David Lee Zweifler

• The Inevitablist

January 10, 2022. Little Blue Marble. My first pro-sale, this Cli-Fi story shows how multi-billionaires have the power to put themselves in charge of critical activities that they are not suited for, temperamentally or intellectually.

• Do You Know Why We Stopped You

April 22, 2022. The Dread Machine. This story presents a darker and more malevolent picture of AI. Bias hard-coded into the loss prevention AI of a human-less store prevents the egress of a customer who doesn’t fit into the usual customer demographic.

• Getting Better

October 5, 2022. The Dread Machine. A disease that only affects the elderly turns its victims into dangerous, hateful monsters. A reluctant caretaker for his afflicted father needs to decide whether it’s making his dad into a better, more accepting person, or if his father’s disease is turning him into a monster as well.

• Dad Jokes

January 15, 2025 Radon Journal. Once a leading temporal neuroscientist, your father used to be brilliant. Funny. Now, his jokes are becoming crazy. Not funny. Are his dad jokes a sad side-effect of old-age... or is his sense of humor being warped by the cumulative effects of unregulated time travel?

• New Medium

May 31, 2024 The Saturday Evening Post. Lee Sachs is haunted by memories, and his father's ghost, when he tries to sell his childhood home. Out of options, and nearly out of realtors, he finds Madam Livingstone off the internet—a new medium who is Lee's last chance to exorcise the kind but stubborn spirit that stands in the way of his real estate windfall.

• The Laughing Wolverine

February 28, 2024 Calliope Interactive. They say your family is often your toughest audience, so as a comedian, I was proud of the fact that I could always get my kids to laugh. Now I’ve got to figure out a way to get my youngest son to cry.
That might be an impossible task because I’m dead. (Requires subscription.)

• Stuck In The Middle

November 2023 Issue. Nature - Futures. A man shells out big bucks for a robot body that corrects all his physical flaws. Unfortunately for him, neither the migration to his new shell, nor his new life, goes as planned.
Learn the story behind the story here.

• Wasted Potential

November/December 2023 Issue. Analog Science Fiction and Fact. An unemployed marketer logs on to an all-knowing, quantum job-search platform using his girlfriend's credentials, and discovers he may need to break up with her so she can fulfill her destiny of saving humanity from the scourge of space piracy.Included in Tangent's Magazine's Recommended Reading list for 2023.

• Early Riser

July 30, 2023. Mirrors Reflecting Shadows. (Anxiety Press, Outcast Press, and Roi Fainéant Press ) This is a story about a memory – a love letter, of sorts, to a son I hadn’t had yet – from a time when I was considering my mortality and all the might-have-beens while facing a dicey situation as a cub reporter in Jakarta.

• Standard Deviation

July 23, 2023 Parsec Ink, Triangulation - "Seven Day Weekend." - A workaholic CEO relies on analytics and AI to quantify his life's output -- at work and at home -- but they don't do a great job of helping him understand the tragic outcomes.

• Catch and Keep

June 27, 2023. Creepy Podcast. A divorced father in recovery tries his best to recreate a father-son fishing trip after a climate apocalypse turns angling into an amusement-park attraction for the wealthy.

• I Like To Be Hit

May 24, 2023. Metastellar. Neither a benevolent helpmate nor a merciless destroyer, the needs of sentient AI can run parallel, or counter, to humanity’s. Case in point: A sentient golf ball that likes to be hit and is willing to do what it must to ensure it is on the receiving end of long drives. (Originally published at Wyldblood Magazine 12/10/21.)

• The Best Buggy Whip You Ever Saw

May 16, 2023. Obsolescence Anthology. Busby is an obsolete repair droid looking for purpose in all the wrong places. Busby taps into an old movie for inspiration and develops an elegant plan to stay relevant, although he suspects it will take a lot of blood, sweat, and tears. Especially blood.

• Running In Circles

Apri 6, 2023. Paramnesia anthology. Viola Securus. An elegant name for a musical instrument, perhaps, or a Greek poet, or a wine. But not for what’s happening to everyone now. It was just yesterday that we saw the squirrels running in circles. Not, big, lazy, squirrels-playing-in-the-grass circles, but tight, crazy pinwheels on the ground, on the sidewalk... everywhere.

• Getting Better

October 5, 2022. The Dread Machine. A fatal type of dementia affecting the elderly makes its victims abnormally strong and aggressive, then turns their personalities upside down. When a reluctant caregiver sees how the disease is changing his bigoted father, saying goodbye proves to be much more difficult and dangerous than expected.

• Do You Know Why We Stopped You

April 22, 2022. The Dread Machine. This story presents a darker and more malevolent picture of AI. Bias hard-coded into the loss prevention AI of a human-less store prevents the egress of a customer who doesn’t fit into the usual customer demographic.

• The Inevitablist

January 10, 2022. Little Blue Marble. My first pro-sale, this cli-fi story shows how multi-billionaires have the power to put themselves in charge of critical activities that they are not suited for, temperamentally or intellectually. (Included in the Little Blue Marble 2022: Warmer Worlds anthology. (Available on Amazon or Kindle.)

• Role Reversal

April 12, 2024 Shacklebound Books - Programmed Hearts
A mixed human-robot couple is keeping things spicy after being together for decades by doing a bit of retro role-play.

• Reconnecting

July 31, 2023. Martian Magazine A data scientist uses Artificial Intelligence trained on hacked data to find out why his missing girlfriend dumped him, but the AI connects the dots faster than he expects. (Publication defunct.)