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3.5 

The Touches

By Brenda Peynado
The Touches by Brenda Peynado digital book - Fable

Publisher Description

Brenda Peynado's "The Touches" is a Tor.com Original short story set in a post-apocalyptic world

Salipa and Telo have perfect lives in the virtual reality world that humanity has retreated to after bacteria and viruses resistant to all medications take over the outside world.

But when the robots that take care of the necessities in the dirty outside world start glitching, Salipa must figure out what it means to truly live if they can never return to the world they once knew.

At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

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13 Reviews

3.5
“"All the superbugs—microbes and viruses that evolved immunity to antibiotics, that melted out of the polar ice caps and were released into the oceans, bugs we hadn’t seen for a million years" So the setting of this story is basically in 2030? My only complain is that the glitching is not explained. What happened?”

About Brenda Peynado

Brenda Peynado's stories have won an O. Henry Prize, a Pushcart Prize, The Chicago Tribune's Nelson Algren Award, a Dana Award, a Fulbright Grant to the Dominican Republic, and other prizes. Her work has previously appeared in Daily Science Fiction, Tor.com, The Georgia Review, The Sun, The Southern Review, The Kenyon Review Online, The Threepenny Review, and other journals. She received her MFA at Florida State University and her PhD at the University of Cincinnati. She's currently writing a novel about the 1965 civil war in the Dominican Republic and a girl who can tell all possible futures, and she teaches at the MFA program at the University of Central Florida.

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