Project Blue String and Other Failed Instructions (Dystopocon Anthologies)

Monsters file paperwork. Crows run the comms network. Godzilla sells Girl Scout cookies in a cul-de-sac with a very nervous HOA president.

Welcome back to Dystopocon, a universe only a few degrees off from our own, just enough for the cracks to show.

In these eighteen surreal, darkly funny, and unexpectedly tender stories, Cody Poston takes on bureaucracy, apocalypse, customer service, and the small, stubborn ways people (and not-quite-people) keep trying anyway.

Inside you'll find:

A man with an AI wingman feeding him terrible pickup lines until something real slips through.

Glen, a burned-out green iguana enforcing nature's balance in triplicate as a reluctant cryptid cop.

A post-collapse lineman riding broken power lines with a flock of cheating crows, arguing over whether "dirt" might secretly mean hope.

An HOA president facing her greatest enemy yet: a 70-foot kaiju in a sash helping a Girl Scout troop dominate cookie season.

A quarantined island, a lonely scientist, and Velvet-a massive serpent once built as a weapon, now a living archive of memories no one else wanted to keep.

Two girls at the edge of the Painted River deciding which answers get to exist while glowing koi carry those choices into the future.

From broken job-matching rituals and doomed executive retreats to cosmic strings knotted around memory, Project Blue String and Other Failed Instructions blends sci-fi humor, absurdist satire, workplace meltdown, and soft existential dread into something deeply, strangely human.

If you enjoy Black Mirror, Kurt Vonnegut, weird speculative fiction, and laughing at the end of the world, pull this thread.

Just don't expect the universe to follow the instructions.