by submission | Oct 9, 2025 | Story |
Author: Linda G. Hatton
Juniper’s steel-toed boots weighed down on the gas pedal like a cement anchor at the bottom of the sea, letting up only as she pulled her new fifty-thousand-dollar investment into the slot marked “service.”
She ducked out of the car as soon as the A.C. shut off and eyed the room. Then she saw him—the first man, or at least man lookalike—she had seen in weeks.
She examined his face for signs of his origins—pores or razor stubble. “I have an appointment for a knocking in my engine. I just bought the damn thing online last month. I’ve already had three issues with it.”
The salesman with his shirt half hanging over his fly, fingered his tie as he shouted out something about singing happy birthday. He turned to her. From the eyes up, he resembled “The Rock.” From the eyes down, he looked like Fred Flintstone. The droids had become so realistic, she couldn’t tell if he was real. “Who with?”
“Huh?” Her eyes darted from his nametag—Jared—to the blaring TV switching from a documentary about housing astronauts on the moon in new condominiums to a pirate cartoon centered on a hidden island and a map back to the “old world” that had been torn into three pieces.
The room, lined with ten black stiff-looking chairs resembling the polished heels of an army platoon standing at attention, was studded with tabloid-reading housewives that looked like they had been dressed by their toddlers. The first one, a smiling redhead, her legs tightly crossed, her hair thrown into a messy bun, refused to offer eye contact—only a master of body language could know she was hiding something. Was she harboring one of the few real men left on earth?
The next one shuffled through a handful of credit cards, sinking deeper into her seat as she pulled one from the pile, rubbing it like gold, then setting it aside. Once she had pushed the others all back into the empty slots in her wallet, she picked up her smart phone and hung her head low, her face glowing from its light like a candle inside a jack-o-lantern.
“Hey, Miss!” Jared slapped the counter. “Who is your appointment with?”
“I dunno. I didn’t get a name.”
“Right. I see it here. You were scheduled with the Perceptive Engineering Drone. Sorry to say we had a malfunction with that member of our service team. So you’re stuck with me today.”
She squinted and cocked her head.
“You know, a human?”
“Oh, right. I don’t care who handles it as long as I can take it home today.”
“We’ll see.”
After checking her car in, she hid in plain view in the back corner of the room under a spotlight where she had a panoramic view of the abundance of visitors to 21 Rosewood Street. Visitors so preoccupied with their own problems—and blank-faced droids gliding around in matching outfits, droids that had taken over the old way of life—that nobody noticed her until several hours had passed.
“Looks like you’ll need to leave it. We haven’t been able to quite figure it out.”
She scoffed. It figured.
They could develop a substitute human but not get her car to run right.
by submission | Oct 8, 2025 | Story |
Author: Majoki
You’d think I’d be happy about beating the odds on my very first try, of hitting a hole-in-one, winning the lottery, finding a needle in a haystack.
Not so much.
Not when you beat the astronomical odds of folding space-time to the exact system that is likely to spaghettify you in the next few days. I thought it would take lifetimes to find this place. So did most of the exo-specialists who were running the program. That’s what they told me and the dozens of other field team members who’d signed up.
They said it was a one-in-a-million chance one of us would actually fold into the problematic system they were searching for during our tenure. Lucky me. I hit the apocalyptic jackpot on the very first pull. Three lemons as bright as the collapsing megastar that was inexorably drawing my foldship into its hungry maw.
Foldships were great for scrunching space-time between two given points to make the vastness of interstellar space crossable. But foldships were not built to resist the pull of a caving giant that was likely to destabilize this sector of the galaxy for millennia.
I mean, this kind of enormous black-hole-in-the-making was exactly what we’d been sent to find. It was just highly unlikely that one of us pilots would stumble into such a system on the first go. Bingo!
I suppose I could be happy for the program. Rah, rah for science and all that. The exo-specialists were ecstatic. They now had a collapsing system to study at a fraction of the time and expense they thought it would take to locate such an event.
But, it was coming at my time and expense. As in, my time was up, and I was expendable. Yup. I knew the score. I knew what was coming, though no one had been in my current position before. The instrumentation on my foldship had been designed to record and relay the very moments of spaghettification as I was sucked beyond the event horizon.
No one knew for sure what would happen as I disassembled, but it was a pretty sure thing that I would literally become one in a million…pieces.
Lucky, lucky me.
by submission | Oct 7, 2025 | Story |
Author: Rick Tobin
“Sir, shouldn’t we turn about? Maybe hide in the asteroid belt?” Ensign Murphy stood to the Captain’s side, expecting an immediate order to retreat as a fleet of hostile aliens approached at maximum speed.
“Hardly, Murphy. You were brought on this mission to learn. This challenge should be a major boost in your understanding of field operations and a captain’s prerogatives in crisis.” Melosis sat back in his high-backed chair, ignoring the furtive tone in his young officer’s voice.
“But, Captain,” Murphy continued, “we have no idea what the Tsosis are capable of outside of myths and stories from unreliable sources. We’re in open space, but what if they’ve already claimed it?”
“You mean survivors, Ensign? The migrants from Lemayo called them the Tentacles. No human has ever seen one and lived, but the stories of their omnivorous consumption of other life forms is documented. Those few Lemayians were survivors…lucky victims. No, we aren’t running from this fight. They’ll be in our quadrant soon enough if we don’t send a message. Ernst, call up our inventory logs for the Everything Hold.” Melosis turned to his tactical officer for critical research.
“I have it, sir,” Ernst replied, as a flush of red from excitement rushed to fill his male Moon-based countenance.
“I must advise, Captain, that scanners indicate advanced weaponry on their armada. We wouldn’t have a chance if…”
“That’s enough, Ensign. Don’t interrupt me again. Ernst, do we have a displacement barrage package still in storage?”
“Yes, still in its original wrapping. I’m sure it’s functional.” Ernst smirked while staring at Ensign Murphy’s sudden flapping arms.
“Captain!!” Murphy’s voice rose. “You can’t be serious. That weapon is forbidden by every race, including our own. How did you get it? You can’t use it. You know what…”
“What it will do, Ensign?” Melosis interrupted. “Of course. But, they won’t. Our little secret warehouse onboard holds many surprises. Now, Ernst, is it illegal to buy such a weapon?”
“Absolutely,” replied the officer as he directed the weapon to be removed and placed for activation at the spaceship’s bow.
“Did we order it from Earth and have it shipped to us?” Melosis asked Ernst, sarcastically.
Ernst laughed. “No, sir. Two missions ago, we found an ancient Baroozian battleship adrift in the Pleiades. It was a leftover hulk from the Razonic Wars of the twenty-third century. You have the authority to remove anything from abandoned wreckage.”
“You see, Murphy, back home we had this drawer in our kitchen where my mother threw every kind of gadget and cooking tool she might use only once a year, or maybe only once ever. It was our Everything Drawer. We have one on this ship. The Tentacles were never within a parsec of that conflagration. They have never seen what a displacement tool can do. They’ll soon find themselves separating into cellular goo as their bodies forget to hold their forms together. Their fleet will be full of jelly before they can fire a single weapon. So, if I could never have such a weapon, how could I have ever used it to stop an invasion by a ruthless horde?”
Murphy stood still, wide-eyed, as he felt an unusual vibration ripple through the ship’s hull following the deployment from the ship’s Everything Drawer.
by submission | Oct 5, 2025 | Story |
Author: Ernesto Sanchez
I never thought I would ever hear my father’s voice again. Pitying my aimless life, he handed me this job decades ago, a post so simple a witless robot could do with ease.
The monotony is the most difficult part; log every disturbed visitor entering my assigned black hole. The visitors are disintegrated in short order. It’s the farewell bridge for those patient enough to travel light years merely for a poetic end. Some believe they will be transported into another dimension, but most use these coordinates as a gateway to oblivion. Blue collar miners, trillionaires, diplomats, even a former president of the United Colonies of Sol took the plunge.
Few know I can tap into their spaceship radios as they approach from my monitoring station. “It’s beautiful,” many say, before the pain and anguish of disintegration alters their perspectives. Some even manage to quote the ancient classics; Shakespeare, Kierkegaard, Kafka…far too much Kafka.
His raspy voice caught me by surprise, barely recognizable after decades apart. “I’m sorry Martha, Arina,” he said softly of my mother and sister moments before the spiral would swallow him. He didn’t even remember the son he abandoned in the depth of space, seconds from the point of no return.
This is completely against protocol. Dare I? I wipe decades of dust from the microphone abandoned on the floor. “Father? It’s me. Your son. I’m watching you from the nearby moon. I love you.” His small transport ship slowed down, silent. Yet it didn’t yet turn back, a period of indecision that sent a chill into my bones. “Remember when you sent me away? I did it willingly, for you. Perhaps you will return the favor, and let me see you one more time.” For an instant, I thought he was turning around.
“Goodbye son,” the black hole whispered back, emotionless.
I watched frozen as his ship convulsed into a helix, a daily yet ever-astonishing occurrence. Every inch closer to the singularity caused a convulsing shock in my veins, a metamorphosis of inexplicable proportions. My cells were rewriting themselves, quantum-entangled with his descent, becoming someone I’d never been.
It was over soon enough. I saw myself break open the emergency glass. I saw myself press the big red button, the one you are never supposed to press. Part of me wanted to return to civilization. But another part wanted to follow right behind him.
by submission | Oct 4, 2025 | Story |
Author: Alzo David-West
swirling leagues
of double stars
and life-pulsating suns,
waving bands
and cosmic rays
and manifold planets turning,
plasma clouds
expanding in the spaces
of the void,
inter-solar orbits
in great eccentric form—
a nova blast explodes,
nuclear fission
on teeming worlds,
quanta and atoms decay;
fields of glimmering
molecules and light
fading on the horizon;
matter
makes a whisper
where once there were orbs;
scattered ice and gas,
like dust, linger
for eons that pass;
then in between
the spaces
of the desolated void,
a rift, a beam, a spark,
and the manifold planets
reforming;
quanta and atoms energize,
fields of glimmering
molecules and light,
and there arise new orbs
from the shattered fragments
of the past;
a generation of revolutions
revives the vast
galactic scene,
a stargazing anthropoid
beholds, sits, and puts its hands
on its soft bearded chin
