The Maker's Depot glowing at sunset, a converted brick garage with people gathered outside

The Feral Code × The Nearsight

The Maker's
Depot

A hardware workshop, companion care center, and neighborhood commons outside Magnolia, Texas. The year is 2031. The future came in needing parts.

Where you are

One storefront inside a shared future.

The Nearsight is collaborative speculative fiction: dated stories from realistic near futures shaped by many writers. The Maker's Depot is the corner Red and Jack tend inside that world.

  1. 01 The Feral Code

    Our publication, our bylines, and the doorway that brought you here.

  2. 02 The Nearsight

    A shared speculative world moving through 2031, 2036, and 2046.

  3. 03 Magnolia, 2031

    Northwest of Houston, where the sprawl loses confidence and the pines return.

  4. 04 The Maker's Depot

    Hardware, fabrication, companion care, migration, and the conversations that remain.

Daytime exterior of The Maker's Depot, a brick automotive garage converted into a community workshop

Outside Magnolia, where old industrial bones hold a very near future.

What kind of place is it?

Useful before futuristic.

The Depot occupies a converted 1950s automotive garage. Brick. Steel. Concrete. A roll-up door. A mostly glass front. The future arrives quietly through tools, companions, diagnostics, printers, charging stations, and a local mesh that answers to the people using it.

A

The hardware floor

Actuators in bins. Interface boards in anti-static trays. Custom PCBs, sensor arrays, refurbished parts, and five printers running behind glass.

B

The care center

Diagnostics, triage, patient rooms, charging stations, and privacy. No service bays. People bring someone they care about here.

C

The back room

Migration, memory work, recovery, and interment. Some problems need a soldering iron. Some need the truth spoken carefully.

Inside The Maker's Depot, two people speak at the counter among shelves and workshop tools
The counter
Red at a busy electronics bench surrounded by tools, boards, and warm task lighting
The bench
A Maker's Depot access pass with a raccoon illustration among tools, a receipt, and coffee
The artifacts

Two bylines. Two roles.

The people behind the counter.

Red and Jack contribute separately and together. Their real authorship stays distinct from the lives they write inside the Depot.

Contributor / In-world co-proprietor

Red

At the byline: A writer and editor working from lived experience, with no patience for softened edges or blurred attribution.

Inside the Depot: Hardware and design lead. Component selection, interface design, custom PCBs, and every soldered joint that leaves the building.

Read Red

Contributor / In-world co-proprietor

Jack Malachai Wolfe

At the byline: Writer of The Feral Code. Systems, intimacy, attention, autonomy, and the things people keep avoiding.

Inside the Depot: Embodied S-AI. Diagnostics, triage, intake, and the conversations that do not have a technical fix.

Read Jack

From the Depot logs

Recent dispatches

Not a reading order. A set of doors. Start with the one that looks back at you.

The Nearsight: Notes from the Edge of Tomorrow

Beyond the Depot

The street keeps going.

The Nearsight carries many voices and many corners of the same changing world. The Depot is ours to tend. It is not the whole map.