You are listening to a Clarksworld magazine podcast with your host and narrator Kate Baker.

Greetings, Clarksville citizens. I hope this podcast finds you extraordinarily well.

Welcome to the third story for the month of August 2025, issue 227.

This and all of our stories are brought to you by your ongoing support. So thank you for being here,

taking time out of your day to listen. Thank you for going to patreon.com forward slash Clark's World to check a few

bucks our way to show that what we're doing matters. We cannot do this without you. Our story is titled

Sleeper and is by R.T. Esther lives just outside of Dallas, Texas, where he works full-time as a graphic designer and spends his off-hours raising three young kids with his wife.

In his spare time, he writes speculative fiction and has stories published in Interzone and Clark's Robe.

His debut novel, Baganameen, is due out fall 2025 from Solaris Books.

And if you like what you hear, you can go back to Rake the Leaves. Anias gets a turn, slight forms,

and meddling fields. So, my dear listener, I do hope you can sit back, relax, and let me tell you a story.

Sid got seven grand a sign over the rights to her virtual clone. The broker she used

put up billboards promoting additional payment each time it was leased. When I came home to her apartment

and she told me,

it felt like an ambush. Money was tight and there she was to remind me giving up something of hers.

I wouldn't have imagined she would when we first met. At her desk that night, I sat alone

and gave the view through her window, all the emotion I could muster after 16 hours at the

training center,

plugged in with virtual constructs ready for life on the outside. Through the rain pattering on

the glass, floating billboards roamed. The Envoy Church had just announced the opening of a new school,

and its ads flickered against the clouds. I was raised in an envoy school. One of the billboards came close to

the window and made me nostalgic for early mornings inside a cafeteria with the envoy hologram in its

...