Last Date Night in the Valley
He’d wanted to take her to a fancy restaurant in Corpus Christi, but with her last class of the day letting out at 7:30 p.m., she’d balked at the six hour round-trip just to eat raw shrimp from a champagne glass.
He’d wanted to take her to a fancy restaurant in Corpus Christi, but with her last class of the day letting out at 7:30 p.m., she’d balked at the six hour round-trip just to eat raw shrimp from a champagne glass.
Daniel Verastiqui is a science fiction author based in Austin, Texas. He is currently writing The Vinestead Anthology, a series of standalone novels set in a shared universe where virtual reality, synthetic humans, and one very powerful corporation keep making everything worse. His latest book, House of Nepenthe, released in June 2026.
Thirty years ago, you could answer that question with whatever lie you wanted. That was what made the internet awesome.
Technology has grown far beyond the cookie-cutter experience of your grandparents and into a realm where knowledge rules and strength is no longer determined by the size of a man’s muscles but by the size of his brain.
Welcome to Friday Footnotes, a new series intended to fill the void when I've spent too much time writing fiction and too little time writing a new thoughtful blog post for you.
The bar around him was an amalgam of familiar set pieces: the long bar with multi-colored bottles on the wall behind it, the pool tables in the distance with their clacking balls, and a small dance floor with only a handful of people gyrating to a song he couldn’t hear.