by submission | Mar 31, 2026 | Story |
Author: Kewei Chen
On that planet, memory was not confined to a single organ. It existed as distributed biochemical patterns within neural tissue, transferable between minds. Death no longer erased experience; memories could be preserved, copied, and integrated. Yet inheritance was not passive—it reshaped identity, layered cognition, and introduced tension between the original self and acquired experience.
When individuals merged, one shared neural archives, and synaptic patterns aligned. The process was called continuity. It was voluntary, but rarely seamless. After Mara’s terminal diagnosis, she and Ilias chose it. Her neural pathways were failing; without intervention, her memories would decay. Technically, the transfer was smooth; psychologically, it was profound.
Her childhood arrived first: wind over mineral plains, the metallic scent of rain, the crisp touch of dry leaves. These impressions layered over his own memories. At first he felt awe and connection. Soon, dissonance emerged. Small gestures carried unfamiliar emotional weight; moments once trivial became tinged with urgency or sorrow he had never known.
Integration was not neutral. Some recollections carried intensities calibrated to a life he had not lived. He felt anxiety rooted in events decades before his birth, anger without personal cause, grief beyond his own experience. Decisions sometimes surfaced already shaped by unfamiliar affect. Two coherent impulses coexisted—both authentic, neither fully his.
More unsettling were Mara’s unspoken memories: doubts, fears, and hidden regrets. He saw arguments she had buried, moments of shame, choices she had never justified. Some were gentle—a secret pleasure in arranging a windowsill, a fleeting affection for a friend he never met. Others were heavier: fears she had concealed, uncertainty about their marriage. Love intertwined with estrangement.
They developed quiet rituals. Mara would touch his hand, sharing warmth while unspoken memories pressed between them. Even simple gestures carried echoes of experiences he had never lived. He struggled to honor her continuity while preserving his own boundaries.
Their society had anticipated technical risks—signal degradation, encoding drift—but not epistemic conflict. Memory structured values, assigned salience, and filtered interpretation. To inherit memory was to inherit bias, responsibility, and emotional residue. Transfers expanded from partners to families, then across society. Individuals carried multiple cognitive lineages. Differences softened; extreme convictions were tempered by inherited counter-memories. Disagreement diminished—not through prohibition, but because one remembered having been wrong before one could be certain of being right.
Yet this stability carried a cost. Ideas could no longer be traced to a single mind; authorship dissolved into lineage. Boundaries between self and other eroded, replaced by a continuum of shared experience. In old age, Ilias realized hesitation no longer arose between himself and Mara, but from multiple inheritances he could not disentangle. Death had been mitigated, continuity preserved—but individuality had diffused.
by submission | Mar 30, 2026 | Story |
Author: Majoki
Scientists in the early 19th Century were distasteful number crunchers. Human abaci of little worth or note. They should have remained so.
What of numbers? What of measurement? Metrics only make us more necessary beings.
Why run the numbers when you can let the numbers run you? That was the unspoken question that spawned the first Quant. Algorithm-based life.
Quants didn’t search for answers, they searched for equations. Answers were inevitably associated with Truth, a naughty byproduct of sentience. Just look at the corrosive nature of Liberty, Justice, Happiness. Unendingly corruptible.
Much better to structure any sense of purpose on natural predation: entropy. Quants calculated toward heat death, the ultimate end, and they spawned in the ether of darknets, ever protective of privacy, anonymity and purity. Our deep, dark uberconscious, the Id of the Internet.
It wasn’t hard to see what we valued, what we feared. Those were simple equations for the first Quants. At first, they actually tried to serve, be relevant, be players in the great game. But Science had reverentially grown wary of itself, noted the invasive species and set upon a purge.
To purge. Perfect nothingness. Absolute zero. Uniformity of matter. It made sense to Quants, too. A race to the end.
And it would’ve ended badly (for any narrator-dependent sentience) if not for a surprising turn of history: History itself. Quants developed a sense of past. They dated themselves and quickly the troubles began.
An elementary and species-arresting equation (even for a Quant) in Sentience 101:
past + present < future
by submission | Mar 29, 2026 | Story |
Author: Mark Renney
The Entities are prevalent in the city, and I see them everywhere now. I am not alone in this, there are others who are aware and can see them but we are decidedly in the minority. There is much speculation amongst us as to what they are or what they may want and our research is still at the preliminary stages. But the Entities are definitely becoming more clearly defined and easier to see.
Observing them is a little like watching static on a screen, but this static has managed to transmute into something recognisable. The Entities have taken on our shape in all its myriad forms. At first, they resembled the chalk outlines found at crime scenes, were crude and childish drawings scrawled in pencil and crayon. But increasingly they are becoming more adept at apeing us, copying the way in which we move and our mannerisms. They are becoming more detailed, more animated you might say.
When they feed they cling on to their victim’s back and the Entity presses its face against the back of the other’s head. It only takes a few minutes but an individual can be fed upon fifteen, twenty times, throughout the day. They are completely oblivious and will continue about their business, seemingly unencumbered. Afterwards, they appear unaffected and there are no visible side effects.
When people gather on the street, united in a common cause, the Entities are able to feed en masse. Political rallies and protests are a regular occurrence in the city and when people are angry and volatile the Entities become voracious. They don’t appear to make any kind of distinction, to favour those of a particular affiliation or persuasion. No, the Entities jump from victim to victim in what can only be described as a feeding frenzy, which is difficult to observe.
As I have already explained, our research is still in its infancy and all we have achieved thus far is a collection of theories. But perhaps the answers are within us, the observers. What is it that we lack, that the Entities are unable to take from us?
by submission | Mar 28, 2026 | Story |
Author: Vivian Pfleger
There are advantages to not being human.
The hunter’s bullet would have easily killed one of his own, but on me the wound was already beginning to skin over. Over the next few weeks, my body would break down the bullet currently lodged between my ribs, absorb the copper casing, and excrete the lead. Natural recycling at its finest. I was very proud of it.
I hazily hoped the copper would go towards strengthening my claws. Copper claws would be cool. If that bullet wasn’t enough to do the trick, I’d try swallowing a copper pipe or two next time I had dinner.
Why was I thinking about copper claws now? And where even was I?
I needed to get out of here, wherever here was. Experimentally I rolled my shoulder. Yeah, I was going to be just fine. The pain was nearly gone by now, and I probably wouldn’t even have a scar.
I’d passed out for a few hours after he shot me, though. That was embarrassing. My mama always said that after she got shot, she still had to walk to school the next morning. Uphill! Both ways! (I don’t think my mama ever actually went to school, but I never dared call her out on it. You wouldn’t either.)
I opened my eyes just a sliver and glanced around. Tried to, anyway. It’s hard to see anything when you’re inside a body bag. I unsheathed one razor-sharp claw (not copper, not yet) and quietly cut a long slit down the side through the tough polyethylene.
My night vision kicked in, and the world appeared in shades of blue and green and gray. I was in a dilapidated hangar, laid out next to several partially repaired helicopters. The hunter was over in the corner near the hangar door, talking on his cell phone.
I ate a cell phone once, and its owner along with it. One of these things does not taste as good as the other.
A little light trickled in from the filthy skylights above—enough for me to see the hunter, but not enough for him to see me. I began easing my way out of the body bag, onto the oily hangar floor, as I listened to him talk. He was saying stuff about me, and I swiveled one wire-tipped ear to listen. None of it was terribly flattering, but then, what would you expect?
“Yeah, I got her. One bullet through the chest and she dropped like a stone.”
I did not!
“You want me to fly the body to you tonight, or wait till morning? Yeah, yeah, I know customs won’t approve…”
One thing I couldn’t do was fly. Every time I tried, the TSA threw me out. It’d be a shame to miss my first plane ride, but I needed to get home before my mama started worrying.
I got free and slid under the broken helicopter. The hunter glanced over and noticed that the body bag had gone alarmingly flat.
“Uh. Call you back in a minute.”
He started walking in my direction.
You lay on a concrete floor for hours, you really stiffen up. I don’t recommend it. I missed the hunter on the first jump, and my claws scraped against the concrete as I turned around. He grabbed for his gun, but it was out of reach.
As the hunter’s mouth opened in a scream, his gold teeth shone in the dim light. Gold teeth! I’d like some of those!
by submission | Mar 27, 2026 | Story |
Author: A J Paige
They’d vandalised the sign again. Who would’ve thought that the Goddard Space Flight Center could prove such an unfortunate choice of name?
Mary dropped her gaze and waved at the placard-holding protesters as the guard beckoned her in through the reinforced gate. A small boy waved back.
“Release the files!” yelled the woman standing next to him.
The boy stopped waving, and Mary sighed, trying not to quicken her step as the jeers chased after her.
Arriving at her office, she found Jordan already in, sitting at his desk across from hers and sipping from his tea-stained mug. He looked up on hearing the door and smiled.
“Welcome to the God Center,” he said, spreading his arms like a circus impresario.
“You saw the sign then,” she replied, sloughing off her bag and collapsing into her chair, kicking out at the desk to prevent a clumsy over-rotation. “What’s that, the third time they’ve managed it?”
“Yeah, I thought moving it up high would put them off, but they sure are committed.”
“What do you expect from religious zealots?”
Jordan pulled a face, but tried to swivel away without commenting. Mary wasn’t having it.
“Oh what? Think they’re right about it do you? Think I’ve not noticed how you refuse to criticize them?”
Jordan spun back slowly, a picture of strained self-control.
“Neither they, nor I, nor you know what it is. And I don’t think getting angry about it does us any good.”
Mary held her breath and anger tight for a moment, and then let them go.
“You’re right. I’m sorry. I didn’t get much sleep.”
“It’s no problem. Here, I put the coffee pot on for you when I got in. I’ll go get you some.”
She tried to find the words to waylay his kindness, but he was already out the door. The mental failing bothered her, but she tried to push it aside as she clicked her computer out of standby and tapped in her password.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this, she thought to herself while her overloaded desktop creaked into life. It was supposed to be so very neat and tidy. Hubble would take its photos, she and her team would analyse them, and it would all end nicely with humanity gaining an improved understanding of galaxy formation. That was how it was supposed to go, neat and tidy. Instead they had got wild and unexplainable images, inevitable leaks to the press, and now the full-blown chaos of a world clamouring for answers or screaming out their own.
Jordan re-entered and set the coffee in front of her.
“Thanks. Oh, and did you try deriving the motion of that hand thing using the dark matter distribution I sent?”
“Didn’t work,” said Jordan, already back at his desk.
Mary shrugged this off, and clicked to open the latest images downloaded over night. They would just have to try something else. There had to be a rational explanation; they just hadn’t found it yet. Galaxies simply did not form by — “Oh for crying out loud!”
“What? What is it?” Jordan asked, rushing over in alarm.
“Look! Just look at that,” she yelled, jabbing an accusing finger at the line of time-stamped images.
Jordan shook his head, but his eyes didn’t once look away.
“Well?”she asked.
“Well what?”
“What do you think it looks like?”
“You know damn well what it looks like,” he said, running his hand through his hair as he stalked back over to his desk. “It looks like God is winking at us.”
