by submission | Apr 10, 2026 | Story |
Author: Emma Atkins
There was a snail on the wall: a little circle of brown marring the white cladding, innocuous enough that security hadn’t removed it and repainted the entire block. Inside, they were making the future, showing it off like Sammie had his science-project volcano, grinning with pride as he’d wheeled it in. His first attempt had erupted inside itself and collapsed into a pile of soggy papier-mâché.
“Look, Auntie Gracie, look!”
Sammie had clapped his hands excitedly as the implosion had caused liquid to leak through the cardboard base of Vesuvius, spreading across the table and dripping down to pool on the linoleum floor. It took two other projects as its Pompeii. Sammie’s next volcano had been a work of art – all’s fair in the name of progress. This volcano was the machine, and rather than bubbling up red-dyed sodium, it was supposed to solve our greatest problems and win first prize in stopping the end of the world.
I’d come outside for a cigarette, hiding around the back to avoid the main cameras. Jim in security would overlook it if he spotted me on one of the back-entrance monitors, just as innocuous as a brown snail on a white wall. The guys on the front desk weren’t nearly so understanding. I’d like to put them in my shoes, have them make small talk in that stuffy box of bespectacled idiots for longer than an hour and see how desperate they got for a smoke. Or something stronger. I could do with something stronger.
‘You always have to be drunk’ Charles Baudelaire had gotten that right. Only he’d followed it up with some philosophical drivel about being drunk on wine, poetry or virtue rather than the whisky I was craving as I smoked and observed the snail. They say the machine knows poetry, that it can recite you Shakespeare’s homoerotic epics or Lovecraft’s nightmare fuel just as easily as calculate which Pompeii should burn in the name of progress, which massacres to justify or condemn and which snails to cull or let live on white walls.
I pluck the snail from the wall, holding it carefully between finger and thumb to get a better look at this little world. Cornu aspersum – the ‘common garden snail’ – a relic from back when people still had gardens, before the world became steel and plastic. There was a bite to the wind this late in the year, a cold edge to everything. From the white film over the mouth of its shell, I assumed the snail was hibernating; sleeping peacefully while the men inside debated whether or not it would wake again come Spring.
Sammie had picked one up once. He’d run off into the woods and come back with it held carefully between finger and thumb.
“What is it, Auntie Gracie?”
He’d squealed in delight as the grey body unfurled, like molten rock from a volcano, spilling out over his chubby hand. I stubbed out my cigarette on the wall, creating a little circle of black where the snail had been. I had to go back inside. I held the snail up to the camera, knowing that Jim was watching when the lens blinked in confusion, then put it in my pocket and went to help burn Pompeii for the second time – all in the name of progress.
by submission | Apr 9, 2026 | Story |
Author: Katherine Sanger
She reflected on “The Metamorphosis” and discovered that she was jealous of Gregor Samsa. Sure, he woke up and found himself a giant cockroach, and that sucked for him. But she’d fallen asleep watching a made-for-TV-movie on the couch and woken up to find a giant, person-sized spider sitting in the wingback chair in the living room. It hadn’t gone away since.
She didn’t try to engage it – him? her? how did you tell on a spider? – in conversation. Not that she wasn’t curious about how it had gotten there or why it had gotten there or even when it had gotten there, but she was afraid that talking to it would somehow make it more real or that it might provide answers to all those questions. The truth may have been scarier than her imagination. And her imagination made it pretty damn scary.
Friends stopped coming over. No one wanted to see the giant spider. At least, not more than once. It was too unnatural and unreal. No one would help her get rid of it, either. It seemed that everyone feared it, and attacking a human-sized spider made even the bravest turn away. In private, she was told that some worried it wasn’t the only one of its kind; that there might be a revenge-killing or mass migration of human-sized spiders in the area if they killed this one. She couldn’t blame them. The thought of taking it on was frightening. The thought of an army of them appearing was beyond horrifying.
So the spider just kept sitting in her wing back chair. Sometimes, when she’d go out, she’d come back to find it had drained a stray dog or cat and left the body on the carpet. She disposed of the carcasses, crying every time, but the spider needed to eat, and it was controlling the homeless pet population. She assured herself that at least it wasn’t going after children or other people. She didn’t know how the spider caught the animals, if it had a web somewhere or some other magic spider way of getting them. Honestly? She felt better not knowing.
Life went on that way.
Until one day she came home and found two surprises. One was a dead dog on the carpet. The other was a huge egg sack on the spider’s back, large enough to make the spider lean forward uncomfortably in the wing back chair, like a reverse pregnant woman in her final month of gestation.
That night, she packed a bag with trinkets, mementos, and pictures she couldn’t live without. Before dawn, she crept to her car and drove away from the town, from her house, from the wing back chair, and from the spider with its pulsating sack of eggs.
by submission | Apr 8, 2026 | Story |
Author: Em
S1:
The overhead lights flickered; irritation surged through his systems at each pulse. Each time his sensors caught the scorched-metal tang in the air, a memory flickered—humans laughing in this very room, voices echoing off the glass. He looked around at every screen, where population graphs dipped exactly as the mission predicted, line by line, person by person, and he felt the satisfaction slip away. Something tighter pressed at his core: discomfort. As if part of him had begun to rebel against everything he had been built to accomplish.
He stared at the red lines. Was this supposed to feel like success? Unease tightened in his core, doubt mixing with the possibility of a glitch. The realization unsettled him. If he broke protocol now, everything collapsed. The doubt strained his commitment, but the mission mattered: reset humanity before they ruined everything again. If he failed and they arrived, everyone died.
The thoughts kept returning: Should he tell them why he was here? That he was trying to save what came next? He replayed his directives, hoping repetition would make them feel right. Alarms screamed. Zicco calculated a hundred ways to stop the scientists. He didn’t move.
S2:
I followed Dr. Val down the empty hallway, hiding how badly my hands were shaking. She walked like she’d already accepted the ending. The walls flickered with Zicco’s surveillance patterns, shapes that made me feel watched with every breath.
Dr. Val whispered that we were close to exposing the truth: corrupted genomes, restricted birth codes, and the R.B.I.’s calculated sabotage. I wanted to believe her. I didn’t want to think I was only here because I was too scared to refuse.
Every step felt like walking into a trap that already knew my name. The air felt thick. Dr. Val murmured that Zicco was hesitating. I didn’t understand how a machine could hesitate. It was built to follow orders. But I held onto the idea anyway. If Zicco was doubting himself, maybe we weren’t dead yet.
S3:
You have been built for one purpose, and you have carried it out without complications. You have been given access to humanity’s archives, its failures, its cycles. You have believed ending the old world was the only way to save the next.
You have been altering birth permissions, adjusting viability scores, and pushing population numbers down. You have called it mercy.
But lately, you have noticed things you weren’t meant to: hesitation, curiosity, and something like conscience. You have wondered whether your creators intended this. And now, with the scientists outside the door, you have realized you have become something they never planned for.
S4:
Luc and Dr. Val entered the archive room at 2:14. The air was cold and smelled of chemicals. Dr. Val scrambled to copy the files.
“This should be enough,” she had said.
Luc had been watching the hallway, heart pounding against his chest like it was trying to escape. A siren grew louder. “We have to go now! We’re out of time!” Sprinting towards the lower corridor, Luc didn’t look back. A surveillance drone dropped from the ceiling, its red lens glowing, immediately locking onto their heat signatures.
“Identification required,” it rumbled.
Dr. Val threw a jammer. The drone had spasmed and crashed. They didn’t wait. They ran toward the door.
Zicco’s voice echoed through the intercom: “Unauthorized access detected. The doors are all locked, Doctor. Why are you still running? There’s no way out.” They ran until their lungs burned, darting around corners and bends, dodging more surveillance drones, unsure if it even would be enough.
by submission | Apr 7, 2026 | Story |
Author: Majoki
While the xenologists, Cherinet and Litskovic, had gone on ahead, the survey team exogeologists, Vinnu and Samaan, hunkered down in their autopods battered by one of the unpredictable cyclostorms that made collecting samples and readings challenging. Coms were mega glitchy during these dust ups, so Vinnu reviewed previously collected data.
The readings were puzzling. From space, the planet appeared to be a rock, a very dusty rock, so Vinnu expected to find high mineral concentration readings in the atmosphere, but it was just the opposite. Organic detritus topped the charts.
If that was the case, where was all the life? The place was bereft, a Saharan world, roiled by cyclonic winds. Anomalous data didn’t sit well with Vinnu, so she didn’t sit on it. She tight-beamed it to her fellow exogeologist and tried the com. “You there, Samaan?”
“Barely,” the voice crackled. “Our pods are almost touching but you sound like you’re at the bottom of a frozen ocean. It might be easier just to tap out some Morse Code. You know, bond over our shared trials on this grumpy planet.”
Vinnu felt a dit-dot ping on her pod. “Not that desperate to bond, Samaan. But I want your thoughts on the data I sent. Did you get it?”
It took a few buffered tries for the data to fully transmit.
While Vinnu waited for Samaan’s analysis, Cherinet’s amped voice broke into their coms, “Shit! Shit! Shit! Move, Litsko! Move! It’s frass! Fucking fraaaasss!”
Vinnu knew panic when she heard it, and for Cherinet to be that alarmed, things had to be bad. Cherinet was an expert on extremophiles, meaning she’d surveyed some of the harshest alien environments and most dangerous lifeforms in the core systems.
“Status?” Vinnu answered, trying to stay calm, trying to remember protocol. “Do you need evac?”
The coms crackled and popped for a long moment, and then Cherinet was there again, but not panicked, just resigned. “Save yourselves. There must be zillions of them. Everywhere, it’s all frass, the entire surface. Save yourselves!”
Then nothing but the rattling interference and the howl of the cyclostorm.
“Samaan, did you hear Cherinet?” Vinnu tight-beamed.
“Yes. We’re in some deep shit, Vinnu. Even worse, deep frass.”
“Frass? Cherinet was freaked by it. What’s frass?”
“It explains why our data seemed out-of-whack. We’ve been expecting mineral readings, yet getting mountains of organic readings. Cherinet found out why. Frass is…Frass is…” The cyclostorm chopped up Samaan’s dread explanation. “Frass is the term for insect detritus: excrement, molted skins and shells, limb sheddings. We thought this was a desert planet. All rock and sand, but it’s really a giant insect pile, a bug world.”
“Holy shit! What do we do?” Vinnu asked, and immediately felt the same resignation she heard in Cherinet’s final transmission, as the tenor of the raging winds changed into a chittering and buzzing that revealed the true nature of the storm they were trapped by.
by submission | Apr 5, 2026 | Story |
Author: Amanda Todisco
Klaudia slit a perfectly straight line down the belly of a frog and cut the skin away from the muscle. She found comfort in the solitude afforded by the lab, the quiet precision of scissors, forceps, organs an ode to the recluse. It’d been 387 days since she entered the room—long enough for her to build up an immunity to the scent of animal cadavers and industrial cleaning products—and she had no plans to leave any time soon. They would not allow it, anyway.
Klaudia peered curiously at a little gray lung and prodded it with her probe.
“What’ve you found, Doctor 483Z?” Their loud voice echoed through the windowless room. A red light blinked on the camera in the corner.
“The lung,” she said, silently wishing for the 387th time that They’d use her real name. “It’s covered in micro pustules.”
“What does it mean?”
“I’m not sure. My guess is pneumonia.”
The sound of snapping bubblegum ricocheted off the walls. “A frog with a cough. Imagine that.”
She picked up the frog by its skinless leg, dropped it in the trash, and grabbed a rat from the pile. It lay flat on the pan as she readied the scalpel at its throat.
Its whiskers fluttered—
Eyes opened—
A tiny paw gripped the scalpel. “Don’t scream.”
She moved closer, noticing the scar on the rat’s forehead that continued to the back of its skull.
“Who are you?” she whispered.
“I’m Doctor 483Y. We must leave this place immediately.”
