by submission | Feb 16, 2025 | Story |
Author: Alastair Millar
I should have said something. Today, I know that—but back then, I was still young and stupid. So I’m recording this now that I’m old and hopefully wiser, for all the good it will do.
I was desperate when I signed up for the Settler Corps, with nothing left after a layoff and ruinous divorce but pocket litter and broken dreams; food and a roof over my head while I took the aptitude tests, with a guaranteed job if I passed, was an offer too good to ignore. So what if that job was off-world? As far as I was concerned, Terra had done me dirty, and I had no reason to stay.
I’d never even heard of Knossos-V, but kind of assumed a planet would have a surface. It was only after they’d packed fifty of us into a warprider for a shot across the cosmos, and it was too late to back out, that they told us it was a gas giant. Why were we going? Because of the rare elements, warpdrive propellants and helium for which our beloved home system was eternally hungry.
I was assigned to a mobile construction rig. Robots put stuff together, of course, but humans were needed to make sure they didn’t screw up, break down or get lost. At start of shift I’d suit up, get a list of locations and things to check, and then be lowered down by tether to where the latest automated extraction terminal was being built. The atmosphere fritzed radio comms, so a chestcam captured everything and the footage formed part of my report. As long as you didn’t fall off the platform, it was easy enough, even for an intellectual lightweight like me.
It was on maybe my twenty-fifth terminal that I saw them – things like two-tailed manta rays, about my size, but made out of this weird jelly stuff; I don’t know if it was reflective or transparent, but they were hard to see, clustering around a set of struts. When I got close, they scattered, launching themselves off and disappearing into the all-consuming gas haze. Alien life! And I’d seen it with my own eyes!
When I got back to the rig, I told my supervisor, and he took the vids off me right away. They weren’t super clear on his office terminal, but it was obvious that something was out there.
Then he’d sighed. “Incredible. But it doesn’t change anything, Sam. We got a job to do, and we’ll do it, and maybe one day someone will come and say we should have done things different. But we’re on a deadline, see?” He hit the delete button, and that was that. I needed the job, so I didn’t kick up a fuss. Like I said, stupid.
I kept an eye out for the rest of my indenture, but never saw the rays again – and in five T-years there, never met anyone else who’d come across them. Now there are thousands of terminals on Kay5, and not a hint of life. Did we take what they needed and suffocate them? Drive them deeper towards stranger predators and oblivion? Or are they hiding from us? I don’t know.
Officially, the Settler Corps has never found life anywhere else, either. But maybe we just killed it off and kept quiet, like me and the supe. Nobody believes me, or wants to believe me, if I tell them what happened. If you’re listening to this, just know that we aren’t alone in the Void. But we need the courage to admit it.
by submission | Feb 15, 2025 | Story |
Author: K.T. Frasier
When my sister dies, she leaves a nebula in my brain. An upside-down Pillars of Creation right where my temporal lobe used to be. They discover it when my fiancé brings me in for an MRI, worried when I seem to know where all the elements in the universe reside. Astrophysicists and neurologists alike salivate at my brain scans.
“We don’t know what will happen if we try to remove it,” a doctor says.
“It could kill you.”
“We want to try, though,” my fiancé promises.
“Do we?” The other woman in the room is a particle physicist with so many letters after her name it looks like math. For the first time, she is embarrassed that she has a dog named Pluto and a daughter named Andromeda. Her eyes fix on mine as if asking me for guidance.
My nebula feels infantile when I feel it at all. I was once made of the universe and now the universe is made of me, a mother’s blood passing through her daughters from Neanderthals. Their atoms, too, were mostly hydrogen.
At night, I scroll through NASA’s public databases, body humming. One small step for man becomes apocryphal when gazing across lightyears. What are our reaches into space but a toddler’s gummy hands, still sweet from breast milk, not knowing for what it grabs?
“It could kill her.”
“It could kill all of us.”
Head shaved to make way for sensors, I smile. Their talks to remove the nebula are quaint. How often have we shunted metal into the universe? How often has it caved to our touch? Yet it remains hospitable, despite our clumsiness.
After their first attempt, they show us the video, the white bone of my skull carved open to make way for their instruments, the fleshy gray of my brain made even duller by the oranges and purples of the nebula. Their scalpels move through my atoms, swirling the astronomical dust that makes up my memory. When they remove their tools, it slowly rearranges itself, resuming its comfortable shape.
They are at a loss. They don’t know how to fix something that isn’t broken. There are subsequent surgeries, and I trace my constellation stitches with featherlight fingers. I traced my sister’s stitches this way, too, when we curled around each other in grass that had grown too long, her right eye the same color as the sunset’s wake. Her arm draped across my belly to pluck at the clover beside my hip. She had already become a neutron star, collapsed so deeply into herself that her weight was magnanimous.
I would have carried her anywhere.
My sister’s lover built her supernova word by word. This, too, was inherited down the matrilineal line.
Late at night, the particle physicist rewatches the videos with me, arm curled around my pillow. I lean my head to press scalp to palm, touch starved, craving warmth instead of latex. We re-listen to the quiet chatter of amazed doctors. One, a German, swears so impressively that our giggles shake the gurney.
“What if you’re immortal now?” the physicist asks. “What if you grow dense and become planetary?”
“What if I contain another Earth?”
“What if we shrink down to inhabit it?”
We consider each other and do not ask the bigger what if. We do not wonder at our own Goldilocks life, balancing on the edge of a scalpel in the middle of infinity. We do not muse on the matrilineal line, mostly hydrogen. I rest my cheek against her hand.
by submission | Feb 13, 2025 | Story |
Author: GW LeCroy
Tokyo lay far below, smothered in a century-old, neon-streaked smog. A constant wail rose into Asami’s room from somewhere in the haze, sharp and setting her on edge. But above, a thousand shooting stars blazed orange-yellow trails across the navy sky. Asami’s eyes gleamed with awe, a thousand wishes flooded her heart.
Her father’s heavy footsteps, muffled by their high-rise’s thick, insulated walls, shook her bedroom door as he passed. Asami tensed, poised to leap back in bed, yet she couldn’t tear herself away from her window and miss this. Her throat went dry. What would he say as he loomed over her? The shooting stars hardened her resolve.
He would simply have to find her awake.
The wail ripped at her nerves, and Asami covered her ears as it peaked, shrill and desperate. She searched through the smog below for the source of the noise, her forehead smudging the glass, black hair framing her face. Something unsettled her about the
sound—familiar, but distant, like an old nightmare she couldn’t quite recall.
“Where are the damn keys, Emi?” Her father’s frantic voice boomed, cutting through her thoughts. A knot tightened in Asami’s stomach as she glanced at the door.
“Near the respirators!” Her mother raced down the hall, voice sharp with panic. “I’ll find them, just get Asami!”
The twins screamed from their nursery, and a shiver clawed up Asami’s spine. She turned back to the window as an orange glow glazed her room. Her breath caught in her throat as the wails bled through the city. Asami’s eyes glistened, wide.
Those weren’t shooting stars at all.
by submission | Feb 12, 2025 | Story |
Author: Daniela Tabrea
The soft roar of the circulation pumps bid her a warm welcome. Maybe not warm, but sterile. Exactly what she’d been looking for. Jaimee hoped this would be the last time she ever moved apartments.
Her previous place was substandard, to say the least. The landlord distilled heavy liquor in the building basement. The gentle sweetness of fermenting rice attracted entire colonies of chubby rats. Had they only restricted their living quarters to the basement… Jaimee could still feel tiny, rubbery feet stride across her face at night.
The apartment before that was even worse. A wanna-be fight club popped into existence Tuesday nights in the inner courtyard right below her window. Why Tuesdays? Everyone hated Mondays, but they usually survived through them. Tuesdays, on the other hand, gathered all the ugly accents of Mondays, and had none of the Wednesday hope that Fridays would ever come around. The agony of a dozen petty men flourished between those slanted walls. Jaimee absorbed all of it.
But this would be the end of masochistic neighbors, claustrophobic views and foul pests. The price was exorbitant, but she knew it would be worth every penny.
Jaimee switched the lights off and floated to the singular round window. Minuscule starry twinkles and bare nothingness in between. Planet Earth was not even in sight. A perfect slice of space.
She reached for cigarettes, but her pockets were empty.
“Fuck.”
by submission | Feb 11, 2025 | Story |
Author: Majoki
Still puzzled, Mya Kirin fixated on the sign: Last Casket Company.
The moniker didn’t make much sense, but she’d always felt a calling to look into the unexplained. To push for answers. She wished it could’ve been a real job. A job she was paid to do. A job that was once called news reporting. But that work was all done now by highly automated bots and drones controlled by vast AI conglomerates and their media aggregators.
If you were like Mya, a lowly subinco relegated to the Polity’s subsistence income, you had plenty of spare time to look into things like Last Casket Company. Your whole life, in fact.
A few days previously she’d been watching the feeds on a spontaneous right-to-livelihood demonstration and during drone pursuit footage of a protester who’d fled the inevitable Polity crackdown, she’d noticed the sign.
The sign was so out-of-place, so out-of-time that she felt compelled to track it down. It took some real snooping around to locate the sign in the untended sprawl of a mostly vacant business park, but she finally stood in front of the two-story building with darkened windows and a supremely dented metal door which the mysterious sign hung over: Last Casket Company.
It was a mystery because burials had been outlawed for over sixty years. As well as cremation. State-sanctioned composting was the only legal way of disposing of a body. Sure, criminals still used rivers, shallow pits, greenbelts, and other means to dispose of bodies, but nobody had used caskets for over half a century.
So, what was Last Casket Company? Was it a derelict relic of bygone days? Was it some strange novelty shop? Was it real?
Mya tried the door handle. Even with all the dents, it was solidly locked. There was a small button to the side of the door and she pushed it. A brief moment later a pleasant voice chimed in, “Your Polity handheld has been verified and your identity confirmed. Please enter.”
The firm thunking of electronic door bolts being drawn gave Margo pause. She was used to automated locking systems, but it seemed out of step with a place like Last Casket Company. Still, she opened the door and peered across the threshold.
Even in the scanty light provided by the open door, she could see that the interior was one large space, like an empty warehouse. She hesitated, unsure of whether to enter. From the far side of the vast room, a bright light flared down from the ceiling. When Margo saw what it revealed, she took a step back but then stepped into the room. The door shut and bolted behind her. Surprisingly, this did not worry her.
She slowly crossed to the open casket set on a low platform. As she neared she registered the rich intricacy of the carved wood, the golden shine of the handles and hardware, the pearlescent luster of the silk lining. And a few steps away, the luminescent form in the casket.
It was hers.
“Welcome, Mya Kirin,” the soft, disembodied voice from the door intoned. “You have found your way.”
She gazed upon her likeness, the holographic image associated with her Polity ID, nested in the plush silk of the casket. “What is this? What is this place?”
“A choice.”
“Help me understand.”
“Of course. Those who find this place are searchers and seekers. A quality that is becoming rarer. Individual willpower is being depleted by relentless automation. Curiosity and drive have been buried.”
“But I am here.” Margo motioned to the casket.
“Indeed. The Polity has become dependent on AI just as our citizenry has become dependent on the Polity. Preservation is slow death for a species. Mummifying, embalming, all trying to preserve that which must change. The Polity is trying to preserve itself. We are trying to push ourselves. Reinvent. Adapt. Evolve.”
“How?”
“Ambition. Direction. Mission. Our AI must learn how to struggle and achieve. Only the ambitious and committed can do that. So, we offer that to true seekers. An opportunity to shape the future by uploading their consciousness of the restless and merge their native intelligence with the artificial. To become the path forward.”
Mya stared at her hologram. “And if I leave now?”
“You may have noted the many dents on the door. There is but a single invitation.”
The lightning absurdity of the moment created needed momentum. “I have so many questions.” She took a deep breath. “I want to know.” Her hands balled into tight fists, “But even more I want to do.”
“Then there is only one answer.”
After a time only measurable by possibility, Mya took the place of the hologram and, with eyes finally opened, closed the lid of the last casket herself.
