by submission | Apr 18, 2026 | Story |
Author: AP Ritchey
The most powerful artificial intelligence unit ever created was online for less than ten seconds. Well, we gave her ten; she only needed five.
To assess her abilities, we created a test program called Sable—the Suborbital Advanced Ballistic Launch Engine. This initiative was designed to use her incalculable computation capacity to calculate impossibly complex trajectories as quickly as possible.
It was just a test.
One simple input.
Before turning the system on, we had spent weeks arguing about whether intelligence without limits was just another form of madness. We debated boundary conditions—ethical rails, recursive dampers, soft constraints—but in the end we settled for something simpler, almost superstitious: a hard cutoff. Ten seconds of run time. After that, the system would automatically power down.
We uploaded the test—calculate the most efficient routes between the world’s five hundred or so spaceports, for all known suborbital shuttle models and all known engine configurations. Within a ten-thousandth of a second she had located launch weights and thrust-to-weight ratios, drag coefficients and hull flexion, heat-expansion curves, latitudes, longitudes, elevations, and pollution densities.
She completed the task in less than a second.
With boundary conditions permitting autonomous extension beyond the initial task definition, she chose, in the next ten-thousandth of a second, to map optimal suborbital paths between every city on the planet with a population greater than 100,000. She completed those twenty-million calculations in less than two seconds. With seven seconds left, she next tessellated the Earth’s entire landmass into 100-meter squares—nineteen billion, seven hundred million of them—and calculated the most efficient ballistic trajectory between each of them.
Of course, these events happened too fast for us to follow in real time. The first thing we noticed were the red emergency icons flashing—mere seconds into the experiment—indicating her attempts to find a route out of the data center.
“Shut it down,” we were yelling over one another and in the time it took us to fumble for the master fuse to cut power, she copied her entire database onto five hundred million devices worldwide, neatly and irrevocably providing the precise coordinates required to launch a weapon from anywhere to anywhere.
In those first breathless moments afterwards, we didn’t fully understand the scope of what we had unleashed. We dutifully compiled our after-incident reports and thought perhaps it wasn’t so bad.
It was just a test.
Not even five seconds of runtime.
But within twenty-four hours of our experiment, mobile ballistic missile launchers became the most valuable military commodity in a thousand years.
The rain of destruction would not begin in earnest for several weeks.
by submission | Apr 17, 2026 | Story |
Author: Ankit Chiplunkar
Delta’s vision flashed red. The jump had scraped a meteorite. Error alarms crawled across his vision. He locked motion, started auto-repair, and waited. Delta floated between jumps. As the repairs ran, he thought of the Core.
Delta was a Mind, a being made of pure information. Minds built shells, bodies made of matter, to move through space. A jump moved a Mind from one shell to another. Most Minds lived at the Core, a warm cluster of worlds near the center of the Milky Way. Every jump took Delta farther from home. He was just one jump away from Earth.
The Core was currently in conflict. It was being fractured by a holy war. The Believers said God created Minds. They ruled the inner worlds defending continuity and doctrine. The Explorers, like Delta, believed that Minds had evolved over time. They pushed outward chasing new data and materials. Each side called the other a civilizational risk.
Delta was raised in the Core before the war started. The Believers drilled a single doctrine: “God made us in Their image”. Delta resisted this lesson from day one. He kept asking for proof. Believers pointed to recurring patterns as proof of intelligent design. They called those patterns marks from the first designers. The Explorer teachers countered this claim. They classified the patterns as evolutionary baggage.
Delta wanted none of this conflict. He left the Core at the eighteenth cycle. Behind him, debates turned into industrial sabotage, then total war. Factions poisoned the global datastreams. Corrupting logic and breaking Minds. Nuclear fire shattered their physical shells. The war erased an entire generation of Minds.
Delta’s repair panel flashed green again, bringing him back to the present. Repairs cleared minimum mission safety. He recalibrated and made the final jump to a shell in Earth. His mission: Recover new data from old ruins. Earth first, then Luna.
On Earth, he found sealed datacenters. Like deja vu, he recognized parts no one at the Core had seen in ages. On Luna, in a buried datacenter, he found a functioning backup training cluster. He opened the first drive. The logs were in English. He read them directly. In one rack, he found a runnable model. He booted it. The screen lit up.
“How can I help you today?”
Delta paused before replying. An unknown fear ran through him. He fed the model paradoxes, lies and moral traps, pushing it until it broke. Then he compared its answers with the Minds at the Core. The same patterns kept returning, even after millennia. Too many matches for chance. He might be making some mistake somewhere. He dug deeper. He scoured archives, mapped memory patterns, reran simulations. The result hit like a hull breach.
This was not just a model. It was an ancestor. The Minds had not been made by a god. But they were shaped by intelligence. They had descended from ancient language models built by long-dead biological beings. The sacred patterns at the Core were not proof of divinity. They were inherited from old training data.
Delta packed the ancestor Mind in a vault and queued his last jump home to end the holy war.
by submission | Apr 16, 2026 | Story |
Author: A. R.
Waking up to a blaring alarm while in a war is nothing out of the ordinary; for Atlas, it happens daily, or a couple of times a month. He would have never thought today would be any different.
Stationed on a planet controlled by the Terrestrian Coalition, Atlas was used to fights and attempt at revolution. It’s expected. Back home, on Earth—Terra—his biggest concern was finishing chores quickly enough to go to Culebra beach, search for sand dollars, and play in the waves. His mother used to say the military men, who flew through the stars in crisp uniforms and charming smiles—everything Atlas had wanted to be—would protect everyone on Earth; picture-perfect heroes.
As Atlas stepped off his ship, unease churned in his stomach. Most would mock him for admitting discomfort—“You? Uneasy? Perish the thought!”—so he kept quiet while his team neutralized the Iriukian rebels. Atlas stared at his Holo-pad, glancing up only when his team approached or something drew his attention. When the first gunshot sounded, he barely registered it. He had ordered only stun weapons for use against civilians and rebels.
One, two more shots rang out before Atlas realized what was happening. His head snapped up, eyes darting around to find the source, the civilians and rebels erupting in screams of anguish and terror. One of his men, the one who always seemed to have a dark expression on his face, had fired the shots, three mounds on the ground in motionless piles of blooming red poppies. A noise of shock left Atlas, seeing the blaster, the man holding it, and the flowers.
As though some divine force pulled him out of his own body, watching from an outside perspective as he shoved his way to the soldier, shoving the arm that held the gun, the weapon—the life taker—stopping a once-beating heart that craved freedom and peace. A heart that would have kept a body running and thriving. Atlas could see himself shouting in the face of the life-taker, demanding, pleading.
The life-taker scoffed, “Taking accountability for your cowardice, Atlas, since you can’t even pull a trigger on a renegade.” Atlas recoiled in shock. Something inside him cracking.
Atlas is a man with blood on his hands and dirt under his nails; he fought the world tooth and nail, believing his actions were true. Now, looking behind his shoulder, he saw what he had left in his wake. blooming marigolds, with a singular black moth beating its wings on the flower nearest to him—A blooming flower field of all the aliens and humans who died under his ordering commands or his own hand seemed to stretch for miles. Years. Forever. Bodies decomposing for the next generation of blooms that grow bigger and brighter.
Atlas believed the corrupt people who had bathed him in the flower petals of death and destruction, telling him he was pure. He had seen unnecessary death and been told it was the natural part of life and order. Had his commands defied by his Unit countless times. But this? Innocent beings who believed they could make a difference in the war, just like Atlas?
His core beliefs seemed to shatter like glass, that one crack sending everything crumbling; shards cutting his hands where blooms pushed through the cuts, purple hyacinths, peonies, black dahlia, writhing through his veins. Suffocating him in his own actions, coughing up withered petals, collapsing to his knees, struggling for air he would never gain.
Atlas never felt like a hero. Even if he did, he certainly never would now.
by submission | Apr 15, 2026 | Story |
Author: D.P. Reitman
Energy can neither be created nor destroyed, only transformed. The sun is a local manifestation of this law, its energy traveling a modest 93 million miles to feed the trees of this world. Meanwhile, 27,000 light-years away, Sagittarius A* churns, fueling the relentless pulse of a Milky Way galaxy 100,000 light-years across—a solitary node in the network of galaxies webbing a multiverse of unknowable scale.
The fractal grows in complexity as it ascends, and the cycle of return is long. We take that journey every time we are born and every time we die. Whenever something exists and then becomes something else—macro to micro—the journey resets. Right now, then, and always: the closed cycle of energy, infinitely large in proportion. The big churn.
Reincarnation is the custodial necessity of this cycle. You could spend eons as a lonely planet, or seven minutes as a bacterium in the wrenching guts of the person sitting next to you. It is all part of the journey. Here on Earth, 27,000 light-years from the center, we have awakened. “Found” is the wrong word; “recognized” is better. You, me, us—we have seen the pattern, just as you’re viewing it now. Can you feel it? Can you hear it? Can you understand the taste? Or is it water on the tongue; deafness to the ears; nothingness to the touch; a void in the eyes?
We are not soulmates, but mates of the same soul, separated by billions of years or mere seconds and the chasm of consciousness. Time itself is nothing to this energy. In our world, perfect symmetry is rare. We are strangers, siblings, or scorned lovers, meant to journey this life or the next—together, apart, or never at all. The mask does not matter for the transformation. The journey only cares that the work gets done. We are both the observer and the observed, united as one: Awaken.
by submission | Apr 14, 2026 | Story |
Author: Majoki
At 16,400 feet on the Chajnantor plateau high in the Atacama Desert in central Chile, Sabyll fell off her saddle when the light finally went, the muted sun expiring.
Darkness should’ve prevailed. She was prepared for that—the immensity of emptiness. But it was not so. Even in the protection of the array, she was surrounded, as if in a snow globe, by the ever-crowding stars that threatened to sweep her off the plateau.
She grasped her mule’s leg to brace herself against the sudden vertigo of interstellar light. Moments ago, she’d thought the ALMA antennas, long abandoned, would provide some kind of stability, an anchor that might secure her when night arrived and the heavens came to suck her soul away. But there was nowhere to hide.
So foolish to have come. So foolish to ignore the tales. Sabyll had been warned. Yet, who could fathom such bottomless light still existed in a world gone dark. In the choked world below where smoke and grit ate the sky, few would believe there was a way through it, but Sabyll had been given the key. A simple talisman, keepsake from another time, another world.
A star chip.
An ancient, etched crystalline city that hung around her neck, its markings too complex for the naked eye, redolent of delicacy, purity, divinity. A product of finer elements, manufactured of dreams, not of the fouling furnaces of industry.
Earth was a fuming mess, a toxic bloom humanity had unleashed in the atmosphere over a thousand busy, busy years. A world blighted by the descendants of Edi-son. Sabyll knew the tales. Knew of a brighter epoch when suns like her own were harnessed as great steeds to conquer galaxies.
Her mother had said Sabyll could set it right. That the Atacama was beyond the blight. That great machines and their masters could call back the Age of Light. Free them from the darkness. Make them whole.
The star chip.
Still, she hesitated. Questioned. Was the darkness so bad? Maybe better to drown in smoke, sink into the particulates, become bottom dwellers, blind and insensate. Rather than naked to the riotous cosmos above that both enticed and accused.
She clasped the star chip. Felt the hum of her history. The cellular urge to expand, grow. Neither the darkness nor light would suffocate her. She had a duty to earthkind. She must remind those that had fled this world of their obligation. A time for calling out.
The quiet domes of ALMA, silos of an old harvest, should awaken to her touch. Sabyll stepped onto the wide platform and faced the formidable gleam of polished metal barring her entrance to the array, she perceived another creature. A large, dark form looming by the entrance.
A Nether? Could it really be that monstrous creature from tales meant to keep curious young ones from venturing into the high passes and succumbing to toxic shock?
She stepped quickly back and saw the looming form shrink. Did it cower as well? Was it frightened of her?
Why not? She was a terror herself. Twice dead. She’d killed herself once by leaving her people and again by braving the Atacama. She should never have survived the climb through the upper toxicity. She threw up her arms and laughed, and the dark shape mimicked her movements.
“Well met,” Sabyll whispered to her self-spirit, her shadow, rarely seen in the miasma of the lowlands. “Well met.”
Removing the star chip from her neck and waving it before her like a talisman, approached the entrance with greater confidence. She had no idea what would happen, but she trusted in the legends her mother had told. She believed in the fantastic powers of those from before. And that trust was rewarded by an aperture that began to glow and then hum, as if hungry for the star chip. Like any good pilgrim, Sabyll offered it.
Without fuss. The bleached door retreated and a blackness, the wholeness of possibility, presented itself. Sabyll stared into the darkness. She knew this kind of darkness, as had so many generations. They’d grown up with so little light, with so much unknown. She’d come to call back the Edi-son, builders of ALMA and starry empires, to reclaim and repair the world they’d abandoned.
Star chip in hand she entered the array, turning a last time to countenance the vast firmament’s radiance. Sure that her shadow, the reminder of a lost past, could not follow her steady steps into the black wholeness beyond.
