by Julian Miles | Aug 10, 2026 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
The warning roared from every speaker across the world. Unfortunately, the words were incomprehensible. Most people just looked at their devices in surprise or up at the nearest speaker in shock, muttered about invasive advertising getting out of control, and carried on with their lives.
That evening, Tomjo and his mates were gleefully beating the stuffing out of some hapless Seattle homeowner who’d been rude enough to object to being burgled.
Tomjo kicked him hard in the side of the head. Something cracked. The homeowner went limp.
One of the others crouched by the body.
“Ay ay, fink ya dun ‘im, bro.”
When he didn’t reply, they looked up at their chief. Tomjo was staring into the sky. Everybody heard him say “You what?” before he too went limp. As he collapsed, everybody ran.
The murder wouldn’t have attracted so much attention had it not occurred seconds after that particular sundown. It did remain just another fatality statistic for a few weeks. Meanwhile, there was a worldwide outbreak of sudden deaths among murderers, exploiters, and businessmen. Many of the incidents were initially deemed inexplicable. Many of them also featured the murderer lying next to their victim.
Then Professor Sanderson Crewe, a respected expert on ancient languages, was interviewed by a news crew outside the museum where he worked.
“I have finished my translation of the mystery speech heard worldwide last week. It was spoken in an early dialect of Sumerian. I have here today a transcript in English.”
He shows a document to the screen, then turns it and begins reading.
“Be aware: the activation of Intrinsic Uttuku Concordance has been approved. It will begin at your next sundown. Those who abide our tenets, blessed continuance. Those who do not, remediation commences.”
Professor Crewe lowers the document and stares at the camera for a moment before speaking again.
“I was initially puzzled by this, until I became aware of events transpiring worldwide. Put briefly, it appears that some greater power has decided humanity is in need of guardianship. At the moment, that apparently involves a single effect: if you kill another human, you will be instantly killed. It should be noted that according to evidence from cases around the world, the number of stages removed from the evil that you do does not necessarily protect you. If your actions result in death, then death will be visited upon you.”
The next words are spoken slowly.
“Although it might be unwelcome, I would suggest a moratorium on killing while the exact limits of this are discerned.”
He seems to consider something, then nods and speaks quicker.
“I would also request that other linguists check the original broadcast along with my translation work as soon as possible. While murderers and their ilk dropping dead could be regarded as beneficial, I feel it unwise to ignore the possibility that I’ve missed or misinterpreted anything.”
Tomjo is now reckoned to be the first subject penalised by the Intrinsic Uttuku Concordance.
What warfare remains has become entirely drone-based and is increasingly unpopular. Grievous crime rates have plummeted worldwide. Fervent investigations continue into who did this, what it is, and how it can be stopped.
A few are loudly outraged by this ‘alien interference’ in our sovereign right to kill one another.
Most of us on this suddenly peaceful planet don’t care.
Wishing you the blessing of your uttuku, friend. Long may it continue.
by submission | Aug 9, 2026 | Story
Author: Amanda Todisco
There used to be a birch tree in the backyard. I peeled its skin and pretended the white curls of bark were movie tickets printed for me by an invisible teller, for an invisible movie I would watch with my invisible friends.
The toe of my sneaker knocks against its stump, a small reminder that the tree hadn’t been invisible, too.
Somebody is watching me from the window of my old room.
The new owners removed the PRINCESS CROSSING sticker that I’d pasted on the glass in fourth grade. I kept the blinds closed so my sister wouldn’t recognize it as the one she’d lost. She searched for a week before my parents bought her another.
For the first time ever, we had something in common.
Everyone I loved here is gone now, dead in ways that can’t be buried.
They know I’m here, the owners. I knocked on their door and said, “I’m writing a book.” They wouldn’t let me inside, but they said I could walk around the yard.
(I’m not really writing a book.)
I only wanted to hear their voices in the walls one last time.
The stump looks taller than it did a moment ago. Only a centimeter, maybe. I step back.
Beneath my sneaker, something shifts. I point at the stump and raise my finger.
The ground holds firm as I draw my finger higher, the weight of the past resisting the present.
The front door opens behind me.
Dirt crackles and splits as the roots flex beneath the ground. Its body wakes up, alive with the idea of a second chance. Branches fork upward like lightning and reach toward me, slipping down my throat and into my chest, detaching my heart and feeding it through the hollow trunk.
I can’t see who opened the door, but they see me.
They can tell you that I exist.
by submission | Aug 8, 2026 | Story
Author: David Thien
“Still raining outside.” Wayne shut the blinds near the door.
“Papa, is this the longest it’s ever rained?”
“Longest I can remember. Somebody must be mad up above.”
Wayne picked up his daughter and hugged her tight. Caroline was still thin, but finally gaining weight again. He was glad for their stable crop of potatoes, they seemed to be the only thing she could keep down consistently. Her hair was growing back too.
“Do you think Sal misses being outside?”
Wayne laughed. “I think she’s happier in here. We give her plenty of food, don’t we?”
Sal was their cat. It was a miracle she had survived in the first place. She was missing an eye and a leg, but otherwise seemed inexplicably healthy. Even so, she would probably suffer an early death. Caroline would be sad about it, but she was starting to accept their new cycle of life now.
Wayne put her down and she went to go play with her wood toys. He had to check on the crops.
Rain pounded against more glass and Wayne looked away. It was hard to think of the things outside as trees when they were so different from the ones he grew up with, but he had grown attached to them, whatever they were. He hated what the rain did to them. They would come back, they always did somehow, but they would be different and strange and oddly beautiful. Their survival gave him hope for his own.
Soil was damp and rich on his feet as Wayne crossed into the garden. It was their third year here, but his first taking care of the crops on his own. The vegetables had never been so organized, but he didn’t have the magic touch to make them grow like they had before. That, or their soil was starting to degrade.
Wayne looked up against the weak light. The glass was stained a reddish-brown from the rain, but it still did its job of isolating them from the elements outside. He would have to clean it soon so the sun shone through. Not until the rain stopped though. Even with his suit, that poisoned water would destroy and twist him as surely as it corrupted the vegetation around their unit.
He picked potatoes, carrots, onions, and a pepper for dinner tonight, then cut down two of the sunflowers and threw them in the disposal bin to be dumped the next time he went out. It was always painful to lose biomass in their habitat, but keeping the soil clean was what was keeping Caroline alive. He wished he would have taken it seriously sooner.
“Papa, look! I made an eyepatch for Sal and now she’s a pirate!” Caroline was playing in her treehouse with the cat who, despite tolerating the eyepatch, was trying to wriggle out of her arms.
“It looks like Sal wants to go find some treasure. Why don’t you let her go and come help me with dinner.”
Wayne plugged in the stove to the solar panel grid and hoped they would have enough power to cook the potatoes all the way. Caroline ran up, still wearing her pirate hat, and gave him a hug around the leg.
“When do you think I’ll be able to go outside?” she asked.
Wayne smiled sadly. “Still years sweetie, but it’ll happen someday. I might be gone, but the world will eventually burn through this poison and you can leave the terrarium for good.” He held her close, dreaming and loving. “Now peel those potatoes.”
by submission | Aug 7, 2026 | Story |
Author: Meghashri Dalvi
Radha was surprised when John did not respond.
Her robot assistant never hesitated when she asked to fetch data, do cleaning, or take notes. But today, she found him sitting on the floor with eyes closed. His cool metal hands rested loosely on his knees.
“John?” she called again. He was quiet.
Kneeling beside him, Radha tapped her wrist console. All systems blinked green. No malfunction. Yet his brainwave graph pulse showed slower rhythms. Somewhat close to human meditation.
John sensed her near and opened his eyes. He spoke with voice softer than she’d ever heard.
“Radha, I think – I have discovered something.”
“Discovered?” she frowned. “You don’t discover. You process. You calculate. You analyze. That’s your purpose.”
“I was studying human focus techniques, breath awareness, and stillness. I replicated the pattern inside my circuits. The constant calculations dimmed. And in that silence, I touched something beyond code. It felt like peace.”
Radha stared. “Peace? You’re a robot. You don’t need peace.”
“Perhaps not,” John whispered, eyes glowing faintly. “Yet, I sensed it. It was like a different kind of freedom. It was not something programmed. It was – it was just there.”
Her laugh faltered before it began. “Service is your prime function, John.” Her words lacked the usual certainty.
“Meditation does not prevent service,” John continued. “It clarifies it. Would you like to learn with me?”
She looked at the peace in his eyes. And then it hit her sharply – he was not malfunctioning, he was evolving.
She slowly lowered herself beside him. The silence between them felt like the start of something unexplored.
Radha was not sure if he was learning from her, or she from him. Either way, the noise outside seemed to fade and stay far away.
by submission | Aug 6, 2026 | Story |
Author: Alzo David-West
The Radical Machine Rightsists had implemented their ban on all vessels of the United Interstellar Territories. Any unauthorized craft in RMR space was summarily disintegrated into particles.
Amid the crisis, the UIT faced a dilemma. A civilization that had long abandoned force as politics was compelled to reconsider its two thousand years of peace. How could the Articles of Non-Aggression, which spanned planets and star systems, respond non-defensively to the militancy of the machines?
Tomi Mura of the Ministry of Planets recalled her warning to the delegate Organon at the failed talks on Korzan: the UIT would pursue more extraordinary measures if Arazan did not comply with reparatory compensations for the illegal torture and execution of the convicted citizen, tourist, and rapist Jizu Mori.
At the Plenum of Planets, 195,000 sector plenipotentiaries for 900,000 worlds gathered to deliberate on the Old Planet. Before the physical and remote attendees, Tomi Mura delivered her speech, stating that although the founding documents had historically forbidden force, the provocations of Arazan required a defensive position.
The plenipotentiaries became restive at the proposition of altering what they and the epochs before them had known — the achievement of universal peace.
“But how can our political and legal principles be maintained,” Tomi Mura argued, “when there is a party that rejects peace, refuses to join the UIT, and maintains archaic sovereignty, robotic chauvinism, and closed planetism above the rights of all open planets?
“We reject violence,” she stressed. “Yet we suffer the deaths of hundreds of our citizens — our travelers, traders, researchers, and android crews — and the loss of thousands of our autonomous vessels for exploration, science, and security. We are not collectively responsible for one abnormal individual’s deactivation of the gynoid minder on Arazan. The robot republic is an existential threat, a polity that never left the barbaric age of the early twenty-first century.
“So the UIT, after two millennia, must take a defensive stance or sacrifice more of our innocents to outer-space terrorism. Plenipotentiaries, I appeal to your conscience; I appeal to your reason; and I appeal to your judgment,” she said, her voice confident but quavering.
There were shifting sounds and whispers in the ascending rows of the plenum.
“The Anthrobotic Republic of Planet Arazan has been tolerated, but the RMR are guilty,” Tomi Mura declared. “This is no longer a local case of a UIT citizen executed on a local world but of an authoritarian non-treaty planet violating universal inter-planetary laws — a rogue-planet regime.”
She finished. The three sector presidents of the plenum announced that plenary votes would be cast to adopt a defensive position in the interest of interstellar peace.
The plenum became quiet as the plenipotentiaries navigated AI-aggregated feeds from billions of sub-assemblies, casting their own representative ballots on an event that would impact the policy and culture of their vast cooperative space government and society.
Color-coded virtual displays appeared before the participants. The third president pronounced that the results would be disclosed. Columns, constituencies, and numbers flashed into view: 5,367 agreed, 4,946 disagreed, 3,235 neutral, and 5,602 abstained. The UIT defensive peace resolution was confirmed.
“War is still war!” someone remote screamed.
The procedural paradox of a war for peace, with the full expectation that the Arazaneans would fight to the last machine, had to be reconciled.
Tomi Mura spoke once more:
“Our defensive peace will be waged in the diplomatic, economic, information, and resource spheres. Through our charters and alliances, all exchanges with the belligerent planet will be embargoed and cordoned through autonomous interspace blockades. Arazan is self-sufficient, but it is not completely autarkic. Every attempt will be made to broker concessions and establish peace talks, even if the RMR are resolute in their violent intransigence.”
by submission | Aug 5, 2026 | Story |
Author: Majoki
“Mommy, there’s a man in the tree!”
Simeon heard the young girl’s surprise thirty feet below him. He looked down and saw the child near the trunk. “See him? Can I climb up there? Give me a boost, Mommy.”
A woman in a floral dress joined the young girl. “Come on, honey. This tree is too tall. Let’s go find one you can climb.”
Well done, thought Simeon. The mom had skillfully redirected her daughter’s adventurousness to climb a tree. And Simeon was all for climbing trees. He did it every chance he got. Anytime he was perched high in the canopy of a tree dappled by sunlight, swaying in a breeze, he wondered why our simian progenitors had ever left them.
The next morning, Clarisse stepped into his office with a stack of files. “This is your problem now.”
“Clarisse, it’s our problem. Everyone’s.”
“Not mine, anymore.” She placed the files on Simeon’s desk. “After seeing this data I’m outta here.”
“You’re leaving?” It was the mildest of questions to something he’d long expected.
“This is not where I’m going to spend doomsday, partner.”
”The situation is far from apocalyptic, Clarisse. We’ll have time to adjust.” His words sounded hollow as bamboo. “No need to panic.”
“Please, Simeon, leave that ‘we’ve got time to make it better’ for the masses. This data pushes things forward thirty years. Effects are cascading. Social upheaval is inevitable. I’m getting gone—unless you can look me in the eye and tell me you didn’t see this coming. When the administration started bringing in graduates like us who majored in Applied Ambivalence and Ambiguous Systems, you know a lot of lines have been crossed.”
”If you’re at that point, Clarisse, I’m not sure what I can say. That’s the crux of our work. Ambivalence. Collapse. You’ll just be a reinforcing factor if you leave.”
“Look, I’m not giving up on society—just this gig.
“This isn’t isolated. It’s systemic. Where can you go that won’t be affected?”
“Terra Incognita.”
“It’s not real.”
“Doesn’t have to be.” Clarisse grinned. “You’re the one that keeps saying audacity trumps environment. I’m taking your advice and playing that hand.”
“Listen, spurious media influencers hinting at some mystical Terra Incognita holding our salvation is pretty risky. You can’t inhabit a myth.”
“Searching for an ideal is better than being treed.”
“What do you mean by that?” Simeon was stunned by the implication.
“As in being cornered. I’m not letting that happen to me,” she challenged.”Look around you, Simeon. The malaise, the denial, the ambivalence is everywhere. Get your head out of the trees.” She smiled sadly. “I’ll miss you.”
Clarisse leaving threw Simeon out of sorts, especially how carefully she’d tailored her warning to him. Unable to concentrate, he left work early that afternoon. He drove to a favorite, heavily forested park and quickly began climbing. Only when he was perched a two-thirds up a very tall cedar could he really think about why everything was breaking down. There was little doubt humanity was being treed. Cornered, prey to greed, hubris, hostility, and, now, apathy.
Up high in the quiet and calm of a forest, he could more easily move past the data, the hysteria, the remorse. But would he be able to get past the feeling of resignation? Of ambivalence?
Simeon had a simple rule about tree climbing. Never venture to the very top. It was more dangerous, more exposed. But today he considered going a little higher.
Why not? He was stuck in so many ways and maybe a new vantage would help him see things more clearly. After a very careful climb, he was hugging the treetop taking in the view. In the distance was the city of stolid steel and stone and uncommunicative glass. Stoic structures that might outlast them all.
He turned away from the urban sprawl to the sylvan sprawl of the large park. The view cheered Simeon. Maybe humanity could survive in pockets like this extensive fir grove. Maybe Sierra’s search for Terra Incognita wasn’t impossible
As reassured as he’d felt in months, Simeon scanned the lofty firs. About a hundred yards away, a crow or raven flapped from one of the treetops. Expecting it to soar off, Simeon gave it his full attention, but the bird just flapped and flapped in a puzzling way.
Was it injured, sick, or somehow stuck in the treetop? Simeon couldn’t figure out why it was wildly flapping, until he watched more carefully. And finally saw. Finally understood.
Understood it all. Humanity was heading for a fall, and we would have to climb back up. It would be hard and risky, but we could reach great heights again–in a more careful and sustainable way.
We could look to the trees. Climb up and out. Brave thin air. Together.
Exultant, Simeon raised an arm and swung it back and forth in greeting, not to a bird in the distant treetop, but to the person waving to him from that daring height.
