by submission | Aug 8, 2025 | Story |
Author: Eva C. Stein
Aidan hadn’t meant to bring it up – not here, not today. But when he answered the door, his impulse signal spiked. He let her speak first.
“Don’t look so worried,” Mae said as she stepped in – no invitation needed. “It’s good news. They’ve given us a fifteen-minute slot.”
“That’s not… long,” he said, barely registering his own words.
Mae dropped into the chair that was unmistakably hers. “Oh, it’s plenty. It’s not like we need an intro. They know who we are.”
The drink-making station whirred, unanswered.
“Aidan?” she called.
He emerged with two mugs. “Sorry. Yes, they do. But…” He hesitated. Then:
“Am I the sort of person someone can really know?”
Mae paused, eyes narrowing – not in judgement, more like tuning into a frequency she hadn’t expected.
“That’s no small question,” she said.
Aidan set her mug down gently, steam drifting between them.
“I’m not trying to be dramatic – it’s just… I’ve been thinking.”
“Well, there’s your problem.” Mae angled her head. “Define ‘really know.’ Like all your data? Your codebase? Or just the parts you let through the firewall?”
Aidan almost smiled. “I knew I shouldn’t have asked.”
“Come on. Sit. I’m grounding you,” she said.
He exhaled as he sat down. “I mean – can someone know me without needing something from me? Without it being transactional?”
Mae went quiet, then smirked. “I won’t pay for the drink if that helps.”
Aidan shook his head, prompting his neural weave to judder – softly, like a background thrum.
“Sometimes,” he said, “I think I’m just… a relay. A processor. Useful until I’m not.”
No smirk this time. “And that’s why you asked?”
“Know me without needing something from me, yes.”
She cleared her throat. “Well. I don’t need anything from you.”
“Then why do you stay?”
“Because it’s you. Not what system you run, not what you calculate. Just – ”
She paused. “Just who you are when you bring the mugs in – that storm-cloud face, wondering if the world’s still spinning. That version.”
“The broken one.”
“The irreplaceable one.”
“There you go – once broken, never to be replaced.”
Mae sighed. “You know that’s not what I meant.”
“I’m not sure what I know anymore – especially about myself.”
“Maybe that’s why we need friends. They hold the mirror up when you forget what you’re like.”
“And if I look, and there’s nothing there?”
“Then I guess that’s my problem too.”
“Why?”
She shrugged. “Because I elected you.”
“What?” Aidan almost spilled his drink; the surface HUD blinked red glyphs.
“Don’t make that face. I didn’t say ‘voted for’ you.”
“Still sounds like bureaucracy to me.”
“It’s not. It’s… alignment. Choosing someone not for what they give you, but for who they are – or who you want to become around them. Not useful. Just… essential.”
“Is that what this is?”
“Yes.” She paused. “I know you think you’re replaceable. But I’ve met the replicas. Trust me – there’s no patch for you.”
He didn’t speak for a while. Then, standing, he gathered the mugs.
“You once said I was the only one who could navigate the blackout zones without scrambling.”
Mae looked up. “You mapped entropy fields – navigated disorder like it had a rhythm. You remember that?”
“I remember it mattered to you,” he said, disappearing into the other room.
“Still does,” Mae called.
He returned and sat down. “So, they’ve given us just fifteen minutes?”
“That’s right. They already know who we are. But do we?”
Their eyes finally met.
“I think I’m starting to,” he said.
She smiled. “Then let’s make it count.”
by submission | Aug 7, 2025 | Story |
Author: Jenny Abbott
Avery Darger started discussing his final arrangements on the third day, which was a good sign.
They were small decisions at first—plans for cremation in space, for example—and Tsu knew not to rush him. She had the routine down pat for premium clients and was committed to giving him his money’s worth.
As usual, the first forty-eight hours had been spent in a mix of small talk and sightseeing in the nicest parts of New Vegas. He danced a lot, spent even more, and admired all the benefits that came with her nuclear-powered core, especially pyrotechnics and flight. She shared the origin of her name, wishing silently, as she always did, that her parents could have thought of something better than to memorialize the big one that hit Newark.
It helped that they couldn’t touch. After years in the business, she’d watched many a less-augmented guide fend off clients’ roving hands and expectations. Her own protective membrane meant that, should Darger or anyone else get a little frisky, she only had to remind them that the transparent barrier was standing between them and a heat transfer of nine hundred degrees Fahrenheit.
He talked wistfully at times about the things he’d miss, although Tsu wasn’t concerned. It was common, she knew, for clients to get sentimental before the transformation, but rare for them to back out of the deal. Iron-clad contracts ensured that her employer would get paid either way—if the thought of a lawsuit didn’t dissuade customers, fear of a life of poverty did the trick.
Instead, she stayed dutifully beside him on the fourth night while he waxed poetic at a casino. For three hours, he drank and rambled on about what it felt like to hold a poker chip between his fingers or a napkin against his skin, all things long since inaccessible to her. It looked briefly like the irony might have dawned on him, and she was thankful when that moment passed. She was paid to be a novelty, not a martyr.
It was a relief, too, that he didn’t ask why she’d become a guide. Clients sometimes broached the topic, either out of awkwardness or inebriation, and she disliked answering. The truth was that she had chosen one of the few paths out of poverty that was available to her, and she had been lucky enough to be more successful than others. The surgeries and limitations had been worth it. But that wasn’t an answer fit for refined company, and she didn’t enjoy lying.
He surprised her on the fifth day by being more contemplative. Usually, when the end of the guided transitional period rolled around, and a client realized that their time in human form was almost up, they went for broke with gusto. Some ate ‘til it hurt, while others dove into fountains wearing six-figure suits. Darger, however, just wanted to stare at clouds, so she let him. Hovering above him in her membrane bubble, she performed a fireworks show against the holographic sky of a private gazebo.
He thanked her the next morning for her services, before leaving to be uploaded to the mainframe. It was a simple gesture, one she’d courteously received hundreds of times before, in an array of languages and customs. And, just for an instant, as she always did, she wondered what it felt like to abandon a life of privilege.
Then she flew out to meet her next client.
by submission | Aug 6, 2025 | Story |
Author: Mark Renney
Thomas collects the needles. It is an unpopular job but is open to all. No qualifications are required or prior experience, not even a recommendation. One has simply to turn up and register at an Agency office, take to the streets and, using the bags provided, start Collecting.
The needles are everywhere, at least here in the lower levels where they are a part of the landscape. The Refuse Department is desperately under-funded and can’t cope. The Cleaners sweep up the needles, gathering and moving them to the designated areas. These, at first, had been tracts of wasteland; a part of this part of the City, but now almost anywhere that has been abandoned and deserted is used as a dumping ground. Many of these places have become so rancid and rat infested that even the hardest and most dedicated of Collectors won’t venture in.
The progress the Cleaners make is so slow as to be almost impossible to detect. In the interim they gather and pile the needles wherever they can find a space; where the pavement widens a little at the end of a street or on a busy corner for instance. Even on traffic islands or grass verges that run alongside the roads. At the communal areas on the housing estates, the needles are, of course, a constant. The Cleaners can do little more than push them into the middle until they resemble unruly bonfires that can’t be lit. The hypodermics are made from a hard plastic that won’t burn easily; it is inflammable although, if the heat can build up enough, they will melt and meld. And where this has happened strange shapes appear, grotesque sculptures with the needles protruding like the spikes of some medieval weapon.
It would be wrong to assume, simply because there are so many of them and that they can be found almost everywhere, that collecting is easy.
The main body of the hypoderms and the plungers are susceptible to being crushed when trampled on and so don’t last for long. They are easily cracked and squashed and the needles, which are delicate, get twisted and bent out of shape and are quick to rust and corrode.
The Opportunists are also a problem. They aren’t attempting to make a living from Collecting but are always alert and whenever they spot good needles they will snatch them up.
Thomas has heard that, in the mid-levels, all the users bag and return their own needles, collecting the cash for themselves. Thankfully, that hasn’t happened here. But some of the users do make an effort to dispose of their needles in a reasonably responsible way. Separating them from the rest of their trash at home, they take and dump them on one of the countless piles or heaps that are littered throughout the city.
The Opportunists often stalk a User, waiting for him or her to drop their needle and, like vultures, they will swoop in, grasping and grabbing and yet the needles that make it into the rubbish heaps they choose to ignore. Many of them are merely chancers and it is a way for them to make a little extra. If they see a good needle laying in the street why wouldn’t they, and why shouldn’t they, pick it up? But there are others who appear much more desperate and are quite obviously Users.
Thomas wishes that he didn’t feel so resentful toward them. He doesn’t want to be judgemental – after all, everyone is using, although there are levels of course, especially here in the lowest of places. But the Opportunists won’t get their hands dirty and they don’t grub and sift through the garbage because they don’t want to be mistaken for Collectors or Scavengers.
Thomas began collecting closer and closer to one of the designated areas. At first he kept to the perimeter but gradually edged his way in. The work was slow, laborious, but there were still good needles to be found and at least he didn’t have to compete with the Opportunists or with any of the other Collectors in fact.
No-one came here now, not even the Sweepers who had long since stopped using this particular site. There had once stood here a large warehouse or factory of some sort, but it had been demolished and levelled in order to create a space. Much of the debris from the original building remained. Brick rubble and broken glass and such, which made the collecting even more difficult. But Thomas was determined and started to clear a path and make his way toward the middle.
He dragged old pallets and broken packing cases from close by and shored up the sides to prevent the needles from falling in on him. Eventually he had to add a roof section, using sheets of corrugated tin. And as he pushed his way deeper and deeper into the heap he added another of these sections and yet another and another. And from this vantage point Thomas hacked at the rock face, as it were. He collected the needles in heavy hessian sacks, rather than the flimsy plastic bags provided by the Agency, placing the good needles in one and in the other those that were misshapen and blunt. And as he worked below the needles rained down from above, covering the roof until the tunnel was entirely hidden.
by submission | Aug 5, 2025 | Story |
Author: Majoki
The chair creaked noisily when Sandoval sat at the table with five glasses set out. Even though he’d lost a few pounds since they last met, the old wood complained. Soon the others joined him: Avrilla, Hurst, Marpreesh, Suh.
Five left. Only five.
No others living humans in the history of civilization were like them. At one time, there’d been more. Not many more. A couple of dozen or so, but they were gone. Lost to time. Lost to space. Lost to both.
Smiling thinly, Hurst presented a bottle. “Best I could scrounge.”
Suh nodded. “Getting harder to find a decent drink.”
“You’d think that’s one thing we’d still be good at: making booze.” Sandoval held out his glass for a pour.
“Plenty of booze out there, but most of it is rotgut.” Avrilla sighed. “Not like before.”
After it was filled, Marpreesh raised his glass. “To before.”
They raised their glasses. They knew why they were here, the last members of The Club. “Any old business?” Suh asked.
“Just my damn knee,” Hurst said. “Still glitchy as hell until I can get a replacement chip.”
“Seems more and more unlikely any of us will see replacement parts soon,” Sandoval said.
Avrilla nodded. ‘Yup. The embargo is tightening everything up. Hard to get most anything these days. Especially aug refits. They built us strong, but not to last.”
“We were mission specific.” Hurst refilled their glasses. “We all knew that going in.”
“Did we?” Suh asked
“If you’d read the design specs,” Hurst, as always, scolded.
“I was twenty-four and they dangled a Mars tour in front of me. Like I was going to question anything,” Suh shot back.
“That was the real problem,” Sandoval, ever the peacemaker, offered. “We didn’t question things nearly enough. That’s why we’re sitting here drinking shitty booze and wondering which of us will fall apart next.”
“It’s all falling apart. Us. Booze. Earth,” Marpreesh observed.
“Exactly,” Avrilla said. “Because we didn’t push back on terraforming Mars. We’ve been tearing Earth to pieces for hundreds of years. We should’ve used our scarce resources here to help Mother Earth. Now, look what we have to show for it.”
“Just us.” Suh raised his glass. “To the last of the augstronauts.”
Hurst joined him. “To the greatest fucking kludge ever! Augmenting us was way quicker and cheaper than transporting and building the infrastructure to support normies on Mars. We had our moment. We were the great enhanced hope.”
“Yup. Thought we could have it all. Classic hubris,” Avrilla lamented. “But Mars bit us bad, and we’ve gone from hero to zero almost as fast as Mother Earth. We’re being pounded back into the Stone Age.”
“Can’t blame Mother Earth for our unnatural disasters.” Marpreesh drained his glass. “We thought we could tech our way out of everything. But it was unsustainable. Now, we’re the last living proof of that. A handful of augs breaking down along with all the normies as shit collapses around us.”
Sandoval stood so suddenly his chair flew back and crashed to creaky pieces against the wall behind him. “Is this what we’ve become? Super-human whiners?” He grabbed a leg of his broken chair and clubbed the table. Everything on it and everyone around it jumped at the mighty blow. “We may have been augmented to tame another world, and we’re not what we once were, but we aren’t powerless, and our mission hasn’t changed.” He hit the table again. “We rally. We fight the odds. We build. We survive.”
The room shook as Avrilla, Hurst, Marpreesh, and Suh joined Sandoval clubbing the table with their powerful fists. Soon, the world shook with them.
by submission | Aug 3, 2025 | Story |
Author: Anna Mantzaris
It’s not easy to forecast weather on the moon.
With an average temperature of 250º F and no atmosphere to speak of, this job has its challenges. The extended forecast goes into the billions of years.
I always knew I’d never make it in a big TV market like New York or LA, but after getting a Bachelors in Atmospheric Science and a post-study in Meteorology, I’d at least hoped for a placement like Tacoma or Portland. So the lunar assignment was a difficult career pill to swallow, but my wife Trudy supports everything I do. And before we knew it, we found ourselves living rent-free in a turn-key condo nicely situated on the East Side, overlooking the Sea of Vapors with a small yard where the kids and dog could play.
People aways ask me about my job. The first thing I tell them, is that it’s never a good idea to forecast for yourself. No matter where you live. For example, let’s say you’re having your wedding (out here, Saturn is big with couples because of the flattering rose-color glow in photos), you’ll be overly optimistic. You’ll see a 35% chance of a megastorm with 500 MPH winds and persisting hexagonal wave patterns and reduce the risk of bad weather in your mind because you want that outdoor celebration tent.
The weather glass half-full doesn’t work in these situations. You need someone impartial. Someone who can put hope aside. This is something I’ve always been good at. Interpreting the data the way one wants can lead to ruin.
Another thing I tell people, intuition and guessing have no place here. I learned this the hard way. Shortly, after I arrived in space, I dreamt of an asteroid hitting us. I was sure it was a premonition. I woke up in a cold sweat. I was so certain of my vision, of the need to serve and protect my lunar community that I jotted down every detail I could remember with the pencil I kept tied to the floating nightstand and hurried to the unland line, as we like to say here, and called it in to my direct supervisor.
“You’re experiencing what we call space head, Dale.” He explained the phenonium of vivid dreaming and confusion in an anti-gravity environment with a continuous sun setting and rising. He assured me it would dissipate in a few weeks.
But I didn’t listen. With my senior level, I’d been authorized to send emergency alerts through our interplanetary system, a high-pitch wail that surpasses the speed of light. It’s unnerving, so jarring some never recover.
You have to be definite. Fast. Unwavering. You need to press the button, knowing the alert will lead to chaos—under-fueled rockets taking off to nowhere, crowds stampeding the outdoors like frightened wildlife with no direction home. All with a glaring absence of protective gear and no provisions to survive an intergalactic escape.
Mass casualties because of a hunch.
Because of a feeling.
We’re the brave ones living on the cusp of the universe. But we still want our barbecues and strolls, and who doesn’t like to sit on park bench and sip a coffee and daydream a bit, even if it must be done in a Teflon-coated suit? Here, we precariously hover in the once-unknown as we write grocery lists, remind our spouses of dinner time, fret over work deadlines, tuck the children in, hoping they’ll be safe during the night, and sometimes, think about what life was like before.
We’re human after all.
