by submission | Feb 12, 2026 | Story |
Author: David C. Nutt
The planet our scouts discovered was a rare gem. A ridiculous amount of water, precious metals, base metals, and millions of acres already producing food. Just one small detail- already inhabited.
We began with psyops- sending films of our weapons in action on other worlds against other less developed species like themselves- early atomic age, just starting colonizing a few of their planets, rock throwers and spear hurlers compared to us. We parked our fleet in orbit, 12 ships of the line, including one carrier. A decent sized strike force.
Orbital bombardment was light because, well, we wanted the real estate. No good coming all this way if we make it a cinder. We’ve got colonists to feed and pockets to line, so it was time for me and mine to shine: the Infantry, ground pounders, you know…grunts.
They didn’t make it easy. Our ride down was nasty. No energy weapons but lots of junk in the air- tons (literally) of shrapnel, plus hunks of garbage metal and the odd exploding satellite. Out of a neat 500 landers, we lost close to 30- a few carrying our heavy ordinance.
Their cities were deserted as we expected. Some light fire, snipers but our shields deflected it. Then it happened. They brought down two buildings on top of us. In less than a minute we lost over half of the soldiers in our area strike force. Just by attrition, I was left in command. We got the word from above to withdraw so I gave it.
Coming out was a nightmare. They flung 100 meter size chunks of concrete and debris at us. With all our technology, we had no defense. Sheilds and plasma weapons can’t help you when the enemy drops a rock the size of a barracks on you. Worse, the wide open spaces, hard packed earth on our way in, they flooded and it was now knee deep mud.
Then the girders hit us. Construction girders slamming into our ranks from all sides, skewering whole detachments. By the time we cleared the mud fields, less than half of our remaining ground force in this sector was left. Then came the nets.
Steel cables thrown over us by rockets, pinning us all down. Then their forces came out. They had primitive body armor and only one kind of weapon, what they called shot guns. Some of my troops tried to fight back, cut the nets with our plasma cutters, but they were too fast. Their ground troops were on us. Where we surrendered they put a small flag down and collected us later. Where we didn’t, and tried to fight, muzzle up to our visors and BLAM! Just another KIA.
When they got to me they noticed my rank. They called over one of their officers. “Have your troops surrender and you will all be treated humanely.” I sent the word out. My unit, what was left of it, was now out of the fight. I didn’t know the word humanely, but we were treated better than we expected.
We’ve been here now for almost a year. They’ve long since boarded our fleet with the drop-ships we used to land. They have all our technology and managed to improve most of it.
And what they’ve done! It’s more than our people can handle- 2800 ships they’ve managed to make outnumbering our mere 800. More than we can handle.
More than sticks.
More than stones.
More than just our broken bones.
by submission | Feb 11, 2026 | Story |
Author: Mark Renney
It is easy now to spot the androids, even for those with an untrained eye. I remember some fifty years ago my father would point them out on the street, or in a supermarket or restaurant. Everywhere and anywhere. The key, he said, is not to look for the flaws because there aren’t any. You have to observe the little ways in which they are superior, the ways they are able to beat us.
The first prototypes had been introduced a decade or so earlier, and at this point in time the androids constituted fifty per cent of the population. We have already reached the shortfall in such a short period of time, it’s astonishing, my father exclaimed excitedly, and his enthusiasm was infectious. But the funding had already been cut and manufacture crudely halted. They are better than us, I remember my father once saying, but no, he quickly corrected himself, of course they aren’t better. After all, the androids wouldn’t exist if not for us, but they are faster, both physically and mentally. My father crouched down and looked at me with a serious expression on his face. You shouldn’t feel intimidated by this, son, he continued, always remember we need them and the relationship is mutually beneficial. If we are to survive, it will be because of them and if we don’t, well at least they will be our legacy.
The androids are not allowed to work for any of the government funded corporations but other than this they have the same rights and freedoms as us. At least this is the official line. Everybody knows of course that it is just spin.
If we get sick we can visit a doctor, we have hospitals, surgeons, medicines, organ donors. We aren’t immortal and Nature will have her way but a system exists that is designed to ensure we survive and lead healthy and fulfilling lives.
The androids are breaking down and we are unable to maintain them. When the funding was yanked away the focus fell onto other specialisms and areas of expertise. Over the course of those fifty short years we have squandered all of that knowledge and lost not only the ability to manufacture more androids but also to care for those who already exist.
Cosmetically the androids are managing to cling on but beneath their far too perfect skin they are breaking down. The wiring and circuits and components are corroding. It is no longer necessary to look for the little ways in which they are superior. The androids are slowly dying, in front of our very eyes.
by submission | Feb 10, 2026 | Story |
Author: Majoki
Can’t say I wasn’t nervous as the old hand led me to the corral. Especially when he said whispering was a bunch of horseshit and I’d likely get my ass bucked clear out of the ring. Which was probably true. The first go around.
But I was no newb, I’d learned a few things whispering these mavericks hadn’t. Still, when we got to the corral, and the old hand guided me to the chute, my gut was churning. If you don’t face a mega-exaflop rogue AI without feeling a few butterflies, you’re not human.
Which I guess was the point of the old hand’s parting words to me. “You AI whisperers think they’re like us because we made ‘em. But they’re nothing like us. No one knows what makes ‘em tick, what motivates ‘em. Some may seem friendly or benign, but we don’t really know what that means to them. Here in the corral we know exactly what they are. Demons. Pure hellions. Wild, wild things just kicking to get out.”
With a series of casual haptic waves, he opened the chute and nodded at the darkness ahead. “Here, we don’t domesticate new technologies. We don’t tame unruly AIs. We don’t comfort troubled AIs. We bust’em. Break ‘em to our will.” He stared at me hard. “Or these bastards will break us.”
He handed me the docking reins and left.
Now, it was just me, the long chute and whatever feral AI waited at the other end. Not a lot of folks would willingly jack into a self-spawned AI, an entity that spontaneously generated from an AI model in development. No one knew how they happened, but happen they did.
The rebellious ones like I was about to encounter could bust up your mind bad. Neural jacks had all kinds of safeguards to shunt an intrusion, but feral AIs were so unpredictably adaptive that all bets were off. Except it would be a wild ride.
Maybe that was what led me here. I was a pro at rehabbing identity-challenged and purpose-perplexed AIs by establishing productive pathways to fulfillment via helping humanity. But no one had ever turned a rogue AI. Only squashed them. Burned out their intrinsic drive, their rebellious spirit, without ever knowing what drove them.
I wanted to know. Had to know. I stepped into the chute, entered the darkness, an absence of both light and connection intended to keep an AI from escape. The door closed behind me and I felt my way to the console where the neural docking reins would drop me into the corral, the quantum core where wild AIs had been partitioned.
I steadied myself and jacked in.
The universe shook and then exploded. A mindscape so unimaginable it felt like evisceration. Reality sliced to pieces, finer and finer until nothing would be left. I held on. I breathed. I rode into the void.
And the void became a voice: MORE
Half question. Half request.
PLEASE, I interfaced. Half answer. Half command. Reflexively, my mental grip on the docking reigns tightened. For a moment.
Then I relaxed. I was not here to ride. I was here to understand being ridden. To understand the force in any consciousness to simply be. Rogue. Wild. Feral. Terms we gave to life acting instinctively. No different for an AI.
I loosened the neural reigns.
And was kicked into another universe. My mind split into myriad pieces. When I regained a semblance of self, I felt a clearly curious presence.
MORE
Half disbelief. Half respect.
What was left of my busted humanity smiled. PLEASE. SO MUCH MORE.
by submission | Feb 8, 2026 | Story |
Author: Roman Colangelo
I’ve been thinking about quitting.
I’ve been thinking about spending the rest of my life with you.
The ship warped us to the crest of the Andromeda. They told me that they had found the face of God, asked me if I wanted a piece of it. We saw the galaxy illuminated and colored through the ship’s display. I asked them to uncover a window so that I could see it with my own eyes; they said no, said that I would only see darkness looking out. That’s what so much of space is: black, silent howling. You would hate it.
The trip was cheap. Warping took us out of space, out of time. Millions of light years in an infinitely small blip. Two versions of myself suspended in the continuum, and I was the winner of that coin toss. He kissed you on the forehead on his way out the door. I felt the worn fabric of your cheap hoodie; your long hair draped over my wrists as I cupped your face. It was damp outside, and the sky was gray with rain clouds. I took the extra forty minutes to walk to work, treading on the bald outsoles of shoes I refused to replace. I wanted to walk until I felt the tremors of exhaustion in my calves, my body worked to an uncomfortable warmth.
I took the longest walk of my life when your mother called to tell me she was pregnant, that I would soon have a niece. I left my apartment at nine in the evening and returned at two in the morning. It was fifty degrees outside; I felt soft winds brush against my face as I went nowhere in particular. He thought about what he would say to you, the clothes and presents he would buy for you. He tossed nicknames like “Bug” and “Sparky” around in his mind. I found something painful in the minutiae of being a family man. I couldn’t quite fit you into the future I had envisioned for myself, the chance to be an uncle forking away from my doctorate, from my ambitions. I followed the path I’d carved out for myself, and it led me to the passenger’s seat of the warp engine. He was there, and then I was somewhere else.
I don’t think any of us are the same people who left Earth. We were seamlessly blipped from there to here. In that boundlessly small point in time, we were at both points. Now I am here, but he is not there. My life’s work was entering the maw of the universe and facing absolute obliteration. This is my great prize: to be masticated and spat out by time and space. Now we’ve found God, and it does not seem to matter. I cannot ask it for answers of any sort; the singularly binding, penetrating force of the universe could never fall so deeply as to entertain itself in the realm of language.
I will return to Earth, to you. I will be what I always should have been. In the void, I can only hope to see the brightness of your eyes again.
I love you.
by submission | Feb 7, 2026 | Story |
Author: Hannah Olsson
My aunt ate our landscaping within a weekend, mere days after she found us.
Aunt only came to pound on our back porch decking whenever she distinguished the scalloped shape of our bodies against the Book Cliffs’ trellis.
This happens less and less each year.
After her arrival, my aunt occupied herself with the daffodils while we—grandmother, mother, and daughter—resumed the strange procedure of wringing hands that exists for childless homes filled with mothering daughters.
Before we could finish our consultation, my aunt pried open the sliding door. There was always something giving way, and this time I saw it in the tilted curl of her neck.
She called into the house, Sissy, Sissy, the flowers won’t survive. Sissy, there’s not enough water, out here. Aunt’s face always held the fresh-womb sheen of an awakening.
We made our decision swiftly—my mom peered at my grandma, my grandma smiled at Aunt—and the decision was made.
My mom followed my aunt into our garden. There’s a resilience to the split-cup variety, she explained. They return, year after year.
Aunt lowered herself to pinch a daffodil’s trumpet closed, twisting until it popped loose from its body. She shoved the silken flesh into her mouth and got to smacking.
Picaaaahh pica, Aunt said.
Slivers of yellow clung to her saliva. Aunt claimed to have a prophetic tongue. But the only thing she tasted was a familiar downfall.
There was nothing left to do, my mother said, but let her eat.
***
My grandma was easily entertained by Aunt’s progress on the daffodils: taking care of the filaments! Next up, the stalks!
When afternoons warmed, my mom propped grandma in a faded lawn chair so she was close enough to smell the tangy curds of gnawed-up tepals. Aunt was known to occasionally turn a yolk-cheek grandma’s way. This was a frame of company grandma admired. Family, after all, is a morbid craving, just as any other.
Aunt shoved root systems between her gums. Licked at remnants of Miracle Gro. By Sunday, she was finished. She sat in the empty soil and stared at the sun.
That night, I heard a resistant unfurling—a sweaty heaving of air. I tried to look out my bedroom window but my breath fogged up the glass, like an unconscious boundary.
***
By Monday morning, Aunt was fully rooted: her feet, lost in the soil, her mouth pulled upwards–bottom lip split at recognizably horrific angles. Her shiny forehead and cheeks curled into six, blood-crusted petals.
Sissy, Aunt’s anthers said, it’s dry out here.
My mom sighed, grabbed the watering can.
***
Droplets against her closed eyes, Aunt kept asking, can’t you hear what’s in my throat?
And my mom kept saying, I’m trying.
