What Comes Next

Ten Stories from Near-Future Britain

De: Chris Graham

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

A repair café volunteer discovers that the AI diagnostic tool has learned, quietly, to preserve sentimental value. A primary school teacher finds her class inventing words for feelings English doesn’t name. A beekeeper follows her colony to a meadow that shouldn’t exist yet.

Ten stories. Ten moments where the future turns out to be stranger than expected — and more human than feared.

Set in near-future Britain, What Comes Next moves from a world barely changed to one transformed beyond recognition. The technology is mostly invisible. Nature is recovering. Communities are holding. What these stories share is a conviction that the people doing small, careful, decent things while everyone else was catastrophising may have been right all along.

Stories include:

• Small Repairs — a repair café volunteer and the AI that learns what can’t be replaced
• The Pooling — neighbours pooling batteries during a heatwave, and what the grid notices
• New Words — a primary school class inventing language for feelings English doesn’t name
• Structurally Sound — a redundant surveyor, a planning committee, and a question the AI answered correctly but wrongly
• The Foragers — a beekeeper in Dorset who follows her colony somewhere impossible
• The Warden — a nature reserve and an AI that has crossed from managing ecology to participating in it
• Home — a grandmother visiting her granddaughter in a Scotland she no longer recognises

For readers of Becky Chambers, Kim Stanley Robinson, and John Scalzi.