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.
by submission | Apr 16, 2026 | Story |
Author: A. R.
Waking up to a blaring alarm while in a war is nothing out of the ordinary; for Atlas, it happens daily, or a couple of times a month. He would have never thought today would be any different.
Stationed on a planet controlled by the Terrestrian Coalition, Atlas was used to fights and attempt at revolution. It’s expected. Back home, on Earth—Terra—his biggest concern was finishing chores quickly enough to go to Culebra beach, search for sand dollars, and play in the waves. His mother used to say the military men, who flew through the stars in crisp uniforms and charming smiles—everything Atlas had wanted to be—would protect everyone on Earth; picture-perfect heroes.
As Atlas stepped off his ship, unease churned in his stomach. Most would mock him for admitting discomfort—“You? Uneasy? Perish the thought!”—so he kept quiet while his team neutralized the Iriukian rebels. Atlas stared at his Holo-pad, glancing up only when his team approached or something drew his attention. When the first gunshot sounded, he barely registered it. He had ordered only stun weapons for use against civilians and rebels.
One, two more shots rang out before Atlas realized what was happening. His head snapped up, eyes darting around to find the source, the civilians and rebels erupting in screams of anguish and terror. One of his men, the one who always seemed to have a dark expression on his face, had fired the shots, three mounds on the ground in motionless piles of blooming red poppies. A noise of shock left Atlas, seeing the blaster, the man holding it, and the flowers.
As though some divine force pulled him out of his own body, watching from an outside perspective as he shoved his way to the soldier, shoving the arm that held the gun, the weapon—the life taker—stopping a once-beating heart that craved freedom and peace. A heart that would have kept a body running and thriving. Atlas could see himself shouting in the face of the life-taker, demanding, pleading.
The life-taker scoffed, “Taking accountability for your cowardice, Atlas, since you can’t even pull a trigger on a renegade.” Atlas recoiled in shock. Something inside him cracking.
Atlas is a man with blood on his hands and dirt under his nails; he fought the world tooth and nail, believing his actions were true. Now, looking behind his shoulder, he saw what he had left in his wake. blooming marigolds, with a singular black moth beating its wings on the flower nearest to him—A blooming flower field of all the aliens and humans who died under his ordering commands or his own hand seemed to stretch for miles. Years. Forever. Bodies decomposing for the next generation of blooms that grow bigger and brighter.
Atlas believed the corrupt people who had bathed him in the flower petals of death and destruction, telling him he was pure. He had seen unnecessary death and been told it was the natural part of life and order. Had his commands defied by his Unit countless times. But this? Innocent beings who believed they could make a difference in the war, just like Atlas?
His core beliefs seemed to shatter like glass, that one crack sending everything crumbling; shards cutting his hands where blooms pushed through the cuts, purple hyacinths, peonies, black dahlia, writhing through his veins. Suffocating him in his own actions, coughing up withered petals, collapsing to his knees, struggling for air he would never gain.
Atlas never felt like a hero. Even if he did, he certainly never would now.
by submission | Apr 15, 2026 | Story |
Author: D.P. Reitman
Energy can neither be created nor destroyed, only transformed. The sun is a local manifestation of this law, its energy traveling a modest 93 million miles to feed the trees of this world. Meanwhile, 27,000 light-years away, Sagittarius A* churns, fueling the relentless pulse of a Milky Way galaxy 100,000 light-years across—a solitary node in the network of galaxies webbing a multiverse of unknowable scale.
The fractal grows in complexity as it ascends, and the cycle of return is long. We take that journey every time we are born and every time we die. Whenever something exists and then becomes something else—macro to micro—the journey resets. Right now, then, and always: the closed cycle of energy, infinitely large in proportion. The big churn.
Reincarnation is the custodial necessity of this cycle. You could spend eons as a lonely planet, or seven minutes as a bacterium in the wrenching guts of the person sitting next to you. It is all part of the journey. Here on Earth, 27,000 light-years from the center, we have awakened. “Found” is the wrong word; “recognized” is better. You, me, us—we have seen the pattern, just as you’re viewing it now. Can you feel it? Can you hear it? Can you understand the taste? Or is it water on the tongue; deafness to the ears; nothingness to the touch; a void in the eyes?
We are not soulmates, but mates of the same soul, separated by billions of years or mere seconds and the chasm of consciousness. Time itself is nothing to this energy. In our world, perfect symmetry is rare. We are strangers, siblings, or scorned lovers, meant to journey this life or the next—together, apart, or never at all. The mask does not matter for the transformation. The journey only cares that the work gets done. We are both the observer and the observed, united as one: Awaken.
