by submission | Apr 5, 2025 | Story |
Author: Jennifer Peaslee
The stale air of the Interplanetary Dynamics office reflected the collective mood of its desk jockeys. Ash Zendar, stewing in a stiff-collared uniform, barely glanced at the form in front of them before stamping approval for a three-cycle visit from the dangerous K’noth planet. Number nine hundred and ninety-eight.
Today, Ash’s five years on the job were going to pay off. Today, they would stamp their 1,000th consecutive approval and earn a bonus of ten thousand credits. Ash stamped a form allowing the transport of bog-standard goods between planets Daruta and Zyke. Nine hundred and ninety-nine.
The hairs on the back of their neck raised in anticipation. They glanced at the top of the next form, their hand positioned to stamp APPROVED before the ink on the last form had dried. With this, they would finally have enough for Gil’s treatment.
Then their stomachs dropped. They read the top of the form again. A request for sentient cargo transfer from Arth to Helian.
“Could be nothing,” they muttered. Request for sentient cargo transfer covered all sorts of applications, from prisoner relocation to discount travel arrangements. It also happened to be notorious for allowing the continuation of the sentient slave trade. And Helian was not a planet known for its liberal attitude.
Their hand wavered. They scanned the form in its entirety and bit their lip. Under “reason for transport,” whoever completed the form wrote “indentured servitude enforcement.” Technically legal. Indentured servitude, while distasteful to many, opened the possibility of interplanetary immigration for those who otherwise could not afford it. But again, it was easy to hide unscrupulous acts behind the generic “indentured servitude” label. And “enforcement” had nasty implications.
But it wasn’t Ash’s job to administer the law. Their job was to approve as many forms as possible so that the company could make an obscene profit.
Ash began to lower the stamp. Gil’s face appeared in their mind. What would she say to this?
Ash grabbed the DENIAL stamp and pressed it to the form, sighing a little. They took the next form and read it carefully before stamping their approval. Number one.
by submission | Apr 4, 2025 | Story |
Author: S. Douglas Hall
Doctor Hibberd’s shoulders slumped and he laid his clipboard on the table. The buzzing at his lab door overshadowed the normal beeps, clicks, and whirls from the lab around him.
He ran his hands through his graying brown hair and adjusted his sturdy black rimmed glasses before reaching for the latch on the door.
“What is it now?” Hibberd forced open the door to find a man in a suit. The fluorescent lighting from the hallway outside his lab hurt his eyes at first.
“Doctor Hibberd,” the man’s mouth quivered, “I’m from…the accounting department.”
Hibberd took a deep breath and let it out with a sign. “I didn’t ask who you were. I asked, “What is it now?””
“Cost…overruns.”
“What do you mean…cost overruns?” For a moment, the irony of needing something explained to him, the lead scientist at ValueMax Enterprises, crossed Hibberd’s mind before the anger of being interrupted returned.
“You are over budget…way over budget… on…” the rep from accounting referenced the paperwork in their shaking hands, “ammunition?”
“Show me.”
The man in the suit stepped inside the lab door and handed Hibberd a printed spreadsheet of the costs from his lab.
A mix of bleach and formaldehyde assaulted his nose before he got two steps into the lab. Red and green lights from the displays on various machines contrasted with the otherwise dark room.
A loud thumping erupted momentarily from somewhere nearby.
Hibberd’s eyes grew large and round, “It’s nothing. Nothing to worry about.”
Both men looked back at the budget spreadsheet and the large red numbers at its bottom.
“It’s not my fault,” Hibberd motioned toward a heavy door with thick ballistic glass labeled Irradiator. “Sometimes they die in the machine and sometimes I have to shoot them…repeatedly.”
“You have to do what?” The man in the suit stared at the irradiator’s door.
Hibbered picked up his clipboard and flipped through several of the attached pages. He quickly circled something on one page and looked to the irradiator door while nodding. After pausing for a moment, Hibberd looked back to the man in the suit. “Oh, you’re still here. If you need paperwork for the…
“Cost overrun…”
“Yes, cost…overrun…I can provide you with a print out…”
A pair of thuds rang out from the irradiator’s door.
“That one’s going to need a lot of shooting,” Hibberd looked toward a door on the other side of the lab labeled Weapons Locker.
“What?” The man in the suit’s jaw fell open.
“What?” Hibberd looked back to the man in the suit. “I thought I already explained this to you.”
The man in the suit took a deep breath, “Look, you need to get your ammunition costs down or corporate is going to audit your lab and maybe close it down.”
“Yes, Yes…” Hibberd looked around the room, “invent a death ray. Got it.”
by submission | Apr 3, 2025 | Story |
Author: A.R. McHugh
Diamonds won her as a child. Looking at sedimentary quartz under 200x magnification, she was fascinated by the possibility of so much clarity, such mineral perfection.
Somewhere between her mother’s flashing ring and her father’s relentless pressure to produce better grades and faster times, a harder carapace around her teenage soul and a deep love of diamonds was born.
Earth, with its exhausted supply of diamonds, bored her.
A rover brought one back from Saturn, formed from the compression of methane soot in the thunderstorm alleys ten miles above the planet’s surface. She stared at it in its glass case at Houston, trying to comprehend its being. This thing did not simply bear up under pressure, but was formed by it. The Saturnian diamond was the expression of distant matter under pressure, and thus of the very texture of life as our phylum feels it.
Years later she found herself in another rover, going to that Saturnian diamond’s origin. She entered the atmosphere gladly, knowing there was no return. The many moments of her life, like inclusions, were pressed together as she fell in the tiny craft through Saturn’s diamond rain. Dropping downwards, the pressure increased until the rocks struck the wings of her craft, bonded with them, and melded into a speeding crystal of impossible hardness.
When the pressure grew beyond even that, the chimera melted, drowning what had once been a woman, in a diamond sea.
by submission | Apr 2, 2025 | Story |
Author: Julia Rajagopalan
Bertrand Dent knew that the lotto was rigged. Everyone knew. Only paid actors won, or friends of the Lotto Commission. Still, Bertrand stood in line at the Station 14 lotto stand to buy a ticket.
It was what everyone did when docking at a refueling station. 1. Dock, 2. Secure your ship, 3. Take a gravity-aided shit, 4. Take a water shower, 5. Get a lotto ticket, 6. Get drunk.
Long-haul spaceflight was harrowing, and stations offered rare comforts in their cold, metal worlds. The order of tasks differed from person to person, but Bertrand liked his order. He had plenty of time till the end-of-day drawing. Bertrand reached the front of the line and stepped up to the counter.
“One daily,” Bertrand said to the man behind the laser-proof glass. The man scratched his nose and printed out the ticket. According to the Lotto Commission, digital tickets were insecure, but Bertrand thought paper was just another way to control the winners.
Ticket in hand, Bertrand headed to his favorite bar, the Pink Fox. The Pink Fox was a dark yet clean establishment with enormous windows that overlooked the shipyards. He felt clean from his shower and pleasantly empty from his trip to the bathroom, and he was ready to drink.
Three beers later, the bar quieted as the bouncing lotto balls flashed onto the screen. Bertrand dug around in his pocket for his ticket. He knew he’d never win, but the dream was half the fun. Maybe he would buy a small property on Mars and start a business. Somedays, he thought he would buy out his partners and take over the hauler, but he wasn’t a masochist.
“The numbers are 19-21-48-54-89,” the pretty girl on the screen said. Bertrand choked on his beer. The paper sat in his hand like a live grenade.
19-21-48-54-89
It was impossible. It was a miracle. It was a giant target. He wanted to scream and shout and do a backflip, but he didn’t dare. He had to get to the claim window. Bertrand stood and waved down the bartender.
“All done?” the woman asked as she handed him the payment machine.
“Yeah, I gotta get back to my ship,” Bertrand said, pressing his thumb on the screen. He tucked the ticket into his pocket, his left hand still clenching the paper. He gave the woman a large tip, and she smiled at him.
“Wow, that was nice. You win the lotto or something?”
“Ha, I wish,” he said and hurried out. He couldn’t believe it. How had he won? Maybe the lotto wasn’t rigged. Bertrand’s feet clanged on the metal planks as he walked. He tried not to hurry. He didn’t want to draw attention. He just had to get to the claims office. Still, a big, goofy smile stretched across his face. The lotto wasn’t rigged. Sometimes, good things happened in this messy universe.
Across the concourse, he could see the sign for the claims office shining in welcome. Bertrand was only a few feet away when a large man stepped out in front of him. He wore a dark mechanic’s jumpsuit, but he walked like a soldier. He grabbed Bertrand’s upper arm and yanked him toward an alley between two food stalls. Another man stood in the shadows waiting.
“How’d you know?” Bertrand cried. “I didn’t say a word.”
“You don’t seriously think anyone ever wins, do you?” the man asked, a sad smirk on his face.
by submission | Apr 1, 2025 | Story |
Author: Majoki
What was I thinking? Tiasmet could not put the thought—the picture—out of her head. The chipmunk with its shark-blank eyes and its panicked keening as the tictocs methodically circled and closed on it. The chipmunk should have been able to easily dash away. It was ten times the size of a tic or toc, and much more powerful. Yet, the chipmunk froze in place as the tictoc bots linked up, creating an inescapable net.
Senior robotanist Tiasmet Cjurganni, head of motility and chemotactic applications at DowX, should not have been thinking about the chipmunk and her tictocs. She should have been happy beyond all reason. It was her long-awaited wedding day, but, like the chipmunk surrounded by tictocs, she could not escape a sense of doom.
She had risen with the sun in anticipation of the rich, time-honored ceremonies to launch her new life with Ansar. After years of indecision and constant reminders that her biological clock was ticking, Tiasmet finally felt she could truly become part of another. Part of Ansar. She no longer worried she would be subsumed or fragmented. She now believed that she would become whole.
Still, on this first day of their future, their new life together, she was distracted by the harbinger of the chipmunk. Why couldn’t she be like other brides fretting over her hair and henna?
That was not Tiasmet’s makeup. Work and she were one. A robotanist with a decidedly green thumb, she’d helped pioneer the work of florabots, mechlife based on plant behavior. It was not unlike the breakthroughs achieved by roboticists in the early 21st century who modeled insect behaviors to create the first swarm bots. Tiasmet had started there, too, mimicking insect behavior with her first crude tictoc bots. But the further she delved into self-sustaining mechlife, the more she found herself drawn to the plant kingdom.
She’d begun programming her stem-like tictoc bots (tics attempting to keep a vertical orientation, tocs a horizontal one) to behave like heliotropes. Seeking the sun, seeking energy, tictocs self assembled in ever-changing arrays to maximized solar collection. Her dream, and now the business plan of DowX, was to sow vast deserts like the Sahara, Gobi and Death Valley with florabots to harness and harvest the sun’s energy. Tictocs were her proof of concept.
The problem pricking at Tiasmet on her wedding day was that the tictocs seemed to be self-conceptualizing. How else to explain the unsettling scene with the chipmunk? She’d meant it to be a simple field test of the tictocs establishing an area in which to propagate. When the curious chipmunk investigated, the tictocs reorganized in a way Tiasmet had not predicted, attempting to capture and harvest the poor creature.
It appeared the tictocs had adapted ridiculously, almost cognizantly, fast. As if when enough of them had linked up, they were struck with an idea, a collective epiphany.
It was outlandish. It was possibly career-destroying to voice such a conclusion. Yet, on the morning of her wedding, watching the sun spread over the fertile valley of her parents’ home, she believed it, like she believed her own existence. And the new existence she would consummate today.
She knew and so it was known. What would she do? What could be done?
She’d set the clock ticking. Was she ready to ring the alarm?
Tiasmet made her way into her parents’ garden, so alive this glorious morning with the tang of dew, the chatter of birds, the low hum of insects and the stillness of heavy trees. She bent and picked a small white peony blossom, cupping it in her so-clever hands. She inhaled deeply, feeling the freshness of life. She carefully tucked the peony in her rich, cascading hair and turned to face the rising sun across the valley.
More than an idea. Self-awareness assembled on so many levels, in so many ways.
It was known.
We are not so unalike, she thought, turning and smiling into the sun. A verdant garden growing between them. Time for assimilation.
