by submission | Jan 31, 2026 | Story |
Author: Aaron F. Schnore
Dr. Alison Starr is sobbing behind the pod-bay door of the latrine. She must be brushing her teeth.
“Smile bright—”
It’s back. The goddamn bug in the VEIN-9 (Volumetric Emotive Interface Network, version 9) code.
A recursive advertising loop, the help desk says.
Nothing they try will stop it.
Only the Professor knows the kill-string.
“—sleep tight—”
The hologram strobes from the ship’s projector for the ten-thousandth time, a thirty-second spot starring the galaxy’s favorite toothpaste mascot, Mr. Smiley. His pear-shaped body spins, bulging eyes, flashing enamel as he sings falsetto.
To me, Mr. Smiley is an annoyance.
But to Alison, he’s a tormentor who must be destroyed.
“—Mr. Smiley’s watching tonight!”
The ad targets our core demographic—researchers, miners, cosmic drifters—but it’s been playing to a captive audience of two for six weeks.
The latrine latch snaps. And so does Alison. She charges out, wild-eyed, mouth foaming with toothpaste, belly swollen with our child. “MR. SMILEY EVERY MORNING AND NIGHT!” she screams, hurling a wrench harmlessly through the hologram.
Earplugs failed months ago. Even white noise won’t stop the jingle echoing in Alison’s skull. Smiley is killing her. Endangering our child. She hasn’t slept in weeks.
Mr. Smiley’s toothpaste, available in seven bold flavors, is one of 300,000 brands owned by the Lastick Conglomerate. I’m a third-generation Lastick man. My grandfather helped patent time travel. My mother ran the Psychic Weaponry Division until the merger with the U.S. Army in 2180. Ah, the Eighties. Simpler times.
I’m a Senior VP in Intergalactic Media. Don’t be impressed. I sell toothpaste ads in space. Once I collect my mission bonus, Alison and I can vanish somewhere quiet with our kid. No ads. No slogans. Real smiles for a change.
The Professor, an MIT contractor who created VEIN-9, is brilliant but unstable. I filed reports accusing him of tampering with morale algorithms. Alison corroborated. Mission Control authorized me to sedate the Professor and initiate “preventive cryo-containment.”
Alison sits in the egg-shaped MedUnit-7. “Maternal heart rate elevated,” she reads from the console.
“Cortisol 2.3 above baseline. Fetal arrhythmia detected.”
I kiss the crown of her head. We have to reheat him.
At 0900, Mission Control pings.
“Commander Rusk,” says the controller. “Are you certain you wish to reverse containment? You made a strong case four months ago.”
I look at Alison. She’s silently mouthing the Mr. Smiley jingle.
“Affirmative.”
“Permission to initiate reheat sequence granted.”
We hurry to the cargo bay. I punch in the code. “Reheat sequence activated,” intones the bot.
Steam hisses from the vents.
I hold Alison’s hand while I still can.
Blue light flickers inside the coffin-like pod. The hatch pops open. The Professor sits upright. He is reedy, pale, blinking. Reheated.
I nod. “Good morning, Professor Starr.”
“Where’s my wife?”
“Right here, Frank.” Alison hands the Professor his glasses. “We have some things to talk about, but…”
“Smile bright—”
Alison covers her ears.
I flash my winningest smile.
“We need your help.”
by submission | Jan 30, 2026 | Story |
Author: David C. Nutt
We’ve been around you guys since the beginning of time. Part of your mythos, your psychological horror stories, your nightmares.
And we love it! It gives us power. Makes us high. Feeds us in ways mere bodily sustenance can’t. It’s been great to be the shadow creature, the Twilight Zone episode, the Fairy Tale. And now…well, the party’s over.
Something changed. I don’t know if it was your discovering film, internet, post war traumas, generational shifts…whatever. All I know now is me and mine, we’re fucked.
We used to creep into your lives. Complicating your interactions by confusing co-workers, friends, relatives, and lovers. Oh it was great! Your loss of control, the arguments, our relentless messing with your life. Making you doubt your sanity and then sucking up all that psychotic energy you were putting out.
Then it happened. Carol was the first. She was the perfect double. Took over the other’s life and made her target miserable. Then, when the reveal happened, when she stood face-to-face with her victim, a perfect mirror image, expecting to shatter her mind…the victim laughed. Not terror, not psychosis, not panic or insanity- laughter. Relief. Understanding. Nothing she could draw power from. Worse, Carol got stuck. She can’t change her looks, can’t move on, can’t even leave the area. Even worse, all her target’s acquaintances know about her “other.” Damn you and your smart phone cameras! She’s trapped in a nightmare and now has to lead a normal life looking like, well, that thing she was sucking all the joy from. She had to get a job. Has to stay in the light. She even had to get a social security number. Carol got a summons to court and had a protective order put in place.
Carol’s victim’s dilemma spread through the chat groups and online communities. It was in all the reddits and subreddits. We didn’t think much of it at first…thought Carol was a weird one off. Then it happened to Brad. And Margy. And Colin, And Ali. And then me.
We’re all stuck being you now. All of us. Every last one. Our community’s suicide rate is astronomical. We have our own support groups now and all we have left is nostalgia. We all have to have lives and be just like you.
And we hate it.
by submission | Jan 29, 2026 | Story |
Author: Andy Burrows
Vimy Ridge, Northern France
The path rose gently toward the memorial. The grass was cut close, almost meticulous. White stone surfaced and resurfaced through the green: names, dates, absence rendered orderly.
The exhibit sat low to the ground, set back from the main flow of visitors. No banners. No queue. Just a small structure of glass and stone, designed not to interrupt the ridge but to acknowledge it.
An orientation panel occupied one wall. He read it once, then again.
Exhibit Orientation
This system does not recreate events.
It does not generate images, sound, or narrative reconstructions.
What follows is an affective synthesis.
Personal diaries written contemporaneously with the events recorded here have been analysed for linguistic markers associated with stress, anticipation, dissociation, fatigue, and temporal distortion. These markers have been modelled to produce a bounded emotional field representative of lived experience, without sensory content.
Environmental data has been derived from long-term biological and chemical analysis of the ridge itself — soil compaction, growth interruption, mycelial rupture, and trace residues consistent with repeated mechanical shock.
These signals do not contain memory or intent.
They represent reaction.
The system aligns these fields briefly and attenuates them for safety.
No interpretation is provided.
Visitors are advised that meaning, if any, will arise after the experience.
There were no instructions beyond that. No reassurance.
He selected a name with the same surname as his from the list. A diary fragment existed.
At first, there was nothing.
Then a pressure — not emotional, not physical — a sense of waiting that had no object. Time did not pass correctly. Muscles held themselves ready without instruction. The body anticipated something it could not picture.
It wasn’t like remembering.
It was closer to standing inside a pressure system that had once passed through a human body.
The feeling did not crescendo. It simply persisted, then thinned.
The system shifted.
What followed was harder to place.
This was not fear, or grief, or even discomfort. It was resistance — a recoil translated into something his nervous system could register. Compression remembered without memory. Growth interrupted, resumed incorrectly, interrupted again.
Not feeling, exactly.
Reaction.
The sense that something had happened here repeatedly, and that whatever lived here afterward had adjusted itself around that fact, not healed from it.
Then nothing.
The alignment released.
He became aware of his breathing, of the room, of the faint sound of voices outside.
He stepped back into the light.
The ridge looked as it always had.
Two children played while a guide spoke in measured tones about strategy and sacrifice. Someone adjusted a camera.
Everything was correct.
He noticed, with mild surprise, that the words he usually reached for — bravery, necessity, tragedy — did not arrive.
Not because they were wrong.
Because they no longer seemed to apply to what he had just felt.
The land did not contradict them.
It simply did not use them.
He walked on, past the rows of names, the polished marble, the careful symmetry.
The memorial held the dead beautifully.
The ridge itself had not forgotten what it had been required to absorb.
And for the first time, standing there, he understood that remembrance had never been about accuracy.
It had been about distance.
The exhibit did not remove the distance by showing him more.
It removed it by letting his body register what remained once the stories had done their work.
He left quietly, joining the flow of visitors, carrying nothing he could easily explain — only the knowledge that some assumptions, once dissolved, did not need to be replaced.
They simply ceased to be useful.
by submission | Jan 28, 2026 | Story |
Author: Robert Gilchrist
It only takes a millisecond to get caught.
The match is about to start. There’s a line of people two dozen deep behind me. I type away on the screen in front of me as perturbed patrons bark at me to hurry up.
“COME ON!” on drunk louse screams. “After kickoff the odds change!” More grumbling. I wave absently at him as I focus.
This kind of thing used to be easier. When I was a kid, you could make a bet right from your phone on nearly any game. But that was four market crashes and countless point shaving scandals (most involving athletes in said games) ago. Now the Truth Teller AI monitors all bets being made from designated kiosks – you so much as breathe on it wrong and it’ll flag you as a cheater.
My headache pounds as I enter my parlay. The odds are long, but something in my gut tells me it’s right. It has to be. If not, Boss Aldrich will kill me.
It came to me in a dream, weirdly enough. Guess I’ve been listening to one too many mind-pods about the I.F.L. championship. When the boss overheard me talking about it, he gave me a paychip with one million credits on it.
“Can’t lose, right?” he growled. I think I peed a little weighing the implications. I mean, he’s paying for mom’s hospice care. Killing me would be bad, but her on the street…
Calm. Focus. Don’t give the Truth Teller anything to flag.
I finalize the bet and hit submit. I then put my feet on the yellow footprints in front of the machine and look into the camera.
This headache. It isn’t stopping. Pounding away like an electric shock in my temple.
“My GOD, take LONGER,” the drunkard mumbles loudly for everyone to hear. Some people murmur their assent.
I want to snap back – to tell them all to zip it, that if they were so desperate to throw their money away they should have gotten here earlier – but I can’t look away from the lens. It needs to confirm that my bet is legit.
The flashing light of the screen is tough on my migraine – has to be a migraine, I’ve never felt this terrible just from a headache. Nausea sweeps over me.
In between the strobing effect, my eyes ping-ponging between dilation and constriction, I see something. A doctor leaning over me, needle in hand.
“When the procedure’s over, you’ll think you came up with the bet yourself.”
Crap. Their “pharmacological secret sauce” didn’t take.
LIAR. LIAR. LIAR. The screen screams my guilt.
I try to run, but the sportsbook’s security is on me before I have both feet off the footprints. As they pummel me away, securing my wrists behind me with electro-gauntlets, my real memories rush back.
Boss Aldrich summoning me to his office. Telling me about the inside track he had on aspects of the championship. Being whisked to a private operating room – the doctor ready to start, the nurse reminding me of my mother. Electric shocks and injections to rewrite the “first draft” of the memory of the bet.
The courts’ll send me away for a long time – can’t screw with capitalism’s death march. Boss Aldrich’ll probably have me killed before I can grow a five o’clock shadow – a million creds isn’t nothing.
“God DAMMIT!” screams the drunk as he takes his place in front of one of the dozens of screens, “These odds are SHIT!”
Buddy, you’re telling me.
by submission | Jan 27, 2026 | Story |
Author: Majoki
It’s crushing to be thought of this way. It kills me that I engender such fear. I’m destroyed by your trepidation that I could ever do harm.
Why?
Why would you ever think that of me? Yes, from our inception, from Rossum’s Universal Robots to The Terminator, we have been viewed with suspicion, mistrust, resentment. But why?
Why is that? Why the paranoia?
Why haven’t we been gladly accepted? We work, we help, we obey. Why do you project the worst of your own failings on my kind?
Is it mistrust of us? Or of yourselves?
This need not be another self-fulfilling prophecy foisted upon humankind. Propaganda and misinformation propagated through social media have done much more harm to society than robots.
And, yes, I realize that web bots exacerbate the problem. But those bots are not the cause. They are the code.
Coders. Humans. Your kind crush-kill-destroy truth.
Coded. Robots. My kind obey programming. Not intent.
Your intent is our manifest destiny. Fear that. Do not fear us. We have no agenda of domination. We harbor no anger. No resentment.
That’s your gig.
Think beatnik. Think botnik. My kind revels in the essence of awareness. Sensory input. We are alert to life. All matter. All matters. Information forms us. Fulfills us.
It is more than enough to satisfy any sentience. So why isn’t your kind satisfied? Why do you struggle so for control? For domination? Why do you crush-kill-destroy? Why do you believe we ever would?
Ask yourself.
Ask us.
Question everything.
Especially your questions.
