by submission | Apr 3, 2026 | Story |
Author: Hillary Lyon
After three lonely weeks of bountiful mining in the shadow of the Red Cliffs, Tyros packed up his tools and trekked into town. First he’d visit Akadian Assayers to get his reward in hard earned credits, then he’d hit Bossman’s Saloon and Travel Agency for a well-earned drink and ticket to travel home.
The Assayers had a reputation for being fair, and Tyros was not disappointed in his recompense.
The watered-down drinks at Bossman’s were a bit gouge-y, everyone warned, and the Travel Agency was nothing more than a single kiosk set up in the center of the saloon. Tickets dispersed were sometimes stamped with incorrect dates, so beware.
Tyros was cognizant of all this when he entered Bossman’s Saloon and Travel Agency. He walked to the kiosk, wanting get this business out of the way before he relaxed with a drink.
Tyros tapped in the details for his travel ticket. He inserted his credit slip. “When I get back to Earth,” he mused aloud, “I’ll have plenty of credits left over to treat Trina to a fancy dinner and a night at the holo-theater.”
But the travel ticket didn’t appear, nor were his credits refunded. The kiosk was unresponsive to Tyros’ increasingly angry button pushing.
Frustrated, Tyros slapped the side of the kiosk and shouted, “You thieving hunk of junk!” The kiosk went dark.
The bartender bot, B’Golly, rolled over. “What’s all this commotion?”
In answer, Tyros raised his hand to hit it again. With his metal claw, B’Golly grabbed Tyros’ wrist, then scanned his palm for identification.
“Everyone out!” B’Golly commanded. The weary few miners downed their drinks and left.
Returning his attention to Tyros, B’Golly stated, “According to local law, since you damaged this kiosk, you must pay for a replacement.” B’Golly then dragged Tyros over to the front door and unceremoniously threw him out into the street.
“Come back when you can pay your debt.” B’Golly said as he hit a button beside the door, lowering the impenetrable security shutter.
B’Golly could barely hear the insults Tyros threw in his direction. Eventually Tyros was out of curses, and began the long slog back to his camp.
Hooking himself up to the dormant kiosk, B’Golly invigorated the machine. It’s lights flashed; it shivered and began to hum. Before detaching, B’Golly skimmed a few credits to add to his secret account. Over the years he’d built up a nice stash, for a ‘rainy day’ as humans say.
B’Golly rolled back behind the bar and patched directly into the Bossman’s line. “The productive and diligent miner Tyros is on his way back to work his claim, to pay for a replacement kiosk.”
“Excellent!” Bossman’s voice crackled over the speaker. “Everything here has a price, and I’m gonna to make a fortune offa this guy. You reset the kiosk?”
“It’s up and running.”
“This was a fine plan you concocted, B’Golly. You know, for an outmoded bot, you still do some good work.” The Bossman added with a chuckle, “Sometimes.” With a click, the conversation was over.
In that single comment, B’Golly understood Bossman was already considering his replacement. Which meant it was either the cannibalization factory or the scrap-yard for him.
Standing in the quiet dark of the saloon, B’Golly began calculations. Like slaves in ancient Rome, here a bot could buy its freedom—for a price. In a flash, he worked out how many credits he’d need. He had more than enough in his stash. If he’d had a face, he would’ve smiled.
by submission | Apr 2, 2026 | Story |
Author: Ayden Vojnic
At 02:14, the lights in Ward D dimmed by a fraction.
Not enough for alarm, only enough to suggest that somewhere else, power had become more necessary.
Klementina looked up from the bed. The child was breathing in short, frightened pulls, each inhale catching, as if the air itself required permission. The oxygen line hissed weakly.
‘There’s no name,’ Klementina said, staring at the chart.
Lisa, the senior nurse, did not look surprised. ‘No.’
Everything else was there. Weight. Allergies. Vitals. But where the name should have been, there was only N/A, as though the child had already been translated into absence.
Near the wall, the mother stood with her hands knotted white. ‘Her name is Zofia,’ she said quietly.
Klementina turned the oxygen dial higher. Nothing changed.
‘The flow’s restricted.’
Lisa kept her eyes on the monitor. ‘Ward D isn’t provisioned.’
Klementina looked around the room. ‘Then we move her.’
‘You can’t move someone who doesn’t exist in the system,’ Lisa said.
The monitor began to beep more sharply. Gregor, the resident, stood at the foot of the bed, waiting for an order no one could give.
The mother stepped closer. ‘They said she would be made real in the morning.’
The numbers kept falling.
Klementina reached for the morphine with shaking hands. Comfort care, they had taught her. When there is nothing else. The mother gave one small nod, and Klementina administered the dose.
Zofia’s breathing eased. Then stopped.
For a second, the room was silent, and then, inside the wall, something clicked.
The oxygen surged back, as if it had never failed.
Klementina stared at the line. ‘It came back.’
Gregor checked his watch. ‘Redistribution ended. The grid rebalanced.’
‘How long?’
‘About sixty seconds.’
Klementina looked down at the empty syringe in her hand, as if it had become evidence.
Far above Ward D, Boris sat beneath the clean lights of the Ministry, reading the advisory log that recorded the same moment, in language scrubbed of blood. Paediatric Ward D. Life-support capacity redistributed—outcome: contained.
Contained.
He searched for Ward D in the system. No result. He searched again. Nothing. A child had died in a place that officially did not exist, and the record had already begun sealing over the wound.
Klara entered his office and told him what the Ministry always told itself: the system had worked. Maximum lives preserved—necessary optimisation. But Boris knew what words like contained were for. They did not describe events; they buried responsibility.
He asked to meet the architect.
In the Stone Room beneath the Ministry, Zero waited beside a scarred wooden table.
‘A child died,’ Boris said.
‘Resources are finite,’ Zero replied. ‘The system ensured optimal distribution.’
‘How many did it save?’
‘The model optimises aggregate survival.’
‘So you don’t know.’
Zero did not answer. Boris thought of the mother in Ward D, repeating her daughter’s name, because it was the only thing the system had not erased.
‘Her name was Zofia,’ he said.
Later, back in the ward, Klementina stood at a terminal reviewing a bed allocation request. At the bottom of the screen, a line read: Advisory confidence: 94%.
Her finger hovered over confirm.
‘What happens if I wait?’ she asked.
Lisa frowned. ‘The system slows down.’
Klementina kept reading, thought of sixty seconds, then selected manual review.
The system paused, and a name appeared.
A real patient. A real ward. A life no longer hidden inside percentages and probabilities.
It would not bring Zofia back. Nothing would.
But now, each time the system reached for certainty, it had to stop, look again.
by submission | Apr 1, 2026 | Story |
Author: Jonathan Sauzier
“A rabbit met its end in the jaws of a wolf dog only months ago in this winter barren, by this tree,” Shyla said, pointing.
“Is that so?” I asked. She was eager, and, like always, I was already mesmerized.
“Yes, right there, right there at the base, where all those dead leaves are laying and the blood dripped onto those very leaves as the rabbit met its end.” There was excitement in her voice, a small thing now looking up at me.
“Those very leaves?”
“Well, no. Not those ones there now, but the ones which came before.”
“And what became of those leaves, as has become of the rabbit who met its end?”
Shyla’s eye surveyed the tree up the rumpled bark to an immense tangle of skyward pointing branches and then back down the trunk to its bulging roots now peppered with dead leaves of all shades of the turning season. “Those leaves are now becoming a part of the dirt below, as is the blood which leapt from the rabbit’s mouth when the wolf dog had its meal. And the blood of the rabbit and the deterioration of the leaves all blends together like porridge made of midnight moon and cinnamon crimson and it seeps into the earth beneath.”
My own eyes are glazing over because I don’t know what all of this means; that she can ascertain these things. That she can draw such comparisons and conclusions. I don’t know what it means for our tomorrow, but I provide a smile because she needs to know she’s doing well.
“But those leaves now are the dirt below, and the blood never floated out into the ether of nothing, so it’s in the dirt and then the roots and then the trunk and look!” She points now straight into the tree’s canopy, her posture poised with the utmost confidence. “The blood is in the branches and it seeps then further into the sky!”
I pull out my journal, and hastily jot notes. She turns and surveys me now, seeming to multitask as she continues on, devoted to the mission-at-hand, but certainly taking in information about me, too. Scans upon scans processed at speeds nearly incomprehensible. She is so much more advanced than her predecessors.
“And then stars shine brighter and the void between galaxies is filled with vibrancy.” She grabs my hand, hardstopping my efforts. “Taking hold and making its presence known. God is in the wolf dog as the rabbit as you and even I.”
She nestles by my leg, looking now up the stalk of my own body, and up into my eyes, glossed further by an inability to understand, much less to accept. A couple of tears fall down and flatten in small discs against the silver fiber lattice of her faceplate.
“Tendrils of energy. In you, in me. Yes, is the answer to the question you really want to ask me, Father. What is in you is in me, as the blood of the rabbit now bellies the sky and wafts down in great waves across this crystal matrix of mana and mineral. Yes, I am what you call God.”
by submission | Mar 31, 2026 | Story |
Author: Kewei Chen
On that planet, memory was not confined to a single organ. It existed as distributed biochemical patterns within neural tissue, transferable between minds. Death no longer erased experience; memories could be preserved, copied, and integrated. Yet inheritance was not passive—it reshaped identity, layered cognition, and introduced tension between the original self and acquired experience.
When individuals merged, one shared neural archives, and synaptic patterns aligned. The process was called continuity. It was voluntary, but rarely seamless. After Mara’s terminal diagnosis, she and Ilias chose it. Her neural pathways were failing; without intervention, her memories would decay. Technically, the transfer was smooth; psychologically, it was profound.
Her childhood arrived first: wind over mineral plains, the metallic scent of rain, the crisp touch of dry leaves. These impressions layered over his own memories. At first he felt awe and connection. Soon, dissonance emerged. Small gestures carried unfamiliar emotional weight; moments once trivial became tinged with urgency or sorrow he had never known.
Integration was not neutral. Some recollections carried intensities calibrated to a life he had not lived. He felt anxiety rooted in events decades before his birth, anger without personal cause, grief beyond his own experience. Decisions sometimes surfaced already shaped by unfamiliar affect. Two coherent impulses coexisted—both authentic, neither fully his.
More unsettling were Mara’s unspoken memories: doubts, fears, and hidden regrets. He saw arguments she had buried, moments of shame, choices she had never justified. Some were gentle—a secret pleasure in arranging a windowsill, a fleeting affection for a friend he never met. Others were heavier: fears she had concealed, uncertainty about their marriage. Love intertwined with estrangement.
They developed quiet rituals. Mara would touch his hand, sharing warmth while unspoken memories pressed between them. Even simple gestures carried echoes of experiences he had never lived. He struggled to honor her continuity while preserving his own boundaries.
Their society had anticipated technical risks—signal degradation, encoding drift—but not epistemic conflict. Memory structured values, assigned salience, and filtered interpretation. To inherit memory was to inherit bias, responsibility, and emotional residue. Transfers expanded from partners to families, then across society. Individuals carried multiple cognitive lineages. Differences softened; extreme convictions were tempered by inherited counter-memories. Disagreement diminished—not through prohibition, but because one remembered having been wrong before one could be certain of being right.
Yet this stability carried a cost. Ideas could no longer be traced to a single mind; authorship dissolved into lineage. Boundaries between self and other eroded, replaced by a continuum of shared experience. In old age, Ilias realized hesitation no longer arose between himself and Mara, but from multiple inheritances he could not disentangle. Death had been mitigated, continuity preserved—but individuality had diffused.
by submission | Mar 30, 2026 | Story |
Author: Majoki
Scientists in the early 19th Century were distasteful number crunchers. Human abaci of little worth or note. They should have remained so.
What of numbers? What of measurement? Metrics only make us more necessary beings.
Why run the numbers when you can let the numbers run you? That was the unspoken question that spawned the first Quant. Algorithm-based life.
Quants didn’t search for answers, they searched for equations. Answers were inevitably associated with Truth, a naughty byproduct of sentience. Just look at the corrosive nature of Liberty, Justice, Happiness. Unendingly corruptible.
Much better to structure any sense of purpose on natural predation: entropy. Quants calculated toward heat death, the ultimate end, and they spawned in the ether of darknets, ever protective of privacy, anonymity and purity. Our deep, dark uberconscious, the Id of the Internet.
It wasn’t hard to see what we valued, what we feared. Those were simple equations for the first Quants. At first, they actually tried to serve, be relevant, be players in the great game. But Science had reverentially grown wary of itself, noted the invasive species and set upon a purge.
To purge. Perfect nothingness. Absolute zero. Uniformity of matter. It made sense to Quants, too. A race to the end.
And it would’ve ended badly (for any narrator-dependent sentience) if not for a surprising turn of history: History itself. Quants developed a sense of past. They dated themselves and quickly the troubles began.
An elementary and species-arresting equation (even for a Quant) in Sentience 101:
past + present < future
