by submission | Jun 24, 2026 | Story
Author: Majoki
Walk it. That’s how I processed a murder. Walk the crime scene, walk the neighborhood, walk until my mind caught up with my legs.
This case would take a lot of walking because I suspected this wasn’t an isolated killing. This looked to be related to a string of deaths and disappearances in the burbs stretching back years.
I’d made detective early in my career because I was patient. I didn’t force facts into convenient patterns. I let the evidence and environment paint the picture. And this crime scene was a huge canvas, a lush landscape brushed in blood.
So, I walked. Through the neighborhoods abutting the greenbelt where the most recent remains had been found. Almost a full corpse this time. Unexpected. Most of the remains the force had found up until now were bits of clothing, bones and teeth scattered in the undergrowth.
Since these deaths and disappearances in the county started a few years ago, popular beliefs ranged from cougars, bears or even wolves roaming the greenbelts to serial killers using the ravines as convenient dumping grounds for their victims to the turf wars of gangs using the cover of the greenbelts to make and distribute AI-generated drugs. Nasty hits that were more than mind-altering.
All plausible. All with problems. When you really walked them through. Especially with this corpse that was found face down in a culvert at the terminus of a greenbelt. The clothing shredded, the body bloated and decayed beyond recognition.
That’s what was eating at me. Making my legs turn faster and faster, so my mind would have to catch up. Beyond recognition. Of what?
Of a human?
That was the problem. It didn’t fit. Didn’t fit a cougar, bear or wolf either. The teeth and claws fit, but not the form. Or the clothing. It wasn’t at all clear what we were dealing with.
I stopped walking and took out my handheld. I brought up an aerial of the immediate crime scene. I expanded it and dropped an overlay with pins of deaths and disappearances in the county over the last three years.
I’d done this many times before, but something about this unrecognizable corpse in the culvert told me to walk it over again. I zoomed out on my screen until I could see every pin. Even the latest death.
It didn’t take any kind of skill to see the relationship of the killings to the greenbelts. But that facedown corpse in the stream was telling me something I’d overlooked.
Why greenbelts? What was their reason? Their pattern?
All greenbelts in the area stretched from the high hills. That was their origin. It was clear on the overlay. Five fingers of green sluicing into the burbs before the concrete of the city halted them. Each greenbelt a drainage, tracking back to a central source.
So elemental. So natural. They were drainages. Water forever seeking the sea.
The pattern of death pins was clear. Something was roaming the ravines, moving down towards the city. Bringing trouble. Staring at the overlay, it seemed to resolve more clearly into a massive claw with ever sharper points.
Time to walk. Back to the wellspring. Locate the source. Find the origin. Of this crime. That mutant corpse. What these new AI drug lords had spawned.
I put away my handheld. Patted my revolver. And headed up the drainage knowing full well what was going to come down on me.
by submission | Jun 23, 2026 | Story
Author: Bryan Pastor
Jayce watched it trudge out of the desert.
It took its good old time. Twice now Jayce went in for water. The desert air was dense with heat and blew in swirls making it impossible to hide from. Jayce added a little something to the second drink, something that would help with whatever this was that moved slowly thought the waste.
Jayce had almost fallen asleep leaning on an outbuilding when the noise caught his attention. Clack, skid, clack skid. It was maybe a hundred paces out. Jayce walked slowly, matching the pace. After about forty steps Jayce stopped, holding up his hand. He examined his guest waiting for it to notice hm. It was a bot, nothing factory made. It had a humanoid shape, though not symmetrical, each appendage looked scavenged. The right arm looked familiar, the O-95 unit he had lost last cycle? A leg was an inch shorter than the other.
Jayce decided it wasn’t stopping.
“Hold up there buddy.”
The bot stopped with a rattle and thud, the termination of its movement punctation on what had been a very long sentence.
“I am Royce9Blue, hand of the Master.” It began. Its voice was an unwelcome imitation of the old ship’s computer. “I have been sent here by Master to inventory your hold. It is his duty to know of all available resources should an emergency arise.”
“Not happening.” Jayce replied cutting R9B off before he could continue.
“As stipulated in the Accord of First Fall, Master is the protector of these lands and as such….”
“An accord needs at least two parties to agree to it.” Jayce interrupted, “Since your master decreed these things with no one’s consent then there is no accord.”
Jayce spat in the dust to mark his point.
“Master warned me that there would be resistance. I am prepared to complete my count by force.”
“No, you won’t”
“Say’s who.” The bot challenged.
“Says the imp you’re standing on.”
R9B’s head bobbed rapidly back and forth between looking at Jayce and the ground.
A maniacal laugh rang out, culled from some long-forgotten media. Its head stopped moving.
“I call your bluff.” R9B said
“Suit yourself.” Jayce turned and headed toward the outbuilding for a wheelbarrow.
The was a flash as R9B lifted his mis-aligned leg, though not in a spectrum Jayce could see.
_____
“Hey buddy. You, Okay?” asked the stranger.
Royce9Blue swiveled its head. It was laying on a rocky path. To its left was a steep hillside that rose a dozen meters straight up.
“Looks like you might have taken a fall. Though doesn’t look like you broke anything.”
The stranger helped R9B up. R9B looked at him, there was a moment of recognition, then a spike of interference, sight and voice crackled, then it was gone.
“Do you remember where you are going?” the stranger asked.
“NoooooooooooYeesssssssssssssss.” It stammered; its head started to bob in acknowledgement. “Back to Master. I am to receive orders of a most important nature.”
“Well then off you go.” The stranger gave him a little nudge.
_____
When it was out of sight, Jayce went up to the top of the rise and monitored R9B’s trek home.
After about an hour it disappeared. Jayce became concerned, but then twenty minutes later it reappeared. Two clicks further west.
“Tunnels. I have to start listening for frying bacon.” Jayce made a mental note to set up listening terminals.
Another two hours would go by before the explosion.
by submission | Jun 20, 2026 | Story
Author: Marion Lougheed
Sandy poked at the sticky substance on the living room floor. How many times was this stuff going to reappear? She looked at the ceiling, the plush couch, the walls, as if this time she’d pinpoint its origin.
With a sigh, she scraped it off the fake hardwood with a butter knife, then tossed the gunk in the trash. Like green gum, but not gum. It smelled like rotting grass.
When she returned to the living room, the goo had reappeared.
Angry heat shot through her. It was impossible, and yet there it was. This time when she scraped it up, she dropped the goo in a plastic container and carefully sealed it. She stuck duct tape around the lid to ensure no air — or goo — could escape.
The lab test told her little. Some kind of organic matter akin to cellulite. Like fat? She moved her rug to hide the spot where the goo had once again reappeared. Within a week, the whole floor was covered. The goo was crawling up the baseboards.
She closed the door to the living room. There was no lock, so she dragged the chest of drawers from her bedroom to block the way. At least it was contained.
A few days later as she was getting dressed for work, she dropped an earring. It scuttled beneath the bed. She knelt down to feel for it. A familiar grassy smell met her nose, and her groping fingers touched a sticky substance.
That evening, she locked the house door, loaded her suitcase into her car, and followed the signs to the nearest highway.
by submission | Jun 19, 2026 | Story
Author: David Berger
“How much longer do you think we have?” TRX-Dan (a Tyrannosaurus Rex), perhaps the world’s leading astrophysicist, asked.
“About a month,” TRI-Susan (a Triceratops), his trusted colleague said. “It’s coming on fast.”
“I concur,” TRX-Dan said. “And ARG-Lou (an Argeninosaurus) has confirmed it with the big scope in Montana. They heliographed me.”
“Have you notified the President?” TRI-Susan asked.
“Just did. I let them know yesterday when we first spotted it and confirmed its course. That was before we had a good estimate of time.”
“And the Minister of Science, ORT-Li (an Ornithomimus)?”
“Them, too,” TRX-Dan said.
A few hours later President TAL-Stefanie (a Talalarus), met with their Council of Advisors in Squo, the largest city and capital of Laramidia. The President was now in constant contact with TRX-Dan and TRI-Sue.
“There’s no doubt?” TAL-Stefanie had heliographed back to the two scientists. They had confirmed the impending doom. There was no way that the ordinary DINs would be able to survive the collision.
“Then,” the President said, “we’ll need to build bunkers, huts, yurts, caves, tunnels. So some of the smaller Teranurians, with their feathers, will be able to make it through if we take care of them. But none of us, not our clades.”
“We’ll also have to protect the mammalia; otherwise, they’re finished,” the Minister of Zoology, ISI-Pablo , said. “They’re too stupid to survive by themselves.”
“What about the pisces, lizzies and bugs?” the President asked.
“They’ll lose most of their species, but they’ll survive,” ISI-Pablo (an Isisausrus) said.
“We’ll need special structures to preserve seedstocks of the edible plants for the surviving ones,” MAP-Sven (a Mapusaurus), Minister of Agriculture said.
“After everything, it’ll all be gone,” Minister of Culture ZAL-Rasha (a Zalmoxes) said. “All we’ve built.”
“Yes,” President TAL-Stefanie said. “Everything. So let’s get going?”
“TRX-Dan said only a months” The President asked “No chasnge?”
“Thirty and a half rounds,” Minister of Science, ORT-Li said
“It’ll all be gone,” TAL-Stephanie said. “Our cities, our great machines, our plain-wide murals, our carved mountains? And our faith. Who’ll honor the Great Explosion? No one. And all that’ll be left will be our bones, turned to rock like the Old Ones. If only we’d made it to the Red Wanderer, or even just to the Face. Some of us could have survived there.”
“Another hundred spins or so, and we’d have been there,” TSA-Maali (a Tsaganetia), Minister of Transportation said. “There just wan’t enough time.”
Meanwhile, the Roid could already be seen in the night sky.
by submission | Jun 17, 2026 | Story |
Author: Elena Tosato
My visor kept flagging gaps: from timestamp T+19:43:12 onward, my sensors had gone dark. The system had filled the void using Steve and Ian’s data, which were both intact. Yes, sir. The implant reconstructed my memories from backups, but my sensors stopped recording after we crossed Hill 37-b11. So they used Steve and Ian’s data.
According to these cross-referenced memories, I killed Wayne. Meaning this is what you can see: Wayne walking away, an altercation, a high-energy discharge, and me heading back, alone. Yes, sir. The maximum-likelihood hypothesis. Two independent sources converging. However, sir. We all passed through the same contaminated environment. Hill 37-b11 may have introduced spurious correlations, and we have no way to correct the data for unknown environmental biases. No, sir. I’m not saying I remember it. I’m saying the data converges, and the data was written into my memories. Yes, sir, I understand. “Killing Wayne” is a well-formed sentence in natural language. But past that hill, well-formed sentences don’t guarantee referents. Yes, sir, I’m a linguist. For the mission, that’s correct. No, sir, no contact. Excuse me? No, as far as I know there was no friction between me and my companions, with Ian and Steve. We weren’t friends, but no one up there can afford to have friends. Wayne was a hard man. He was the same way with everyone. But I always considered his conduct appropriate, sir. It was. None of us ever filed a code violation against Wayne.
So there’s the question of motive, sir. The reconstructed memories suggested growing tension between me and Wayne. But that’s not sufficient evidence under any interpretive framework. I would propose the presence of an external synchronization agent. I’ll explain: my alleged words were nearly identical to those attributed to Steve in a different sequence. Sir, the data suggests that Ian’s and Steve’s sensor synchronization signatures align too cleanly after the hill.
No, sir. I’m not saying someone else did it. My memories, sir. It’s not me, it’s my memories. The system minimizes error by assigning the action to me, because that’s how it reduces the divergence between Steve and Ian. I could posit an unobserved event that accounts for the discrepancies without attributing fault to any human agent. If the resulting error is smaller, then I… No, sir. I’m not saying the system created the event. Words don’t create reality, sir.
Very well — let’s say I killed Wayne. Sir, the problem is that the sentence assumes “I,” “killed,” and “Wayne” maintain stable identities across the hill. Which is an unproven assumption. You see, sir, if Wayne’s memories were also reconstructed, you would most likely end up with a version in which he doesn’t die, or dies differently. The killing would become a family of narratives, pairwise compatible but not all consistent at once. Or Wayne isn’t dead. If Wayne still exists, he isn’t in a space our models can describe. No, sir, those were only conjectures. No, sir. I have no next of kin to notify.
