by submission | Dec 29, 2025 | Story |
Author: Mark Renney
The Sweepers are always plentiful, inconceivably there isn’t ever a shortfall but always enough recruits coming through on that metaphorical conveyor belt. A surplus filling out the application forms, readily signing on the dotted line, undergoing the intensive training programme from which they emerge ultra-fit and battle ready.
Awaiting deployment, all new recruits return home. They come from both the cities and the countryside but always the edgelands, the poor places. In their dress uniforms they are hailed by their family and friends as returning heroes. For the first time in their lives they have money and are able to help their loved ones and hold their heads up high. The money continues to be paid to their next of kin or trustee for the next six months, even if the recruit doesn’t return. The majority of course do not survive the first tour of duty.
The training is physically challenging but its real objective is to prepare the recruits mentally. They have to be resilient, not simply in order to enter the battlefield but they need to believe they will survive. Most of them will not but at least 5% of every intake will, and those recruits return home to await their second deployment. They still need to be heroes and able to hold their heads high. It is important returning recruits do not share their experience by talking about what they have seen. Everyone knows the score of course but no-one needs to hear it from the horse’s mouth.
by submission | Dec 28, 2025 | Story |
Author: Majoki
It’s hugely satisfying to watch the person who murdered you, go bonkers. Gyrsen was thrashing like a madman as company security restrained him outside the boardroom. He frothed and spittle flew everywhere as he pointed my way, screaming, “He’s here! He’s right here! He’s going to kill us all. Don’t you see what’s happening?”
What was happening was revenge. I used to be a lot more live-and-let-live, but that was before
Gyrsen and the rest of TurnTech’s board gave R & D the green light to spaghettify me. The suits didn’t like that term, but what else do you call it when trying to pull every molecule of a person’s being through a “controlled” black hole.
Yeah. Controlled. As if designating the riskiest experiment in scientific history as “controlled” made it okay to put me in a chamber designed to produce one of the most inherently unstable remnants of the early universe: a micro black hole,
Why mess with something so cataclysmically unstable? Initially, TurnTech was looking to harness micro black holes in order to create ultra-dense batteries that would hold tremendous amounts of energy. It’d be a revolutionary innovation for humanity’s insatiable energy needs, and I couldn’t really fault the board’s pursuit of that goal.
In fact, I spearheaded a lot of the R & D. But then our early testing indicated that micro black holes could also form peepholes into other dimensions. And that’s where things went sideways with Gyrsen and a few other suits on the board. They asked me if a human might be able to squeeze through one of those tiny blackhole peepholes.
I flat out told them, “No.” Even though I knew it might be technically feasible after decades of testing and innovation. I knew how TurnTech’s suits operated, and a patient, nuanced, costly approach to R & D was not their bailiwick, so I wanted to quash any crazy speculation on their part.
But Gyrsen relentlessly hounded me about setting up a test. I refused, at first pointing out the incredible risks, and then as he pressured me with more strident demands, I threatened to complain to HR and the board president, if he didn’t stop badgering me.
When he did stop I should’ve realized that was the real danger. Because it’s how I ended up in the micro black hole test chamber, supposedly as a willing experimental subject. Gyrsen had orchestrated my “participation” with Machiavellian cunning, Faustian double-dealing, and Rasputin reality bending.
Gyrsen turned me into his thrall using a new form of psy-ops AI hypnosis. I was brain-washed and then put through the wringer. Literally. Spaghettification doesn’t come close to describing what happens when one is squeezed through a micro black hole.
Nothing can prepare you for what happens to your mind, your human essence, your very soul. I was bereft, totally alone. It seemed eons before I became self aware again, though simultaneously in multiple dimensions. Time and space and matter had little effect on my tenuous existence. My consciousness could manifest anywhere at any time, yet only the most threadbare of my thoughts remained. Only the sense of being completely undone.
Undone. Undone. Undone.
That’s what brought me back from the void: I remembered exactly who had undone me.
It’s been said that ghosts are just unfinished business. And Gyrsen was the first of many to see how much I had left to do at TurnTech. It felt good to be back at work in my old haunts.
by submission | Dec 27, 2025 | Story |
Author: Andrea Tillmanns
The colony had called for help, and we had come – with a heavily armed spaceship. But there was nothing here for us to fight. The planet was empty, except for the long-decayed corpses of the colonists.
And the shadows that first invaded our dreams after landing and then became more and more visible during the day, whispering, threatening, finally not letting us sleep for a second, until the first of us reached for their weapons in madness.
Then the planet was empty again, except for the shadows and a spaceship that would take them to Earth in a few weeks.
by submission | Dec 26, 2025 | Story |
Author: Alzo David-West
“Citizen. You are called before the Court of Will.”
“What’s my crime, Counsel?”
“Your crime, Citizen, is that of being born outside the Will of the State.”
“My birth was out of my control. I had no choice in it.”
“No, Citizen. Your parents, who were banned to reproduce, fertilized what would be you, and from there, you were responsible.”
“Responsible? My fertilization? It’s a law of nature, biology. I didn’t control any of it, not even how my cells divided.”
“That is wrong, Citizen. The innate will of your life is your own. Had it not been so, then you would not have been conceived and here today.”
“I wasn’t even a person. I was a zygote. I wasn’t yet me.”
“You were then, as now, a life, Citizen. A life with your own will and way.”
“I wasn’t conscious, Counsel.”
“You were still a life, a potential consciousness, which became a sensory consciousness and then a personal consciousness.”
“But how can this make me guilty? No one’s born out of their own free will. It’s an accident of life.”
“You are right, Citizen. Your birth was not the Will of the State.”
“I can’t understand this. It’s all a circle.”
“There is no circle in the Court of Will.”
“Then, explain it to me. I at least have the right to understand, shouldn’t I?”
“The people exist for the State, not the State for the people. The State plans life; the State conserves life; and the State ends life.”
“Why? Tell me why. Because my parents were unauthorized to have me? Because birth incriminated a child? It makes no sense. I’m a citizen with an ‘r’ number. It’s r902504. I’m a working person. My life is authorized.”
“Your individual life was conserved for the necessary duration in State life. Now, your conservation is surplus. Your life is unnecessary.”
“Unnecessary? I’ve lived forty-five years! I’ve done everything as a loyal citizen of the State! My parents’ personal decision wasn’t my crime!”
“Your emotions are unruly, Citizen. You are in contempt of the Court of Will.”
“Everyone … has emotions, Counsel.”
“They are an added penalty to your crime.”
“Let me say something. Please. Let me appeal my right to live as a citizen.”
“You are unauthorized to appeal. That is the Will of the State.”
“Then, if that’s the case, I’ll say it anyway since it doesn’t matter, because it’s all ‘unauthorized’ and has always been ‘unauthorized,’ from the day I was a decision in the minds of two people who the State didn’t approve.”
“That is correct, Citizen. And all further statements you make shall reconfirm your anti-State crime.”
“I’m a citizen of the State. I’m not unnecessary. I’m a sovereign social being regardless of anything the Court says.”
“Our sovereignty is the Universal Power to preserve our unified integrity of individual persons, with the citizens organized in the Great Organic State, whose mass right to rule is exercised under the Universal Will of State life and its mass bodies.”
“Nothing you say changes who I am, or that I’ve experienced, or that I’ve known what it is to be sad and to be happy, or that I’ve lost and worked, or that I’ve dreamed, or that I’ve … loved. Nothing, nothing changes the fact that I lived until today, because those are the facts that happened, and they’ll never change.”
“Upon the closing of this hearing, you, your ‘r’ number, your record, your domain, and your memory shall be permanently erased. There will be no unnecessary facts. Do you understand, Citizen?”
“And after I die, do you really believe no one will remember me?”
“No one will remember because the State wills it. Our integrity will forget you and that you ever were.”
“You too, Counsel? Will you forget what you saw and heard before your eyes today — this shameful mockery, this sham hearing, this outrageous show trial?”
“Yes, Citizen, I, too, will forget all.”
“It doesn’t matter. The facts don’t change. So I’ll die. We all die. Then, one day, you and all the Silent Witnesses before us here, and out there, and everyone else will die, too. We’ll all be equals in death. Then, the new world will replace you. That’s something none of you can ever change.”
“The Court of Will is now concluded, Citizen. The verdict stands and is reconfirmed. You are unnecessary.”
by submission | Dec 25, 2025 | Story |
Author: Daniel Miltz
They live remote, because living remote they remember everything. The neighborhood leans inward like old men listening, and the people hold faces that don’t blink. During the day, the ghosts come out wearing the habits they died in: a man still counting coins that lost their value in another country, a woman gripping grocery bags filled with nothing but regret. They don’t float. They linger. They’ve learned the city’s most important rule, don’t take up space unless you have to.
In the neighborhood, the ghosts blend in better. They sit on stoops and smoke air. They argue in languages that were supposed to be left behind, arguing about land that no longer belongs to them, about who suffered more, who survived, about how things used to be better when everyone knew their place. They haunt the house windows, staring down at kids who don’t say hello anymore. The ghosts call it disrespect. The kids call it survival.
The children are alive, but only technically. Rotten behavior grows well with some of them, like weeds through cracked concrete. They shove each other for no reason, laugh too loud at pain, talk about everything except their own emptiness. Their attitudes are armor, thick, loud, sharp-edged. They learned early that kindness gets stolen, that softness gets you laughed at, that selfishness is the only thing nobody can take from you. The ghosts watch them with tired eyes, recognizing the pattern. This is how haunting starts.
In the parks, the ghosts spread out. Parks are supposed to be for breathing, but the city forgot that. During the warm months, old men play games against opponents who died years ago, slamming their fists down like they can still win something. Mothers push invisible strollers, humming songs from the words worn smooth from repetition. The grass is thin here, trampled by memories that never learned how to recognize them.
Some ghosts don’t know they’re ghosts. They still punch clocks, still complain about prices, still shove past strangers without looking. They don’t move on because moving on costs energy, and the city already took most of that. They carry old rules into new streets and get angry when the streets don’t obey. They say, “I earned this,” even when nobody knows what this is anymore.
The city itself is the worst ghost of all. It remembers every promise it broke. It taught people to hurry, to hoard, to harden. It rewards selfishness with survival and calls it success. It doesn’t ask you to be good, only efficient.
Sometimes, late at night, a living person pauses in the neighborhood. They feel the weight of all that staying. They breathe, really breathe, and for a moment the ghosts quiet down. One or two fade, just slightly, unsure. Moving on is contagious, but so is staying.
By morning, the city will be loud again. The ghosts will return to their homes. The kids will keep acting tough. And somewhere between the park bench and their domains, a new ghost will begin, still alive, already stuck.
