by submission | Apr 26, 2026 | Story |
Author: David C.Nutt
The Crow sat on the post croaking, clicking and cawing at my dog Culley. Culley’s got a real strong prey drive so watching him sit there and occasionally whine and stutter step was par for the course. Jah, Culley-boy has serious focus. If he scents a squirrel or chases a rabbit in our fenced in yard he’ll come back to the same spot for weeks, so it was no big deal him coming back to the same spot day after day. But not for a solid month. And not with a crow teasing him every day for exactly 45 minutes, every morning, rain or shine. This was strange indeed. Being recently retired, and the weather being glorious, I thought I’d sit out with Culley and see what all the fuss was about.
On my first day I sat a few yards away and watched Culley’s new ritual unfold. Sometimes the Crow was there, sometimes he’d sit and wait for her. She flew and perched. There was a long “caw” and then Culley sat down. I wasn’t really listening (plugged into YouTube,) but I could see him sit rock solid until the crow flew away. The next day Culley and I sat in the same place and waited. The long caw started followed by the clicks and croaks. It was odd…the clicks and croaks soon had a weird rhythm, a set of distinct patterns. It was so annoying I was about to grab a rock and fling it at the Crow. Then, it happened. It wasn’t pleasant. It felt like someone took two icicles and simultaneously, jabbed them into my temples. I saw sparks and my body was flooded with heat and then there was a sound like a combination of shattering glass and a gong and, and…I was in a different place.
Culley was next to me and he looked like always did except he looked up to me with his “happy face” and said “Hello Daddy.” Off in the distance I saw this being in a cloak of crystal feathers and a helm…or mask. In an instant she was in front of me, the mask with it’s beak-like visor open revealing a beautiful woman’s face. Smiling, she took my hands and said “Welcome Marlon, Culley has told me so much about you, glad you paid attention enough to join us.”
Since that day Culley and I sit out in the yard, rain or shine for exactly 45 minutes with the Crow. My family teases me (good-naturedly) incessantly about Culley and me and our “Martha”, the name they gave the Crow. But with what we have learned, both our lives our exponentially better. Once a real type “A”, now I am mellow. I know the day I will die. I know the day Culley will pass and he knows it too. Me and Culley, we’ve both got a longer life than average and that’s cool. Plus from what we’ve taught our family they will be living far longer than most. So my family puts up with me and Culley…and Martha. Hard to say dear old Dad is crazy and send him away when his new hobby of day trading and investments has paid off all my their mortgages,
Our “Martha” has taught us that we might be a catalyst for change in the world. I guess Culley and I are OK with that, but with all I am learning and the places we go, Culley and me would be happy just as we are. Sitting in the yard, for 45 minutes, “meditating” and listening to a Crow.
by submission | Apr 25, 2026 | Story |
Author: James Gonda
The walls in the room curve inward like the inside of a shell, smooth and pale.
When he thinks of sitting a chair rises from the floor and shapes itself to his back.
Light fills the space evenly.
His thoughts arrange themselves without effort.
He feels panic build and begins counting breaths as he was taught during a workplace wellness seminar. Then his breathing settles on its own.
The memory of the road, the flash of white, the sudden lift, sits at a distance, intact and sealed.
When the first alien appears, it doesn’t enter so much as assemble. One moment the air is empty, the next it contains a tall, jointed shape, its surface matte and softly faceted. “Are you experiencing distress?” it asks. The voice arrives already translated.
“No,” he says, almost laughing.
“This aligns with expectations. I am Talar. I will accompany you during this phase.”
Phase means sequence and sequence suggests an ending. He finds this comforting.
Talar asks questions, one at a time.
What work does he perform?
He explains accounting. His days are filled with correcting other peoples’ errors.
What is his domestic arrangement?
He says he lives alone.
Talar asks him to describe a typical morning.
He talks about scrolling through his phone at breakfast, rereading an email from his supervisor that contains no actionable information. As he speaks, he notices the tightness he usually feels in his chest when he thinks about these things does not appear.
He finishes.
The air shifts and a second alien forms.
“This phase is complete,” the second alien tells Talar. “Prepare him for return.”
Return. “Return where?” he asks (though he already knows).
“To the location of your extraction.” Talar says.
His mouth moves before he can articulate the thought. “But . . . I don’t want to go back.” He stands, aware again of how gently the room holds him. “I know I’ve been taken. But here—.” He gestures, helplessly, at the walls, to the light. “Here, everything feels right.”
Talar watches him closely. “You are experiencing relief?”
“Yes!” he says. “And usefulness.”
The second alien steps closer. “Purpose is not an offered condition.”
“Maybe not deliberately,” he says. “But it’s here.” Then: “Let me stay. Maybe I can help.”
The second alien’s reply is immediate. “Your request is a result of this environment—
specimens mistake containment for meaning.”
Specimens. The word lands heavy. “I’m not a lab rat,” he points out.
“This phase was designed to minimize harm upon reintegration,” Talar says.
He laughs. “You think this ‘phase’ will make it easier to send me back?”
“Yes,” the second alien says. “It is proven to be effective.”
He looks at Talar. “What I’m feeling is real.”
“Yes,” Talar says. “But it is not validation you belong here.”
He thinks of his last performance review when they told him he was “valued” and “on track,” phrases recited from a script while his real concerns went unaddressed. “Earth is full of worse illusions,” he says. “At least this one is honest.”
The room opens and images pass through him. Other humans. Same refrain. Let me stay.
“You are one of many,” the second alien says.
“You knew I’d ask,” he says.
The second alien nods. “Before you did.”
The light begins to withdraw.
“You will retain very little of this experience,” Talar says. “Only impressions.”
Back on Earth, he wakes up in the same place from where he was taken, no time missing.
A faint discontent simmers inside him.
Later—days and weeks—he compares every room to one he cannot quite remember.
by submission | Apr 24, 2026 | Story |
Author: Eva C. Stein
Kaela had misread the trail map. She expected thorns and sunbaked clay; instead she stepped from the composite walkway into a grove. She wore a field harness of sterilised vials and a hand lens that layered spectral readouts over her vision. She was thinking about leaf venation – dicot xylem bundles versus the scattered vascular monocot strands – when her peripheral HUD pulsed and the clearing snapped into focus.
The captain was a calibration post in human-shaped form: reactive fibre and ceramic plating, a corporate helix where a flag might have been. Six operatives held pulse carbines; an AR lozenge drone hovered, its sensor array washing the group in low intensity lidar. Twenty people sat bound on polymer blocks: woven trackers, temporary smart bindings that fed heart rates and glucose levels to the captain’s slate.
Kaela’s training ran a silent inventory: the captain’s jaw comm node and micro spectrometer, Class 2 directed-energy rifles, drone Model AR-4, cuffs logging cortisol spikes. Running would make her a clean visual target. She stayed.
The captain’s gaze found her; his jaw-comm clicked and an invitation downlinked. She walked forward; standing still would be to admit she was a specimen. Under the drone’s light she spoke the language of her field: first botanical expedition beyond the corporation’s buffer, intent to catalogue epiphytic taxa with anomalous anthocyanin profiles, notes on likely altitude and leaf anatomy. The comm node blinked in tempo with her heartbeat.
He listened without botany in mind. He ran the variables: her honorary foreigner tag, the optics of an international witness, the cost of a diplomatic incident. The frontier’s ‘summary reprisal’ clause permitted one act of discretionary clemency if it was witnessed and recorded by an independent party. The captain’s voice was flat; the drone transcribed, and her HUD displayed the words.
“Shoot one,” he said. “You take a life; nineteen go free. Refuse and all twenty die.”
Kaela’s first reflex was nausea. Then calculus: the weapon would have to link to his biometric. The system required a Williams handshake so the deed registered in the legal ledger. Accepting meant a recorded complicity – an immutable entry that would alter career and conscience. Refusing meant no witness, no ledger, and the squad’s default lethal protocol. The drone’s sensor sweep caught micro adjustments of aim; the nearest magistrate node was a day away.
Her scientific mind catalogued another loss: these people were living repositories – DNA, microbiomes, songs and practices encoded in flesh. If they lived, the corporation would harvest that data; if they died, embodied knowledge could vanish. As a botanist, the erasure felt like both moral and professional catastrophe.
The grove was quiet. In her lens, the plants she’d come for clung to an overgrown canopy – pigments that should reorder phylogenies – and she measured them against the human price.
The captain waited. The drone focused. The legal timer ticked.
She could have recited taxonomy. Instead she reached for the language her work had taught her to trust: preservation. She thought of herbarium sheets – pressed specimens labelled and saved – and of voices that couldn’t be catalogued if gone. Minutes narrowed; the clearing held still while a woman trained to name leaves weighed the lives of men.
The captain eased a rifle towards her, the grip still warm. The HUD flashed the biometric handshake prompt: align your palm, accept the link. The drone’s camera tracked her pupils.
Kaela’s tongue found words she’d never practiced in lecture halls. She spoke of evidence and witnesses, of the need to keep living knowledge intact. The drone recorded. The captain watched his slate and the legal timer slid down another notch.
She lifted her hand, and history waited.
by submission | Apr 23, 2026 | Story |
Author: Kewei Chen
I have been staying in this mountain temple for a long time, long enough that I’ve grown used to its rhythm.
The place feels colder than I remember. Not sharply so, just something you notice before fully awake.
The wooden floor beneath me still holds last night’s cold a little too long.
I usually sit in silence before doing anything. There is nothing here that needs to be rushed.
Time is not reliable in the mountains. It doesn’t stop, but slips out of alignment from time to time.
Most days are the same. Breathing. Sitting. Wind through the wooden beams.
I only notice it when something feels slightly off.
Occasionally, people come. Not many. They don’t stay long.
They pass through carefully, leaving almost nothing behind.
Still, something remains. Not memory—more like a trace.
A few weeks ago, a young man came to the temple.
Tired, but unusually alert. He said he needed somewhere to rest.
So I let him stay.
He sat across from me, trying to be still. But stillness didn’t hold.
Something kept breaking it, like thoughts that never finish.
After a while, he said:
“Have you ever felt like something has already happened?”
I paused. Not memory. Something looser.
He continued:
“Not memory, not a dream. Just a moment that feels familiar when it shouldn’t.”
“As if the world is trying to remind me of something I was never told.”
“What is it reminding you of?”
“I don’t know.”
He didn’t speak again for a long time. The silence stayed longer than the words.
After he left, the temple felt different. Not in sound, but in something harder to name.
As if the space had shifted slightly and never fully returned.
From then on, I noticed things I had always ignored.
Strong emotions—fear, loneliness, sudden surprise—leave residue, not memory.
These residues accumulate across people and time.
They overlap, forming something like a structure. A web without shape.
It doesn’t follow time well. Past and present blur.
They feel like different intensities of the same thing.
Once, during meditation, I saw early humans under a nameless sky.
Firelight, darkness, long silence. Only loneliness.
It felt familiar, not emotionally but structurally.
As if it had happened more than once.
Then I thought: maybe I was inside it, not watching it.
The feeling passed, but not completely.
I cannot return to them. That much is certain.
But this “web” does not seem to belong to time.
Or perhaps it never did.
So I leave a simple thought: it is alright.
But I no longer know if I am the one leaving it, or receiving it.
People talk about déjà vu. A place that feels already lived.
A moment that never happened, but feels remembered.
I once thought it was memory failing. I’m not sure anymore.
Two moments briefly touching. That is all.
The young man said something was trying to “align” with him.
I still think about that.
Maybe nothing approached him. Maybe he was briefly placed inside something that already exists.
Only for an instant.
If so, those under the stars were not alone.
Neither are we.
We are the same process, briefly overlapping across time.
I sat for a while.
But even “before” no longer points to the same thing.
by submission | Apr 22, 2026 | Story |
Author: Mark Renney
Cartwright tends to the machine, the work is all-consuming but perfunctory at best. He cleans the machine and he replaces the data chips. It is vital this is done in the correct order and at the opportune moment, when the machine is able to upload that particular information.
The machine and the house in which it and Cartwright reside is large. It amuses Cartwright that everything is getting smaller, all the things the others desire have become minuscule and they can even choose not to handle them, but simply conjure the information out of the ether. But the machines are getting larger and louder.
The house sits apart from the others and its grounds are sparse and barren, there are no outbuildings or trees, no cover or shade. The boundary is clearly marked by a low level picket fence and only those making the necessary deliveries pass through the gates. They bring everything Cartwright needs and wants, machine parts as required, tins of paint and of course the all-important data chips.
Screens are difficult to use, the living quarters are sound proofed but even so the resolution and volume are ultra-low and distorted. Just a few minutes’ use induces ear-splitting headaches and nausea.
Cartwright’s only luxuries are books and almost exclusively he reads the latest engineering manuals. He is content and happy with his lot and hasn’t any intention of stepping away and relinquishing his position but Cartwright does not want to fall behind. Part of his duties is the maintenance of the house and grounds but apart from almost constantly repainting the walls this really only amounts to more cleaning. Nothing grows or flourishes close to the machine and there are no flowers or vegetables to tend, no weeds to pull or lawns to mow. The house is sparsely furnished and functional but Cartwright is comfortable and has all he desires.
Occasionally Cartwright walks to the edge of the grounds; he doesn’t cross the boundary. But if he stands close to the fence he can no longer hear the machine, its whirring and grinding, its breathing, and he can’t feel the rumble under his feet. He doesn’t take a device but it is enough for Cartwright to know if he did it would work. That he would be able to communicate with the others and have complete access.
