by submission | Jan 18, 2026 | Story |
Author: Kiley M. Campbell
“Less than twenty percent is still intact,” said Rehwa.
“For the entire precinct?” Komaer boggled.
Rehwa nodded grimly. “I’d guess the whole province is roughly the same. Nothing’s left of the city. The last of the outer expansions are collapsing. By next week,” he shook his head, “the precinct will be done for.”
Komaer sighed heavily. “Sulfur dioxide spreading through the air from the West, temperature increasing six percent each week…” he began packing up his emitter, “deterioration’s progressing faster than anticipated.”
Rehwa stared up at the pewter sky and the charcoal clouds. The Sun was concealed behind the atmospheric muck– light feebly seeped through in a sickly yellow haze.
He picked each of his four legs up one at a time and let them settle back on the craggly rubble that used to be Qurtha–to Mountain.
Somewhere down there, Rehwa thought to himself, underneath that sea of rock and dust… He did not like to think of the dead, but they haunted him nevertheless, especially during surface trips like this, and the thought of standing on top of it all… At rest, crushed miles underground… Their bones would rest in the planet’s broken layers for all eternity.
He became conscious of the heat– the wind carried hot wafts and the suit was becoming uncomfortable. Even with the tri-visor– invented before the quake and therefore designed for full-strength light– Rehwa was squinting his three eyes tight, almost shut. Even after a year, he still felt pangs of longing for the old life. Taking all things into account, he thought, the salvaging of the species had gone as well as could be hoped for– the last of the evacuations were scheduled to depart in three days from the remains of Xulwaq down in the far South. All the citizens were gone; the only ones left on the planet were administrators, military leaders, scientists like him. The government and the military men would leave soon enough; he and the rest of this group and all the other Analysis crews scattered across the ghostly continents would remain. Week after week, they would still descend, gather samples and readings, keeping close watch as the planet entered its death throes and then, only when it was truly dead, they would leave it behind. Forever. The alliance between the two political coalitions was tenuous, but they had managed to make certain agreements quickly. There was zero further travel permitted to Dui Al– once the Analysis teams left, that would be it. Rehwa pictured the engineers planting surveillance drones and mine clusters in the planet’s outer atmosphere. Anyone who survived would be spotted and hauled away. And that would be the fate of Dui Al: languishing as a molten, broken, choked former world with nothing left behind to let the universe know life had once flourished there.
“Okay, everyone,” Komaer patched into the radio, “back to the shuttle.”
The seven members of the Qurtha–to team made their wobbly way across the wreckage of the mountain, back to their shuttle, which cut through the poison clouds like a knife and floated back up to the orbiting habitation vessel.
Five days until the next trip down. From his quarters, through his personal viewport, Rehwa could see the massive fields of lava that spread across the molten remains of the Zhelho–to Range, the borders of the roiling seas as more and more coastline plummeted into its depths, the grimy storms that choked the skies.
It wouldn’t be long before Dui Al was completely dead.
by submission | Jan 17, 2026 | Story |
Author: Alastair Millar
“Look guys, I just wanted to say, like, thanks for being here. I needed it.” Mack had downed over a litre of the house distillate, and was slurring his words. “You okay, man?” I asked. I was the newbie on the work crew, but when Old Man Doug had suggested we join him for a drink at Marvin’s after work, to celebrate his 2000th shift, a bunch of us had agreed. It had been a long evening, and now just the three of us were left.
“No buddy, no I ain’t,” said my new friend. “You, you dunno what it’s like here. Hell, you only arrived last month! You’re just a baby Martian, bro!” He clapped me round the shoulders. “But, lemme tell you, lemme just tell you, it gets real lonely up here. Sally’s my rock, man. Always there when I get home, always bucks me up when I’m down, always helps me talk about stuff, get my head sorted. She grounds me, see? And I been looking after her too, right? Buying her things, being there, making an effort… I did all that. I thought, I really thought, we had a good thing goin’, ya know? Like, really good. Special. But now she tells me she don’t want kids. That she ain’t the right type for it. It’s like, she don’t want a family or summat. Or maybe just not with me, I dunno. It hurts. It hurts real bad.” He paused, and seemed to pull himself together. “Anyway, glad you guys are here, wanted you to know, you’re the best. I’m a gonna get home and sleep off this rocket juice. See y’all tomorrow.” After a few more boozy goodbyes, he wove his way to the door and into the night.
“Aww, poor guy,” I said. “That’s rough.”
“Kid,” said Doug, “you don’t know crap. That boy’s just made life choices. For a start, he’s got a wife back Earthside that he’s sending money to every payday. You think she’d like to hear this kind of talk? Damn fool, got a good woman waiting for him while he does three years here in Marsport, and he’s all ready to throw that away!”
“Whoa. I… didn’t know that.”
“It gets worse. That Sally? She’s a synth.”
“What? But he said she talks to him. And he buys her stuff.”
“Look, just because she ain’t real… doesn’t mean she doesn’t listen. But this is Mars, boy. The only way you’ll get a heart-to-heart with a synthetic is if you’re paying a monthly sub for MarsCorp Services’ ‘Companion’ package. And then he buys extra clothes for her from the company store. Which I guess is fine and dandy if you’ve got the spare credits – which he doesn’t. The ‘can’t have kids’ thing? Well, ’course not, she’s not human! He just doesn’t want to accept it! Besides, plastic or flesh, there’s words for women you have to pay to be with, and they ain’t nice ones.”
I sat back, and must have looked shocked.
“Hey, synths have their place, okay? They help keep people from boiling over, ’specially the long-termers. Hell, I’d be lying if I said I’d never sat and poured out my troubles to one.” He gestured towards the holograms that had been gyrating all night on the stage in the corner. “But dammit, his problems are worse than that. Right now his head’s so twisted up that if those strippers were real, he’d probably think they liked him, too!”
We laughed then, but later I realised he was teaching me how to survive Mars. Lesson learned, Old Man.
by submission | Jan 16, 2026 | Story |
Author: Susan A. Anthony
Huge spherical objects, each with a pale green tail, laid end to end seemed to stretch forever.
The interior roof of the building was a dome shape, also green. The floor concave and squishy underfoot. She reached down, pulling at the white matting at her feet, bringing it to her nose. It smelled like food. Breaking protocol, she risked eating it. Moist. A little chewy. Sweet.
She pressed a hand to one of the giant balls. It depressed slightly where her hand had been. She dragged a finger against the surface leaving a narrow indentation, green under her fingernail. She sniffed, licked. Same as the floor but sweeter.
Through a small gap she saw daylight. She jammed her boots into the soft surface and climbed towards the hole still wondering where her transport was but it would wait. Peeking through, she saw a giant eye. She flew backwards, startled. Another look. It pulled back, revealing an even larger head.
The building she was in started to vibrate from side to side. She was thrown off the wall, onto the ground. The whole structure then turned upside down and she crashed past the giant green spheres landing at the opposite end, her feet jammed into a crack. She tore at the sides, trying to break free. Handfuls of white matter clogged her nails and piled around her.
Where the hole had been, there was now a tear. The giant eyeball was back. The tear widening, the building splitting in half. If she had not been wedged, she would have tumbled out.
A massive claw came in and pulled out one of the spheres, then another. She heard a sound as they disappeared like a stone falling off a cliff, finally all the spheres were gone and it was just her.
The eyeball appeared again then a booming sound she could scarcely bear, like standing under a thunderbolt.
“What do we have here?”
The green structure was bent open by the giant claw and her feet popped free. She fell through the air, into a different white material, rough to the touch, an enclosure of sorts but not symmetrical. She bounced around inside it as light faded, and then falling again, she dropped to a hard floor, surrounded by glass walls with two eyeballs staring at her.
Above her head, far in the distance, a round copper roof was turning then vanished. A giant pipe was placed inside and a small pond of water appeared. One of the spheres was added, floating in the water. The pipe was removed, the copper roof returned, turning, the sound so loud she had to cover her ears.
The eyeballs were back, along with another object she recognized, marveling at its size, the diameter of a radio telescope, but it was a magnifying glass based on the eyeball behind it.
The eyeball pulled back. Less loud than before, she heard, “What the heck?”
And then the eyeball came back for a second look.
“Can you understand me?” it asked.
She nodded.
“Oh, my goodness. What happened to you, Elizabeth?”
“Mother?” cried Elizabeth, running into the glass and falling backwards into the water.
“Can you hear me mother?”
No response.
She ran to the water, swimming to the green sphere, a pea she now realised, scraping off the green exterior and gathering it in her hands. She then went to the glass side opposite from the eye and wrote.
“Help me. Call NASA. Get me some thin paper and charcoal.”
by submission | Jan 15, 2026 | Story |
Author: Alzo David-West
an autonomous
neural capsule drifts
in the orion nebula
This is my star song to you. Here I am in this watercolor night. Listen. Hear my whisper. I love you. My words will travel across the cloudy trails. And even after a billion years, my song will come, journeying to be with you. Accept my love, and accept my fear. Know that my passing life is now this form. Tomorrow was always today. No one understands, other than us, how this love endures even after our particles become the birth and death of stars. Your dusty tired eyes are closed now. But look at the planets amid the purple and sepia vapors, rotating far, rotating near. See these sparkling apparitions, the plasmic storms and the veils, the stars like mountains, the terrains of electric gravity, the rain of my song, the sounds of our happiness. See it now. Here it is. Believe me. It is true. I lived, and I lay down to dream, and with meteors, I live again for you, in cycles and spirals and turns, from levels to dimensions that go from near, to in, and far, and out, and back again.
by submission | Jan 14, 2026 | Story |
Author: Mark Renney
All those who can afford to are jumping ahead. Almost everyone has the App, and those who don’t are excluded, and are seen as social pariahs. This is how we now connect, where we communicate. Admittedly the App isn’t any different to the other platforms, apart from the fact it allows us to jump ahead. And this is why we are here, it is the reason that we stay.
The longest anyone has managed to move forward so far is eighty seconds but for most of us it is less than a minute and the estimated average is fifty five seconds. It is a minute segment, a tiny slice, but it is time travel. There is much debate as to whether this is enough for us to actually manipulate time. Whenever anyone jumps ahead it is recorded on the App and so we can’t use it for personal gain. Even so, we have to check our phones if we wish to enter a casino or a betting shop or a sporting event, anything that is ticketed in fact. Most of us have dispensed with communal entertainment and I haven’t visited a cinema or theatre, or listened to live music in over a year. Like everyone else, I cannot bear to be away from my phone and not have access to the App.
We are all jumping ahead as often as we can now, and to do so is quick and easy. We listen to the audio, the noise and we engage with the spirals and the colours, immerse ourselves in the convex and complicated patterns. It isn’t difficult but pleasurable and all a part of the trip. We don’t feel the elation until we circle back and complete the loop and it doesn’t matter how trivial or mundane, or how frivolous it is, it is the knowing that creates the buzz. The high continues after we move beyond the jump and are stumbling again in the dark. It isn’t long before we need to jump ahead again but we have to rest, a period of gestation. This is difficult, and like everyone else I keep trying and failing. It is costly because, even when we don’t hear the noise and the screen remains blank, we have to pay. But I keep trying and paying because I need my fix. Some people are upset by this phrase, by this type of terminology, and they insist that time is not drug and perhaps they are right. But time travel is certainly a trip and what we feel in its aftermath is the ultimate high.
