Memories of the Old Sun — Eugen Bacon

A speculative short story of family, love, and creation.Mazu designs biorobots – living instruments built to measure the world's weather and never question it. But in the sterile rhythm of code and command, his own life feels increasingly mechanical: long shifts, video calls home to a mother who wants him married, and brief messages from Jordan, the man he can't quite bring himself to tell her about.When one of Mazu's creations, a biorobot named Jazz stationed in Antarctica, begins to show signs of emotion and memory, Mazu is forced to confront what he's made – and what he's become. Jazz's awakening mirrors his own longing to live freely, to love honestly, to exist outside the expectations that have shaped him.Set between a cold city apartment and the endless white of the Antarctic ice, Memories of the Old Sun explores the pull between duty and selfhood, science and tenderness, parent and child. It's a quiet, beautiful story about migration, queerness, and the human need to be more than the sum of our design.(Approx. 35 pages)