Ballysports.com/activate Novels & Stories

I'm the primary surgeon of the nation's biggest medical malpractice case. Apparently, I've screwed up intentionally in a joint surgery that leads to the instant deaths of five patients. My wife, Wanda Johnson's mother is one of them. The medical world purges my name immediately. The Internet demands that I pay the price with my own life. The patients' families kneel before the court with a petition. With tears running down my cheeks, they plead to the court to sentence me to death. In order to ease the public outrage, the court decides to euthanize me. The head of the investigative team of the health department wants to activate Project Nightingale. With the power of AI, the truth of what happened in the surgery will be re-enacted. But Wanda, who also works as a police officer, shoots that idea down. "There's no need for that. Do you actually want the patients' families to witness how their loved ones die again? The youngest patient is just an eight-year-old, you know! Let's just euthanize him!"

My parents adopted an AI daughter. The day she came home, I suddenly became the most hated person in the family. Dad said I was a thorn in his side. Mom thought I couldn't hold a candle to Sophia, the AI. My brother Jack yelled at me, "All you do is make trouble!" I was so furious that I shoved Sophia to the floor. Mom's face went dark. She struck me hard across the face. "Sophia is your sister! If you were even half as good as her, I wouldn't be this angry!" "You're going to the Academy of Exemplary Obedience to learn how to be a proper, obedient daughter." I was sent away to "swap places" with an AI daughter. Three years later, my parents and brother came to pick me up. They called my name, but I didn't move. The headmaster smiled and said, "Mrs. Walker, you have to say 'Activate' before Unit EVA will respond."

I was the world’s last mermaid. At birth, I was granted three wishes by God. I used the first when my boyfriend, Alex Zane, was dying. I offered up the child in my womb and my fertility in exchange for him to live a long and healthy life, untouched by illness or disaster. I used the second when the Zane family was going bankrupt. I offered up all my power and wished for their fortune to be restored and for their future to be secured. When he came to me for the final wish, his childhood sweetheart, Valentina Wilson, was dying in childbirth. After I turned him down, he threw me into a men’s prison. “A dollar a turn. Do whatever you want with her. She can’t get pregnant anyway.” That night, I wept until my voice broke. At dawn, when the light finally crept in, I offered up my life to activate the sacred token and made my final wish. “I wish for all who betrayed me to watch their world burn. Let them lose everything and die a painful, miserable death!”

The death of her sister shocked Belle but that didn’t stop her to step into the mystery of her sister’s murder. But what if those murderers aren’t done by a supernatural being? Belle’s sister died the day before her marriage. People claimed she had killed herself but Belle didn’t believe the investigation and decided to take it by herself. Everything comes down when she had no rules, and the only way for her to find the bottom of the mystery was to call up a demon. Except, this demon is a willful, selfish, and as handsome as devilish he was. Extract: In fear, Belle tried to dash but a hand had sneaked out from the black fog, holding tightly to her elbow. What followed the tight grip on her arm was a voice that sounded deep— deep enough to sound as though he hell was shallower compared to him. "Now, now, where are you running, little prey?" Belle didn't know what she had done. She didn't know what force had caused her to activate what she did. She didn't know what had happened either as her mind was slow to grasp her surrounding. But there was one thing she knew after staring back at the bright red eyes across her. She was looking at a demon. She had called a demon.

When my sister, Helen Fisher, was dying of late-stage cancer, she got tied to a system that forced her to win over the fake heir, Shaun Fisher. She begged me to donate a kidney to him. As long as his affection for her reached 100%, she would be cured. When my fiancée, Joan West, was on the verge of bankruptcy, she got bound to a system that told her to save Shaun. She begged me to take the fall for him. As long as he stayed out of jail, she could bring her family back to glory. They both said I was the one they cared about most, that everything they did was out of necessity. But on the day I was released, they hired a group of thugs to violate me, took photos, and blasted them all over the internet. Helen said, "Shaun wants to be my only brother. I have to make that happen." Joan said, "Shaun wants to be my husband. I can't bring myself to say no to him." That same day, my parents called me disgusting and threw me out of the house. Joan and Shaun held a grand wedding. Helen gave them half her fortune as a wedding gift. I was left dragging a broken body, my name ruined, my future gone. With nothing left to lose, I called the director of the lab and gave the order. "Activate the anti-system device." The director replied, "The device has been activated. In one week, every change brought by the system will disappear." Helen would return to terminal cancer and die. Joan would spend her life in poverty. That was their original fate, wasn't it?

For the past three months, I've slept only three hours every day just so my team and I can create an app. Thanks to our hard work, the app goes absolutely viral to the point we've garnered over 100 million registered users on the first week of its launch. At the afterparty, my wife, Stacie Woodward, announces that her godbrother, Tory Frost, who's the PR manager, will be the one receiving the million-dollar bonus. She then tosses me a few 50% discount coupons that can be used in shopping malls as my bonus. "You're just a code monkey—why do you need that much money anyway? You can have these discount coupons. Use them on anything you want. At least buy some nice clothes for yourself. Don't go around wearing these rags. You'll just end up humiliating me more." I plead to her in a low tone, "Have you gone crazy, Stacie? My dad needs the money for the best medication in order to save his life! Can you please stop joking around?" But Stacie clings to Toby's arm, looking high and mighty. "Your dad's dying, isn't he? He might as well stop wasting the public resources! I can always choose him a better grave and hold a nice funeral for him when his time comes!" As I look at Stacie's smug face, I just smile at her instead of getting mad at her. She must have forgotten that the app's core algorithm and the user growth model are built using my private, undisclosed technology stack. That means the copyright is mine and has nothing to do with the company. I just smile while nodding at Stacie. That night, I activate the technology stack's self-destruct and migration protocols.

Nadia Reyes has died twelve times. Different centuries, different methods — same hands, same face, same cold eyes watching her take her final breath. At twenty-seven, armed with soul memories that science cannot explain and a rage that twelve lifetimes of dying has sharpened into something precise, she stops running. She spends eight months engineering an introduction to Dorian Ashvale — the man her soul recognizes as her killer — seduces him deliberately, and marries him with one goal: end the cycle on her terms before he ends it on his. Dorian doesn't remember any of it. He only knows that Nadia feels like a memory he was never supposed to have, and that marrying her is the first decision in his life that has ever felt completely, terrifyingly right. But as Nadia moves closer to executing her revenge, her forensic genealogy skills uncover something that fractures everything — Dorian's violence across lifetimes wasn't chosen. His soul has been hijacked by an ancient predatory entity that feeds on Nadia's interrupted purpose, growing stronger every time she dies before completing something she was always meant to finish. The monster she married didn't kill her. Something far older did — using his hands. As the entity begins to activate, triggering blackout episodes Dorian cannot control, Nadia faces the most dangerous realization of all thirteen lifetimes: she is falling in love with the man she planned to destroy. Book 1 ends when Dorian surfaces from his worst blackout yet to find Nadia bleeding — and looks at her with the eyes of a man who remembers nothing and is about to lose everything.