by submission | Jun 4, 2025 | Story |
Author: Kenny O’Donnell
Touchdown. The ship rumbled. The landing gear drilled into the asteroid, anchoring his one-man yacht. The asteroid, only a kilometre long and half as wide, was too small to hold a ship without anchors. His joints popped as he floated from his chair in micro-gravity. He grabbed a handle on the bulkhead and swung himself down the central ladder into the airlock.
Eighteen months of drifting on a course he programmed atrophied his muscles. He had only enough strength to put his atmo-suit on. A suit older than the ship itself. Emblems of empires, insignias of a fallen army marred by time. A relic, like himself.
He chuckled. He always knew he would die wearing this. He thought it would have been decades ago. When war was so much simpler. When death was real and not some fairy tale of a forgotten civilisation. A fantasy perpetuated by an empire that cheats death.
He clamped a tether to the yacht’s hull and let go. The asteroids gentle spin took the ground from his feet. After a few yards the tether pulled taut and like a fish caught on a line he jerked into a slow spiral.
It was sunrise every few minutes as the star came into view with every rotation. Saturn was in view, almost in line with the rocks axis. She was no bigger than his fist. He had fought for her once, many wars ago. Fought, killed for her moons’ resources. Won them too. For the empire. The one who lauded him as a hero, the one he was now hunted by.
Their hunt will be over soon enough. His last breath would be the end. He wouldn’t abort his ships transmission this time. The data packet would send on an open channel. Proof that his now war crimes were once orders of the Empire.
He enjoyed the poetry. His final breath will destroy an empire which he slaughtered millions for. One he was once proud to be a part of. But he had waited long enough. Now he was ready. He wasn’t going to rush it. This was on his terms, not theirs. He tapped the controls on his arm and instructed his suit to inject him with morphine.
Stars twisted above him, around him. The darkness of space grew darker. Once he was gone he hoped it would be a little brighter.
by submission | Jun 3, 2025 | Story |
Author: Majoki
When his son stepped through the privacy-field into his home office, Manfred began to disconnect.
“You told me to come see you after I finished my homelearn session, Dad.” His son’s eyes narrowed disdainfully at the etherware bands his father removed from his head and set by the brainframe, their household’s direct link to the infosphere.
“Dex, your mother and I both wanted to discuss this with you. But, it’s dust up on Mars, so she messaged me to talk with you tonight. To have a kind of old-fashioned man-to-man talk. You’ll be eighteen in a month and you’ll be eligible to — ” Manfred hesitated. “You promised you wouldn’t decide until Mom returned, but that could be a year now, and she’s worried…we’re worried…you won’t wait.”
“I’m not going to wait. I’m going Post on my birthday,” his son declared.
Manfred rose out of his chair. “Dex, don’t do this to your mother, or me. You haven’t thought this through.”
His son’s eyes narrowed fiercely. “You mean about getting rid of this crappy body, asthma, acne, colds, retro-flu and all that other biological bs? I don’t need this physicality. Nobody does since Singularity. I’m ready to upload. I’m going Post!”
“What about this?” Manfred placed a hand on Dex’s shoulder. “What about touch? Talking face to face? Man to man? What about having a child of your own someday?”
“You mean, so I can watch my kid grow apart from me as my body slowly rots. I’m sorry, Dad. You’re living in the past. It’s dying and so are you. I’m going to live forever as a Post. I’ll experience every possibility.”
“It may not be that way, son. Not everything happens like the sim ads promise on N-vision.”
“You’ve never even done the simulation. I’ve done it plenty. It makes your precious brainframe seem like a thousand-year-old abacus. You don’t have a clue how it liberates your mind.” Dex hesitated. “And Melanie’s visited.”
Manfred shook his head.
“She has, Dad. I’ve felt her, like she’s trying to pull me beyond N-vision and the infosphere. She’s tugging at my mind, but I can’t go because of this deadweight. This body. I want to go with her. You have no idea how that feels.”
“I know the grief her parents feel!” Manfred shouted. “They’ve had to cryo Melanie in her room. They’re hoping she, her consciousness, will come back. No one even knows if that’s possible.”
His son went rigid. “You’d better not do that to me. I don’t want some metabolizing mass that’s supposed to represent me frozen forever!”
“You’d rather we just forget you were once our living, breathing son?”
“Chrislam, Dad! You are so…so human. Why can’t you see the future? Do it with me. Plenty of families have. Then you and mom could be together forever, too.”
“What about your sister?”
“You can all go Post when she turns eighteen.”
“We may not want to. It’s not so simple. I don’t want to become a hive-mind hybrid.”
Dex exploded. “I can’t believe you use that kind of propaganda! It’s racist. It won’t stop the trend. Thousands go Post every year. The numbers keep growing. It’s evolution. You Corpses are going to die out within a few hundred years.”
Manfred winced at the nasty term. “You really believe the Postsingularity Office? That you’ll become a liberated consciousness, no longer constrained by time, space or physical maladies? This isn’t just some slick N-vision ad promising omnipresence. What will your ‘totality’ mean when it just looks to us like you’re brain dead?”
“You and mom should’ve thought about that before you had kids. Posts have been around for over twenty years.”
“Only daredevils, neurotics and freaks did it then!” Manfred shot back.
“So, which category do I fit? Do you consider me a freak?”
“Right now, you certainly aren’t behaving human.”
“Then, this is a good move for me,” Dex said quietly. “Is that your back-handed blessing?”
Manfred sat down, rubbing his temples in a way parents since the dawn of time would recognize. “Just one more question, Dex. Will you try to ‘visit’ us?”
His son smiled earnestly. “Every day.”
Manfred took a shallow breath. “Then promise me one thing.
“Sure, Dad. Anything.”
“If, as a post-human you really do attain these purported god-like powers,” Manfred pleaded, his head beginning to throb, “be merciful, my son.”
by submission | Jun 1, 2025 | Story |
Author: Aubrey Williams
I’ve been looking for work for months now. After the chip company got all-new machinery, the bean-counters did a review, and I was one of the names that got a red strikethrough. I can’t live on redundancy forever, and I’m not poor enough to get a rare welfare payment, so I need to find something in this nest quick before I’m shuffling along the vents and tubes looking for discarded fast-food. Okay, I won’t actually be homeless, but a person worries. Like a robot I’ve been standing in lines at job centres, mechanically sending CVs and letters to all manner of firms, hoping to hear back something. It seems like half of the jobs I see don’t actually want me, but I’m told I have to keep persevering. On my way to and from the main job centre, I pass by an alley that leads to a confluence of other alleys behind the backs of the major buildings here— an all-boys secondary school, a medical supplies warehouse, of course the job centre too, a cheap canteen, and some sort of plumbing firm. There’s a sort-of concrete courtyard of scorched cement and forgotten dumpsters, a few scant weeds here-and-there, and disused loading doors. I’ve noticed that each time I pass by, there’s always a few men standing there. They’re not lounging around, not really, and they don’t seem to be doing all that much. Most of them seem like employed men, or at least they’re either wearing high-visibility jackets, pressure overalls, or suits. As I’ve passed by, I’ve realised it’s always the same men, or at least none of the men I’ve seen ever seem to vanish. New ones join occasionally, and end up also standing around. I think there’s about ten.
Weird, right?
My curiosity wouldn’t go away, so after another week of failing to get even a modicum of acknowledgement, I decided to pop into one of those alleys and observe the group. I saw six of the regulars there, some with their hands in their pockets, slightly bobbing around as fellas do when they’re waiting around, one man leaning on a pillar, the rest stood tall and straight. As I watched them, a tall man with a good head of hair and a suit from ten years ago brushed by, and he turned, curious. He looked me up and down before smiling, and asked:
“You want to join us? Not got anything much either, right?”
I nodded, and he motioned for me to follow. This man in the old suit walked over past some ragwort poking-out of a crack and settled on a spot next to a rusted bolt about the size of my wrist. He didn’t say anything or motion anything to the other men. I hesitated for a few seconds, but I followed, wanly smiling at the others before taking a spot next to the man I’d spoken to, with a discarded crate to lean against. In the next ten minutes, three more men came from different alleys: one looked like he worked in construction; another had on the kind of apron that reminded me of the medical building; and the third had a look that screamed “teacher”. All of the men took up what were clearly the positions they were accustomed to.
Nothing was said, nothing happened. We were there for an hour. In that time, I noticed a regularity to all the men’s movements, a repeating of patterns. I also realised that none of them ever exhaled or inhaled.
Come to think of it, I didn’t breathe either. I couldn’t, and didn’t know how.
by submission | May 31, 2025 | Story |
Author: Eva C. Stein
After the service, they didn’t speak much.
They walked through the old arcade – a fragment of the city’s former network. The glass canopy had long since shattered. Bio-moss cushioned the broken frames. Vines, engineered to reclaim derelict structures, crept along the walls.
Mae’s jacket was too thin for the chill that seeped through the open airlocks, but she didn’t seem to notice.
“Do you ever think people get shame wrong?” she asked, not looking at him.
Aidan kept his gaze on the cracked tiles beneath his boots, feeling the throb of the neural weave in his spine. “Wrong how?”
“As something to run from. Like it… hurts.”
She slowed her step. “But what if it’s trying to tell us something we’ve been avoiding?”
He nodded. “You mean, like a warning?”
“Not quite so simple. Shame isn’t a wound – it’s a lasting scar in the code, a memory that won’t erase.”
He considered that. “And anger?”
“Anger is louder. Shame waits.”
They passed a rusted data terminal, half-swallowed by vines. Its screen blinked beneath lichen-like growth. Aidan paused beside it.
“But both show up uninvited.”
“Most things do,” she said.
“And some don’t leave.”
“Maybe they stay until we stop pretending we can’t hear their signal.”
She brushed a spray of moss from the terminal’s edge. “Until we stop closing the door.”
He looked at her. “You really think feelings can be met like that?”
“Better than treating them like corrupted files to be quarantined.”
Aidan exhaled. “I think I kept rewriting the entry protocol – hoping nothing would get through.”
They walked on. Somewhere, a window shutter scraped.
“When shame is earned,” Mae said, “maybe it’s the part of us that remembers who we wanted to be – the original upload.”
Aidan didn’t reply. His steps slowed.
“And anger?” he asked at last.
“Maybe it’s what won’t let the world forget. Or won’t let us forget that we cared.”
“You make them sound almost noble.”
“I’m not trying to. Maybe they have reasons – even if we can’t name the code that drives them.”
A breeze moved through, carrying the smell of damp brick and something faintly medicinal – from the chapel or the hall, or both. Aidan adjusted his sleeve.
“Sometimes I think I lived the last ten years quietly. Not because I felt nothing, but because I was never sure which were my words to say.”
Mae nodded once. “And when you did speak?”
“I was careful. Too careful.”
He paused. “I used to think that was strength. Now I wonder whether it was just another layer of security.”
“Maybe it was fear,” she said. “Of hurting someone.”
He looked away. “Or of being known.”
The arcade opened onto the street. Afternoon light fell across the paving stones. Near the kerb, a child’s bicycle leaned against a lamppost. Its front wheel turned, though there was no wind.
Mae stopped.
“Do you think those feelings – shame, anger – ever leave us?”
Aidan watched the wheel spin. “If they do… maybe it’s not because we chased them away. Maybe it’s because we finally stopped talking over their signal.”
Mae didn’t answer. She didn’t have to.
They stood for a while, turned just enough not to face each other. The street lay quiet ahead. A bird flew across the light above the rooftops, then disappeared.
When Aidan finally spoke, something in his voice had changed. “Do you think she knew?”
“Yes, I do,” she said. “She told me.”
by submission | May 30, 2025 | Story |
Author: David C. Nutt
It was an alien invasion, not in the sense of “War of the Worlds” but more like what historians called the “British Invasion” but without the Beatles. What invaded us was close to five million overprivileged alien tourists, all here for one reason: to inhale us. No, this is no metaphor. They are here to literally, sniff us out. They love our scents.
Turns out, the rest of the galaxy doesn’t smell like much…some rot here, smoke from different kind of fires, and the odd change in air quality differing from planet to planet based on what kind of dust and water was indigenous. One wonders why evolution gave the various human adjacent aliens olfactory senses at all.
Their cultures had no flowers. No essential oils. No animal scents. No complex pheromones. No body odors. Just a dull scent palate, at that was it for the galaxy.
Except for earth, and well, us.
My son and daughter-in-law ran a candle shop, a business they started when their profitable cleaning franchise closed due to the home robot revolution. They were doing all right but struggling.
Then the invasion came. Now my son and daughter-in-law have more money than they actually know what to do with, and that’s after spoiling me and his mother (and the rest of the family) absolutely rotten. But it doesn’t stop there; and it’s not a good thing.
One cannot walk down the street without being accosted by aliens of one stripe or another wanting to come closer for a sniff. It doesn’t matter who we are or what we’re doing. Lovers walking arm-in-arm, business folk rushing off to a power lunch. Kids on bikes or boards careening down the sidewalks. DOT workers filling potholes. Without so much as a I-beg-your-pardon we all get a nose shoved somewhere on our bodies, going beyond any accidental violation of personal space. It has gotten so bad the UN has complained to several off world governments and banned at least three alien species from coming to earth.
The rest of the galaxy doesn’t see it that way. Nope. Think we are being “primitive,” and “oversensitive.” The common view is, and I quote from one of pamphlet of a consortium of planets, “Earth has no right to deny the greater galactic community this incredible resource.”
Things are getting more and more out of hand. A tour group of aliens over-ran a gym last week. Bad idea, especially when coming between powerlifters and their work outs. Two humans injured, 16 aliens put in the hospital before police arrived. Four aliens pummeled with baked goods at a farmers market outside of Niece. An enraged crowd in Bangalore tipped over a tour bus. Alien visitors in route to Manitoba, turned away. Hell, its got to be pretty bad if it’s pissing off Canadians. Now, Earth has kicked all the tourists out. The last of the shuttles departed to cheers and jeers.
It’s been almost three months and all of us are finally getting back normal. We’re told by our military folk there are alien battle cruisers on the way, an armada if you will. Fortunately for us the last decade or so of reverse engineering and just plain tech left has put us on an even footing with just about any other species in the galaxy. Maybe even ahead of a few.
All of this because we happen to be the defacto Pot-Poruri of scents for the galaxy. All I know is that all this really stin- no sucks. Yeah, all this really sucks.
