Eight Letters

“Eight Letters” is a near-future speculative short story that follows an employee at a Canadian space tech company after a quiet corporate decision reshapes who is deemed worthy of survival. As humanitarian language and institutional restraint mask cost-saving measures that erases a public lottery for escape, the narrator confronts the sudden horrible intimacy of moral complicity, which is made visceral by a false emergency alert that, for one terrible moment, turns an abstract list of names into the irrevocably dead. Caught between paralysis and action, they are forced to reckon with the limits of ethical purity and the weight of choosing something over nothing.

Told in a close first-person voice, the story unfolds within a single workday and moves between bureaucratic routine and embodied memory as the narrator’s certainty dissolves into panic, guilt, and resolve. Through repetition, restraint, and a single irreversible act, “Eight Letters” examines how systems create harm through procedure, how language becomes a tool for both violence and mercy , and how moral agency survives not through grand resistance, but through one small, imperfect refusal to let a person disappear.

“Eight Letters” was submitted to The Writers’ Union of Canada for the Sort Prose Contest. If chosen, it will be available for reading in early 2026.