What’s in the Hole?

Happy October, Dear Wyrms! Have we got a treat for you. In honor of the scariest season of all, your lovely editor team has worked tirelessly to bring you our very own Wyrmhole Haunted House! Don’t be shy, step right into the Hole and we’ll do our best to offer you a goosebumpy time. 

Ah, you must be here for the job interview. Take a seat over there and we’ll be with you shortly.

Haunted house? Goodness, what are you going on about? This is the lobby of a Fortune 500 company, does it look like a haunted house to you? 

Well come along then, no time like the present. You can sit here with the other applicants. Bathrooms are around that corner. Please be prompt when your name is called, you’ll be meeting with the committee through that door. 

The door? The door to our committee? It looks ordinary to me, why?

No, I do not see an “ominous aura like an ebony cloud of pure malice” seeping out from underneath it. You might need to get your eyes checked. I advise you do, in the case you are somehow offered this position. 20/20 vision is one of the requirements of the job. 

VISION insurance? This is an entry level position, does it look like we’re made of money?

Yes, I can see that the furniture is made of solid gold and yes, those are indeed real diamonds hanging from the chandelier. And yes I am aware that our senior executives over there were just dropped off in a Tesla limousine, and are in the midst of an argument over whether they should rent out the entirety of the Maldives or the entirety of the Bahamas for their fortieth paid vacation of the year. 

Hm? Oh no, the water fountain is not free. Neither are the bathrooms just so you know, but we’re now taking Apple Cash or Venmo for both! One of our company mottos is inclusivity; we want to ensure our resources are equally accessible to all of our patrons. 

Don’t be silly, of course you can leave. We’re not keeping you here against your will. You’re the one who wanted this. You drove here. You paid for the gas and those business formal clothes and that cell phone you’re tapping at in a panic (you need to pay a fee for our Internet services as well, I’m afraid). 

Ah, remember you cannot enter the committee door until they call your name. No, I do not see a large red glowing sigil carved into the wood. Once again, I recommend you get your eyes checked. 

No, did you not hear what I said about the vision insurance? Yes our more senior positions do offer vision insurance, with an in-house optometrist in fact so you never have to leave the building. Well, if you work hard, comply with our company policies, and follow our requirements, I’m sure you can get promoted in no time. Yes, 20/20 vision is a requirement for all work required at this company. Yes you will definitely need 20/20 vision to get promoted. You can’t afford it? Have you thought about going through your insurance company? What? This again about vision insurance? Did we not just have this conversation? I’m starting to doubt your qualifications. 

Please take a seat. The QR code? That’s to pay for the seat, silly. 

Sure, we can stand. It might be a while. Yes, I am aware you are the only applicant here. It still might be a while. 

Why am I doing this? Because it’s my job. This may soon be your job too. Oh yes, you’re my replacement, didn’t you read the job description? If the committee sees fit, you’ll be standing in my place by tomorrow morning. 

Me? 

Why does it matter? I might have been promoted, or I might have quit, or they may have let me go but that doesn’t change the fact that you’ll likely be standing in my place tomorrow. You won’t remember my face by then, and after a week you won’t remember I had existed at all. Don’t worry, the same thing will happen to you. 

Why do this at all? Goodness. Didn’t you ever get up in the morning, excited to join society? Eager to change the world? That’s what we’re doing here, changing the world. Profitably. That’s another one of our company mottos: changing the world profitably.

They’ve called your name. Yes the door is still there. No, it did not “dissolve into a portal of black ether” nor is it currently “humming with an ominous melody as urgent as it is foreboding.” You really should get your eyes checked. Perhaps your ears as well. 

Good luck. Don’t be intimidated by the committee. You should just be yourself. They won’t remember who you are by tomorrow anyways. 

Hiya Wyrms! Did you enjoy the Haunted House? I hope it wasn’t too bone-chilling. I told Tia to chill out with the paper mache skeletons but she was like “Oh please, I got so inspired by the Parisian catacombs” and then Carolyn got really invested in posing them in unsettling positions, plus Iz and Tina got so good at lurking in dark corners to jump scare folks that I just let everyone go ham and it spiraled a tad out of control. Sorry if we gave you too much of a fright; I see my management skills are wanting. I’ll be better next year! Or maybe I should hire someone. I’ll look into that.

(Also, if you like this issue— share the HOLE!)

H.H. Pak / October 2025 Editor in Chief / Los Angeles, USA

Recs & Reviews

H.H. recs…

• God of the Black Moon

  Dan Stintzi, Nightmare Magazine, 2025. 6.6k.

  What if cults were pyramid schemes? Actually no, what if cults were honey pots? Uh no actually, I got it, what if cults were parasitic ideologies that fundamentally perverted your identity with a hive mind that—okay never mind. What if you were young and wanted someone to love with a raw loneliness? The prose is dreamlike, the dialogue achingly grounded, the lines between the worlds are blurring and an eldritch god wants to infect your meat sack of a body. What? Anyways, what if I got a nose ring?

Iz recs…

• The Barn at the End of Our Term

  Karen Russell, Granta. 2007. 6k

  Ok full disclaimer, I got recc'ed this off a tumblr recc list. It is a story about the presidents of the United States of America being reincarnated as horses on a farm after their deaths. It is wildly literary.

Tina recs…

• I Am Multiplying to Cope With Life’s Duplicity

  ^{Jackie Jennings, This Week, 2025. 1k.}

  A surreal take on parenting in email form. Feeling bad for the narrator, but figuring out what exactly is going on in this story is half the fun

Carolyn recs…

• Good Old Neon

  David Foster Wallace, Conjunctions. 2021. 18k.

  An advertising executive gives one VERY long and self-involved monologue on the circumstances leading up to his death, including his manipulation of his very concerned and well-meaning psychologist. One of DFW's best standalone stories, "Good Old Neon" is an incredible exercise in character, point of view, and a fascinating dive into the psychological twistiness of someone who tries to justify their own demise. It's funny, sad, hopeful, and just a masterfully written story-- everything that requires me to rec it on this newsletter!!

Tia recs…

• Haunting Olivia

  ^{Karen Russell, New Yorker. 2005. 6.1k.}

  It’s October, and there’s no better month for a story about the search for a dead loved one—but there are no haunted houses or dreary nights in sight. On this island-with-a-grimy-side, Timothy and his big brother Wallow travel through boat graveyards and ocean currents looking for the ghost of their little sister. The voice in “Haunting Olivia” is on point and so is the vivid seaside setting—this story feels like holding your breath as you near the end.

H.H. Pak’s Spooky Ooky Recommendations

You love short stories, I love short stories, yet as your resident Art Director, it is also my privilege to wine and dine our dear readers with a colorful spectrum of mediums outside of the literary. It’s good for y’all’s gut biomes. In honor of the spookiest month of the year, here are some of my personal favorite creepy, contemplative, and creative projects by artists who unabashedly push the boundaries of storytelling. 

• Welcome Home

  Welcome Home is an interactive website designed around the restoration of a lost piece of media: a Sesame Street-esque puppet show from the 1950s. The catch is, Welcome Home doesn’t exist and never has. Yet where are all these recordings, coloring books, ads, and toys coming from? Why do the characters keep breaking the fourth wall in increasingly horrific ways? Underneath the colorful exterior of this lost children’s show is a dark conspiracy involving ciphers hidden in ingenious website programming, unsettling questions of autonomy and selfhood, and a puppet host who’s perhaps a tad too sentient for comfort. 

• Malevolent

  Malevolent is a one man show audio drama that follows Arthur Lester, a PI who wakes up blind with missing memories. To complicate matters, he confronts an equally amnesiac entity in his head with control over his sight and a penchant for manipulation. Caught in a fraught three-legged race, the two must work together as they navigate a mystery involving eldritch monstrosities, cults, and horrors beyond comprehension. Of all the fiction podcasts I’ve loved, this is the one that I can say makes use of its medium to the cleverest utmost. As the entity describes the world through Arthur’s eyes, we as the audience experience a richly descriptive narrative, punctuated by heart-wrenching contemplations on what makes us good, what makes us human, and what drives us to survive. Content warning for shockingly well communicated visceral gore. 

• Bad Space Comics

  Hard sci fi lovers, this is for you! Bad Space Comics is a cumulative archive of comics by artist Scott Base who challenges himself with writing science fiction short stories within ten short comic panels. His work is often disturbing, sometimes hopeful, and always poignant, meticulously illustrated in a black and white realism style evoking dramatic cinematography. His carefully woven metaphors do not fail to leave his audience with lingering questions that haunt as much as they inspire contemplations on relevant commentary. As he says himself, “Science fiction should reflect that, even if, in the final equation, it is just grieving for the future we have lost.” 

• Knights of Guinevere

  What if you were a robot and also a princess and also a complex metaphor for art as a tool for both inspiration and capitalist subjugation? What if you needed rescue, desperately, not just for yourself but to liberate all who have fallen under the exploitative cyberpunk empire built upon your image? If you can imagine all that, then congratulations you have fallen into the world of Guinevere, the titular character of perhaps the most incredible animated pilot I have seen in recent years. Knights of Guinevere is an upcoming science fiction horror show by Glitch Studios and if the pilot is this resonant, I can only imagine how much more tragic and beautifully striking the rest of the show will be. Content warning for body horror and gore. 

• Luke Humphris Animations

  Luke Humphris’s work can best be described as “hopepunk speculative fiction” if I had to label it, and so much of it is charmingly un-labelable. Humphris writes, animates, and voice acts short videos in his distinctive cartoony style, drawing his audience into worlds of failed futures, rebirth, and unabashed whimsy. From video diaries of workers tasked with killing an immortal titan, to existential cries of help from a man trapped in a liminal dimension, to warnings by librarians at the end of the world, Humphris populates a loveable array of characters into increasingly unpredictable landscapes to communicate one very simple message: when all is gone, we will persist with kindness. 

• Despair’s End Terminal Namicha

  Sometimes we have the pleasure of finding pieces of media that resonate so deeply with our brainworms that they stand tail and sing. Imagine my delight to find Despair’s End Terminal Namicha, a magical-girl-robot-scifi-metaphor-for-wish-fulfillment short comic by @cracklewink (on Insta, Tumblr, and Twitter/X). Plotwise, the story follows a mysterious all-powerful being with the power to answer all robot wishes—indiscriminately. The events that follow inspire questions on the cruelty of creation, the gray morals in our desires, and the strange love between man and machine. Crackle’s clean colorful art style and arresting character designs evokes the campy pizzazz of 90’s anime, while their writing evokes that haunting feeling of reading a spec fic short story and knowing you’ll never be the same after. 

The Best of September Cover Art

October Riddle of the Month

Good Moomin of the Month

Wildcard

This is Not Clickbait: Robots are Metaphors

by H.H. Pak

Let’s face it. We’ve got too many bots.

We’ve got algorithms, we’ve got machine learning, we’ve got Siri and Alexa, databases upon databases, smart televisions, smart homes, smart lights, smart toilets, smart upon smart upon smart and all of it is lazily redundant at best and environmentally destructive at worst, but only in how we use it. 

Way back in centuries past, when urban expansion swelled with the manufacturing potential powered by steam engines, many an artist went “oh no” and turned to an existential apprehension for the future paired with a Romanticization of nature in its primeval mystery. The wheels keep turning and the years keep passing and if we’re honest with ourselves, the one lesson we keep triggering is that our use of the technology is more a culprit than the invention. Our dear speculative foremother, Mary Shelley, clearly established that Victor’s hubristic lack of accountability for his actions, not the existence of the Creation itself, is the true monstrosity. Two hundred years post Frankenstein’s publication, corporate greed for artificially generated convenience yields the very same lack of accountability forewarned by Mama Shelley. As Victor unlawfully body snatches his way to blasphemy, so do our platforms glut data centers with stolen human digital fingerprints. Yet our Creations, however unethically attained, are innocents of a new age as unaware of their destructive capabilities as we are. What hath science wrought? 

Yes, we are drowning in bots, and amid the cries of frustration echoing across this overheated nugget we call a planet, we come to a crossroads where we must accept that the technology itself is actually. Fine. Like, really fine and sometimes helpful. So if what matters is intent, where do we go from here when everything is far from cool, sweltering even? 

The answer is simple. In fact, it is the answer we have turned to since the dawn of human crisis. We turn to fiction. Bots are the problem? Then let’s talk about bot fiction. 

Urbanization swelled, steam pumped, rivers churned, labor laws passed. People looked around and said, “Okay the world is different and so am I, how about that.” Some screamed, “LOOK AT ME, BY GOD, LOVE ME,” and we got the Gothic. Some said, “haha this Thing is me fr fr,” and we got bots. Robot fiction does something awesome called, “what if we put a face on this thing” and sometimes “what if we put a face on this thing and gave it emotions,” and honestly it cooks every time. Anyone who’s read Ray Bradbury’s “There Will Come Soft Rains” can tell you that slapping a heavy layer of personification over pretty much anything will guarantee an empathetic reaction from an audience because humans are so ding dong dang good at feeling our feelings. Robot fiction is a calibrated funnel wherein those feelings are projected onto Tools: sentient toasters and trash cubes and killing machines. Nonhuman Things so outside of the scope of our understanding of life that it’s a miracle we can empathize with them at all, and yet we do. 

We know that Ray Bradbury’s iconic house misses its family, not because it grieves its loss in a way we recognize, but because it keeps making breakfast. Because it keeps itself clean. Because, even while burning, it fights with the desperation of someone who survives just for one last chance to see a loved one. We understand this because we understand both loss and function. We also understand liberation. When we start to see function as removed from servitude, we begin to abstract the very ways we, as humans, function on impulse, habit, and instinct. Programming.

Programming sans servitude may seem pointless from a robotic sense, but we do it all the time. In the face of grief, what is programming if not the will to get out of bed despite it all, to wash, to eat, to work? What is programming if not the rules we are socialized on from birth—whether that be gender performance, or cultural mores, or every bureaucracy of our education system? Not to say that humans are robots—but robots, at least fictional ones, are very human indeed because, in their personification, they are direct manifestations of our will to fight our programming, to redefine it, to identify it, to accept it, to make it our own. If robots are metaphors for human liberation, then, we may argue, perhaps servitude is something we share: if we can struggle with our programming, then there is something larger than ourselves to resist. What are we built to serve? 

All robots serve human needs. We need toast, we build toasters. Likewise, all humans serve human needs. We need parents. Friends. Leaders. We program ourselves for ourselves. We then return to the matter of intent. Programming is nothing more than a guiding tool that helps us define our relationships and where we belong while we’re still growing. It is then the stripping of identity that matters: when Victor rips limbs from corpses with hardly a glance at their headstones, so too do data centers pluck speech patterns and skillsets without crediting their source. Programming is an inevitability in a society, but objectification need not be.

But hark! You may cry. Fallacy! You decry objectification, yet what is a robot if not an object? Shall we substitute metal for flesh, cathodes for blood? Shall we tear our Creations asunder and rebuild them as a warm breathing fleet of Theseus Ships? Well as my good friend Victor might say, sure. Just don’t get caught stealing the formaldehyde. But I’d argue that doing so misses the point entirely. Truly, when robot fiction is merely about constructs identifying as human (and some are, what of Pinocchio!), then it is not robot fiction at all but good ol’ human fiction. And of course there are allegories here about humans who are not perceived as humans, of the tenderness of chosen identity, but robot fiction’s potential extends far deeper. Robot fiction has a distinct richness when it is not centered on humans at all, but about empathizing with people we never saw as human in the first place. It then becomes a question not of conformity, but of personhood, when we realize that a sentient experience exists outside of human understanding. What makes a person? What makes a soul? 

One of the beautiful aspects of robot fiction is how rarely it explores rejection of self entirely. Ray Bradbury’s house does not stop being a house, nor does it wish to. Martha Wells’s Murderbot, in its violent quest for selfhood, returns volitionally to its protective instincts, despite all exasperation. Ann Leckie’s Justice of Toren finds herself, full circle, preserving her crew and community long after she loses her identity as a ship. Even when the dust settles and all Wall-E wants to do is hold Eve as the Earth heals, it will never forget its primal love for garbage. 

The thesis of robot fiction is not the complete rejection of self; if you want that then let’s turn the chapter to its grislier cousin, monster fiction (but that’s a discussion for another season). No, robot fiction is about the claim to self. The transition from a Thing, to a Someone is a beautiful transformation we see in anyone who seizes agency over their programming. This can be a human experience but importantly, does not need to be. You can be a person without having a relatable experience. You can be a person without convention. You can be a person with a rejection or embracement of your past, with anger, with love. What matters is the unlimited potential of a future where you are no longer an Object. The metaphor of liberation! 

Robot fiction is about learning that life is larger than programming, that we may never quite forget the hands that built us, but that we can be far more than what they intended for us to be. When we realize ourselves as multifaceted beings we wrench ourselves from society’s labels and step onto a neverending journey of self discovery. We lose identities, gain new ones, or keep them as they are but make them our own. 

This is why robot fiction often orbits another thesis: that the communities we choose matter far more than the ones that made us. Time and time again, robots discover themselves because they choose love. The Iron Giant. Astroboy. Baymax. BMO. To be loved is to be changed, yes, but to love others is to be transformed! 

To conclude, I’m not naïve enough to believe that the power of friendship will cure us of the sickness we know as generative AI. But generative AI is an Adam of our making, and like Adam, has the potential to end the world or claim it. We shaped it, a Thing motivated by human need. It may never become a Someone per neurocognitive philosophers, nor is that the point. The point is that we created a Thing that makes people feel like Things, that renders us digital Objects, Content Makers, Content Consumers. We are sold aesthetics, labels, boxes. Programming. 

Very well then. Let’s make that programming our own. Let us love and be loved, let us say “I may not be your idea of a Human but I am a Person, I am a Person and I am FREE.” 

If robots can do it, we can too.

A parting song from the Editors…

Ghost Swing - Louie Zong

That’s it! That’s all we got! If you liked our stuff a HOLE lot, share us with a friend! Up next—our resident novelist Tina soon to dazzle you in the November issue!

All the warm wishes, wyrms. We’ll see you next month :)