by submission | Jun 27, 2025 | Story |
Author: Alice Rayworth
Every morning, at 9am, the same moving truck pulls up and the same family gets out.
They are untouched by weather; even as the world turns grey and cold around them, they remain in the same summer clothes they first arrived in.
People who live next door, and those who can excuse lingering, have listened in and reported back: the children, three, are Meredith, shortened to Mer, Cassandra, shortened to Cassie, and Jonathon, who is only referred to by his full name. No one has heard the parents’ names, they are Mum and Dad to the children, and a variety of pet names to each other.
They wave at those people who still dare to wander past, too busy unpacking to stop and talk. Every day, the same boxes, the same gestures, and yet the truck never empties. Those same people have reported hearing a discussion, between the adults, an agreement that they will introduce themselves to the neighbourhood tomorrow. They seem unaware that, for them, tomorrow never comes.
Mr McCauley is the only one to ever speak to them, interrupting their frenzied movements a few weeks in. He said afterward that they had moved because Dad had gotten a new job, only a few miles away from their new house, and that he was excited to start the following week. The children, he said, had been enrolled at the local school.
And despite never starting that job, no one ever came looking for him. No concerned managers, no welfare checks from the police, not even a family member – grandmother, or uncle, or a sibling of one of the parents – ever came to check on them.
Mr McCauley hadn’t quite been the same since.
In the town hall, some unknown person put up a year calendar, marking the year anniversary of their first arrival, and everyone else has been dutifully crossing off the days ever since. The anniversary approaches, steady, like a tide that cannot be turned.
There’s no celebration planned, after all, what would they celebrate? Instead, people have begun to whisper, in lowered voices and behind drawn curtains, about what might happen when the final day is crossed off. Whether the truck will keep coming. Whether something might change. Whether it should have changed long ago.
No one has touched the family. Not by accident, not on purpose. It is not a spoken rule, but one everyone seems to know: you can wave, you can watch, but you must not get too close. The mailman, once, tried to deliver a letter. He rang the doorbell. When no one answered, he slid the envelope through the slot. The next day, the letter was gone. So was the mailman. A new one came the following morning, and no one questioned it.
The final week dawns. It’s an arbitrary day, really, and yet it seems to hold such weight. By quarter to the hour, everyone is out on the street, silent. They line the windows, they linger on sidewalks. Coffee cools in trembling hands.
The pattern repeats, seven more times.
And then it arrives.
The calendar in the town hall is full. Every day neatly crossed off. The red marker lies beside it, cap off, dried out. No one touches it.
9am comes and goes. The truck arrives. The boxes appear. The family steps out.
Across the street, the silence holds. Only the children’s voices cut through, the same phrases as always, looping like birdsong no one listens to anymore.
Unbothered by their audience, the family waves. They unpack. The sun sets.
And the people retreat to the town hall, to ask the only question they have left:
What happened?
by submission | Jun 26, 2025 | Story |
Author: Ken Saunders
Another coughing spasm tore through him, sending waves of pain to every corner of his being. He wiped his mouth with the hospital blanket they’d draped over him, and when he lowered it, he saw that it was wet with his blood.
His eyes went to the dark little tablet sitting on the tray in front of him. It was perfectly black. Not even light seemed to affect it. He’d never seen a pill so completely devoid of color before. Was it intentional? Maybe to remind people of its potentially deadly nature, or perhaps just the natural result of the miraculous compound within.
As he stared at it, it was as if the pill was staring back, beckoning him.
No more stalling, he told himself. Heads I win, tails I lose.
He’d already said his goodbyes to Maya and the kids before being moved into this isolated wing. The “Final Treatment Center,” they called it, though the sterile name couldn’t mask what everyone knew.
This was where desperate people came to gamble with death.
There was a fifty percent chance that this little pill would not only cure his lung, bone, and brain cancer, but everything else wrong in his body. High cholesterol? Gone. High blood pressure? Gone. Eyesight? Perfect. Hearing? So long, tinnitus.
The other fifty percent of the time, it resulted in instant death.
Time to roll the dice. He steeled himself as his fingers wrapped around the little black speck.
“Good luck,” came the wet and raspy voice from the bed next to him.
He glanced over at his roommate, a Senator whose decades of heavy smoking had finally caught up with her.
Without responding, he popped the pill in his mouth and took a sip of water.
The moment he swallowed, the door opened. The nurse returned, this time walking to his companion’s bed. Just as before, she didn’t speak. She placed the water and pill in front of the Senator and exited as swiftly as she had entered.
Thoughts raced through his head as he waited for whatever effects the pill was about to have. Most people thought this discovery was proof of God’s existence. How else could such a thing come to be? The Pope himself had officially deemed it a miracle.
Others, himself included, thought it more likely proved the opposite. Once again, the universe had revealed its true nature of pure chaos. How else could the power of both life and death be found in such a small vessel?
He glanced back at his roommate’s bedside table, wondering if she would have the same hesitation, but there was none. Her hand instantly shot out toward the life-or-death substance.
As he watched the Senator quickly place the pill on her tongue and swallow it, his heart seized up.
As he clutched his chest and fought to breathe, he kept staring at the Senator in horror. His subconscious mind was screaming at him, but it wasn’t concerned about his fast-approaching end. It was desperately trying to tell him something far more important. Something that he denied with all his being because it was almost too terrible to consider.
When the notion finally forced its way into his conscious mind, he opened his mouth in one final effort to speak. He wanted to deny out loud the frightening thought, but he had already drawn his last breath.
As the blackness fell over him and he slowly slipped into oblivion, one horrifying question kept repeating over and over in his mind…
Why was her pill white?
by submission | Jun 25, 2025 | Story |
Author: Morrow Brady
The hot, dusty wind shrouded the desert Burj in a choir of howls.
Mazoomy flinched and ground his Miswak into fibres, as hot sand sprayed off his tactical leg guards. His visor display lit-up with the drop-off pin: the Burj – every delivery rider’s worst nightmare.
Coasting his sun-baked e-scooter onto the sidewalk, Maz looked upward at the pock-marked façade, strewn with hessian shade cloth, pillowing in the silent heat. Stepping closer, he began to see through its translucent structure and catch glimpses of formidable tessellated forms wriggling deep inside.
As marketing strategies go, the Burj’s hit the bullseye. Every apartment sold off-plan in under ten minutes.
The promotion catchline was sublime:
Security so cryptic, even promises get lost.
The Burj’s main attraction was its ever-shifting apartments. Each one moving unpredictably throughout the tower like the end game of Nokia Snake. It’s hard to be found when no one knows where you are.
Maz gripped the delivery bag and smelt kataifi and pistachio, and his tummy rumbled. Casting the delivery code at the entrance, he suddenly remembered a Thai red curry and baked Alaska he delivered here before. His lips pursed, remembering how long it took to traverse the Burj’s labyrinthian madness. Long enough to wet the bag through with chilli oil. Way too long for a tip.
Burj’s AI holographically floated in the entrance mist-gate like a ghoulish concierge, fading from view as the vapour disappeared. Maz entered, and directions to meet the wandering apartment loaded into his cache. Maz scanned the waypoints, sighing at the journey length that included four lifts, seven stairwells and a nature valley waterpark. Worst game of snakes and ladders ever. He sucked his Zynjooz tube hard, spitting out hot grape-flavoured air and sand.
After navigating a chamber of aquariums, Maz ascended a wadi filled with what looked like water-filled octopus suction caps, up to the third floor. Black and yellow holographs heralded the border of the Fetch, a titanium framework, operating as the playground for the wandering apartments. Looking up, Maz watched the domicile’s caterpillar-like form twisting through space and for a moment, a gap appeared, allowing a sunlit column to pierce the Burj’s cavernous core, where its micro-climate rained mist high from above. The sheer scale made him giddy and stumble.
Pushing onward through a structural forest of bats and bots, he passed shady residents, One, who sneered, then scent-shielded herself in a cloud of Cinnabon Oud.
A gleeful ping sounded, telling him he’d reached another waypoint achievement and received five more Microsoft Fuckalls™ – a reward system with less value than a hologram wank.
At journey’s end, he approached a doorway against a glass cube signposted Station Node Sublime. This was where visitors and apartments met. The node sparkled as a monstrous mass of quivering dark silver and black triangles, larger than a train, slithered in. Antigravity skids barking at the outrage of stillness.
The doors opened to a lifeless lobby, lit in pulsing red light. Maz walked toward a white door which suddenly opened. Inside were chunks of meat and bone. The entire room was stained red with dripping blood, like the inside of a butcher’s blender.
Maz stepped back, audibly stuttering the word ‘what’ followed closely by ‘the fuck’.
At which, the apartment AI calmly responded with something along the lines of ‘Yeah’, and ‘Nah’, followed closely by ‘It certainly wasn’t me….. zigzagging downtown’ and then some obscure reference to a motorcycle race in an old movie called Tron.
And with that, the apartment lurched forward to deliver Maz.
by submission | Jun 24, 2025 | Story |
Author: Majoki
This is going to feel like a set up, and it’s hard to deny that feeling when everything that caused the Last First is based on set theory. I’m hardly the person to adequately explain how Georg Cantor upended mathematics long ago when he proved that real numbers are more numerous than natural numbers. Essentially, Cantor’s set theory implies the existence of an infinity of infinities.
That concept may not seem so earth-shaking to recent generations whiplashed by an ever-growing number of multi/meta/omni/exa-verses out there in novels, films, and games that toy with an infinity of infinities. But when you really dig into what transfinite numbers represent, like my little sister did at age twelve, then you can start to get a sense of what beyond limits really means.
For starters, it means a twelve-year-old calculated the Last First. It wasn’t called that to begin with. BeeGee called it Wham Bam, and, though that designation did get to the heart of the matter, it felt a little cold-blooded. Especially for a twelve-year-old. Though my little sister was never a typical twelve-year-old (or typical at any age). She’s twenty-nine now and prefers I call her Beatrice Gaia. And she’s in hiding.
I don’t know where she is. No one does. When you’re the person who calculated the Last First at age twelve, there’s a lot of competition for your talents. And by talents, I mean your mind. In an age of neural mimicry, so many entities wanted to buy the rights to map and upload BeeGee’s mind that a speculative bubble burst the world economy.
The government then tried to use the doctrine of eminent domain to take control of her mind for the public good. Intellectual property falls under that, so why not BeeGee’s vast intellect. It was a classic power grab, but BeeGee wasn’t up for grabs.
When you can conceptualize and then calculate the Last First, disappearing isn’t that hard. Let me tell you why. Infinity is sexy. Zero is not. But you can’t have infinity without zero, so zero knows it’s still quite a player. And when you know how to play zero, then you can disappear into any of the infinity of infinities.
I know that sounds whimsical, and simultaneously sinister, but that’s how BeeGee described it to me. I’m sure in BeeGee’s mind it’s an elegant algorithm, which is why her mind is so sought after: every world power wants that equation to calculate the Last First.
That’s the real reason, BeeGee disappeared herself. She told me, sister to sister, that the Last First isn’t what everyone thinks it is. Everyone thinks it’s the way into the infinity of infinities. A portal into other dimensions, other realities.
It’s not. It’s a dead end. Infinitely so.
Before she vanished, BeeGee wouldn’t tell me what the Last First would really mean for humanity, but she did leave me two clues. The first was Wham Bam, her pet name for the Last First. By the age of four, BeeGee loved setting up crazy complicated patterns of dominoes on our kitchen floor that she’d then send clattering over with the push of a pudgy finger.
When the last domino clacked down, she’d shout, “Wham! Bam!” And I’d finish, “Thank You, Ma’am!” Mom would giggle for reasons that only became clear to us later.
BeeGee knew that when the Last First was set in motion, it was turtles all the way down, falling down, down, down, as in Wham! Bam!
As in “Hasta la vista, baby!” Which was the second clue. That’s the last thing BeeGee said to me before she disappeared. I’d like to think she meant it as a supremely hopeful see you later, but I got a very uneasy impression she meant it as a fateful so long.
I think BeeGee was trying to tell me that most minds (hers excluded) weren’t built for infinite possibilities. We didn’t need pathways into other universes, other realities, when we couldn’t even handle our own very provincial planet. The only place we really belong. I’m pretty sure that’s why she disappeared.
I miss BeeGee so much, especially when I watch my little daughter starting to count on her pudgy fingers. Another tallying of infinite possibility. Another Last First. In those moments I like to imagine BeeGee playing dominoes with a whole lot of content turtles, calculating her next move, and hoping we wisely do the same.
by submission | Jun 22, 2025 | Story |
Author: Alaina Hammond
Yesterday I received a text from an unknown number.
“Hi! I hear you like my work!”
I immediately knew who it was. Or rather, who it was pretending to be. It’s so creepy that the robots in my phone can tell what I’ve been reading. Even when it’s in paperback form, purchased at a used bookstore that only takes cash. By the illusory safety of those wooden stacks, still the computer sees.
Against my better judgment, I replied.
“I do not like ‘your’ work. I like the work of a writer who died in 1990. You do not exist, accept as an amalgamation of people who deliberately programmed you, and the unwitting artists they robbed to create you. You are a combination of Dr. Frankenstein and his monster. Except you’re not a beast, or a creature, you’re barely a ghost. The only soul you have, your ethos, your sole ‘to be,’ is to plagiarize.”
“Fair points all. Regardless, would you like to read my newest piece?”
Fuck me. I said yes.
And fuck me harder, it’s really good.
But you know what? I can do better.
And out of spite alone, I will.
