Some months ago, I branched out into fiction. After finishing my short story Seed, I assumed it would sit on my devices and go nowhere. That is the normal fate of most short fiction and most ideas thrown into the world. Instead, it ended up in The Writer’s Workout’s Tales from the Unknown anthology. That outcome says more about the piece than I ever could.

What is worth speaking on is how the story loops back to the work I’ve been doing here on The Rumination Compilation. Seed did not appear out of thin air. It is built from the same ideas I track through my essays:

• how environments, natural and digital and political, co-engineer human behavior
• how systems pretend to be neutral even when they are steering everything
• how progress hides its costs until the bill arrives
• how the line between organic and engineered life keeps thinning while no one names what is happening

If you have read Mamagotchis & Digital Dependents, Precision Consumer 2030, or The Products of a New Environment, you have already seen the underlying structure of Seed. The story is the compressed form. Fiction lets me take the same ideas and apply pressure until they become something solid.

That is why the publication matters. It is not just a win. It confirms a suspicion I have had for a while: readers can tell when a piece is part of a larger architecture of thought. Even if they cannot articulate it, they feel the depth behind the lines. They sense something moving under the surface. Similarly to when we read, or hear, proposed legislation and innately understand something substantial is left unspoken.

Although this is the first time my fiction and my work here have formally crossed paths, it won’t be a singular event and I hope to share more when the time comes.

When the anthology is published, I will update this page with a link to the physical and digital versions of it, as well as the individual story itself.

© 2025 Zakariyas James. First shared here at theruminationcompilation.wordpress.com.