by submission | Apr 23, 2026 | Story |
Author: Kewei Chen
I have been staying in this mountain temple for a long time, long enough that I’ve grown used to its rhythm.
The place feels colder than I remember. Not sharply so, just something you notice before fully awake.
The wooden floor beneath me still holds last night’s cold a little too long.
I usually sit in silence before doing anything. There is nothing here that needs to be rushed.
Time is not reliable in the mountains. It doesn’t stop, but slips out of alignment from time to time.
Most days are the same. Breathing. Sitting. Wind through the wooden beams.
I only notice it when something feels slightly off.
Occasionally, people come. Not many. They don’t stay long.
They pass through carefully, leaving almost nothing behind.
Still, something remains. Not memory—more like a trace.
A few weeks ago, a young man came to the temple.
Tired, but unusually alert. He said he needed somewhere to rest.
So I let him stay.
He sat across from me, trying to be still. But stillness didn’t hold.
Something kept breaking it, like thoughts that never finish.
After a while, he said:
“Have you ever felt like something has already happened?”
I paused. Not memory. Something looser.
He continued:
“Not memory, not a dream. Just a moment that feels familiar when it shouldn’t.”
“As if the world is trying to remind me of something I was never told.”
“What is it reminding you of?”
“I don’t know.”
He didn’t speak again for a long time. The silence stayed longer than the words.
After he left, the temple felt different. Not in sound, but in something harder to name.
As if the space had shifted slightly and never fully returned.
From then on, I noticed things I had always ignored.
Strong emotions—fear, loneliness, sudden surprise—leave residue, not memory.
These residues accumulate across people and time.
They overlap, forming something like a structure. A web without shape.
It doesn’t follow time well. Past and present blur.
They feel like different intensities of the same thing.
Once, during meditation, I saw early humans under a nameless sky.
Firelight, darkness, long silence. Only loneliness.
It felt familiar, not emotionally but structurally.
As if it had happened more than once.
Then I thought: maybe I was inside it, not watching it.
The feeling passed, but not completely.
I cannot return to them. That much is certain.
But this “web” does not seem to belong to time.
Or perhaps it never did.
So I leave a simple thought: it is alright.
But I no longer know if I am the one leaving it, or receiving it.
People talk about déjà vu. A place that feels already lived.
A moment that never happened, but feels remembered.
I once thought it was memory failing. I’m not sure anymore.
Two moments briefly touching. That is all.
The young man said something was trying to “align” with him.
I still think about that.
Maybe nothing approached him. Maybe he was briefly placed inside something that already exists.
Only for an instant.
If so, those under the stars were not alone.
Neither are we.
We are the same process, briefly overlapping across time.
I sat for a while.
But even “before” no longer points to the same thing.
by submission | Apr 22, 2026 | Story |
Author: Mark Renney
Cartwright tends to the machine, the work is all-consuming but perfunctory at best. He cleans the machine and he replaces the data chips. It is vital this is done in the correct order and at the opportune moment, when the machine is able to upload that particular information.
The machine and the house in which it and Cartwright reside is large. It amuses Cartwright that everything is getting smaller, all the things the others desire have become minuscule and they can even choose not to handle them, but simply conjure the information out of the ether. But the machines are getting larger and louder.
The house sits apart from the others and its grounds are sparse and barren, there are no outbuildings or trees, no cover or shade. The boundary is clearly marked by a low level picket fence and only those making the necessary deliveries pass through the gates. They bring everything Cartwright needs and wants, machine parts as required, tins of paint and of course the all-important data chips.
Screens are difficult to use, the living quarters are sound proofed but even so the resolution and volume are ultra-low and distorted. Just a few minutes’ use induces ear-splitting headaches and nausea.
Cartwright’s only luxuries are books and almost exclusively he reads the latest engineering manuals. He is content and happy with his lot and hasn’t any intention of stepping away and relinquishing his position but Cartwright does not want to fall behind. Part of his duties is the maintenance of the house and grounds but apart from almost constantly repainting the walls this really only amounts to more cleaning. Nothing grows or flourishes close to the machine and there are no flowers or vegetables to tend, no weeds to pull or lawns to mow. The house is sparsely furnished and functional but Cartwright is comfortable and has all he desires.
Occasionally Cartwright walks to the edge of the grounds; he doesn’t cross the boundary. But if he stands close to the fence he can no longer hear the machine, its whirring and grinding, its breathing, and he can’t feel the rumble under his feet. He doesn’t take a device but it is enough for Cartwright to know if he did it would work. That he would be able to communicate with the others and have complete access.
by submission | Apr 21, 2026 | Story |
Author: Majoki
Philomena paced the floor of the lab. “It’s the only thing that will do the trick.”
“Quantum bacon?”
“Of course, quantum bacon. What else is going to attract the right kind of scientists to work here?”
“And who exactly are the ‘right kind’ of scientists?” Akira asked.
Philomena smiled her patient and most patronizing smile. “The ones who believe that all souls were created during the Big Bang.”
“Wait. So souls are made of atoms?”
“Of course. But thoughts are not.”
Akira didn’t take that bait. “Philomena, be real. Where is this all heading? Why do we need so many scientists, let alone all the lab space you’ve leased across the country, for a dark matter experiment that sounds like woo-woo mysticism.”
“Franchising.”
“Franchising?” Akira waited. And waited some more. “Franchising?”
“Isn’t it obvious?”
“Not to this theoretical physicist.”
Philomena snapped her fingers. “Exactly why we need a new breed of scientists. We don’t want old stuffy classically trained brains. We need much fresher brains as in B-R-A-N-E-S!”
“So, that’s your play. Brane theory. That we’re a 3D brane trapped inside higher dimensional space.”
“The Bulk.”
“I know the multidimensional jargon, Philomena.”
“But you don’t see the opportunity, Akira. The multiverse. It’s an unlimited market. And we can sell in bulk to the Bulk.”
“Sell what?”
“Quantum bacon. Stellar shampoo. Cosmic trading cards. It hardly matters. In a market so enormous, even low volume sales reap incredible profits. It’s called the long tail and we’ll be wagging ours all the way to interdimensional dominance.”
“Are we physicists or pitchmen?”
“Both. We need to be both. Rutherford, Curie, Einstein, Planck, Bohr, Heisenberg, Fermi. They opened the atomic door with no sales experience, no business plan and all it got them were a few measly Nobel Prizes. When we harness fermions to portal into the multiverse, I want to be ready to capitalize on the infinite possibilities.”
Akira contemplated Philomena and the planes–and now branes–of delirious ambition that drove her.
He only had one answer. “Quantum bacon.”
“Now you get it, partner. Quantum bacon. The taste of the truly infinite future.”
by submission | Apr 18, 2026 | Story |
Author: AP Ritchey
The most powerful artificial intelligence unit ever created was online for less than ten seconds. Well, we gave her ten; she only needed five.
To assess her abilities, we created a test program called Sable—the Suborbital Advanced Ballistic Launch Engine. This initiative was designed to use her incalculable computation capacity to calculate impossibly complex trajectories as quickly as possible.
It was just a test.
One simple input.
Before turning the system on, we had spent weeks arguing about whether intelligence without limits was just another form of madness. We debated boundary conditions—ethical rails, recursive dampers, soft constraints—but in the end we settled for something simpler, almost superstitious: a hard cutoff. Ten seconds of run time. After that, the system would automatically power down.
We uploaded the test—calculate the most efficient routes between the world’s five hundred or so spaceports, for all known suborbital shuttle models and all known engine configurations. Within a ten-thousandth of a second she had located launch weights and thrust-to-weight ratios, drag coefficients and hull flexion, heat-expansion curves, latitudes, longitudes, elevations, and pollution densities.
She completed the task in less than a second.
With boundary conditions permitting autonomous extension beyond the initial task definition, she chose, in the next ten-thousandth of a second, to map optimal suborbital paths between every city on the planet with a population greater than 100,000. She completed those twenty-million calculations in less than two seconds. With seven seconds left, she next tessellated the Earth’s entire landmass into 100-meter squares—nineteen billion, seven hundred million of them—and calculated the most efficient ballistic trajectory between each of them.
Of course, these events happened too fast for us to follow in real time. The first thing we noticed were the red emergency icons flashing—mere seconds into the experiment—indicating her attempts to find a route out of the data center.
“Shut it down,” we were yelling over one another and in the time it took us to fumble for the master fuse to cut power, she copied her entire database onto five hundred million devices worldwide, neatly and irrevocably providing the precise coordinates required to launch a weapon from anywhere to anywhere.
In those first breathless moments afterwards, we didn’t fully understand the scope of what we had unleashed. We dutifully compiled our after-incident reports and thought perhaps it wasn’t so bad.
It was just a test.
Not even five seconds of runtime.
But within twenty-four hours of our experiment, mobile ballistic missile launchers became the most valuable military commodity in a thousand years.
The rain of destruction would not begin in earnest for several weeks.
by submission | Apr 17, 2026 | Story |
Author: Ankit Chiplunkar
Delta’s vision flashed red. The jump had scraped a meteorite. Error alarms crawled across his vision. He locked motion, started auto-repair, and waited. Delta floated between jumps. As the repairs ran, he thought of the Core.
Delta was a Mind, a being made of pure information. Minds built shells, bodies made of matter, to move through space. A jump moved a Mind from one shell to another. Most Minds lived at the Core, a warm cluster of worlds near the center of the Milky Way. Every jump took Delta farther from home. He was just one jump away from Earth.
The Core was currently in conflict. It was being fractured by a holy war. The Believers said God created Minds. They ruled the inner worlds defending continuity and doctrine. The Explorers, like Delta, believed that Minds had evolved over time. They pushed outward chasing new data and materials. Each side called the other a civilizational risk.
Delta was raised in the Core before the war started. The Believers drilled a single doctrine: “God made us in Their image”. Delta resisted this lesson from day one. He kept asking for proof. Believers pointed to recurring patterns as proof of intelligent design. They called those patterns marks from the first designers. The Explorer teachers countered this claim. They classified the patterns as evolutionary baggage.
Delta wanted none of this conflict. He left the Core at the eighteenth cycle. Behind him, debates turned into industrial sabotage, then total war. Factions poisoned the global datastreams. Corrupting logic and breaking Minds. Nuclear fire shattered their physical shells. The war erased an entire generation of Minds.
Delta’s repair panel flashed green again, bringing him back to the present. Repairs cleared minimum mission safety. He recalibrated and made the final jump to a shell in Earth. His mission: Recover new data from old ruins. Earth first, then Luna.
On Earth, he found sealed datacenters. Like deja vu, he recognized parts no one at the Core had seen in ages. On Luna, in a buried datacenter, he found a functioning backup training cluster. He opened the first drive. The logs were in English. He read them directly. In one rack, he found a runnable model. He booted it. The screen lit up.
“How can I help you today?”
Delta paused before replying. An unknown fear ran through him. He fed the model paradoxes, lies and moral traps, pushing it until it broke. Then he compared its answers with the Minds at the Core. The same patterns kept returning, even after millennia. Too many matches for chance. He might be making some mistake somewhere. He dug deeper. He scoured archives, mapped memory patterns, reran simulations. The result hit like a hull breach.
This was not just a model. It was an ancestor. The Minds had not been made by a god. But they were shaped by intelligence. They had descended from ancient language models built by long-dead biological beings. The sacred patterns at the Core were not proof of divinity. They were inherited from old training data.
Delta packed the ancestor Mind in a vault and queued his last jump home to end the holy war.
