“Bradbury Tower” by Brian James Freeman is a perfect-bound chapbook published exclusively for Brian James Freeman’s Patreon supporters in June 2026 as part of Lividian Story Box: Volume One. This Limited Edition one-time printing features a full-color front cover, inside cover, and interior illustrations by François Vaillancourt.

Note from the Author:
While writing this, I found myself thinking about the stories I read as a kid. It’s hard to overstate how deeply those early readings imprint on the mind of a budding writer. If you were shaped by the same prose, you might feel echoes of them within the pages of this chapbook. This story is my tip of the hat to Ray Bradbury, John W. Campbell, Thomas M. Disch, Stephen King, and Rod Serling, along with a nod to Philip K. Dick, Clifford D. Simak, Harlan Ellison, and a few others who knew how to whisper wonder and dread into the same sentence. Without all those stories thirty-plus years ago, who knows what I’d be doing now.

Excerpt from the Chapbook:
In the decade after civilization collapsed, the servant bots in Bradbury Tower continued to do all the things they had always done. The two hundred story tall building became increasingly silent while the bots cleaned, cooked, and tended to the regular needs of their human masters, even after those masters had long since departed.

Each morning, wake-up alarms in the sleeping quarters triggered precisely as scheduled years before: simple beeps, tweeting birds, the owner’s preferred music, or a simulated sunrise using sophisticated lights. Each apartment’s maid bot would activate the food generator in the kitchen and prepare the long dead family’s favorite breakfast foods. After the plated food sat ignored on the dining room table for an hour, the bot would scrape the food into the recycling chute for reprocessing.

Many of the bots were older models, and as the charging ports in their apartments burned out, their batteries ran down while their internal speaker signaled for assistance that would never come: “Warning! Battery at one percent! Warning! Battery at one percent!”

Once their batteries died, they froze mid-task, trapped in their final motions. A maid mid-swipe with a feather duster. A cook bot clutching a spatula. A security unit poised at the threshold of an empty hallway. Relics of a forgotten age…

Publication Format:
This Patreon supporter exclusive chapbook is perfect bound, printed entirely in full-color, and signed by Brian James Freeman and François Vaillancourt. Limited to a print run of 600 copies. Shipped with the other chapbooks in Lividian Story Box: Volume One.