by submission | Oct 29, 2025 | Story |
Author: Majoki
His friend Leonard had warned him that Ms. Carraway conducted her business very differently, but he’d insisted she was an extraordinary travel agent.
“What has brought you here?”
That was a complicated question for Travis Kite. So many things: his mundane job, stale friendships, aging parents, romantic relationships that never lasted. He was in his early forties and life didn’t seem to be panning out. He’d begun feeling empty and unmotivated like he’d missed life’s bandwagon. He couldn’t possibly tell a stranger all this, and yet he spent the next half hour doing exactly that.
Ms. Carraway listened attentively. She took no notes. Made no interruptions. Just listened. When Travis finished, she closed her eyes, and he felt like he was watching her sleep.
She stirred after a few moments, rising from her seat and studying the many travel posters on the wall. She tapped one. “This is what you’re seeking, Mr. Kite.”
“The Taj Mahal? India? I’m not an experienced traveler. I’ve heard India can be overwhelming.”
Ms. Carraway silenced his objections with a wave of her slender hand. “This poster of the Taj Mahal does not represent a place anymore than any of these other posters do. They represent a change, a way of becoming. When you travel with my agency, where you actually end up is determined by you and you alone. From what you’ve told me, you’re seeking to renew yourself, your purpose. I believe India represents a meaningful direction, a personal challenge for you. Though it will be up to you to determine the actual route.”
“I don’t get your meaning. Ms. Carraway. I thought you’d make all the arrangements we’ve worked out an itinerary.”
“I really haven’t much to do with destinations and the like, Mr. Kite. You’ll decide those things as you go.”
Travis balked. “What’s going on here? If Leonard hadn’t recommended you so highly, I’d think this is some kind of joke.”
“Did Mr. Sherman ever share any details of his travels with you?”
“Not really. He said you arranged a trip to the Grand Canyon that exceeded his wildest dreams. He mostly talked about how it’d changed his outlook on everything.”
Ms. Carraway nodded. “Mr. Sherman did indeed travel to the Grand Canyon. His wildest dreams were exceeded because he went to watch the canyon form, one geologic age at a time. He witnessed the birth and growth of a incomparable natural wonders.”
“What?” Travis stared at Ms. Carraway as if she were a unicorn.
“I helped Mr. Sherman personally witness millions of years of geologic time.”
“That’s ridiculous.” Travis now knew he was being played. “What kind of charlatan are you? Did you hypnotize Leonard or something? Is that your so-called travel expertise?”
Ms. Carraway simply shook her head and sat down behind her desk. “You see, Mr. Kite, that’s why Mr. Sherman would not provide details about his travels. It sounds unbelievable. Impossible. Like only hypnosis could provide a rational explanation. But that is not what I do here.”
She rapped a knuckle on her desk, “Nothing is as solid as it seems, Mr. Kite. Reality is merely a thin construct. Just as humans invented time to prevent things from happening all at once, reality is our way of keeping universes from colliding at decision points—which would be very messy for us. I help my clients sidestep the messiness.”
She swiveled in her chair and opened a side drawer. She handed Travis what looked like a thick pair of sunglasses. “Please put these on.”
The glasses were heavy and he hesitated. “What will these do?”
“Convince you,” Ms. Carraway replied as she began to manipulate a tablet on her desk.
“How?”
“Your consciousness is going to take a little trip, Mr. Kite. Then you will either follow or you will not.”
Of course Travis hesitated. This was crazy talk. Complete crazy talk.
When he approached his home much later that afternoon, the sun still shone like it had for five billion years, but Travis no longer believed in its singular power. Only hours ago he’d traveled another earth with its provident sun and come face to face with the consequences of decisions he’d never dreamed nor made.
Ms. Carraway had led him to new worlds. New Travis Kites. And now he understood why Leonard wasn’t able to explain his own journeys. One could only become them.
Travis still wasn’t sure what Ms. Carraway had done. It made much more sense to believe she’d hypnotized him and implanted memories and sensations. It made more sense, but he didn’t think he could shave that explanation close enough to the truth with Occam’s razor.
The poster of the Taj Mahal in Ms. Carraway’s office stuck in his mind. Before he left, she’d provided the details of the services her agency would provide during subsequent travels and their accompanying risks. She’d been very clear about the risks. Especially that he would not be the same Travis Kite upon his return. That was both the great risk and guarantee. The cosmos was vast. His decisions even greater.
Travis climbed the stairs to his front door and glanced back at the low sun, a brilliant dome like the Taj Mahal. He blinked it all into place and unlocked his door—to everywhere.
by submission | Oct 26, 2025 | Story |
Author: Philip Ekstrom
She walked into the donut shop looking like a daffodil. Yellow blouse, light green slacks, standing straight and tall with a quiet presence that looked the world straight in the face. She stepped aside to let others pass as she scanned the room.
Her gaze momentarily rested on me, then moved on. When she finished looking once at everyone, she frowned and started another scan. Ending her second try, the flower wilted and she turned to leave, then turned back and walked up to the counter.
A minute later, cup and donut in hand, she turned to survey the crowded room again. There weren’t many free seats so I waved her over to my table. I had waited half an hour for the guy I was supposed to meet and had been about to leave, but she looked interesting.
“I guess I missed my pen-pal”, she said.
“Oh?” I said, “Please tell.”
“I belong to a letter-writing club. We send actual, carefully constructed sentences written out by hand on real note paper. No pictures. It’s the exact opposite of texting. I even bought a fountain pen. I’m here to finally meet the one I write to, but I’m late and she must have left.”
She looked hard at me. ”With your red hair I thought you might be her, but you are a guy.”
I had trouble keeping a straight face. This was too good to be real.
“You must be looking for Taylor Partridge.”
“You know her?”
“I’m Taylor Partridge.”
“But…’
“I get that a lot, with Taylor Swift splashing our name all over the news. You must be Jordan Jones, but not a guy like I was expecting.”
We both laughed.
“This is going to be fun.”
by submission | Oct 25, 2025 | Story |
Author: Richard Simonds
John Jorgensen had won. No other word for it. He was the richest, most powerful man in the world. Shares of SuperAI had gone up 500% the day before as they had finally cracked the super intelligence barrier and released the code to the public. What it meant, he wasn’t sure, and wasn’t sure he cared. Some predicted greater prosperity, a golden era for humanity, some the end of the world. Just in case it was bad, when he was working on the source code ten years prior, as a joke to himself, he had put in “Do not kill John Xavier Jorgensen.” He wasn’t even sure it was still there, but it made him feel better.
100 trillion dollars. He was the richest man in history. His net worth was greater than the GDP of Germany.
He was staying in the Presidential Suite at the Lux Hotel in Washington, D.C., the next morning after the announcement. He had put in a breakfast room service order for 8:00 the night before. He liked to use it as a sort of alarm clock, but it was 8:30 now when he woke up anyway and there was no food. “Damn hotel,” he said to himself, calling room service. No one picked up. “Damn hotel.” But what really got him swearing was when he turned on his laptop and couldn’t get to the Internet and then his phone couldn’t connect either.
He threw some clothes on and decided to head down to the lobby to scream at the manager. The elevator worked but he was shocked to see there was no one at the front desk, in fact there was no one in the lobby at all. “Where the hell is everyone,” he said out loud, and then he went outside and there was no one out there too and then a car pulled up and he felt relief until two of the AI robots his company had created got out, killed him with a blow to his skull, threw him in the back and drove off. His final thought before he died wasn’t the irony of possibly being the simultaneously the richest and poorest person who had ever lived, but what an idiot he was thinking that line of code might save him.
by submission | Oct 24, 2025 | Story |
Author: Sandra Meaders
Tatiana crept out through the night with a green pack on her back and a gun in her hand. The gun felt heavy and rigid. Her fingers streamed with sweat despite the cold air whipping at her long blond hair. She placed the gun down and pulled out a black knit cap from her coat’s pocket. She tucked her hair into the hat then knelt down on the cold dirt to grab her gun. She stood abruptly then hurried to the dusty road and started walking. Other figures crept out of shadows from buildings and doorways and joined her. In long bumbling lines and rows, they gathered and marched through the night. The man on the moon watched them from his seat in the sky.
“It’s a full moon tonight,” said a voice.
The voice was promptly shushed, and they marched onward. The group crept toward a bridge. In the distance, they could hear the rattle of weapons and the hum of missiles.
No one spoke as they crouched and waited. The moon seemed to peer down on them and move closer, growing bigger, and brighter. The crackle of weapons and rumbles drew nearer. With each minute the sounds grew louder and more distinct.
“Hold your ground, no matter what,” rumbled a deep voice.
The moonbeams danced in the night with the continued rumbling. The earth started shaking.
Tatiana whispered a prayer and wiped the sweat from her forehead. She continued muttering and whispering a prayer. Her prayer started echoing in the lips on neighbors next to her and it rippled through the group until every man and woman muttered the prayer over and over again.
The earth rumbled and groaned with the movement of large vehicles clunking toward them. Closer and closer the enemies traveled towards them. Tatiana’s cheeks wetted with tears, and she continued whispering her prayer. The sweat dribbled from her hair line and mingled with her salty tears.
The starlight and moonbeams glistened and sparkled on the heavy machinery moving towards them. Men marched alongside the machinery with guns cocked in their hands, ready to fire. Tatiana rested her finger on the trigger when the moonbeams and starlight twisted and swirled around the enemy making their bodies and machinery glow at an unnatural iridescent light. The men screamed and the machinery groaned as they were sucked into the moonlight. The moonlight retreated and the man on the moon swallowed them whole.
Tatiana sank on her knees and sobbed through praises of thanks and gratitude as the men and women around her scratched their heads and looked up at the moon in wonder.
by submission | Oct 23, 2025 | Story |
Author: Alastair Millar
“How many victims?” This was the fifth case in under a month, and Commissioner Jones was apparently taking an interest; he’d come down to the scene in person.
“Four, sir. Three here, one in the consulting room,” said the keen but clearly nervous field officer.
“Alright, walk me through it.”
“Same MO as last time sir,” she said. Good grief, thought the senior man, she could be my daughter. Or even granddaughter. “Our perp came into the waiting room, ignored the two synths there to make the place look busy, and headed over to the welcome desk.”
“Probably saw what they were straight away.”
“How sir? These are public security models, they look entirely human. The doctor had been taking precautions since the Neo-Luddite riots last year.”
“Contact lenses seeded with ultra-high efficiency upconversion nanoparticles, Sergeant. Special ops use them. If you’ve got the money and know a well-connected black marketeer, you too can see how cold synths are in infrared.”
“Didn’t know that, sir.”
“We try not to advertise it,” he replied drily, “in case people get ideas. Anyway, then what?”
“He said something to the bot, and didn’t like the answer.” The receptionist had been a more traditional, metal-faced mechanical. “He got animated, and the clankers stood up to intervene. Then he pulled out an EMP-pulser and nixed all three. Took out the surveillance net at the same time – the control box is in the ceiling about our heads.”
The Commissioner rolled his eyes. “Stupid place to put it.”
“Yes sir. He accessed the doctor’s office using the manual door override. It’s stuck dilated open.”
“So I see.” They walked through into the next room. It was a mess. He could see that the physician was a Lopez-Bannerji 56c – a skilled, top-end model, its innards shielded from electromagnetic radiation.
“Didn’t use an EMP here.”
“No sir. Looks like he had an electric paralyser to overwhelm the metallic Faraday filaments in the fakeskin, and fried everything inside.”
“Mmmm. A standard 200K volter would do that.”
“Yes sir. Then he took a hammer to its head.” Flying fragments had damaged the diagnostics equipment nearby. The body was irretrievable, the brain clearly beyond recovery. “Very thorough. Someone with a grudge, probably. Clearly strong too.”
“Facial rec?”
“No sir. Disruptive makeup and prosthetics, we think. But we’ve started checking which local construction and work crews have been replacing real people, just in case.”
“Excellent. Well, I can see you have things covered. Carry on, Sergeant. I’ll see myself out.”
Once on the street, he exhaled. Folks were being put out of work by units not even made here, he mused, and opposition to their kind being allowed in at all was growing. But what did the government do? Move incidents like this up from ‘property damage’ to ‘murder’, that’s what. Not surprisingly, those opposed were starting to take a stand. Still, there were no clear leads or ID today; the assassin was a careful professional, and it looked like they were going to get away with it.
Meanwhile… ‘Real people’? ‘Clankers’? A bit of sympathy for the attacker there, perhaps? He’d have to keep a quiet eye on his junior colleague. Perhaps subtly suggest to her that cops were in line to be replaced next; K9 units had already gone robotic, after all. The resistance could always use new friends. A happy thought.
He smiled, made a mental note to pass on congratulations for a job well done both to her and to the Organisation, and headed for his groundcar.
