The Man Who Collected Futures

The Man Who Collected Futures is a gay erotic psychological mystery with light science fiction. It is not a romance that resolves into one couple, and it is not autobiography. It follows a man whose work is to forecast other people's disappearances, until the same system forecasts his own, then offers him the men who will make that disappearance possible.

Workplace conspiracy, identity thriller and explicit queer erotica in one plot. Cool and exact until it isn't. The sex does not pause the story; it moves it.

I began keeping a journal when I started accepting myself and testing what that actually felt like: sexually, and in the quieter ways identity shifts when no one is watching. The entries were not material at first. They were a record. Some of what I found there later became scenes: not transcribed, but used as pressure, heat, and the particular claustrophobia of wanting more than one life at once.

That practice is what opened the book. A man whose work is forecasting other people's disappearances; a system that turns the forecast on him; men offered as exits. The plot is invented. The question under it is not. I wanted to write the moment when experiment stops being private and starts asking what you are willing to become.

He is paid to name the date other people will leave their lives. He does not meet them. He files the forecast and stays at his desk.

Then the model prints his name. The window is short. What arrives next is not protection. It is a list: five men, each attached to a version of a future in which he is already gone, or already someone else. The office calls the list continuity. He reads it as a sale.

He goes to them anyway. He lets each future take up a room, a night, a body. One of them is kind. One of them is already leaving. One of them knows the model better than he does. Choosing among them would mean keeping a single life and burying the rest. He is not sure that is the same thing as being saved.