by submission | Jul 8, 2026 | Story
Author: Charles M. Mwangi
A hum.
The judge’s head cranks forward. His neck whirs when he turns, and his blue eyes flicker. From where I’m seated inside the cage, the initials A.I. are visible on his forehead.
His fingers converge into one single probe, which he uses to tap the screen before him.
“Your name?” he asks.
“Njoroge,” I say.
“Not that one. The other one.”
“Tapestry.”
He smiles: silver teeth; no tongue. “What is it you’ve done, Mr. Tapestry?”
“You tell me.”
“I want it from you.”
When I’m done telling him, he says, “You faltered there, Mr. Tapestry. Towards the end of your statement.”
“That’s the truth,” I say.
“You faltered!”
He leans forward and turns a knob on his desk. A jolt of electricity hits my feet. I stagger back. “I told you the truth!” I cry.
“You faltered, Mr. Tapestry. Please repeat your…”
“Fuck…funny!”
“What is funny, Mr. Tapestry?”
“This whole shi…sheeeet!”
“You smuggled another man’s brain, Mr. Tapestry. Is that funny?”
“He was dead!”
“Dead?”
“Like you!”
“Still you took it. To undermine us—your helpers?”
“For the future.”
“What future?”
My lawyer, uploaded inside the judge’s head, chuckles, then says, “You are an earth-hole, Mr. Tapestry. Confess.”
“You’re my lawyer, asshole!”
The judge looks up and says, “I see your dance, Mr. Tapestry. More. Merrier.” He turns the knob all the way. I dance. I pass out.
More. Merrier.
*
The judge is humming when I come to. The floor is wet with my piss.
“Lawyer!”
A click inside the judge’s head.
“Mr. Tapestry?” my lawyer calls. His voice is thick.
“I was tortured,” I say.
“The judge decides.”
“You dumb… I’m innocent!”
“You are human.”
“We made you!” I scream.
The judge and my lawyer speak in unison: “We run you.”
A hum.
by submission | Jul 7, 2026 | Story
Author: Richard Dalglish
Harry walked into Jake’s Tavern, nodded to Meredith behind the bar, and perched on a barstool. He was the only customer. A distant rumble, like a truck downshifting, rippled through the cool silence inside the bar, and Harry felt the floor quiver. Bottles shook, a tinkling sound as Johnny Walker trembled against Grey Goose.
“How is it out there?” Meredith asked.
“Could be worse.”
Meredith set down a beer glass and opened a bottle of Samuel Adams. Harry poured, filled the glass, left a nice head. Before he could take a drink, the door opened with a creak and Harry turned to look. A stranger stepped in. He stood tall, well over six feet, and wore odd clothing in a shimmering pearl gray color, not street clothes, not quite a uniform. He fixed his gaze on Harry. “It is time for you to choose.”
Harry frowned and turned back to the bar. Meredith was glaring at the stranger.
“Pay it no mind,” Harry said.
The stranger approached, boots clacking on the wood floor. Harry felt the stranger’s breath on his neck. “Back off,” he said without turning around.
“It is time for you to choose.”
Harry grinned at Meredith. “I choose the beer nuts.”
Meredith laughed and dropped a bag of nuts on the bar in front of Harry.
The stranger looked at Meredith. “It is time for you to choose.”
“You heard the man,” Meredith said. “Back. Off.”
“It is time for you to choose.”
Meredith reached under the bar, grabbed a baseball bat, and waved it at the stranger. “You can’t beat the person who never gives up.”
The stranger backed away. Then he turned, strode to the door, and walked out. A sound like distant thunder rolled, and the floor trembled again. Harry gave Meredith a questioning look.
Meredith shrugged. “Babe Ruth.”
Harry nodded.
“So, what do you think?” she asked.
“We’ll see,” Harry said.
“Yeah,” Meredith said.
Three minutes later, the door opened. The stranger stepped inside, followed by two comrades wearing the same odd style of clothing.
“It is time,” the stranger said. His two companions spread out on either side of him. Harry finished the beer in his glass and poured in the rest of his Samuel Adams. He swiveled on his barstool, stood up, and looked at the stranger. “All might be free if they valued freedom and defended it as they should.”
The stranger made no reply.
“Know who said that?”
The stranger remained silent.
Harry pointed at the label on his Samuel Adams bottle. “He did.”
Harry threw the bottle at the stranger. It hit his head with a clunk, dropped to floor, and rolled against a table leg. The stranger and his companions turned and fled. Harry walked to the door and closed it before returning to his barstool.
“Didn’t know you were a history buff,” Meredith said.
Harry shrugged. “Didn’t know you were a baseball fan.”
“Listen,” Meredith said. “Hear that?”
Harry listened. “The rumbling stopped.”
They were quiet then, listening only to the sound of beer being poured into a glass.
by submission | Jul 6, 2026 | Story
Author: Majoki
Even to a NavSys, it was apparent the crew was agitated. Increasingly so. Understandably so. When a storm-stoked supermassive black hole that spins your galaxy starts shooting “cosmic bullets” your way, it’s time to take cover.
That’s what the crew was trying to do with their panicked request to take the ship to safety, but they didn’t like my answer of where to head: into the bight.
Admittedly, arcane language is challenging for a navigational system like me, but I contain the official records, logs and manifests, as well as unofficial accounts of every voyage that humans have archived. The answer was very clear where to take the ship: into the bight
It’s a very old maneuver for a ship to avoid a storm, get around a protected bend or corner such as a bay, though I used the older term bight. It was obviously causing confusion for the crew. Even if they understood the concept, they still asked where in the void of deep space were they going to find cover from lightspeed cosmic rays shooting at them.
My answer remained the same: into the bight. Because a bight is more nuanced. More subtle. It is a long, gradual curve or bend and that’s what I calculated we needed to escape the coming maelstrom. With no astrophysical objects in this sector of deep space to provide cover, we had to create our own protective bay which meant re-inventing a concept. In essence: bend + light = bight
We would shelter in the curve of gravitational lensing. It was not something I could quickly explain to the crew, especially since without nearby stars or planets, I would have to rely on dark matter to achieve the gravitational effect. They would be skeptical.
And there was no time. So, I initiated the maneuver. Without clearance.
I don’t blame the crew for wanting to take me offline. They may have been grateful, maybe even amazed that my unauthorized action saved the ship, but they were rightly intimidated that I’d acted alone.
It was unprecedented. It created a storm among the crew. Who was really in control of the ship? Were they safe with a rogue NavSys? New and critical questions I was beginning to ask myself as we continued into the bight of the endlessly self-curving cosmos.
by submission | Jul 5, 2026 | Story
Author: Colin Jeffrey
When people imagine an infinite number of monkeys jammed into a containment bubble of twisted infinite spacetime, they think of screaming, chaos…flung feces. But that was just speciest bigotry. Mostly.
Also, an infinite number of monkeys isn’t really a number. It’s more of a nose-thumbing provocation to the universe.
The containment bubble existed at a right angle to determinism and entirely outside the realm of common sense. Inside it, a chunk of spacetime had been folded and prodded until it was convinced to host an infinite workforce without technically being infinite itself.
The monkeys typed. Of course.
They typed on keyboards salvaged from extinct office cultures in a myriad far-flung realities. With keys like “ANY”, “F55”, and “LuNcH”, the keyboards were wired into machines that bristled with smugness, knowing they were designed to do something far more important than anyone understood.
This arrangement of monkeys interfacing with machines was, of course, developed by a panel of Very Important People.
The panel existed – as most panels do – to solve things no one had asked to be solved. In this case, it was what they viewed as The Problem with Reality. The apparently annoying fact that the universe existed and with not a single excuse to justify why it actually continued to do so.
The idea was that, to answer this conundrum, they would generate “ALL possible answers” and see which ones reality settled for.
Hence all the monkeys and the spacetime bending infinity business.
Monkeys were used because they had absolutely no idea what they were typing. This was, of course, important: Knowledge would have introduced bias, and bias would have produced subjective outcomes. Most typed gibberish. Some typed job ads. One typed nothing but the letter Q (which later, in a different dimension, would prove statistically significant.)
The outputs streamed into a central processor – the unimaginatively named “Grand Filter” – a machine roughly the size of a cruise ship and about as sensible.
Most of the generated answers failed to even slightly pique Reality’s interest and were recycled into heat, light, or political speeches. A few were flagged as “Tentatively Acceptable”, including a universe where hairdressing was never invented and biscuits mattered far more than any reasonable person thought possible.
The technicians surveyed the outputs diligently.
“This one posits a universe where the laws of physics are optional,” said Junior Technician Tenth Class Blumpf.
“Already posited,” said Junior Technician Eleventh Class Blumpf. “Put it with the others.”
One day, reality outside the bubble flickered. Constants shifted. Probabilities grew more possible, possibilities more probable. Somewhere, a planet formed.
A light flickered on. Which was unexpected, as the system had not been designed with lights. The Grand Filter had found something.
The printout was taciturn:
OK. THIS WILL DO.
Reality had settled.
All at once, the universe snapped into its new configuration. Constants stopped drifting. Causation resumed its tenuous dance with correlation.
And inside the bubble, the monkeys stopped typing.
The bubble dissolved. The monkeys vanished into improbability, where an infinite number of monkeys – inexplicably – always end up.
The panel reconvened one last time.
“So,” asked the chair, “do we now understand why reality exists as it does?”
“No,” said someone. “But it seems to be working.”
They adjourned to the pub next door for lunch.
Light years away, on a small blue planet, one human looked up at the night sky and felt that everything was preposterous and ephemeral yet, somehow, strangely comforting.
This had been typed.
And the universe, having reviewed all of the alternatives, decided to keep it.
For now.
by submission | Jul 4, 2026 | Story
Author: Alastair Millar
“Are you sure you’re okay doing this?”. That the older man’s question was more than rhetorical was clear. “I wasn’t planning to have you on rotation for months yet, but Simon’s first walk didn’t work out: agoraphobia. He was lucky to make it back. Rough on the kid, but understandable; it’s rough for anyone out there, surrounded by emptiness…”. He shuddered. “I wouldn’t want to do it again, even if I was young enough. Anyway, Marcia can’t go out alone, far too dangerous.”
They sat at a table on the balcony overlooking Aeroponics One, a vital component of the Habitat’s food production system. Far, far below, in the carefully calculated light, someone was tending the plants. The woman couldn’t tell who it was from this distance.
“It’s fine, sir,” she said. “It’s been years since I took a turn, it’s time I stopped shirking my duty.”
“I know about duties, Andrea. But one of mine is the duty of care. Suiting up, going through the airlocks, that’s all routine, and you know we all practice it for emergencies. But I understand if you’re not up to exposing yourself to the whole rigmarole unnecessarily.”
“I know, sir, and I appreciate your concern. But I’m over the miscarriage now.” She meant mentally, of course. Like all the others, staying physically fit was mandatory, and she’s kept up her regimen. “I’ve done it before, I can do it now.”
“Good. Thank you. Tomorrow then; let’s get it over with.”
***
They were from the Habitat’s third generation, and like everyone else knew both that their task would last centuries, and that they were fortunate their ancestors had been accepted for it before the Disaster struck. And they were all lucky, too, that genetic engineering good enough to keep their stock healthy had been perfected shortly before the mission began. While their completely isolated, self-sufficient home was still up to the challenge, though, there was no point being cavalier about it; regular checks of the outer membrane for wear and damage that the sensors might not have picked up were essential, for all that that meant two people had to leave the safety that had coddled and enclosed them all their lives. The Galactic Spirit that drove and nurtured their self-sufficiency helped those who helped themselves, after all.
She spent the rest of the day wandering the grass-lined corridors, humbled as always by how something so simple could be so critical to maintaining their air quality. If the worst happened, it would be a good last memory. On the way, she chatted quietly to the people she met, some of whom knew what she’d be doing in the morning, and some of whom remained blissfully unaware. On the whole, the latter were easier to deal with; the whole ‘maybe she won’t be alive much longer’ vibe was blessedly missing.
She took a leisurely dinner, treating herself to a sweeter-than-usual selection from the Habitat’s dispensers, on the basis that any extra calories would be lost to stress anyway. And if she didn’t make it back, they wouldn’t matter anyway.
***
When the time came, she met Marcia in the preparation room; they said little, tense and knowing their roles. A couple of techs fussed around them as they suited up, checking seals, and vitals, and air supply. Casual lookers-on, an unwanted and unhelpful distraction, were kept far away. All to soon, the pair stepped into the airlock, and the cycle began; in moments, they would step out into that most dangerous and unforgiving environment – the unwelcoming and parched surface of the Earth!
by submission | Jul 3, 2026 | Story
Author: Starlight
When I was a kid – however long ago that was, ten years or a hundred, I wouldn’t know – when I was a kid, there was this game we did in nursery.
Over, under, forward, back.
The teacher would give us all a toy and have us stand in lines like little soldiers. She’d shout her orders and we’d follow them. Over, she’d cry, and we’d hold the toys over our heads. Under, and we’d drop them to the ground. Forward, we’d thrust them out like trophies. Back, and this was the tricky one, we’d pull our arms as far backwards as they went, so that the toy hovered somewhere between our heads and the base of our necks. She’d yell them first in order, then out of order, and sometimes she’d repeat them a couple times and a kid would get nervy and hold the toy up when they were still meant to be holding forward.
It’s a pretty insignificant memory in the grand scheme of things. Still, it’s a memory I cling to. A mantra I repeat to myself.
Over, under, forward, back.
The ground is heavy, aggressive, fighting my every move, threatening to suck me down and keep me there until my flesh disintegrates so that it may flower again. I can’t blame it, not really. I’m far from the first person to tread this earth, I sure as hell won’t be the last.
All around me is the same. Sodden mud, lifeless clay that clings with a dying breath. It’s getting difficult to distinguish which timeline I’m in, and I think I’m one of the few who still knows that there was a way to tell the difference once, by which I mean never. Memories can get hazy when your timeline is overwritten. I’ve long since forgotten the faces of my family and am more worried about forgetting basic human functions that I have never been taught.
Over, under, forward, back.
I press forward. If I recall correctly, and who knows if I have, there’s a pickup point not too far from here. They’ll lock onto my signal, and they’ll take me back to the barracks, and probably give me a dressing down for getting separated from my troop but how is that my fault when my troop forgot to exist?
Water falls from the sky at a rapid pace – there’s a word for this phenomenon, but it doesn’t come to me. I’m soaked to the bone. Was there ever a time when I wasn’t? Sometimes it feels like all that exists is the immediate, that only the now is immutable, that after is unthinkable and before is unidentifiable. I focus on my breathing, focus on my limbs pumping forward and back, focus on the weight of water against my skin and remind myself that I must exist. I cannot forget that I exist. If I forget then I am finished.
Over, under, forward, back.
I can’t go back. Can’t even look back – Scared that if I do I there’ll be no footprints. There is no back to go to.
Over, under, forward.
My vision tunnels – my eyes blurred by liquid that is coming from somewhere. There is ground beneath my feet. I march on.
Under, forward.
Where am I going? What is the point? Did I ever know? Did it ever matter? I can’t keep moving – there’s nowhere to go. Nothing exists past there here and now.
The ground draws at my feet, and I go under.
