by Julian Miles | Apr 13, 2026 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
“There’s a devil on ma shoulder
It’s doin’ real good fer me
It’s not about breakin’ any rules
It’s all about keepin’ free…”
Greaseman Don’s on form today: dirty overalls attracting flies, red cap on backwards, boot stomping time on an empty crate while picking on a fuel can guitar. The man does wonders with that three-string, he really does.
“There ain’t no point in tryin’
When ya gonna fail that test
Better off not botherin’
Stayin’ like I am be best…”
I come down here every few months, just to remind myself of how people will adapt to anything, including the ruinous results of piss-poor voting choices.
“Workin’ nights at Freeport Hub
A good job passes the time
Honest work an’ honest pay
No need for govermint dime…”
Sounds great, but everybody in this borough survives on welfare: Faircare credits if they’re unemployed, Besthealth credits if they’re unemployable, and all the employed receive Workloyal credits because the wages are so low. The only advantage of qualifying for Workloyal is that you deteriorate slower than those receiving Faircare or Besthealth.
Don picks up the tempo.
“Expect too much yer’ll come up wantin’
Best ya stop yer dreams from hauntin’
Play life straight: jus’ toil an’ drink
Be one o’ the workers, no need ta think…”
This place can be bitterly depressing. Which is why military recruitment does so well: offering regular wages, regular meals, and – most importantly – a rent-free place to live in that’s far away from here.
“Afternoons drag when the shoppin’s done
Nothin’ ta do but ‘n extra beer run
Then stack the fridge an’ swipe the TV
Swig yer booze an’ love that AV…”
What everybody misses is that while it can be depressing, it’s still living. I’ve visited military barracks, law enforcement enclaves, and immigration officer high-rises. They all say it’s a good life, but I’ve seen more life in A.I. drone hangars. Kind of telling when a home populated by robots with the intelligence of cats has the most individuality.
“Call the girls an’ make that bookin’,
Weekend’s come an’ it’s time fer lookin’
Watch ‘em dance an’ make yer move
Walk like ya got noth-in’ ta prove…”
The biggest businesses in these areas are bars like this, prostitution, and 24-hour bodegas. Except on the weekends, when nightclubs compete for the number of drunks they can part from their fresh credit.
“Digital paradise ain’t missin’, oh no
Scan the dancer as she a’ go-go
Take that home an’ watch for free
Cheaper beer an’ no bonus time fee…”
The speed at which urban areas became wall-to-wall havens for weekday shut-ins surprised me. There are a few exceptions, but they’re cleaners, roaming security – or criminals.
“Goin’ down ta the homeware store
Gonna get me a portable I ain’t seen before
Take it home an’ learn it well
Show it off next meet an’ tell…”
What baffles me is the hatred for cities from rural areas. Urbanites are blamed for the agricorps taking over. Just about everyone works for them: living in their encampments, never venturing out except to work. The only alternative is subsistence farming.
When did freedom come down to nothing but two flavours of poverty: slow starvation or urban stagnation?
Don drops back to barebones the opening hook: just vocals and stomping.
“With this devil on ma shoulder
I don’t need nothin’ at all -”
Time to leave Greaseman Don to his adoring fans.
“Got no angel on tha other side
Jus’ da scar where she took a fall.”
There endeth today’s sermon. I’m out of here.
by submission | Apr 12, 2026 | Story |
Author: H. Young
The monastery was often quiet at shadow-time. There was something about the darkness that inspired a meditative silence among the monks of the Godhead. The giant metal beast that lurked in the sky cast its massive shadow down upon the earth beneath, bathing the planet in semi-night whenever the sun reached a certain height in the sky.
The only sound was bells and chimes that rang throughout the mountainside leading up to the monastery, stirred by the freezing wind brought on by the sudden darkness. Isaal Smithe staggered his way up to the high temple, arms wrapped around himself, holding his jacket tight to his body in order to save some warmth. Turning to look upwards at the sky before entering the temple, he cursed the Godhead silently. The empty monstrosity was indifferent to his displeasure, floating in space as it always had.
The high priest sat at his long wooden desk, sipping on a caramel-colored liquor that he swirled incessantly in its glass.
“All the supplies have been delivered, as usual,” Smithe told the clergyman, lurking in the doorway, itching to leave.
“Come in, Isaal, have a seat.”
Smithe grimaced and hesitated a moment before obliging the man. As much as he hated the cold, he hated more to be in the presence of the priest during shadow time. The man was prone to becoming overly preachy when his God blotted out the sun, and Isaal Smithe hated being lectured. It was only by necessity that he had come so late during the day.
“Many years ago you told me, but I’ve since forgotten. What is it that you believe God to be?” the priest pointed up at the Godhead.
Isaal chewed on his lower lip, uncomfortable; he swallowed hard before answering.
“A vessel.”
“A vessel?”
He sighed.
“Five hundred years ago, man longed to join the stars in heaven, so he built the Godhead as a means of transportation. For some reason he gave up, but left the skeleton of his desires in the sky as a reminder. Many years later, men like you have forgotten and have taken to worshiping our creation as if it was our creator.”
The priest’s beady eyes watched him with an amused glint.
“And what do you believe that God is?” the priest asked facetiously.
Smithe laughed in spite of himself. “Something in between an ethereal force and an old man in the sky? It’s never explicitly stated, and no one living really knows. The only way we know he exists are the prophets he sent us many years ago.”
“So you believe the words of men who died thousands of years ago over the specter of God that sits above your head and casts a second night upon you daily?” The cleric said with a smirk, but there was a thin layer of malice under the surface.
Isaal said nothing.
“I could have you killed for spreading such heresy, you know.”
He ignored the empty threat.
“I heard something in the market today that made me think of you,” he told the priest, still looking out the grand window and up at the derelict spacecraft that sat in the sky. “I heard that the Godhead is getting closer every year to the earth, and will one day come crashing down upon us.”
The priest was silent, taking a long sip of his drink.
“I guess your way or mine, God will someday rain fury down upon our heads.”
Isaal Smithe made his way back down the mountainside, grateful for the sun that had begun to peek out from behind the Godhead.
by submission | Apr 11, 2026 | Story |
Author: Logan S. Ryan
They landed and attacked faster than we could name them. They flattened armies like moist clay. They didn’t swarm the skies with high-tech ships or storm our streets with laser rifles. Our extermination wasn’t cinematic at all. They just rolled over us.
To no one’s surprise, social media was instantly flooded with the carnage. I got lost in doomsday posts while sitting on my porch. My cat Briciola was sprawled across my lap. One video had been taken in Rome– that meant invaders were just minutes away from my own town, wedged between Italy’s volcanic hills.
Their cloud-like bodies engulfed everything. Ornate architecture emerged from their haze as rubble. An alien billowed toward the filmer right before the clip ended. I shuddered. That could be me. That will be me. I looked up. Hysterical crowds slalomed through town.
I had vanished from work without a word. I hadn’t called my family in years. I had nobody to protect or flee with. I would never talk or laugh or reconcile with anybody again because I was dead. The aliens hadn’t come yet, and I was already dead.
What can a corpse even do? Icy adrenaline coursed through my body. I would run. It didn’t matter if I sprinted into a sanctuary or a stampede of annihilation. I lurched forward in my chair and–
Briciola gawked with offense in her jade-marble eyes, mewling softly in protest. She remained tucked in my lap, even though her hips half-dangled off the chair. “Go!” I spat. Her tail flourished up and down, as if to scold me.
I found myself kneading her silky, mottled fur. My palms became tender and adorned in stray strands of hair. Her body rippled with purring; the sensation seeped through the tattered quilt into my thighs. She offered a slow blink, which I returned. My joints creaked as I slouched back into a comfortable position. She draped her head between my knees with her eyelids lulled closed.
How could I shun such a delicate creature? I became transfixed by the flexing of her rubbery pads as her claws crocheted the quilt. We took deep breaths. The air passed through her hair-thin nostrils with the timbre of a tender flute and through mine like a drowsy cymbal. She flopped onto her back, exposing more waves of fur to my eager hand. Her warm paw furled around my knuckles, strapping my hand to her velvety chest, but she still wasn’t satisfied. I had to toss my phone aside so that my other hand could join the fray.
Haze crested over the hills. Screams ignited from every direction. They had us surrounded.
My gaze sank from the tumultuous streets back to Briciola’s still face. Despite the shrieking, she didn’t stir beyond the occasional twitch of an ear. If I were already dead, I might as well have died with a cat on my lap. Besides, if she wasn’t going to surrender so easily, why should I?
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.
