by submission | May 22, 2026 | Story |
Author: Shinya Kato
The grey cat Minuet was asleep on the windowsill.
Sunlight drifted through the glass and settled across her back. Outside, the campus lawn shimmered in the warm air.
“By the way,” Karim said.
“When the professor talks about his theory, he always raises his right hand and looks into the distance. You know — when he says, ‘The Sun and the ocean are connected.’”
Erena laughed softly.
“Oh, that gesture.”
She leaned back in her chair.
“I actually like it. For a moment, it feels as if the whole world connects inside his head.”
Karim frowned.
“Honestly, it looks like a teenager pretending to summon cosmic forces. He raises his hand and starts talking about auroras being ‘traces of energy convergence.’ The first time I saw it, I thought it was some ritual.”
Erena shrugged and lifted Minuet from the floor. The cat purred, and the faint projection of the magnetospheric structure field in the lab flickered slightly around them.
“Karim, you’re still young,” she said.
“You’ll understand that gesture someday.”
“There’s meaning in it?”
“Oh yes.”
She nodded toward the luminous mesh projected across the room.
“The professor isn’t looking at objects. He’s looking at connections.”
Karim glanced at the glowing threads floating in the air.
“You mean the environmental structure idea.”
“Yes.”
The projection showed a faint network spreading through the room, lines drifting like slow currents.
“In the old sense,” Erena said, “environment meant temperature, atmosphere, ocean currents. Physical things.”
She pointed to the display.
“But environment is really the structure formed by relationships between things — energy, matter, and fields.”
Karim tilted his head.
“Relationships between what?”
“Everything.”
She gestured toward the window.
“The Sun heats the ocean. The ocean moves the air. The air shapes the climate. Climate shapes life.”
She paused.
“And life shapes thought. Thought reshapes the environment again.”
Karim watched the shifting lines of light.
“So the environment isn’t just physical.”
“No.”
Erena looked outside.
“It includes minds.”
Karim laughed.
“That’s a big definition. By that logic, souls are part of the environment.”
Erena thought for a moment.
“Yes,” she said.
“They probably are.”
Karim shook his head.
“So one day, environmental science will study heaven.”
“Maybe it already does.”
Her voice sounded almost casual.
“If heaven isn’t a place but a phenomenon created by relationships between beings, then it may simply be another environmental structure.”
Karim blinked.
“The professor definitely says things like that.”
“Yes,” Erena said.
“With his right hand raised.”
They both laughed.
At the window, Minuet slowly opened her eyes.
Her ears twitched.
Something moved in the grass outside.
A mouse.
The cat lowered her body, muscles tightening.
Karim watched.
“You know,” he said, “cats catch mice as if they can see the future.”
“They predict a few seconds ahead,” Erena said.
“With their bodies.”
Karim considered this.
“So that’s also part of the structure?”
“In a sense.”
She nodded toward the lawn.
“The cat’s nervous system. The mouse’s movement. The vibration of the ground. The air. Gravity.”
“All of it forms one temporary structure.”
Karim nodded slowly.
“And when the cat jumps…”
“…that moment is a convergence.”
Minuet leapt.
The mouse darted away. The cat landed lightly on the grass, empty-pawed.
“Close,” Karim said.
But then he noticed something.
The projection in the lab had begun to shift.
The threads of light were bending westward.
Toward the ocean.
Karim frowned.
“Professor… this isn’t normal.”
Erena stood and looked at the display.
The structure field pulsed once, gently, like a wave passing through it.
“That shouldn’t happen yet,” she murmured.
“Yet?”
She didn’t answer immediately.
Instead, she looked toward the distant sea.
“The professor has a strange hypothesis,” she said at last.
Karim waited.
“He thinks environmental structures sometimes reorganize before physical systems respond.”
Karim blinked.
“You mean before the atmosphere reacts?”
“Before the magnetic field shifts.”
They both looked at the display again.
The luminous threads drifted slowly, as if the world itself were leaning toward the horizon.
Karim turned toward the window.
The Sun was lowering over the ocean.
Suddenly, the chain seemed obvious.
The Sun warms the ocean.
The ocean moves the air.
The air bends the grass.
The grass moves the mouse.
The mouse moves the cat.
The cat moves his own gaze.
All of it is inside the same structure.
Without realizing it, Karim lifted his right hand slightly.
As if testing the flow of air.
Or listening for something.
Behind him, Erena spoke quietly.
“See?”
Karim turned.
She was smiling.
“I told you. One day, you’d raise your right hand.”
Karim sighed.
“…This is bad.”
“Why?”
He looked back toward the sea.
“For a second,” he said,
“I think I understood the professor.”
Outside, Minuet wandered slowly through the grass again.
The structure of the world continued to shift.
Sun. Ocean. Air. Life. Thought.
Everything connected through patterns no one could quite see.
The sky above the campus was quiet.
Ordinary.
Still.
The Earth’s magnetic field had not yet begun to move.
The aurora had not yet appeared above New York.
That would happen a little later.
But something in the structure of the world had already begun to move —
long before physics noticed.
by submission | May 21, 2026 | Story |
Author: Frank T. Sikora
My father’s favorite test subject, a 57-pound bio-genetically altered male piglet, Wilboar, AKA Willie, soars over the storage shed. Its broad wings rhythmically flutter; its eyes dart up and down, left and right. A GoPro camera with AI-level stabilization lenses sits on Willie’s sleek head. I track Willie from the landing site, holding my breath in anticipation of another disaster, my weak legs barely holding steady. Wille, though, is unaffected by my anxiety. He squeals with delight.
My mother and brother, Finn, also follow, riding in the three-wheeler, ignoring the stream of piglet poop trailing behind the silly beast, ready to transport him back to the lab. Microsensors in Willie’s tissues, organs, muscles, and bloodstream allow Father access to multiple physiological data points; the quantum processor calculates probabilities, certainties, and unknowns, all in real time. After one more circle around the shed, Willie descends. Father’s joyful whoops pour through our headsets.
Until today, Willie never traveled more than 150 meters and only a few meters off the ground, tumbling like an overstuffed anti-aerodynamic sausage. Thankfully, mother insists on proper protective ware including a helmet and cup. Yes. I said that. Got to keep his genetic line intact. Can’t start over. Too costly.
Willie is the fifth in line of Father’s flight-engineered miniature swine, having previously experimented on other mammals. Willie’s bones are hollow like a bird’s. His high metabolism provides sufficient fuel for flight. Given their internal organs resemble ours, piglets are Father’s second experimental choice.
After Willie lands, I limp over and inject Willie with a small dose of Propofol. Once sedated, we will wheel him into Father’s lab, which sits behind the house and adjacent to the barn. We lift carefully, mindful of his wings, which span three meters across, plus his one-meter tail feathers.
In the lab, Father will examine Willie before placing him into his personal pen. If we kept Willie with the other hogs, they would tear him apart, jealous of his ability or just because he is different. So human are the swine: intolerant and cruel.
Inside, we pass a clinical history of Father’s failures. Failed experiments float in formaldehyde tanks — physical reminders of Father’s hubris: Poor creatures, bastardized and brutalized with eyes too human, and for what? Glory? Renown? It was Mother who insisted we keep them, hidden from the world but not from us.
I want to burn them all.
Father greets us, smiling and clapping. “Good work, my loves. Wonderful.”
It’s good to see Father happy. He comes over and wraps me up, “Big hug, my little Nova,” he says. I miss his hugs. Most days, he can’t even look at me.
“It’s guilt,” Mom said once. “He can’t forgive himself.”
“Can you forgive him?”
“No.”
It must be awful to live with a man you admire and yet loathe. I don’t loathe Father. He wants to change the world. He dreams of flight for all. I understand.
Mostly.
Me? I represent all that is good and bad about Father. He wants to fix me, but Mom insists that I remain as I am. No surgery. No alterations. A harsh lesson.
I wish I could go to school like Finn. I wish I didn’t have to hide behind an online AI persona. Father thought he could design a wonder child — a marvel for the world to behold.
Father kisses my forehead. “I admire you, so. You have your mother’s strength and grace.”
I know Father loves me. I wish I loved myself.
Someday.
I smile back, holding my tears at bay. I spread my useless wings and bow.
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 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.
