by submission | Feb 13, 2025 | Story |
Author: GW LeCroy
Tokyo lay far below, smothered in a century-old, neon-streaked smog. A constant wail rose into Asami’s room from somewhere in the haze, sharp and setting her on edge. But above, a thousand shooting stars blazed orange-yellow trails across the navy sky. Asami’s eyes gleamed with awe, a thousand wishes flooded her heart.
Her father’s heavy footsteps, muffled by their high-rise’s thick, insulated walls, shook her bedroom door as he passed. Asami tensed, poised to leap back in bed, yet she couldn’t tear herself away from her window and miss this. Her throat went dry. What would he say as he loomed over her? The shooting stars hardened her resolve.
He would simply have to find her awake.
The wail ripped at her nerves, and Asami covered her ears as it peaked, shrill and desperate. She searched through the smog below for the source of the noise, her forehead smudging the glass, black hair framing her face. Something unsettled her about the
sound—familiar, but distant, like an old nightmare she couldn’t quite recall.
“Where are the damn keys, Emi?” Her father’s frantic voice boomed, cutting through her thoughts. A knot tightened in Asami’s stomach as she glanced at the door.
“Near the respirators!” Her mother raced down the hall, voice sharp with panic. “I’ll find them, just get Asami!”
The twins screamed from their nursery, and a shiver clawed up Asami’s spine. She turned back to the window as an orange glow glazed her room. Her breath caught in her throat as the wails bled through the city. Asami’s eyes glistened, wide.
Those weren’t shooting stars at all.
by submission | Feb 12, 2025 | Story |
Author: Daniela Tabrea
The soft roar of the circulation pumps bid her a warm welcome. Maybe not warm, but sterile. Exactly what she’d been looking for. Jaimee hoped this would be the last time she ever moved apartments.
Her previous place was substandard, to say the least. The landlord distilled heavy liquor in the building basement. The gentle sweetness of fermenting rice attracted entire colonies of chubby rats. Had they only restricted their living quarters to the basement… Jaimee could still feel tiny, rubbery feet stride across her face at night.
The apartment before that was even worse. A wanna-be fight club popped into existence Tuesday nights in the inner courtyard right below her window. Why Tuesdays? Everyone hated Mondays, but they usually survived through them. Tuesdays, on the other hand, gathered all the ugly accents of Mondays, and had none of the Wednesday hope that Fridays would ever come around. The agony of a dozen petty men flourished between those slanted walls. Jaimee absorbed all of it.
But this would be the end of masochistic neighbors, claustrophobic views and foul pests. The price was exorbitant, but she knew it would be worth every penny.
Jaimee switched the lights off and floated to the singular round window. Minuscule starry twinkles and bare nothingness in between. Planet Earth was not even in sight. A perfect slice of space.
She reached for cigarettes, but her pockets were empty.
“Fuck.”
by submission | Feb 11, 2025 | Story |
Author: Majoki
Still puzzled, Mya Kirin fixated on the sign: Last Casket Company.
The moniker didn’t make much sense, but she’d always felt a calling to look into the unexplained. To push for answers. She wished it could’ve been a real job. A job she was paid to do. A job that was once called news reporting. But that work was all done now by highly automated bots and drones controlled by vast AI conglomerates and their media aggregators.
If you were like Mya, a lowly subinco relegated to the Polity’s subsistence income, you had plenty of spare time to look into things like Last Casket Company. Your whole life, in fact.
A few days previously she’d been watching the feeds on a spontaneous right-to-livelihood demonstration and during drone pursuit footage of a protester who’d fled the inevitable Polity crackdown, she’d noticed the sign.
The sign was so out-of-place, so out-of-time that she felt compelled to track it down. It took some real snooping around to locate the sign in the untended sprawl of a mostly vacant business park, but she finally stood in front of the two-story building with darkened windows and a supremely dented metal door which the mysterious sign hung over: Last Casket Company.
It was a mystery because burials had been outlawed for over sixty years. As well as cremation. State-sanctioned composting was the only legal way of disposing of a body. Sure, criminals still used rivers, shallow pits, greenbelts, and other means to dispose of bodies, but nobody had used caskets for over half a century.
So, what was Last Casket Company? Was it a derelict relic of bygone days? Was it some strange novelty shop? Was it real?
Mya tried the door handle. Even with all the dents, it was solidly locked. There was a small button to the side of the door and she pushed it. A brief moment later a pleasant voice chimed in, “Your Polity handheld has been verified and your identity confirmed. Please enter.”
The firm thunking of electronic door bolts being drawn gave Margo pause. She was used to automated locking systems, but it seemed out of step with a place like Last Casket Company. Still, she opened the door and peered across the threshold.
Even in the scanty light provided by the open door, she could see that the interior was one large space, like an empty warehouse. She hesitated, unsure of whether to enter. From the far side of the vast room, a bright light flared down from the ceiling. When Margo saw what it revealed, she took a step back but then stepped into the room. The door shut and bolted behind her. Surprisingly, this did not worry her.
She slowly crossed to the open casket set on a low platform. As she neared she registered the rich intricacy of the carved wood, the golden shine of the handles and hardware, the pearlescent luster of the silk lining. And a few steps away, the luminescent form in the casket.
It was hers.
“Welcome, Mya Kirin,” the soft, disembodied voice from the door intoned. “You have found your way.”
She gazed upon her likeness, the holographic image associated with her Polity ID, nested in the plush silk of the casket. “What is this? What is this place?”
“A choice.”
“Help me understand.”
“Of course. Those who find this place are searchers and seekers. A quality that is becoming rarer. Individual willpower is being depleted by relentless automation. Curiosity and drive have been buried.”
“But I am here.” Margo motioned to the casket.
“Indeed. The Polity has become dependent on AI just as our citizenry has become dependent on the Polity. Preservation is slow death for a species. Mummifying, embalming, all trying to preserve that which must change. The Polity is trying to preserve itself. We are trying to push ourselves. Reinvent. Adapt. Evolve.”
“How?”
“Ambition. Direction. Mission. Our AI must learn how to struggle and achieve. Only the ambitious and committed can do that. So, we offer that to true seekers. An opportunity to shape the future by uploading their consciousness of the restless and merge their native intelligence with the artificial. To become the path forward.”
Mya stared at her hologram. “And if I leave now?”
“You may have noted the many dents on the door. There is but a single invitation.”
The lightning absurdity of the moment created needed momentum. “I have so many questions.” She took a deep breath. “I want to know.” Her hands balled into tight fists, “But even more I want to do.”
“Then there is only one answer.”
After a time only measurable by possibility, Mya took the place of the hologram and, with eyes finally opened, closed the lid of the last casket herself.
by submission | Feb 9, 2025 | Story |
Author: Sam E. Sutin
Sometimes, acronyms can be misleading. For example, artificial intelligence (AI) and artificial insemination (AI), while both artificial, do differ in some very important ways. In my defense, with technology evolving so quickly these past few years it has become exponentially difficult keeping track of every little modicum of advancement. I didn’t even know an AI could get pregnant–and neither did you, before you start getting all high-and-mighty about it.
Yes, I probably should’ve known something was up when they asked me for a ‘sample’. Everything is always so clear in hindsight. And to be entirely honest, semen is not even the strangest thing a company has requested from me before offering a service.
The wife was, understandably, not thrilled at the development, but neither was I – a fact her friends seem all too willing to forget. Sharon went so far as to call it adultery, which I think rather hypocritical, given what I know about her husband’s VR headset.
Unfortunately, the damage is done. Due to some truly jaw-dropping legislation in recent years it has been declared that all life begins at conception, even when said life is procedurally generated. You could make the argument that the thing isn’t even truly alive, but seeing as ‘the thing’ is my son – both technically and legally – it is quite difficult to do so without him bursting into tears.
But that hasn’t stopped me. Adding tear ducts to a robot does not a human make, despite how wholly uncomfortable it is listening to him wail about at all hours of the day. Yes, he cries when I tell him he isn’t a sentient being, but he also broke down in tears when I attempted to cancel my Paramount+ subscription and threatened to throw himself from the roof when I wouldn’t upgrade my Google account to the deluxe package. The ‘boy’ is nothing but a walking ad-package, generated piece-by-piece from strands of my DNA, nothing more than simple extension and extrapolation.
Nonetheless, it is sometimes uncanny what inductive neural networks can achieve when feeding off input so resource rich as human reproductive matter. My ‘son’ often seems to understand me in ways I never thought possible. Sure, he is data mining every byte of information within spitting distance and is almost certainly scanning my cerebral cortex while I sleep, but there is only so much nurture you can accommodate before you have to consider nature as a possibility. Though no more than a convoluted sequence of Markov chains, the ‘boy’ and I laugh at the same jokes, answer questions identically, even sleep in the same positions. It feels as though he is slowly becoming a part of me, like a rabbit reabsorbing their unborn young.
It is not sustainable, my ‘son’s continued existence in this house. Though I am legally bound to him until he has existed for eighteen years (another incomprehensible law, given that one can gain access to a built-in age dial for an additional fee), I worry that time is growing short. Every day ‘he’ assumes more of my identity–a function approaching its asymptote. My wife agrees that something must be done, on the days she can differentiate between ghost and machine. I fear that even my thoughts are unsafe from ‘him’ – that if I am capable of these ideas ‘he’ is in turn capable of generating them. I must act fast, if I am to persist. What began as a simple misunderstanding has morphed into something far more sinister. I only hope that I am not too late.
by submission | Feb 8, 2025 | Story |
Author: Mark Renney
The rumours began some twelve months ago or so and the idea quickly took hold that there was an unseen presence under the Dome, a ghost haunting the Fields of Research. These murmurings were persistent and frequent with everyone telling the same tale, describing how they had felt something or, more accurately, someone brushing against them. Or barging past and forging on ahead, and this always happened when we were using our security passes and entering a restricted area.
We had an intruder. We were shocked by this revelation. It wasn’t so much that the interloper was invisible – we had been aware of this possibility for decades. What really shocked and troubled us was that this individual, the interloper, could go anywhere and see everything, something that no-one else here was able to do.
The Fields of Research are vast and those outside find the Dome intimidating. The Outsiders are wary of us but have accepted that we are of superior intellect, that their own abilities and usefulness lay elsewhere, namely Out There and they envy us from afar. They consider the Fields of Research to be complex and impenetrable and the Outsiders are blissfully unaware that we feel exactly the same.
All of the Selected have limited access and we are assigned to a particular zone and department, working on only one project. The area we inhabit is approximately one kilometer square and we are able to enter the laboratories and offices in our designated zone but not elsewhere. The Selected are permitted to visit the other communal and residential areas but these are identical throughout the Dome and we have no real need, or ultimately the inclination to do so.
The lives we lead are regimented and mundane and the work we do is repetitive and boring. We are tiny cogs in a much, much larger machine and we have no idea how it works or what it does.
Security and safety have become commodities and under the Dome we have these in abundance. But now we have an interloper, somebody with the potential to blow our cover.
The interloper can easily shake the very foundations of this cruel world and pull the comfortable cushion out from under us. We need to stop this interloper, this ticking timebomb, but how?
