ONE CHANCE IN A MILLION • by Hana Carolina

They grew a heart for her and had operated by the time Dr. Kracauer realised his colleague, Dr. Montague, misread the scan.

“I didn’t misread it,” he said. “I read the report. I always do. It was all there.”

“She was healthy. Did you even look at the scan?”

Montague snickered.

“Well, did you?”

“Why would I? AI-generated reports are never wrong.”

She died. The computer-operated laser was misaligned by fifty-three micrometers. It was a system-wide failure, which led to a security lockdown.

The doctors did not know how to read the scan.

Or how to unlock the doors manually.


Hana Carolina is a pseudonym of an Edinburgh-based creative and academic writer. She studied Scottish and English literature, Film and Television for many years, and wrote a thesis about the psychology of emotional responses to fictional characters. In love with the gothic atmosphere of Scotland, she moved out of Poland as a teen and now balances her old and tired Polish identity with a messy mix of Scottish and British. She worked as a tutor, interpreter, researcher, and published academically while dreaming of writing dark stories about horrible people. Recent publication in Crow & Cross Keys.


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