Mel finds "The Stone and the Moon" in the archives where all stories are kept: pressed, frond-like, in the layers of digital memory; perfectly preserved for future scholars like themself. But the story in the archives is different from the one they remember treasuring as a child. It’s not a lost variant; it’s not a flaw of childhood memory; it’s not an error of Mel’s AI scholar assistant. No, the story itself has changed. 

Mel’s other studies and relationships fall by the wayside as they search for the explanation behind this impossibility. Deep in the code, they find it: a Worm. Elusive, incorporeal. Hungry. They follow its trail of mutated stories through the archives, but one human and one AI are no match for a digital predator, and so Mel takes a step that no scholar so young has ever taken...

Half-Life is an interactive sci-fi novelette about what happens when Mel and the Worm dive deeper through the holes in the stories, one to eat, one to be eaten.

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Originally created as substantial creative artifact for Futures Project, Narrative Futures MSc, University of Edinburgh, 2024

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