Picture of a London Underground train passing through a station
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Tube

Pestilence crossed his legs as the train rattled through Chancery Lane station. He'd been on the tube since South Ruislip and, apart from a 6-year-old girl who had wrinkled her nose and peered at him with saucer eyes, no-one had looked at him twice.

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The Other Side Of The Wall

He’d always lived next to the wall. It dominated the landscape, an abrupt barrier to hold back the fields and trees that flowed down from the distant purple mountains, a line that ran as far as the eye could see in either direction. It loomed, yet offered the comfort of protection as much as any uneasy sensation of captivity.

A picture of the eagle nebula
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The Universe Game

They discovered the first one in 2091, during the seismic lunar surveys. It was communicated to the lab at Mare Anguis 4, in that self-consciously ambiguous way that scientists have, as an 'anomaly' - an unexpected spike on the graph, an unusually sinuous line within the oscilloscope, a decimal place lurking too far to the left - which meant that they had got their predictions wrong.