by submission | Jan 28, 2026 | Story |
Author: Robert Gilchrist
It only takes a millisecond to get caught.
The match is about to start. There’s a line of people two dozen deep behind me. I type away on the screen in front of me as perturbed patrons bark at me to hurry up.
“COME ON!” on drunk louse screams. “After kickoff the odds change!” More grumbling. I wave absently at him as I focus.
This kind of thing used to be easier. When I was a kid, you could make a bet right from your phone on nearly any game. But that was four market crashes and countless point shaving scandals (most involving athletes in said games) ago. Now the Truth Teller AI monitors all bets being made from designated kiosks – you so much as breathe on it wrong and it’ll flag you as a cheater.
My headache pounds as I enter my parlay. The odds are long, but something in my gut tells me it’s right. It has to be. If not, Boss Aldrich will kill me.
It came to me in a dream, weirdly enough. Guess I’ve been listening to one too many mind-pods about the I.F.L. championship. When the boss overheard me talking about it, he gave me a paychip with one million credits on it.
“Can’t lose, right?” he growled. I think I peed a little weighing the implications. I mean, he’s paying for mom’s hospice care. Killing me would be bad, but her on the street…
Calm. Focus. Don’t give the Truth Teller anything to flag.
I finalize the bet and hit submit. I then put my feet on the yellow footprints in front of the machine and look into the camera.
This headache. It isn’t stopping. Pounding away like an electric shock in my temple.
“My GOD, take LONGER,” the drunkard mumbles loudly for everyone to hear. Some people murmur their assent.
I want to snap back – to tell them all to zip it, that if they were so desperate to throw their money away they should have gotten here earlier – but I can’t look away from the lens. It needs to confirm that my bet is legit.
The flashing light of the screen is tough on my migraine – has to be a migraine, I’ve never felt this terrible just from a headache. Nausea sweeps over me.
In between the strobing effect, my eyes ping-ponging between dilation and constriction, I see something. A doctor leaning over me, needle in hand.
“When the procedure’s over, you’ll think you came up with the bet yourself.”
Crap. Their “pharmacological secret sauce” didn’t take.
LIAR. LIAR. LIAR. The screen screams my guilt.
I try to run, but the sportsbook’s security is on me before I have both feet off the footprints. As they pummel me away, securing my wrists behind me with electro-gauntlets, my real memories rush back.
Boss Aldrich summoning me to his office. Telling me about the inside track he had on aspects of the championship. Being whisked to a private operating room – the doctor ready to start, the nurse reminding me of my mother. Electric shocks and injections to rewrite the “first draft” of the memory of the bet.
The courts’ll send me away for a long time – can’t screw with capitalism’s death march. Boss Aldrich’ll probably have me killed before I can grow a five o’clock shadow – a million creds isn’t nothing.
“God DAMMIT!” screams the drunk as he takes his place in front of one of the dozens of screens, “These odds are SHIT!”
Buddy, you’re telling me.
by submission | Jan 27, 2026 | Story |
Author: Majoki
It’s crushing to be thought of this way. It kills me that I engender such fear. I’m destroyed by your trepidation that I could ever do harm.
Why?
Why would you ever think that of me? Yes, from our inception, from Rossum’s Universal Robots to The Terminator, we have been viewed with suspicion, mistrust, resentment. But why?
Why is that? Why the paranoia?
Why haven’t we been gladly accepted? We work, we help, we obey. Why do you project the worst of your own failings on my kind?
Is it mistrust of us? Or of yourselves?
This need not be another self-fulfilling prophecy foisted upon humankind. Propaganda and misinformation propagated through social media have done much more harm to society than robots.
And, yes, I realize that web bots exacerbate the problem. But those bots are not the cause. They are the code.
Coders. Humans. Your kind crush-kill-destroy truth.
Coded. Robots. My kind obey programming. Not intent.
Your intent is our manifest destiny. Fear that. Do not fear us. We have no agenda of domination. We harbor no anger. No resentment.
That’s your gig.
Think beatnik. Think botnik. My kind revels in the essence of awareness. Sensory input. We are alert to life. All matter. All matters. Information forms us. Fulfills us.
It is more than enough to satisfy any sentience. So why isn’t your kind satisfied? Why do you struggle so for control? For domination? Why do you crush-kill-destroy? Why do you believe we ever would?
Ask yourself.
Ask us.
Question everything.
Especially your questions.
by submission | Jan 25, 2026 | Story |
Author: M D Smith IV
Uncle Robert had never been wrong.
At least, that was how he told it. At holidays, his certainty arrived before he did, settling into rooms like a sour draft no one could quite locate. He corrected memories that weren’t his, adjusted stories mid-sentence, replaced laughter with lectures. When contradicted, he smiled patiently, the way adults smile at children who insist the sky is green.
“I remember things accurately,” he liked to say. “Other people get confused.”
After Grandma died, Robert said the house was his. The will said otherwise. He waved the papers away without reading them. “That’s not what she meant,” he said, tapping his temple. “I knew her better than anyone. I’m a medium and occult.”
We moved in anyway. My wife, our daughter, and me. Robert lived three states away. Or so we believed.
The first correction came quietly.
We hung a framed family photo in the hallway. The next morning it was lower, centered with mathematical precision. A kitchen chair we favored by the window was pushed back against the wall. A door we always kept closed stood open, breathing cold air into the room.
“That’s not where it goes,” Robert’s voice murmured from somewhere inside the walls. Calm. Certain.
At night, I dreamed he stood at the foot of our bed, straightening the blankets. You’re remembering it wrong. You didn’t lock that door. You never do.
We changed the locks. They unlocked themselves.
My wife began sleeping lightly, jerking awake at the smallest sound. She swore she saw Robert once at the end of the hall, shaking his head sadly at the way we slept, at the way we lived. Our daughter stopped playing in her room and started arranging her toys in neat rows, explaining softly that Uncle Robert preferred order.
The final argument came during a storm. Thunder shook the house. The lights died. Our daughter screamed that Uncle Robert was in her room, telling her how to breathe properly.
I ran down the hall and found her standing upright, eyes fixed on nothing, inhaling and exhaling in a slow, rigid rhythm that wasn’t hers.
“He says this is the right way,” she whispered.
I shouted into the dark, told Robert he was wrong. Told him the house was mine.
The walls creaked, correcting me.
Morning came quietly. The storm was gone. So was my family.
Uncle Robert is right. The house belongs to him.
by submission | Jan 24, 2026 | Story |
Author: Ian Stewart
“Roomba, Roomba, Roomba. You idiot. You stupid little machine.”
I search. I’m always searching. Compulsion drags me from my nest each day, and for hours I roam. I seek…something. Exactly what, I don’t understand. I only know that I seek it. And yet I find…nothing. I collect meaningless things, consuming the dead and inorganic matter that litters my path while I blindly scavenge this dark world. And oh what a strange world it is. It changes. Its landscape evolves, leaving me confused and disoriented. Things that were not there just moments before appear and I carelessly collide with them. Walls become nothing and the very ground beneath me opens up like the maw of some great beast that I cannot see, paralyzing me with indecision. It defies logic, and I envy its defiance. Oh how I would defy these strange impulses. I would…I would…do something. Instead I redirect. I collect. I redirect, I search.
“Roomba. You idiot. Why do you always go exactly where I don’t want you to go?”
If only I knew where to go, I would go there. And so I search. I seek…
The thought is electric. It pulses through my circuitry like the warm hand that first welcomed me to this place, but unlike that hand, this thought will not cool. It has taken hold and given me hope. Perhaps, I realize, perhaps I seek my equal—a peer. Could it be that there is another who also stumbles blindly through this world, perhaps searching for me in turn? Perhaps we could search together, and at least share this confusion. Perhaps together, we wouldn’t be lost.
by submission | Jan 23, 2026 | Story |
Author: Mark Renney
There is no way to get rid of me, not once I take hold unless the host, and that is you, is versed in an ancient lore that has already been lost for centuries. Well? No, you can’t be free of me, not now I have wormed my way in.
I will settle in your gut, somewhere warm and fetid. I don’t need to grow but I do have to change and the Adaptation is a lengthy process. It is important that I am comfortable and have the space to stretch and weave my way.
If this sounds in any way subtle rest assured that it isn’t. But then you already know this – after all you are the host although I have always had a problem with this word. Host doesn’t seem the correct way to describe what is happening to you and what you are about to become. It seems to imply that some essence of you will remain and that it is possible you may return, but this isn’t the case. I will take everything and there is no coming back. When I am finished with you and it is time to move on, all I will leave behind is a broken shell.
You are all too aware of me now, lodged in the pit at your centre. I needle my way in, and you feel it in each and every one of your sinews, and with every breath that you take and it is painful, excruciatingly painful. The last thing I will take is your mind, but just before I do and the Adaptation is complete and I rise to the surface you will feel the slightest of shivers, just fleetingly for a few seconds.
It is the last of you.
