Soul Copy

by submission | Jun 3, 2026 | Story | 0 comments

Author: Amanda Fetters

You scramble against the upholstery.

“What are you doing?”

—Hold still.

“No, really. What are you doing.”

—Making a copy. Stop squirming. We could have been done by now.

“A copy of what?”

—Your ≹§.

“My…?”

—It’s not a great translation, but roughly interpreted: your soul.

“You’re making a copy…of…my soul?” A moment of incomprehension, then you’re frantic to cover up.

Even fully clothed, you feel exposed, indecent. Naked.

—Affirmative. Shut up.

The spirit or entity or maybe demon transfers your copied ≹§ to a set of complicated scales, multi-panned with several crossbeams and more than one fulcrum. Gears click and whir until they shriek and smoke, and its meters fluctuate with varied neon hues.

—“Oh for the love of .

“Is something wrong?”

You get the sense the entity is holding a clipboard.

—I’m afraid…well. There it is.

A slot spits out a long, narrow receipt. You reach for it.

Partial to animated fantasy films
Wears the same three niche graphic tees on rotation
Musical tastes stalled in 1994

“Alternative peaked in ‘94,” you say, already on the defensive.

Relishes Broadway musicals, but only admits it in select company
Will not eat kimchi

You have the distinct impression that the entity is frowning.

Avoids committing to anything resembling an RSVP
Freezes in 99.9% of tense situations

You say nothing because you’re frozen.

Secretly believes they are an undiscovered genius
Secretly believes their mother was a pathological liar
Secretly believes all existence is an illusion

—I can assure you: it is not.

You blush. You want to ask questions, but the receipt is still printing.

Dreams of owning chickens, but is too squeamish to clean a coop
Dreams of seeing the Taj Mahal, but is too apathetic to book travel
Dreams of earning a fine arts degree, but is too cowardly to risk rejection

—Thank you, that is all we need.

You blink. “That’s it? That’s my soul? What about my personal morals, my core beliefs? And who is we?”

A slight hesitation.

—Irrelevant.

“Will you share it with anyone?”

—No.

“Will you share it with anything?”

—Possibly.

“I do not give my consent.”

—Sadly, this is not a matter of consent. I need you to stop worrying so much. I assure you, this process is harmless.

“Are you storing this somewhere?”

—Securely.

“I asked where, not how.” You twist in your seat, looking for an exit.

—Stop lolling about like that. We could have been finished ages ago.

Wave Goodbye

by submission | Jun 2, 2026 | Story | 0 comments

Author: Majoki

Cloudfall almost killed him. He’d arrived on Verdant during thirdcycle when the sudden burst of water and biomass knocked him off his feet and sent him sluicing down into the Well.

Only the Mistery had saved him. One of the chanters saw his tell-tale thinsuit boots among the flotsam of the cloudfall and threw a net his way. He’d tangled to a halt a few feet above the lip of the Well, and a chorus of chanters hauled him back from the brink along with a day’s catch of junkwood.

None of his saviors seemed to think it remarkable. When he’d tried to express his thanks to the chanters and apologize for interrupting the Mistery, they had simply spread their hands palm up and raised them in the gesture of the Inevitable. An offering and excuse. He was to die anyway. To the chanters, all would perish in the Collapse. A desirable and necessary end for the people of the Verdant.

It made Henri Tattersol question why he’d transversed three universes to save a race so intent on (even blissful of) its own destruction. They welcomed the Collapse. Every Cloudfall brought it closer, and, with their elongated throats, the chanters trumpeted their impending doom in a harmonious chorus of celebration.

As Henri checked his thinsuit for damage, a high chanter approached with a maiden of the Mistery. In spite of the impossible humidity of the Verdant, her hair bounced in thousands of luxuriant curls creating tribolectric vortices the maiden could channel. With a casual stroke of her hand through lush ringlets, Henri knew she could fling a bolt of energy that even his thinsuit would be unable to ground. He bowed low to her.

“Name us, Henri Tattersol of the Terraverse,” she commanded in the very difficult greeting ritual of the Verdant. The most direct consequence of the Inevitable was that the maidens of Verdant were supremely confident they knew pretty much everything and outsiders were therefore tiresome.

The maiden was baiting him with the Inevitable, in essence, saying, “Tell us what we don’t already know that we’ve always known and that a hapless creature such as yourself could scarcely comprehend.”

Inwardly, Henri cursed the maiden’s smugness, her sureness of the Inevitable, and her damn Cloudfall that pristinely purged Verdant’s thick atmosphere and rainforests every thirdcycle. But, the growing evidence of a massive wavefunction collapse in Verdant’s system and the ripple effects across the omniverse compelled Henri to play the obsequious savior.

His hair matted and peppered with twistles and dorty from his near-fatal floodslide to the Well, Henri bowed low and intoned with perfect maiden-court civility. “Al-el Szafhi, High Chanter of the Verdant Mistery, I name you.”

In response, Al-el Szafhi raised and cupped her palms. “Henri Tattersol, you come on an errand of no consequence. Nevertheless, we welcome your irrelevance.”

She swept her hands down either side of her tightly curled locks causing the air around her head to shimmer. An aura-field spread out from her. The oppressive moisture in the air around them vaporized in a steamy whirlwind that lifted in leaden sky—fodder for the next Cloudfall.

“Your worship knows my mission. Wave function collapse is inevitable.”

“Wafuco is the Inevitable. Why should it be otherwise?”

“Because it is not inevitable otherwhere,” Henri offered.

Al-el Szafhi, High Chanter of the Verdant Mistery faced Henri at the verge of the Well. The massive whirlpool the maidens of the MIstery believed to be Verdant’s mother, giving birth and rebirth to everything. “To save us from Wafuco, this is your wish, Henri Tattersol?”

“It is. A wave function collapse would do the omniverse great harm.”

“Is that all?”

“It is everything.”

Al-el Szafhi rejoiced. “Then wave goodbye, Henri Tattersol! The mother of everything wishes you…her Well.” And she zapped Henri who fell into the swirling Misteries below.

Patterns in the Sand

by submission | Jun 1, 2026 | Story | 1 comment

Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer

The sun beats down mercilessly upon dunes and cliffs, turning the scene to shades of gold scattered with tan shadows. Across this starkly beautiful landscape, a series of small, sandy divots lie where the breeze has not blown them back to conceal the trail of indentations.
Following that trail leads to a series of sinuous ‘S’ shapes, like a sidewinder was progressing at right angles to its usual course. After a while, the sine-wave is paralleled by deep footprints, the ice in their shadowed depths only just starting to yield to the morning sun.
The parallel tracks crest a tall dune, tall enough to see the ruins of Amarna smoking in the distance. At the terminus of the tracks there lies a sun-baked body in the bloodied rags of what had been a pharaoh’s regalia. Crouched next to him is an ebon being with a jackal’s head.

“They thought they’d dragged you far enough away that you’d never return. I knew they were wrong. Stubborn was always your strongest attribute, after your sense of direction.”
The reply comes in a dry whisper: “A curse upon your House, usurper.”
The snout drops as the eyes regard the dying human.
“Too far gone for proclamations, Khuenaten? About time.”
“What would you know of time, or my divine task?”
“As I am somewhat responsible for you thinking you had that task, I thought I’d come to apologise, yet again.”
“Again? We have never met.”
“Not in this Akhet, but your particular obsession is incredibly difficult to remove. No matter how we set things up, you always get the monotheistic urge and set off upon this doomed quest once again.”
“There is only one god. He is the Atun, and he looks down upon me now, ready to receive me into his glorious presence.”
“And there we have it. Your core delusion. I had hoped that by dropping in I’d create some sort of release for this persistent reality twist.”
“What?”
“One god. There is never only one god. As long as my netsheren overlook your Akhets – and there is only one other of us who recalls a time when we didn’t – there can never be a single god.”
“Blasphemer.”
The ebon head lunges and for the first time, their eyes meet.
“Gaze upon me, then say who blasphemes.”
There is a cry of denial; the rattle of a dying breath.
Anhubeth stands up and looks down at the body.
“Good answer.”
As he strides off, a biting, cold wind ruffles the sand and frosts the eyes of the corpse, before whipping off to interstices unknown. The miniscule resonance created by the chill excision of a reality torsion touches Anhubeth’s senses.
Glancing back, he smiles.
“Death-point learning: so profound, too late, but never wasted.”
Looking down, he kicks up sand and barks a soft laugh.
“Unchanging… Yet patterns across a stretch of sand are always different. What can reckon the fall of every grain? Neither gods nor mortals, it seems.”
He snorts.
“And what use a sand predicting machine?”
With a shake of his head, he walks away.

$ubject #33

by submission | May 31, 2026 | Story | 0 comments

Author: Em

The sky ripped open. A giant pixel tear split the fake blue, revealing the rusted skeleton of the “Rust”—the real, ruined world. Théo Laurent leaned on his console, skin itching. In 2936, the government bought the mental labor of citizens to power the city, leaving his colleagues, Miller and Vance, moving like slow-motion puppets while their conscious minds slept.

“Can you talk faster?” Théo snapped. “My brain is growing moss.”

Théo was “twitchy” because he saw the glitches. To him, the V.I.C.E. (Vessel for Integrated Cognitive Energy) was a moldy, inefficient cage. When the system flagged him for “Internal Conflict,” Théo didn’t wait for the guards. He bolted.

After three days hiding in the metallic stench of the trash-heaps, Théo found the resistance. Ciara Wittlow, a sharp-eyed rebel, caught him straightening a wrench in her lopsided basement.

“You’re a key,” she said. “The V.I.C.E. Spire has a neural lock that fries anyone under 160 IQ. Help me destroy the Filter, and I’ll let you redesign the world.”

Théo agreed, but as he fixed their “duct-tape” tech, he found Ciara’s hidden sub-routines. She planned to dump his mind once the job was done. He also shared his truth: his mother, Linia, had died because of a 3% air-filter error. He didn’t want freedom; he wanted a world without mistakes.

During the infiltration of the Core, Ciara prepared to drop the Filter. “We give them back their minds!” she cried.

“You’ll fry them,” Théo countered. His brain, running at 109% utilization, saw Ciara move for her kill switch in slow motion. He didn’t just stop her; he rewrote the entire Spire. Security tethers seized Ciara, dragging her mind into the system to serve as a power stabilizer.

“The Vessel just needed a proper OS,” Théo whispered.

Six hours later, the world rebooted. The Rust was deleted, replaced by smooth ivory towers and the scent of expensive soap. Théo renamed the city Linia. Through the intercom, he told the neural-pulsed, mannequin-like citizens: “You weren’t slaves. You were just messy. I fixed the frequency.”

A month of perfection passed. Théo watched the world through a thousand cameras, ensuring every shadow fell at a ninety-degree angle. He ignored the digital screams of Ciara’s ghost in the code, sliding her volume to zero.

But then, a flicker. On the horizon of the next city, Highwell, a jagged pixel appeared. Théo’s skin itched. He began typing frantically to erase the smudge—until his own sky ripped open. A rusted, ugly tear split his perfect ivory heaven.

The Truth Six months earlier, in a suite smelling of roasted duck and lilies, the “Legacy Class” finished dinner. They watched Théo on a high-def screen. To them, his “fast” movements were still sluggish, like a video at 0.75x speed.

“Subject #33 is coming along great,” Julian remarked. “The ‘Itch’ we programmed is working perfectly.”

“The mom was the best part,” Thomas added. “He won’t just clean the world; he’ll do it for her.”

They had engineered Théo’s rebellion to act as an automated reset button—a janitor to scrub their “gallery” clean of clutter.

“Fix it for us, Sparky,” Elara whispered, dismissively poking Théo’s face on the monitor.

As the elites headed out for drinks, Théo sat in his “perfect” world, feeling like a god, entirely unaware that he was just a puppet straightening the curtains for people who didn’t even know his name.

Overdue notice

by submission | May 30, 2026 | Story | 2 comments

Author: Colin Jeffrey

The first time Elmer Merle realised something was wrong was when his heart stopped beating.

Which surprised him, because he was clearly able to walk and talk, and check the messages on his phone without once falling down dead.

“You’re the eleventh person I’ve seen today with no heartbeat,” said the doctor. “And – like I told the others – I have no adequate explanation. Sorry.”

Merle had left work early that day, along with most of his coworkers. It seemed everyone else’s heart had stopped too. Unlike others, however, he didn’t call in at a place of worship on the way home.

Instead, Merle went to his friend Orson’s house.

He knew Orson Roons had a computer that hadn’t been connected to the internet since 2007, when he claimed to have received an email “from Reality itself.”

Orson wasn’t surprised to see him.

“Your heart’s stopped too?” Orson asked, sipping from a mug that read “Keep calm and carry on coding.”

“It has,” said Merle. “Yours?”

“Yep. Just like everyone else.” He moved a pile of junk from a chair so Merle could sit. “I warned them,” he muttered. “But no one listens to me.”

Orson sat in front of the old computer, turned the crank on a generator, and booted it up. A series of beeps followed.

“What are you doing?” Merle asked.

“Finding the proof,” said Orson, tapping keys. “This isn’t some pandemic – it’s an overdue notice.”

The screen flickered. An inbox appeared, untouched since 2007. At the top:

!!ACTION REQUIRED: Species Subscription Renewal – FINAL NOTICE!!

Merle laughed. “That’s just spam.”

“Open it.”

He did.

> Dear Users,
>
> Your Species Existence Subscription has expired.
>
> As detailed in previous messages, failure to renew within 200 Earth years will result in systematic termination of biological function, followed by gradual pixelation and deletion of your reality.
>
> To renew your subscription, please click on the link below:
>
> [RENEW HERE]
>
> Yours sincerely,
> Universe Management Systems Incorporated

“No heartbeat,” Orson said, “is stage one.”

Merle stared. “A subscription to exist…?”

“Yes. And someone was supposed to handle it centuries ago. There was rumoured to be a Temple of Tech Support somewhere in Mesopotamia, but it was lost.”

Merle clicked the link.

Nothing happened.

“We’re not connected to anything,” Orson shook his head. “Even if we were, the link’s expired. You need the current renewal code. It updates every 78.4 years.”

Merle blinked. “Okay… so how do we get a new code?”

Orson opened a drawer and pulled out a laminated card. He read aloud:

“To contact the Universe Management Systems helpline, please speak into your nearest receiver of cosmic background radiation.”

“Well, that’s helpful,” Merle said.

“It sure is,” Orson replied, oblivious to the sarcasm. “I’ve got an old analog TV in the spare room.”

Bemused, Merle followed.

“When not tuned to any channel,” Orson explained, switching on the TV, “static is displayed – part of that static is actually generated by the universe’s cosmic background radiation.”

The screen hissed with white noise.

“Now,” Orson said, holding up a microphone plugged into the TV “Say: ‘Support Request: Humanity Subscription Renewal Code.'”

Merle raised an eyebrow, but did as he was asked.

“Support Request: Humanity Subscription Renewal Code.”

The screen flickered. A beep sounded.

A synthesized voice came through the TV speaker:
“Your request is being processed. Please stay tuned. Average wait time: 112 to 218 Earth years.”

Merle dropped heavily into the nearest chair, dejected.

“Cheer up,” Orson said, taking a sip from his mug, “at least we’re in the queue.”