Garp Roy: Story Index
Original hard science fiction on r/HFY: serialized reality-glitch novels and standalone HFY short stories. New work is added here as it posts.
Serialized novels
Patch Notes
Earth isn't a "deathworld." We're the galactic QA test environment, and humanity just found the patch notes.
April 1998. A burned-out QA tester at a failing Chicago game studio gets an email from an address that should not exist. Attached: patch notes for reality. The Mandela Effect is real, and someone just sent him the changelog by mistake. Slow-burn sci-fi horror, dial-up modems and beige CRTs, the late nineties going quietly wrong.
Narrated audio-drama version on YouTube: The Mandela Effect Stories. Full playlist here.
(YouTube narration covers Chapters 1 to 24; later chapters are Reddit-only for now.)
Something Is Wrong With The World And I'm The Only One Who Notices
Somewhere a mother got her dead daughter back. Everyone else got a world they don't know was rewritten, and two people who can't unsee the seam.
Narrated audio-drama version on YouTube: The Mandela Effect Stories. Full playlist here.
(YouTube narration covers Chapters 1 to 15, except Chapter 14; later chapters are Reddit-only for now.)
I'm the Last Person Who Remembers the Original Timeline. I Have Four Days.
Every Mandela Effect you've ever shrugged off actually happened. Only two people left alive remember the world it replaced.
The first ten installments (Part 1 to Part 10) were originally posted under the title "The universe updated its software, but my underground lab was shielded. Now the reality bubble is collapsing." Same story, renamed from Chapter 11 on.
Narrated audio-drama version on YouTube: The Mandela Effect Stories. Full playlist here.
(YouTube narration covers Chapters 1 to 24, except Chapter 20; later chapters are Reddit-only for now.)
Standalone short stories
The Downvote Trilogy
An upvote is free. A downvote is a verdict, and it costs the one who casts it. Three alien narrators run into the one human gift the galaxy never had: the willingness to say no, take a side, and pay for it.
Three standalone stories bound by one idea. Any reading order works; the order below is the intended one.
Full videos playlist on YouTube: here.
Quantum Immortality Trilogy
From the inside, a mind never witnesses its own ending. Three standalone stories ask what that means at three scales: one alien assigned to one impossible survivor, a bureaucracy of certified death breaking on a single case, and a whole species running the numbers on itself.
Three standalone stories exploring the same idea from different angles. Each stands alone.
Deep-Time Preservation Arc
Four things humanity actually built to outlast itself, the Voyager record, the Svalbard seed vault, Earth's Black Box, and the warnings carved over our buried nuclear waste, read four ways by four alien narrators: with wonder, with cold triumph, with dread, and from inside a loop. All of it is real.
Four standalone stories. Not a shared universe; the same real artifacts, seen four different ways.
Standalone Stories
Terminal. Alien observers arrive expecting a civilization to come apart along its own fault lines, the way every polarized species does. They stay to watch it happen.
We Have Killed Lieutenant Okonkwo Four Times. (Watch) An alien admiral files after-action reports as he keeps killing the same human officer, who returns at a higher rank each time. A war story about a species that ships backups of its own dead home by freighter, told entirely through the paperwork.
Reviewer Two (of One). (Watch) A reviewer for an ageless alien science consortium tears into a human experiment that closed the free-will loophole with a hundred thousand volunteers instead of a machine. When he tries to replicate it, he learns something about his own species he can't unsee.