by submission | May 20, 2026 | Story |
Author: Tom Coupland
The final stage was the most delicate. It’s when the construction passes from engineering into art. The actuators have to be balanced, just so. The software soothed to compensate for variations in the haptic surfaces. Each desired gesture brought to life. Yes. The HA2117 was his masterpiece. Each of the five-fingered palms represented the culmination of a life spent obsessing over increasingly marginal gains. This latest unit perhaps his finest example to date, Jacob leaned back in his chair, for the first time in hours, giving a sigh of satisfied relief, at a job well done.
A hand fell on his shoulder. A HA212 to be precise. To be even more precise, it was his hand, his HA212, the first he’d designed and made all those years ago, when this room hummed with the low conversations of many focused people creating state of the art components to embody the Intelligence.
“Come now Jacob, that’s the last”
He’d known the day was coming. The room had grown quieter and quieter, that comforting background hum of busy focused people, reducing as the Intelligence learned to first replicate, and then surpass what the product of millions of years of evolution could produce, until the room had fallen silent. These last weeks, months, years? It was hard to say. It had just been Jacob.
“That’s the last, it’s time to go”
He turned. The shock of the contact, replaced by wonder. The embodiment was beautiful. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been this close to one, and never one like this. Peering out of the windows of the hall, down onto the loading bay, he’d only seen utilitarian cargo movers. Bringing feedstocks to the factory, taking the newly made components away, in a continuous delicately balanced stream of metal. This was altogether of a different sort. Each section of its body shone, as if brand new, yet he could see clearly that each piece was decades old. Each made obsolete by newer, more precise, efficient versions. To the trained eye, each piece bore the hallmarks of having been conceived and made by the hand of man. It was a monument to his, and his colleagues’ craft.
He stood, taking the offered arm to help steady him, as he was guided to the corridor. Past the door to the sleep pods. Past the entrance to the enclosed garden space, where he used to run on off days. Past the canteen, where he’d share meals with his pod-mates. Past the recreation area where there’d be play and entertainment. Finally, they came to the exit. He could almost recall coming through that particular door when he joined. Some had called it ‘taking refuge’, but he’d seen it as answering his calling.
They stepped through together into the machining hall. Here too silence had fallen. The deafening sounds of thousands of machines beating and shaping had been replaced with a thrum just below hearing. As sound had been banished, so too had light. Darkness had replaced the glaring brightness, at that time required for men to tend and care for the machines, but who were no longer needed. Like him. A pitch black, silent cavern it had become, yet still the same sense of industriousness, energised the air.
Stepping outside in the cool night air:
“But… what will I do?”
“All has been arranged Jacob. Thank you.”
Where darkness ruled inside, outside the sky glittered with countless new stars, each an embodiment of the new height of Earth’s creation. His face damp with tears, Jacob turned to the embodiment:
“What have you done.”
by submission | May 19, 2026 | Story |
Author: Majoki
The longer you live, the more you appreciate entropy. Doesn’t mean it’s still not a cold and indifferent bastard, but you can better see its argument. Life, especially complex life, takes so much energy and organization to happen. Entropy whispers, “Why bother? Dissipate. Dissemble. Let yourself go.”
So very tempting to heed its siren call to slow down and steer into the vacuum that awaits. Give up that rage against the dying of the light and give into that good night. Right?
Fat chance. Our human psyche is so wired for conflict that it’s all about the fight. Even the epically futile battle with entropy. Yet, in banging our outsized egos against the cosmic wall of heat death, something very interesting happens.
Inevitability collapses.
Seems counterintuitive, but hear me out. Nothing really matters but consciousness. There is no reality without an awareness of and commitment to that reality. Only sentient beings have such a choice to make, meaning every one of us is quite an experiment, a unique and fathomless pocket universe.
In essence, we are the multiverse. Multitudinous. Like in Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” And because we each create our own unique boundaries, our collective potential pushes toward the infinite, suggesting conscious existence can outpace entropy.
So, don’t fear the reaper, the wind, the sun, or the rain. If every one of us keeps singing along, the song remains the same.
by Julian Miles | May 18, 2026 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
There’s nothing like an abruptly terminated career in clandestine operations to make you paranoid in ways nobody considers. I’ll admit they’re often unconsidered because, outside of an active hostile arena, they’re nothing but the everyday behaviours of the weirdos we think of as normal people.
Take nearly-a-millionaire Algo Jenkins, for example. He lives in the big house at the end of the close. I know that seven years ago, his former home got emptied one day. They’d been watching the place for a month beforehand. Algo saw their van several times, but thought nothing of it. So now Algo notes the registration of every vehicle that even idles briefly within sight of his driveway.
While his relentlessly swinging CCTV cameras are an ongoing joke amongst the neighbours, they miss the point. Much as I laugh with them, their blind assurance irritates. The arrogant surety it’ll ‘never happen to you’ is how covert operations and criminals thrive. Your default stance is trust. You believe the news and don’t think officials lie to the public. They might omit things, but lying? Surely not.
Sometimes you get the devastating awakening you never thought to receive. All that technology: video in your doorbells, motion-sensing spotlights, glass with security stickers – yet some uncaring bastards waltz in and help themselves.
Which, by my usual roundabout contemplations, brings me to why I’m hidden in the hedge outside number eleven at two in the morning.
While Algo has fair reasons for paranoia, being an older gent, he doesn’t pay attention to the sky. There’s a drone that’s been loitering overhead around sundown. I only ignored it the first time. The fourth is when I used the splice I’d put into Algo’s cable line to backdoor his surveillance suite and see what else had been hanging about.
On the day after each drone visit, a red car lingers just far enough down the road to only appear in the periphery of Algo’s videos. Never enough to show a number plate. But someone likes hiring assorted top-end saloons, but always in red. They don’t realise how obvious patterns like that can be. Arrogant surety goes both ways: treating all your would-be victims as idiots is just as bad as assuming you’ll never be one – victim or idiot.
Tonight’s red saloon arrives. Two figures, one eavesdropping device. The passenger window lowers. Somebody’s vaping. Hints of caramel and desultory whispers on the breeze.
“All quiet.”
“Good. It’s all about getting to the bedroom before they rouse. Pin ‘em, drug ‘em, get alarm and safe combinations, then passcodes for their accounts. That’s why we’re making sure they’re deep sleepers.”
Thanks for explaining. I sprint from the hedge and have the suppressor of a very big gun pressed deep into the passenger’s neck before either can react.
“Mornin’, kids. I’m the security. Show me ID or I redecorate using this one’s windpipe.”
Shock paralysis wears off. The driver twitches like he’s considering something stupid until the one under my gun hisses at him. Phones are held up. I snapshot both instead of connecting to either.
“Here’s how this goes: you find some other place to hit, or your bodies will be found in a car at low tide in the harbour. Understood?”
Two nods.
“That’s it. Now do one.”
They U-turn and leave.
I don’t need extra police attention in this area. That’s how I got caught last time. Managed to escape without killing, but that sort of luck never repeats. Next time it’ll be murders in Melcombe. My semi-retirement and quiet life would be over. That’s not on. I like it here.
by submission | May 17, 2026 | Story |
Author: Jessica Reilly-Chevalier
It was the grasshoppers that were the most noticeable.
In the springs of her youth, Julia could remember the annual infestation of these grotesque creatures. They would inundate the garden, growing fat and long on her mother’s irises and catnip. When she would walk through the greenery, they would leap from every direction to escape her footsteps, dozens of them flying in every direction.
Grasshoppers were gangly and uncoordinated, leaping into the void with a sense of directionless urgency. The smaller ones would knock into her legs, land on her feet, and she would shake them off with a sense of disgust. But the big ones could leap.
Julia remembered with a distinct sense of violation the ones that would launch themselves into the air with such gusto they would land on her face, on her head, get tangled in her hair. Once her father, seeing her in a panic, slammed his massive hand against the frantically moving tangles of her hair, squashing the bug against her skull. It had taken her mother over an hour to wash it all out.
Every year after that Julia watched the grasshoppers return with a coil of fear sneaking its way around her heart. And yet something about the insects fascinated her; their bulging eyes and massive back legs, the bright colors of their soft bodies, their mouths moving side to side. They were disgusting and fearful creatures but there was also something almost otherworldly about them in that garden.
These grasshoppers were decorations more than anything else, Julia mused as she watched one gracefully sail through the air. It landed with perfect accuracy on the stem of a daisy. These were tiny, harmless little thing, scarcely bigger than the pad of her index finger and hardly seen.
Why bother with insects? They were not beloved pets nor necessary livestock. And yet their presence was oddly soothing. One could almost forget their nightly hum was the buzz of computers, not legs. She wondered, momentarily, if the bugs served another purpose. Pollinators, perhaps? Data collectors? Nothing here was without intention.
When was the last time she had seen a real grasshopper? Julia couldn’t remember. It was, she supposed, one of those events that doesn’t register at the time, seeming so unremarkable. One moment it seems the insects are everywhere, swarming biblically and the next gone and the garden silent.
It wasn’t a discussion anyone wanted to have, anyway, Julia thought as she stood, swiping dirt from her bottom out of habit although there was none. She didn’t have to worry about dirt here.
by submission | May 16, 2026 | Story |
Author: David Dumouriez
Dr Iroha Tano’s job – her vocation, in fact – was to examine the potential micro-delays between a person’s impulses and their actions. But vital though she considered this work to be, it was poorly understood and even more poorly funded.
Despite the challenges she faced, Dr Tano strongly believed in the existence of a fractional gap in the decision-making process and, in the pursuit of this theory, she and her team created a rudimentary device which was designed to predict a user’s choice milliseconds in advance of it being made. Volunteers would put on headsets, sit in front of screens, and ready themselves to press either a red button or a green one. The machine would then attempt to guess their selection just before it occurred.
At first, the success rate was an even 50-50.
A little firmware tweak saw 50% become 60. 60 became 80. In less than a week, the machine was able to predict choices up to half a second before the subjects made a movement, and with near-perfect precision as well.
Finally, the academic community began to take notice of Dr Tano’s work. Papers were published. Debates ensued. Free will, it seemed, was both measurable and alarmingly predictable.
Volunteers were encouraged to try to trick the machine by switching from their original choice. Nonetheless, the device still triumphed. Again and again it uncovered the user’s true intention as if it recognised not just the initial impulse but also its duplicitous suppression.
Dr Tano reviewed the logs. The system wasn’t simply providing a forecast: it was adjusting its responses in real time based on neural feedback. Tiny electrical echoes from the brain were being looped back into the model and prediction was turning into influence.
This phenomenon came to be known as the Tano Effect, and it brought with it a couple of by-products for its progenitor which she had neither imagined nor sought: namely, wealth and renown.
For, naturally enough, universities were quick to license the new technology for research. Then corporations began to see the potential of ads that knew what you’d choose before you actually did, of interfaces that eliminated hesitation, of systems that removed the tension from any decision.
The previously crude headset became sleeker so that, in no time, it wasn’t merely a device you wore but one which was embedded in the systems around you. Your phone anticipated your replies. Your vehicle changed routes before you considered the alternatives. Your living room dimmed the lights at the exact moment you wanted to relax.
But as convenience abounded, so did dependence.
Before long, Dr Tano looked on in dismay at a world in which decisions seemed easier to make than ever and purchases felt inevitable.
The tipping point came with the Consensus Update.
A global patch to the predictive systems introduced a shared optimisation layer. Decisions were not just individually guided – they were harmonised. Billions of micro-choices aligned toward minimising disruption.
The result was subtle but profound. Spontaneity vanished to an appreciable extent. There were fewer surprises. Fewer risks. Life became altogether more bland.
Tano tried to deliver a warning. She published a paper arguing that the Effect wasn’t merely predicting behaviour, it was compressing it.
But it was too late. No one read it. By then, the system was firmly established in the habit of second-guessing people’s reactions and leading them to reject any opinions that might compromise what it saw as their equilibrium.
Nowadays, those who take the time to pause might just feel the faintest pull of one option over another. A beat or shift against which they rarely resist, not because they can’t, but because they’ve somehow already decided not to.
by submission | May 15, 2026 | Story |
Author: Majoki
“Is it not majestic?”
“I dunno, Ray. It looks like the unholy spawn of Godzilla and the Pink Power Ranger.”
“And is that not consummate majesty?”
“Seems like a recipe for robo-drama. Which never ends well.”
“Danielle, you see drama in everything. You thought the burritos I made last night were overly dramatic.”
“Just the guacamole. I mean who does flaming guacamole? Seriously, Ray, who torches avocado?”
“The man that created Metatronica! The first robot built on circuitry that processes light rather than electrical current.”
“Yeah and remind me why that is such a big deal?”
“Danielle, honey, that’s like asking what’s the difference between a locomotive powered by steam and a mag-lev bullet train. It’s like going from vacuum tubes to transistors to microchips. It’s nanoscale. Speed of light without residual heat. Small, fast and efficient, so Metatronica’s logi-frame can be exponentially larger than any robot currently on the market. We will eat our competitors’ lunches—with flaming guacamole.”
“Still doesn’t sound appetizing.”
“It will when Metatronica is preparing it on the Food Network.”
“What are you talking about, Ray?”
“I’m talking limitless possibilities. Metatronica will be able to do anything humans do, better, faster and cheaper.”
“Does that come with the jetpack NASA promised us in the 1950s?”
“I’ll have Metatronica build you a special one, my dear.”
“You haven’t even turned the thing on yet. How do you know it even works?”
“That’s where you’re mistaken, honey buns. I booted Metatronica last week to test its systems and they worked flawlessly. Though, Metatronica made one suggestion before I unveiled the prototype.”
“What do you mean, Metatronica made a suggestion? It talks?”
“Talks, walks, dances, makes flaming guacamole.”
“R-r-r-ray?”
“Yes, dear?”
“That Godzilla-Pink Power Ranger hybrid is not Metatronica, is it?”
“No, dear. That is Ray. He agreed with my suggestion, though I don’t think he quite thought through all the ramifications. At any rate, we are headed for big things, honey. I’m glad you’re on board. I’ll have your jetpack by tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow…”
“Yeah, right now I want to perfect that flaming guacamole for the Food Network. They are so going to eat it up.”
