by submission | Apr 15, 2025 | Story |
Author: Hillary Lyon
“Your rifles are fully charged,” the safari guide said as he walked out to the four-wheeled transport. A group of three hunters followed behind. He opened the door on the driver’s side and got in.
“Remember,” he continued as the hunters climbed in the back, “your prey will not be a two-dimensional hologram, like you get with the cheaper safari tours.” He started the engine. “Nor will they be bots. These creatures are the real deal.” He drove away from the station down a well-worn dirt road.
“They are wily, smart,” he added, veering off the road and into the tall grass. “Fast, but not as fast as, say, a sprite.” He stopped the transport. “I suggest you fan out. That way each of you has your own territory for the hunt.”
The guide turned to look at the hunters. “Due to the peculiarities of the how the light refracts on this planet, if you look directly at them, they will appear as little more than shadows in the tall grass. Once you locate one, squint. Very important to squint as you aim and fire.” He motioned for the hunters to exit.
“When you tag one—and conservation law states you’re only allowed one per season—buzz me and I’ll help you gather the trophy. I’ll be on the roof watching.” He tapped the binoculars hanging around his neck. “This hunt is dangerous enough; please try not to shoot each other.”
The hunters laughed at that. Leaving the transport, they spread out as the guide suggested.
* * *
With a muffled pop, Kore teleported into the tall grass, spooking a small gaggle of almost hairless primates. The mammals scampered to the tree line, hiding in the leafy shade. Kore chuckled; she was not interested in these creatures. She was after more challenging prey.
She scanned the grassy land before her. Kore loved visiting new worlds, and this golden-green one held such promise. New life forms, new trophies to be had. Surely there had to be more interesting fauna than those—
Sun glinting off a small metallic cylinder caught her attention. Kore crouched in the grass, and crept towards the source: a lanky creature standing still, but surveying the immediate area, holding what was probably a weapon.
Now this is more like it! Kore thought. Another hunter like herself. She moved towards this being; every time he caught sight of her, he squinted. And each time, Kore quickly slid into his peripheral vision, so she appeared as nothing more than a shadow. Only when she sidled up beside him did she fully reveal herself.
With mouth agape and still holding his weapon, the hunter stared at Kore. Not because of her svelte figure or her flawlessly beautiful face, but because of the wriggling mass of metallic snakes on her head. Kore reached out and touched his cheek with her little finger. He turned to stone.
* * *
“You’re back! What didya bring me? What didya bring me?” Sel squealed. She tapped on the large crate in the foyer.
“A new piece for your statue garden,” Kore said, pressing a button to open the crate.
“It’s wonderful!” Sel whispered as she hugged Kore. “The best one yet. You’re the greatest mom, ever!”
Kore threw her head back and laughed. It was so satisfying to make her offspring happy. Her shining, articulated crown of snakes writhed in agreement, and opening their mouths, hissed with delight.
by submission | Apr 13, 2025 | Story |
Author: Lachlan Bond
I watch on, as the sun begins to expand before my eyes.
Slowly, at first, its pulsating shape growing ever-so-slightly behind the Vintusian glass. The radiation waves shake the station, solar winds battering our rapidly failing shields. Alarms blare, but I can hardly hear them over the slip disks firing at full force, every spare ounce of power poured into our drive system, one final, desperate attempt to flee the system before the star engulfs us.
I know it won’t work. I know we’re doomed. But I don’t say that. I don’t hang my head and cry. I don’t mourn my death.
Because I’m ready. I’ve been ready for this day for so long. Ever since the helio-satellites fell from their orbits. Ever since the hydrogen-fuel ran out in the star’s core.
I tried to warn them, all those years ago. I begged and pleaded for someone to listen, anyone. Some did, to their credit. The very young, and the very old, and the very wise all saw the signs. But not the senate. Not the leaders or the generals or the dukes.
They were far too busy, feasting and making merry.
Two billion years, the wise-men of old warned us. That’s all the time we have left. It sounds like far too long, but between the time-slips, the hyperdrives and the relativistic dopler-shifting, two billion years really sneaks up on you. Now it’s arrived, it almost doesn’t seem real.
The best we can do is burn our engines, warping space around us, speeding up time in the hopes that the sun will collapse again before it reaches our orbit.
It won’t. I ran the calculations, dozens of times. This is happening.
So now all there is to do is watch as the star that gave us life grows to swallow the system. It expands before us, swallowing the inner planets in a matter of moments. Outside our little bubble of time, that would’ve taken millennia.
We watched it in a blink.
The sun glows red now, no longer its brilliant, radiant white. I think of all the creatures through all the years that looked up at that white, beautiful orb. Soaring high in our blue sky as waves crashed along serene shores.
My great regret is to have never seen a proper sunset. Not a projection, not an artistic rendition, but a true, honest sunset. With my own eyes.
“Drop the bubble.” I command. “Drop the bubble and shift us three million macro-grades negative along our three-axis.”
“B-but sir!” Foreman cries. “Without the bubble, the solar winds will rip us apart in minutes!”
“With the bubble we’ll be engulfed in flames within the hour.”
He looks at me, fear dripping from his brow.
“Aye sir.”
The station shakes as we drop our bubble, finally re-joining the proper flow of time. The solar winds sunder our lead-lined shields, scraping away layers of amour in seconds. We do not have much time, but I only need a few minutes.
Our thrusters rumble, vibrating my legs as we move downwards.
“Have you ever seen a sunset, Foreman?”
“Sir?” He stares, dazed.
“Do you even know what a sunset is, son?”
“N-no, sir.” He admits.
“You’re about to.”
The light of the dying sun fades slightly, as we pass behind the Earth.
We float, for our last few seconds, and watch the blazing sun set behind the blue rock that we once called home.
The last sunset.
I close my eyes, and breathe out a ragged breath.
I let go, and the station is taken by the winds.
by submission | Apr 12, 2025 | Story |
Author: David C. Nutt
I did a quick scan outside my vehicle. I could see columns of thousands upon thousands of them, spinning fast, trying to ride the thermals up and out of the dust devil. At least half of them are getting shredded by the wind and when pieces of their wings and thoraxes catch the light, it is a beautiful sight- but it’s not enough. There’ll be too many survivors, too many for the nets to contain or our drones to burn. That means the convoy will most definitely come under attack.
Fucking Butterflies.
Monarchs, Painted Ladies, Swallowtails, Purple Emperors you name the variety, slip a few moth species in as well, add a little genetic engineering and good intentions and there lies the problem.
“We need more pollinators.” the biologists said. “If we want to the place to look like Earth, we have to have more pollinators.” Who said we wanted our new home to look like earth? We liked it fine the way it was. So they took a vote (left out the colonists entirely,) and let these beasts out.
I remember the day they were released. No one told us, the cargo containers drifted down, the parachutes detached, and they auto opened. The newly re-engineered, butterflies burst forth. Our logistics folk scratched their heads and while they were calling the orbital platform, the damn butterflies swarmed all around us. Our children laughed, we took pictures, it was such a beautiful moment, and then the screaming started. They attacked the eyes first, looking for the salts and other goodies our tears provided. Then when the bleeding started, they lapped up all that, and then their reengineered proboscises began poking thousands of needle sized holes in our bodies. We lost 45 colonists that day, just under half children, all exsanguinated in under two minutes. The corpses covered with so many butterflies one could not tell they were corpses.
Back on old Earth they call this behavior “Mudpuddling.” Butterflies and moths deriving minute nourishment from human tears and blood. Cute in a creepy way if they were just normal butterflies, not at all with these bioengineered dinner plate sized monstrosities. Nature always takes the straightest route to survival, why bother looking for sparce blooms when there were bags and bags of salts and sweets waiting to be tapped?
The platform did not believe us even after we sent them reports and video. They pushed more containers out. We started flaming them with our shuttles as they came down. Burning them worked well. The orbital platform folk were not amused. They sent the reps down to discuss “our paranoia.” We gave them coordinates, told them to come suited up in biohazard suits, full helmet wrist and ankles taped. They laughed. As soon as they disembarked they came. We all yelled at them. Screamed, got on the PA, flashing lights, sirens, the works. The reps from the platform, including the lead entomologist ignored us as the swarms flitted hither and yon, looking absolutely breathtaking. They pointed and we heard their “oohs and aahs.”
Only two of them made it out alive. At least they believe us now.
Knowing corporate the way I do they’ll send us a butterfly eating thing, then a thing that will eat the butterfly eating thing when the butterflies are gone. Then there’ll be the thing that eats the butterfly eater, and then the eater of the eater of butterfly eaters, and, well, you know where it goes from there.
I put my family in for a transfer off-planet, hoping to beat the rush.
by submission | Apr 11, 2025 | Story |
Author: Morrow Brady
Without a backstory, the darker patch at the edge of the busy road went unnoticed. It was being faded to oblivion by layers of desert dust and the enraged rush hour traffic.
As my evening walk took me past that patch, near the busy street junction, I looked over at it and thought about the day before, when those cars played their sinister role.
I remembered how I first saw the new-born kitten’s grey fluffy body trembling. Still blind from birth, the tiny kitten’s fragile form self-soothed as it padded silvery sock-like paws against the warmth of a towering concrete kerb. A stumble away, cars roared by with asphalt-shredding tires and horns barking like hounds on the hunt.
I remembered looking up from the kitten and meeting the dead eyes of a Jinna Witch, who promptly returned her gaze to the kitten, letting her emotions fall to her drug-clenched jawbone. The leech skin wall cladding of the pop-up car detailer she leaned against gave off more emotion. A little further on, also watching the fateful event, stood a guardian prince, adorned in long white coveralls. He subtly smiled, satisfied in the singular moment of our silent connection, then returned his dark eyes to a nuisance video in his palm. Their silence weighed heavier than the kitten’s fear.
I looked around for the kitten’s mother. A damned Dam indeed to let her offspring fall into such peril.
My conscience had clawed at my mind’s chalkboard. While it toyed with mercy, it also reminded me of the burden of parenthood and sealed the deal with the risk of catching some feral disease. Walking by, would join me with the Witch and Prince in support of fate and nature.
As my conscious fought on, that’s when I saw the kitten’s mother. A scrambled grey, poised within the dry undergrowth of dusty plastic peri-planter. It watched with robotic dead eyes, as her new-born kitten staggered ever closer toward its vulcanised demise. For a moment, hope burst forth as I mistook her missing front paw as a poised, ready-to-pounce stance. Her fine raked grey fur was torn in places, revealing ruptures where beneath lay fine metallic gears and illuminated silicon ribbons. My mind put the story together quickly and a mental relief valve in my mind hissed open, releasing my caged conscious to prowl once again.
The mother was a free-roaming catbot. Hardened by street survival, she had evaded capture. Her annual kitten had fallen from her torso-forge like a vending machine soda. Still warm, still twitching from the initial power-up and still syncing through subroutine updates. Its life ready to be written in code and claw.
Only the kitten’s mother had opted for a brief existence, assembling a sadistic crowd of three to witness its grisly end.
Liberated of the burden, I continued down the street, shaking off the horrific demise. There would be no bloody death today, only the instantaneous disassembly of a cute toy.
Back to the present, with the memory of the event fading, I once again passed that same point in the road and registered an absence of kitten-sized gears and silicon ribbons.
The Jinna Witch sat cross-legged in the leech skin doorway, with a cute grey cat nestled in her lap. Its fur, bristling with warmth, was free from damage and its two front paws gently kneaded the dark knitted fabric. One paw carried a familiar silvery sock.
by submission | Apr 10, 2025 | Story |
Author: RY
Jack floated in the observation blister, the void pressing silent against the reinforced plasteel. Earth hung like a chipped blue marble a million klicks sunward. Behind him, the comms array of Lagrange Point 1 hummed its patient vigil, vast silver dishes straining to catch whispers from the interstellar dark. Mostly, it caught static. Forty years mankind had listened; thirty-nine years, eleven months, the universe had offered only the background hiss of creation.
Until last Tuesday.
The signal hadn’t arrived on any standard frequency. It wasn’t radio, not laser, not gravity waves. It registered first as a recurring anomaly in the station’s neutrino detectors. Specifically, the ones designed to monitor solar flares. A faint, impossibly regular pulse train buried deep beneath the sun’s roar.
“Probably instrument noise,” Mission Lead Chen had grumbled over the link from Lunar Base. “Run the standard diagnostics, Jack. Don’t waste bandwidth chasing ghosts.”
Jack ran the diagnostics. Nominal. He recalibrated the sensors. Nominal. He cross-referenced with orbital neutrino telescopes. They saw nothing unusual. But the pulse persisted, stubbornly regular, right there in LP1’s shielded core detectors. Pulse-pause-pulse-pulse-pause. Pulse-pause-pulse-pulse-pause. Always the same. A heartbeat from nowhere.
He spent three shifts trying to isolate it, filter out the solar noise, the cosmic ray impacts. Futile. It was like trying to hear a specific cricket chirp during a meteor shower. But it was there. A faint, rhythmic thump-thump in the neutrino data stream, regular as a metronome set to a tempo slightly faster than his own resting heart rate.
On the fourth shift, driven by boredom or desperation, he did something stupid. He bypassed protocol and routed the raw neutrino pulse data directly into the main comms array’s signal processing unit, telling the AI to treat it not as particle physics, but as information. “Look for patterns,” he keyed in. “Assume non-random origin. Decode.”
The station lights flickered as the AI diverted power. For ten agonizing minutes, the array sat silent, dishes pointed sunward, processing ghostly particles instead of expected transmissions. Then, the console chimed. Not an error code. A text file had been generated.
Jack opened it, heart suddenly pounding a frantic rhythm against his ribs.
The file contained only two words:
WE HEAR.
He stared at the console, the reflected glow making his face pale. He checked the timestamp, the source code. Raw neutrino pulse data, processed as binary information, timestamped from reception less than five minutes ago. Impossible. Neutrinos barely interacted with anything; encoding and decoding them instantaneously across astronomical distances… it violated known physics.
He ran the process again. Diverted power, fed the pulse train into the comms AI, set decode parameters. The station hummed. Ten minutes later, another text file:
YOU CALLED?
He felt ice crawl up his spine. Forty years of listening, assuming any contact would come via radio waves from distant stars. But the call hadn’t come from out there. It seemed to be coming from inside the signal. From the impossible pulse buried in the sun’s neutrino glare. Something riding the ghost particles, something that heard their listening, something impossibly close.
He looked out at the silent, empty void between Earth and Sun. Forty years, humanity had strained to hear whispers from the stars. What if the voice had been right beside them all along, waiting in the static, listening back? His hand hovered over the comms panel, protocol screaming warnings in his head.
Who – or what – had just answered?
And what happened when he replied?
