greatest crime wasn't murder, but copying yourself without permission? Writing this story surprised me as much as the characters. Each twist grew from a single question: when technology can duplicate your body, your mind, and your memories what's left that can't be replaced?
I hope you enjoy wandering the shadows with Victor Thorne, Jacob Halley, and all the ghosts the future might conjure.
Intro for Red Twin:
In the endless dark between worlds, identity is the one thing we cling to—the fragile line separating "me" from "them," the past from the future, the living from the dead. On Olympus Station, a spinning citadel above Mars, that line is about to blur.
Detective Victor Thorne has seen every kind of violence humanity can inflict upon itself: bodies twisted by cybernetics, minds broken by isolation, lives shattered by the invisible hand of corporate power. But nothing could prepare him for the case of Jacob Halley, a man brutally murdered in a squalid apartment, then found walking away from his own corpse, very much alive.