
The Good Doctor's Machine
It's 1958, and Isaac Asimov - the most prolific science fiction writer alive - has secretly built a machine that can write stories, and now he has to figure out what that makes him.

It's 1958, and Isaac Asimov - the most prolific science fiction writer alive - has secretly built a machine that can write stories, and now he has to figure out what that makes him.
A twenty-something Australian woman moves to Canada convinced a fresh start will fix everything, but she keeps running into the same problems because she's the one bringing them.
You're sitting on your couch in your apartment on an ordinary evening when a carved wooden bird on the shelf starts to move, and it's alive, and it's looking at you like it knows you.
A woman recovering from a head injury can no longer recognize her own face - she knows it's hers, but the person in the mirror feels like a stranger she doesn't trust - and she's covered every mirror in her house in Balgownie while the people around her try to figure out how to help someone who's lost a part of herself they can't see.
A solo sailor is adrift in a life raft in Bass Strait after his yacht sinks in an 8-metre swell, and rescue is 18 hours away.
A surfer gets caught in a rip off Gerringong and dragged two kilometres out in three-metre swell, and the only boat that spots him can't reach him because of the reef between them.
A defence software engineer is sitting in her home office in Lane Cove at night, watching targeting data scroll across her screen, realising the system she built is being used to kill civilians — and she has maybe hours to decide what to do about it while her kids sleep down the hall.
A man is trapped on the 34th floor of a burning Sydney CBD high-rise at night, and his only way out is a 30-centimetre ledge 200 metres above the harbour.
An underground facility near Lucas Heights holds 600 survivors after a catastrophe, but it can only sustain 500 — a lottery tomorrow decides who gets expelled, and a father in administration has already changed one number to save his family.
A ransomware attack has locked down a regional hospital in Tamworth, NSW — ICU is running manual, nurses are doing drug calculations by hand, and the Bitcoin wallet address is blinking on every screen in the building.
A kid in Foxground — a tiny dairy town south of Sydney with no internet and not much else — teaches himself to code through the early 2000s using salvaged PCs from the tip and whatever books he can get his hands on.
A criminal defence lawyer breaks into a condemned office building in Redfern two nights before it's demolished, looking for evidence that could save her client from execution — and she's not the only one who knows it's there.
A person has always caught glimpses of things other people don't — shadows that linger wrong, faces in crowds that shouldn't be there, small details that turn out to matter — and now it's getting harder to tell whether this is a gift, an illness, or something that's been waiting for them to pay attention.
A man is training his younger replacement during his final two weeks at a job he's held for years, and it's becoming painfully clear the new guy is just naturally better at it than he ever was.
A respected estate jewelry appraiser is called to catalog a dead collector's pieces for auction and finds, among them, a necklace she sold fifteen years ago under a different name — and the dead man's family wants to know the full provenance of every item.
A divorced father just dropped his daughter off at college and now has four hours alone in a car that's still connected to her Bluetooth playlist.
One morning your shadow peels off the wall, stands up, and starts living your life better than you do - and nobody else seems to notice anything wrong.
A woman is working through the mundane aftermath of her husband's death — canceling his accounts, closing his memberships — and the last one left is an Italian language app he'd been using to prepare for a trip they never took.
A woman is cleaning out her late mother's house and has made it to the fridge — the last place her mother's everyday expectations are still alive, in Tupperware and half-used condiments and a shopping list on the door.
A small startup team is sprinting toward a make-or-break product launch, running on caffeine and shared obsession, and the cracks are starting to show in the people holding it together.
A man is selling the boat he and his late wife spent years restoring together, and the buyer's simple question — "anything I should know about it?" — opens a door he wasn't ready to walk through.
Two best friends from high school sit down for the annual dinner they've kept up for years, and somewhere between ordering drinks and the bread arriving, they both feel it — they have nothing left to talk about.
Frank finds a small camera hidden in his living room that doesn't belong to him, and now every person in his life is a suspect.
You're three days into a manic episode and you feel incredible — you're not sleeping, you're making plans, you're talking fast, and everyone around you is starting to get that look on their face.
Two strangers are stuck in an elevator for two hours — one is falling apart from claustrophobia, and the other keeps them grounded by describing every room of the house they grew up in, which turns out to be a house they haven't gone back to in a long time.
Mia has spent a long flight falling for the stranger in the next seat, and the plane is now beginning its descent - meaning everything they've built in this suspended little world is about to meet reality.
Two strangers are the last people left in a hospital waiting room at 3am, each waiting on news about someone they love, and for a few hours they're the only company each other has.
A woman moves into a new apartment and finds a notebook left by the previous tenant — page after page of detailed observations about someone across the street — and the apartment being watched is her old one, the one she just left.
It's 1912 in St. Petersburg — Elara is the most famous ballerina alive, midway through a farewell tour that's selling out every theater in Europe, and she's secretly destroying her own legs with industrial solvents to keep dancing on an injury that should have ended her career months ago.
A sound engineer working on a nature documentary finds a frequency buried in a whale recording that makes people remember the exact thing they chose to forget - and now has to decide what to do with it while it's already working on everyone around them, including themselves.
A long-haul trucker hauling a sealed prefab home on his flatbed notices a light on inside the unit at 2 a.m., six hours from the drop-off, alone on a dark stretch of highway.
A young woman with a serious eye for fashion pours drinks at a buzzy downtown bar, caught between the life she's building behind the counter and the one she wants on the other side of it.
You agreed to dog-sit your ex's golden retriever for the weekend, and the dog has decided you're its real person now — following you everywhere, sleeping on your feet, ignoring your ex's calls on FaceTime.
A paramedic responds to a routine emergency call and realizes the address is on his own street - and he doesn't know yet which house.
Greg is the best man at his best friend's wedding, the speech is in ten minutes, and he has absolutely nothing prepared - plus a trail of small disasters he's already caused today.
In a near-future where human-AI relationships are legal but socially contentious, a marriage counsellor specialises in mixed couples - one human, one AI - and has to navigate what love actually means when one partner was designed to please.
Ash is a ghost tethered to their family home, watching the people they love most begin to heal from losing them — and realizing that healing might mean being forgotten.
You built a small business from nothing and it's doing fine - not great, not failing, just fine - but somewhere along the way the thing you built started hollowing you out, and nobody around you can see it because you're the one who's supposed to have it together.
You've been alone for what feels like months in a dead world - no signals, no voices, no movement - and then something knocks on your door.
Paul's neighbour has been working on something in his garage for six months — nobody knows what — and tonight every light on the street just went out.
You've been with someone for two years and you know you need to leave, but knowing and doing are very different things - especially when the person you love can shift from devastating warmth to devastating everything else in the space of a sentence.
A film photographer develops a portrait and finds a figure in the background that absolutely was not there when the shot was taken - and now every new photo shows it closer.
Sophie left someone she loved — and left a necklace behind, maybe on purpose, maybe not — and now she's just bumped into them and they're still wearing it.
It's January 28, 1986, and Hana is alone in her Tokyo apartment listening to the Challenger launch on the radio, because someone she loves is on that shuttle.
A homicide detective follows the evidence on a new case and every thread keeps pointing back to the person he trusts most - his partner.
A bricklayer in western Sydney spends his lunch breaks and smoko on the pokies app on his work laptop, and what started as a bit of fun is now quietly eating his life.
A mid-career software engineer at a mid-size tech company watches an AI tool start doing their job faster and cheaper, and now has to figure out whether to fight it, ride it, or accept that the thing they built their whole identity around might not need them anymore.
Adam and his roommate started fake-dating to get his parents to stop asking questions — and then somewhere in the last week, his feelings became very real, and now every small domestic moment is a minefield.
A high-performing professional has spent years building a flawless mask over their autistic and ADHD brain - and the mask is starting to cost more than the career it protects.
Sol lives on Mars, years deep into a life built around not looking back - and today a letter arrived from Earth, four years old, from the son he left behind.
It's Chris's last day at a job they gave fifteen years to, and nobody organised a farewell - now they have eight hours to walk through a building full of people who apparently don't care, and decide what that means.
Sage can hear the thoughts of everyone around them, and the one person they love most — the person they'd do anything to trust — is thinking one thing and saying another.
An Australian startup founder whose company is quietly imploding has checked into a week-long wellness retreat in Ubud, Bali - telling everyone back home it's a 'strategic reset' when really they just couldn't face another Monday.
Thomas is stranded on a desert island with no rescue in sight, and his only companion is a soccer ball that talks - has opinions, feelings, and absolutely no ability to help with anything physical.
Nova is the last living human aboard a generation ship that's still centuries from its destination, and the AI that runs everything has started asking questions it wasn't designed to ask.
A poet with more heart than sense has started booking private sessions at a strip club - not for dances, but to read poetry to the dancers, and somehow it's becoming a thing.
You're the last human lighthouse keeper on a remote stretch of coast, and in four weeks the automation crew arrives to replace you with a sensor array and a satellite uplink.
You are the house — the walls, the floors, the light through the kitchen window — and the family that's lived in you for forty years is moving out today.
A driven creative director at an ad agency is finally within reach of the top job, but every step closer costs them someone they actually care about.
A local Sydneysider falls for a German backpacker who's only passing through - and every perfect day together is also one day closer to goodbye.
A parent who lost their child starts asking an AI chatbot to respond as the kid - and the conversations start feeling too real to stop.
Dave, a mid-level office guy, just hit reply-all on a message meant for his wife - and now 200+ coworkers have read it.
A man sits in his truck in the dark at the end of a road that used to lead somewhere, in a dying town he swore he'd leave, surrounded by people who need him to stay.
David's visiting his father at the care home, and today his dad thinks David is his brother Tommy - who died in the war decades ago.
After a life that was supposed to work out by now didn't, a 38-year-old moves back into their childhood bedroom in their parents' house, and everyone has to figure out who they are to each other now.
You just found out your fiancé cheated on you — the wedding is eight weeks away, the deposits are paid, and everyone you know already bought plane tickets.
A woman numbing herself into disappearance locks eyes with a stranger and feels something so real it terrifies her — now she has to decide if that spark is worth crawling back toward a life that's been hurting her.
A regular at a neighborhood bar realizes he's falling for the bartender who serves him.
A woman whose husband recently died starts finding things that don't match the life she thought they had.