A.Journal

Checks

344 checks

Medium

An electric shudder passes through the deepest canals of your body. Painless but concerning.

Trivial

You hear a few chords on a guitar, just for a moment.

Challenging

A barracks full of small boys, huddled together on a cold floor. An older man reads aloud from a worn and dogeared book. His words echo off the low, tin ceiling.

Medium

Cicatriz Frontera, La Luz. Fabricators from the Ministry of Cosmonautics present three custom spacesuits for inspection. A young publicist with severely angular hair scans them, then shakes her head and says, 'She'll want one in all purple'.

Challenging

Below your feet, the prisoner slips in and out of a terrifying dream.

Medium

Only ghosts can pass freely between such crevices.

Formidable

At the Greater Quisach Gymnasium, the bell rings three times: Recreation Period is over. The children file back into the building covered in peeling plaster. The grey play-yard is empty.

Medium

The receiver buzzes warmly in your hand. In the wiry nerves of the city you just left, ideologies crash against one another like waves. Across the Developed World and beyond, telephones begin to ring...

Easy

The doctor blows onto his tea. A smell of mint rises with the steam.

Legendary

It's at this moment, as the Paleolithic huntress pinches shut the great aurochs' lower intestine with one hand while with the other she expertly slices the hide around the anus from without, that the boundary is suddenly and fatally crossed. 'What am I doing here?' her brain asks in her own voice, as her head falls back and the terrible weight of sentience descends on her with a roar.

Challenging

Of course, some possess this to a greater degree than others.

Medium

Collapsing the mind's conscious defences in order to channel raw cosmos into human language.

Legendary

A solitary anchorite in a cell of aluminium and carbon fibre, 400,000 kilometres above the world.

Challenging

Not a weapon, a tool of psychic eviction, a means to disinhabit the soul.

Medium

A senior aide with a mistress he's committed to an asylum for her own protection. A secretary who's been indiscreet with certain carbon copies. An old torturer for the Weeping Eye who was photographed taking an envelope from someone he shouldn't have.

Challenging

Crackling tree squirrel impaled on a spit. Savoury smoke rising into the night. The Paleolithic huntress turns her gaze upwards.

Medium

A spiraling column of amber and green lights, twenty stories deep, pulsing as one.

Easy

Whatever happened in 69, it may not have had anything to do with him at all.

Easy

A phantom itch. He's scratching at something that hasn't happened yet.

Easy

Another plaything of the stars, impelled by processes beyond its comprehension.

Formidable

A shimmer across your field of vision, or was that the television screen?

Challenging

Back in Foto 24, your would-be double gurgles his assent.

Medium

Portofiro at the break of the 60s. A teenage boy sits on his bed and gazes at a full-page magazine ad for a brand new single-play format. The crimson of the disc spellbinds him. Excited thumbs leave sweat prints on the page.

Challenging

It started in sub-level three. Rose like a prayer through ducts and electrical chases. A slow, fungal liturgy.

Medium

Smuggling the ethereal objects of the subconscious into the physical world.

Legendary

The child trembles in his ice bath. He can't tell the shivers of cold from those of fever, nor the numerous unknown words in the book from the gibberings of his delirium, but he sits there and trembles and holds the matico leaves to his brow.

Medium

Communication has been established between the doctor and something within you, real or imagined, and there is nothing you can do about it.

Challenging

Ribboned flesh, spots of white fat beneath the skin. A tuk-tuk horn blares outside.

Challenging

Ring binders stacked on a glass-topped conference table, a chair at either end. She notices a tiny circle of paper on the carpet -- lost from a hole-puncher? A polite cough brings her attention back to her interviewer.

Legendary

Waves curl endlessly onto a shore of fine pebble. Pascal takes the lid off the teapot, notices two men walking up the garden path. He opens the door with a smile.

Medium

Alone in her apartment, knife under her pillow. She dreads the sound of footsteps approaching her door -- until she learns to recognise his.

Challenging

A breeze rolls through a plantation in Lágundi. Leaves hiss at its passing.

Challenging

The board is set. The Manus Fati wriggles its fingers above the pieces.

Challenging

You know the school well. You've already seen the courtyard, the old ginkyo, the barracks where the boys' minds are beaten until they're no longer their own.

Legendary

Overdetermined, like so much else in the smashed and leaking world.

Legendary

A soul vacating the premises.

Challenging

A suburb of Almina al-Azraq. Green bushes, knee-high, stretch across a plateau. Boys with skirts woven into nets pluck small white flowers from between the leaves, pinching just beneath each bud.

Medium

Overhead, something stirs. It has been waiting.

Medium

Shades from another time move endlessly across the ancient wood, pickling it with nostalgia.

Trivial

The bullet, the monotheist agent who fired it, all of them in on it.

Medium

Twelve thousand years ago, the Paleolithic huntress stumbled onto this place much as you just stumbled onto the location in your mind.

Challenging

In the distant beyond, a massive luminescent body turns in silence amid a sad black cosmos.

Medium

Individualism, emotion, even existence dissipates across the full stretch of eternity.

Medium

The huntress watches the long, reddish back of a sea mink as it snakes through the water, a thorny lobster still struggling in its jaws. Pups run to the water's edge, yipping with excitement.