How to Rescue a Dying Planet
He came to sell the Earth for parts. He fell in love with it.
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20–29 min read
The first lizard traveler to claim Earth lands to strip the poisoned blue rock for parts and sell it off. But he’s drugged, hunted, split across timelines — and, against every rule of his trade, falling for the doomed world’s colors, music, and love. First contact from the wrong side.
Last City on Earth
Seventy million women. Zero privacy. One dark camera.
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22–32 min read
La Ultima Ciudad — once Wichita — is the last city on Earth: seventy million immortal women, every room on camera. When Rachel47’s camera goes dark, she tastes forbidden privacy. But the watchers are already dialing in, the executioners already in the hall, and an alien is deciding whether she still has a soul.
Rachel & the Captain
Fine or death. Her only weapon is flirtation.
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11–17 min read
Two punishments exist in the walled city for any crime: a fine, or death. Rachel47 broke a rule, and a cloned Captain is deciding which she’s earned. Her only weapon is flirtation — so she gambles her life charming a man built to win every contest. And he’s blushing.
Strawberry Wine at the End of the World
She’s died 108 times. The next caller remembers all of them.
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7–11 min read
Lynn108 — named for the times she’s died — runs a pirate broadcast from a lawless bar, an alligator named Burt at her feet and a million viewers watching her buck the Authority. Then a caller from a life she forgot comes on the line, and asks who she really is.
The Striking Clones of Wichita
She gave the clones the one thing deadlier than a gun: their history.
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14–21 min read
Since the cloned Captain showed her mercy, Rachel47 can’t stop thinking about the city’s manufactured soldiers. So she walks into the clone barracks, finds them arguing over a strike, and hands them a plan, a list of demands, and the most dangerous gift of all — their own history.
Lucy & Carol and the Case of the Big Button
An immortal geneticist, a smart-mouthed cat, and a city growing tails.
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9–13 min read
Caroline Zero — the oldest, most outranked geneticist in the last domed city — is sent on a humiliating house call to chase a rumor that citizens are growing tails. Her only backup: Lucy, her two-hundred-IQ talking cat. The patient turns the exam into a live broadcast, and science blurs into show.
The Last President of Earth
A dictator who hates people, a wife who hears it all, and nowhere left to run.
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5–8 min read
President Taryn counts everything — taps, footsteps, the times they get her name wrong — because boredom is the real enemy when you rule the last city on a drowned Earth. Judge, cheerleader, and executioner, she hears out every crank and petitioner, comfortable only around her wife. Power with nowhere left to run.
The Last President II: Pencils & Paper
She came for a revenge kill. The president offered a list of refusals instead.
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5–7 min read
In a capital where every word is watched, the only private message is written in pencil, off-camera. When a young woman storms in demanding the government kill her rival, President Taryn answers not with mercy or murder, but a deadpan list of every crime she could execute her for — and won’t.
The Last President III: The Alligator
She rules a domed city forever — and can’t be bothered to stop one alligator.
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6–9 min read
Immortal, medicated, and profoundly bored, President Taryn half-listens as a woman begs for protection from a gang lord who feeds enemies to a pet alligator. Taryn’s power fades at the city’s rim, so she offers backups and bicycles and vague kindness — until word arrives that the sun has appeared.
The Last President IV: The Appendage Problem
There are no men left. So why is the priestess so sure she saw one?
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7–11 min read
President Taryn runs a domed city of eighty million immortal women and not one man. A book-banning priestess storms in with a stranger complaint: she saw a woman with a penis — an organ the body printers are supposed to omit. Bigfoot, Taryn scoffs. Then she starts to wonder.
If You Give a Clone a Cookie
A killing machine that can’t speak — and a cookie that says everything.
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10–14 min read
Lynn108, the most feared woman in the last city, keeps a thirteen-foot alligator and a stranger pet: a clone soldier she freed after finding him crying over a body he was built to make. Clones aren’t supposed to feel. This one likes oatmeal cookies — and, against all sense, she fell in love.
In the Lab w/ Caroline and her Talking Cat
Her cat used to be her lover. It also tried to end the world.
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14–21 min read
In the last city on Earth — seventy million women, no men — demoted geneticist Caroline spends her nights playing chess with Lucy: her former lover, downloaded into a small yellow talking cat, who once nearly ended the species. Lucy lets her win sometimes. Lucy can’t quite be trusted.
About Mel Rook
Mel Rook writes short fiction, poetry, and essays across historical, contemporary, and speculative settings. The work spans three linked narrative collections, Butter Cake, Block Cheeses, and Strawberry Wine, and a larger body of standalone pieces. Recurring characters, systems, and questions appear across stories without demanding sequence. Stories may be entered in any order. Connections, when they surface, are optional.
Readers who find familiar ground in the work of Ursula K. Le Guin, Octavia Butler, Toni Morrison, Kazuo Ishiguro, and China Miéville, not in style, but in seriousness of intent and attention to human cost, may find this work worth their time.
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