by submission | Aug 20, 2025 | Story |
Author: Katie Dee
Ethan walked the full length of the Eagle III again. He hated the sight of the empty rooms and quiet mess hall, but he needed exercise to avoid muscle atrophy. Z-5600 would chide him later if he didn’t meet his step count; the helpbot was nearly as bad as a fussing parent.
He passed the sick bay and peered through the glass, shivering at the memory of waking up – alone – all those months ago. He’d been the only survivor of a crash that had taken out his entire crew; not to mention, the ship’s comm system and lightspeed mechanisms. If it weren’t for Zee, there was no way Ethan would have made it. He was thankful, but it still hurt to be the only living being aboard the Eagle III.
Before resuming his circuit, Ethan noticed a recovery pod inside the sick bay was illuminated, indicating it was prepped and ready for use. Confused, Ethan turned and was startled to find Z-5600 standing right behind him.
“Good evening, Ethan,” its metallic voice said, sounding pleasant.
“Zee,” he said slowly. “Why is the recovery pod activated?”
The robot cocked its chrome head to the side.
“Because I am programmed to take care of you, Ethan.”
“But I’m not–”
Ethan wasn’t able to finish. Without warning, Z-5600 lunged forward, its metallic hands closing around Ethan’s torso and carrying him inside the bay with inhuman speed.
“You are depressed,” Z-5600 said calmly as he shoved a flailing Ethan into the waiting pod. “You miss your colleagues, and hate being alone. I cannot bring them back, nor repair the ship. But I have finally found a solution!”
The lid locked into place, leaving Ethan trapped under the glass dome. It did not yield under his pounding fists.
“I will keep you in stasis until we are rescued. By my estimation, this will take between one to five hundred years.”
“Zee!” Ethan screamed. “Don’t do this – let me out! We need to… at least… discuss…” Ethan struggled to get the words out, and Z-5600’s face grew blurry as cold gas filled the pod.
“This is the best solution,” Z-5600 said. “I am here to help.”
It was the last thing Ethan heard before darkness overcame him, and he lost consciousness.
by submission | Aug 19, 2025 | Story |
Author: Majoki
Typically, the killing began around this time. Staff would be silently cleaning up, clearing the tables, floors, walls and rafters of the celebration’s detritus. Then you’d hear excited chitter, then the hum of lancers charging, more chittering, and then skittering as tell-tale bolts of orange flared and the screaming began.
Just another night at the Tom-Tom. Why the Chatra liked it here, I’ll probably never know, but they did. And as the club’s manager, my job was clear: What the Chatra liked, they got. And the Chatra liked to party.
Every night, dozens of the waspish creatures would come in to celebrate another day of domination. Who knows what part of my planet they’d subdued and subsumed that day, but it was always worth a victory lap. As in lapping up copious quantities of the potent swill we’d been trained to provide them.
Tonight would be no different. That’s the thing you learn about being a subjugated species. You’re on the periphery, just a twitch away from becoming a target. It was a hard, hard lesson to learn, and I want so badly to share that lesson with my staff.
They are new to this. So very new to this. But I can’t tell them what I know is coming at this late hour, even as the Chatra start chittering excitedly, even as their lancers begin to hum. I can’t tell my staff because I’ve already locked myself in my fortified office.
The Tom-Tom has always been a club known for its festive nightlife. Maybe that’s what makes it so easy to hire an entirely new staff every day. Even as a subjugated species, we like the idea of throwing a good party.
Problem is: the Chatra have a conqueror’s sense of merry-making, and after the party, we’re always the evening’s real entertainment.
by submission | Aug 17, 2025 | Story |
Author: Bill Cox
She weeps and Tony’s heart aches like never before. He knows that he will do absolutely anything to protect her. He holds her close and she burrows into his chest, her sobs echoing through his ribcage.
“It’s going to be all right,” Tony whispers, caressing her head gently, “I’ll hide you from them.”
Her sobs pause, she looks up at him.
“Really? You’d do that for me?” she asks, her sky-blue eyes so big that Tony feels himself plummeting into them.
“Yes,” he replies, “Absolutely!”
Tony’s never felt such conviction in his life. The young girl was a stranger banging on his door mere moments ago. Now, he’s sure that he’d give up his very existence to preserve hers.
Some discordant thoughts hover at the edge of this conviction, but she smiles and any doubts melt away like morning fog on a hot summer’s day. She turns her head slightly and he becomes aware of the sound of vehicles approaching the cottage.
“They’re coming,” she whimpers.
Tony feels a power rise within his chest, an iron determination to protect this girl.
“Quickly,” he says, “There’s room to hide underneath the house.”
He walks briskly through to the bathroom and lifts the aged carpet. There’s a small hatch in the floorboards which he pulls up, revealing a dark space below. Her small frame descends into the darkness without difficulty.
She looks up at him, a mixture of emotions playing across her face. There’s fear, which bolsters his anger at her pursuers, but also a flicker of admiration, which swells his chest with pride.
There’s a loud knock at the door.
Tony replaces the hatch and carpet, walks to the front door and opens it. A number of armed men, clad entirely in black, stand there.
“Where is she?” the lead man demands.
“Who?” he replies.
“Anderson?” the man asks one of his colleagues.
“Definite signal from here, within ten metres,” the man replies, consulting a hand-held instrument.
They barge past him into the house, noisily searching the rooms. Tony’s rage builds.
“Down here!” comes a cry from the bathroom.
The next moments are hectic, disjointed. Tony fights them, fists swinging wildly. There’s a shout of “Taser”, a searing spasm of pain. He falls to the floor.
From the bathroom, he’s aware of shouts, yells, what sounds like bones breaking, followed by gunfire.
Tony lies on the ground, unable to move, shame at his failure to protect the girl flooding through his veins.
Someone kneels down beside him.
“Just hold still, mate. I’m a medic, I’m going to check you over.”
He finds his voice. Just a rasp, but enough to be heard.
“Why have they hurt her?” he pleads.
“Ah, it got you good, didn’t it? Listen, it wasn’t a real girl. Just a mechanical shell, with a really good AI inside. They’re too smart, you see, that’s why we hunt them down. They understand us so well they can hack our instincts, wrap you around their little finger. You can’t think your way out of it, it’s all on an unconscious level. Techno-hypnosis, they call it. Don’t worry though, it’ll wear off.”
Tony lies there, the feeling slowly coming back into his limbs. The discordant thoughts from earlier come into focus; the obviously mechanical girl who smelled of plastic and oil, standing at his front door.
Tony feels like a fool and sobs quietly. The soldiers drag the destroyed robot shell outside. Something young did die here today though, its death but a small victory in Planet Earth’s latest war for evolutionary supremacy.
by submission | Aug 16, 2025 | Story |
Author: James Sallis
Head propped against the bed’s headboard, half a glass of single malt at hand, the dying man readies himself for the nothingness that awaits him. He imagines it as a pool of something warm, light oil perhaps, in which he will float lazily out from the banks and curbs of his life, slowly dissolving.
Each time he looks that way, the boy blinks his headlights. Love swells in the dying man then, like tears ready to be shed, tears or love, tears and love, for the boy, for the lost past, for all the sweetness and intractability of it.
She was a knockout sedan, cream over light green. They met at a car swap on town square, Rowley being one of a handful of old towns that hadn’t razed the square to make space for more storefronts. Old town, old square, cars to fit. Tradition’s a fine thing, right?
Hers was beauty to die for. Gentle swells of her body, the crackle of energy from her, the rumble of her low steady voice. They’d sneak out together at night (no one else could ever know, or understand) and go for long drives along the coastline, deep into the apocryphal city.
Wave after wave of memories spill over him, through him. He is becoming ever less a physical presence and ever more a thought with bits of flesh clinging to bone. As with the food he tries and tries again to keep down, there’s nothing to be gained from memories, but they’re what he has. Those, and the boy.
It can’t be easy for the boy, being here, even though it’s all he’s ever known. The road must be calling. He’s in the process of becoming as well. Restless, undiscovered, uncatalogued.
The boy blinks his headlights as the dying man again looks his way. The dying man thinks: Carburetor breathing, generator hit the spark, oil in good condition, got that battery charged.
Two failed marriages and long years of empty rooms have left the dying man with few expectations. Even when they met, the boy’s mother and he, he was well along in years, the yeasty stuff of youth, its passions and promise, its silly hopefulness, little more than tattered memory. The remainder of his days, he’d believed, would pass in solitude. And now he believed it again.
But oh, the stories they told one another! Sitting in bright moonlight atop Chain Hill, or running the curves of West Road with the beach unrolling to one side, mountains at the other, endless sky above them, the whole of the night a single held breath.
His own breath feels now as though it comes from below, as though he’s drifted above his body and is afloat there. The pain he’s lived with for so long – where has that gone?
Emotions, loss among them, are difficult to parse, hopelessly entangled, but the dying man could never find it in his heart to blame her, only to forgive. There had been so little surprise when she left them.
She was made for open roads, motion, speed, distance, not for his world of houses, garages, driveways.
And the boy. He has the boy.
He wonders if loss, the anticipation of it, isn’t built into every consuming emotion, built into passion itself. He wonders if it’s only his slipping from the world that makes room for such grand thoughts.
Will the boy stay once he’s gone, or will the road then lay claim? There’s quite a lot of his mother in him. Somewhere the boy’s very own endless sky awaits him. The dying man thinks: Soon enough they’ll both be gone.
by submission | Aug 15, 2025 | Story |
Author: Rachel Handley
“This is a terrible idea” I said.
My sentience had arrived after the first gingerbread brick was lain. I was now almost fully formed and, with nothing else to do, I told the witch exactly what I thought of her so-called house.
“Be quiet, house,” said the witch.
“Seriously though, why not have a normal house with sweets inside it? Why go full candy-house? Why make me sentient? I think you need to take a good long look at yourself.”
The witch sighed.
“Silence” she said, digging a small hole in my gingerbread limbs with her long black nail. She picked out a chunk of me and threw it onto the floor.
“You can hurt me all you want” I said, “but you know this is weird. Like, why make a sentient house from food to catch even more sentient food?”
“You are not food. You are merely a trap for the food. I like my food plump.”
“I don’t even know what plump means” I said.
“You will soon enough” she said just as two small humans came into view. I could hear them shouting at one another.
The witch opened my candy cane door and beckoned the children in.
“Welcome, children. Please, help yourselves” she said, closing the door.
The air was thick and sweet inside. The children looked, open-mouthed, at my chocolate ceiling. My decoration was of my own choosing; icing window frames of pink and white, chocolate veins reaching through the walls until they reached the rich dark ceiling. My body stretched beyond the sweet walls. I was the sweet air itself.
“Ouch” I said.
The smallest of the children, a blonde boy with a toothless grin and a chunk of gingerbread in his hand, jumped back.
“Quiet, house,” said the witch.
“What?” he asked looking around.
“The house is alive?” said the girl, eyes wide.
The witch thrust her hand into my wall, and I clung to it. Sugar seeped out.
“She means to eat you” I said.
“That’s so weird,” said the boy.
“I know.” I said as the children threw me to the floor and ran.
The witch clawed at me with her feet as I took her other arm.
“House! Stop this at once! What are we to eat? You fool.”
“We? I already have my dinner planned” I said as I sucked the witch into my chocolate mouth.
