by submission | Jul 27, 2025 | Story |
Author: Alastair Millar
It was our usually bad-tempered neighbour Mr Winkelmann who first told us we could get ‘special benefits’ if we registered in person at the Central Bureau in Lapis. Indigo’s government knew we spent a lot on the exoskeletal clothing and bone-strengthening drugs we needed to help us deal with the gravity, and wanted to help. Later, on the etherwave, the President said that if we signed up, the government would guarantee better jobs, despite all the bad things people say about us. Mamma thought this was great. Pappa said nothing, but the lines in his face seemed deeper, somehow. I was just excited that we’d get to make a trip to the capital.
When we got there the following weekend, Central Plaza was filled with other Latecomers – people who’d arrived in the last Wave from Earth, like Mamma and Pappa, or their children, like me. There were lots of Security Bots, too, but nobody was causing trouble. We queued in the sunshine for hours, under a sky the glorious colour that gave our planet its name, but eventually we got to the scanning booths and had our DNA taken “to avoid fraud”, whatever that meant. Nobody really told us anything; when we tried asking, one of the uniformed scanner operators laughed and said “don’t worry, things will start happening soon”. Mamma was excited to find out what, but Pappa looked skeptical.
That night, there was another broadcast. The President was delighted that so many people had come forward. To save money, Latecomer support gear would now only be available from the State, so anyone who hadn’t registered should do so quickly, or they’d not be able to get anything. “I don’t like this,” muttered Pappa, but Mamma said being efficient was important.
A few days later we heard that all Latecomers were going to be moved to Azure, the second continent, to a brand new colony! We’d get proper houses, and wouldn’t have to worry about being bullied or discriminated against! We were told to come to the Spaceport, with two bags each; everything else would be shipped later. Mamma was delighted – a new home instead of our cramped apartment! Pappa just looked sad.
On Departure Day we were there as instructed. Mamma was goggling: “They’re taking us in style,” she said, “that’s a space-capable liner!”. Our bags were taken by some uniformed attendants, but when we got on board it was nothing like I expected: no cabins, just big dormitories with bunks set into the bulkheads, three-high from floor to ceiling. We managed to get a vertical for ourselves, and I got the top bed! Mamma said not to worry, it was only a short ride. Pappa’s face was grey, and he stayed silent, but I didn’t understand why – even if it was uncomfortable, this was an adventure!
But we didn’t get taken to Azure after all. Instead we were onboard for weeks, and then found ourselves deposited at a bleak landing pad on Earth. The Terran Government wasn’t expecting us, and made a big fuss, but Indigo just stopped talking to them. We never got out baggage back, and now we’re living in a tent in a field while things get worked out. The Sun here’s the wrong colour – big and orange instead of small and blue – and the sky just isn’t right, but I guess we’ll get used to it. It looks like we’ll have to.
“What do we do now?” asked Mamma the night after we arrived. “Start again,” replied Pappa, tiredly; but for the first time in a long while, he was smiling.
by submission | Jul 26, 2025 | Story |
Author: Don Nigroni
“Thoughts can’t die or fade away,” my little brother, Arthur, told me two months ago.
He was an adorable bald baby who grew into a self-taught bald polymath.
I replied, “So, what if thoughts do spend eternity in the thought-ether?”
“If someone could access them then he could find buried treasure, solve unsolved crimes and know our enemies’ ultra-secret schemes. He’d be rich, famous and powerful!”
“But how could anyone ever enter into that domain?”
“That’s easy. Whenever we think, we’re there. But wandering freely about and sorting through the endless mass of junk to find the gems, well, that’s the hard part. However, I know that it can be done.”
I was skeptical and said, “I double dare you to prove it.”
He asked me what I would need to become a believer.
I paused and, after running my hand through my hair, said, “I’ll bury a penny somewhere and you return it to me.”
It was a 1998 Lincoln cent, and that night I buried it an inch in the ground at the library. Early next morning, Arthur stopped by my house and returned my penny. He also bragged that he could find Cleopatra’s tomb.
“But you don’t speak Egyptian,” I said.
“First,” he explained, “Cleopatra was an ethnic Macedonian Greek who spoke many languages, but her first language was Greek. And second, the thought-ether is full of thoughts, not words.”
I soon learned Arthur was using an EV fast charging station to increase the intensity of the electricity in his brain. And he did quickly become phenomenally rich, famous and powerful.
I was confident that he would ensure that I got rich too. But that was until today when, at our mother’s house, he abruptly remarked, “Yesterday, I stumbled upon your thoughts about me.”
So what, sibling rivalry is normal and natural I foolishly thought.
by submission | Jul 25, 2025 | Story |
Author: Sarah Goodman
One unblemished red apple. I passed it along the conveyor belt. Swoosh. One green pear. Its surface was a little rough, but it was decent. Swoosh. Another apple, but this one had a bruise on its side. A horn blared. A door opened, and I slid the apple down a chute marked “B.”
I’d been working at the Produce Product Complex for three years now. I got the job just after the supernova explosion that damaged Earth’s ozone layer, leading to the destruction of nearly all plant life. Here at the Complex, I had a steady income and access to one of the most valuable resources on the planet.
Perfect fruit had become as rare as gold bars used to be. The rich of the world bid on it at auctions, with professional bidders standing in for anonymity. The pieces were later delivered in armored trucks. I never saw anyone eat them, but I could imagine. Maybe they arranged them on gold-plated saucers, cut with diamond-encrusted paring knives. The rich used to trade in precious metals and gemstones, but those were just pretty things now. Still inaccessible to the public, but no longer commodities worth trading.
I was a Grader. Fruit would arrive in front of me on a conveyor belt. If it was nearly perfect, I passed it to the next stage, where it would be photographed and prepared for auction. Depending on its condition, I could alternatively place it gently in a cart marked “A,” let it slide down a chute marked “B,” or toss it into a trash box marked “C.” The ones in the box were for us, but not officially. The company didn’t want to tarnish their reputation by selling low quality produce. We were supposed to dispose of it to keep supply low and bids high. Instead, we marked them as discarded while we took them home to consume or sell on the black market.
A siren blared as a red light lit up the room, marking the end of the shift. I sighed and climbed off my stool. I picked up the box of damaged fruit and carried it to the employee changing room. I peeled off my sterile outer garments and tossed them into a bin, then pulled my duffel bag from my locker and poured the fruit inside.
As I exited the building, I looked around to make sure no one was watching. It was getting dangerous to be a known Grader. Word had spread of the stash we could be carrying, so Graders were getting mugged more than ever.
I turned onto my street, a once-commercial part of town turned residential after businesses could no longer procure anything to sell. We lived in what used to be a Greek food restaurant.
My three kids sat on the floor, each holding a video game controller. They didn’t get out often. They stared, transfixed, at the screen. They had that game system before the explosion, and it luckily still worked.
I dropped the bag onto a table and walked to the industrial sink to wash my hands. As I dried them, I turned back to face the room. The kids had spotted the bag, but only one got up. He unzipped it, looked inside, and pulled out a nectarine. Without a word, he carried it back to where his siblings sat and took two bites. Then he set it down next to him, picked up the controller, and continued to play.
I stood there, just staring at the partially eaten nectarine. People outside would kill for what was in that bag.
by submission | Jul 24, 2025 | Story |
Author: R. J. Erbacher
She was seated on the closed toilet, legs crossed, just a bath towel wrapped across her breasts, water still dripping from her brunette hair onto her pale bare shoulders. She pulled the straight razor along her skin, her fingers laced between the shank and the tang, thumb on the heel. She wondered why Achmed even owned a straight razor.
From the bedroom, on the other side of the slightly ajar door, he expostulated on her lifestyle as he dressed for work. His reproach was a combination of righteous accusations and learned diagnosis. She was listening but not hearing any of it.
What she was in the mood for was – an iced coffee. She produced one. On the side of the sink, in a to-go cup with a lid and straw, condensation on the outside of the plastic. Filled with chunks of ice, a touch of caramel creamer. The dark liquid was the same color of Achmed’s skin. It was his skin, muscular, hairy and fragrant, rubbing up against hers every night when they made love that was one of the pure pleasures in her life. But the consequence of her desire meant she had to listen to him berating her each day. All the words up until now were abrasive white noise that didn’t register, until something he said filtered through.
“Entities are not to be multiplied without necessity.”
Bastard.
She contemplated her cup of iced coffee, pause, and produced another one. And another and another and another, until they filled every inch of the bathroom counter top. She gazed disgustingly at her vindictiveness.
Achmed talked for several more minutes before coming into the bathroom to brush his teeth. His voice halted in mid speech when he saw the abundance of identical cups in neat rows. His line of sight tracked from the peevish display of potency to her defiant stare, his face displaying a tense mixture of anger and revulsion.
She tightened her grip on the wood handle of the razor until her knuckles lost their color. He nodded imperceptivity, walked out of the bathroom, slammed the bedroom door behind him. A minute later she heard the car starting in the driveway and the small squelch of tires as he accelerated from the house.
For long moments she sat motionless as each drop of water gave into gravity and fell to her skin.
If he came home tonight, and if she was still here when he did, it would probably start off very badly. Things would be shouted that would be hard to forget. He would show amazing restraint in his effort not to hit her, as would she, in not producing something malicious. Then the moment would come when they would tear at each other’s clothes and make violent love, leaving bruises and bite marks. And as she laid there recovering, Achmed snoring, she would dot the inside of their bedroom with fading stars the size of fireflies. That would moderately pacify her into sleep.
For this morning, she just continued to shave her legs with his razor, and ponder what would be the consequences if instead of sliding the edge of it across her skin, she dragged it sideway just above her femoral artery. She supposed lots of people had similar notions in varying scenarios and like mostly everyone else she was far too much of a coward to attempt anything beyond visualization.
The simplest solution was not always the correct one. Sometimes, there was no solution.
by submission | Jul 23, 2025 | Story |
Author: Majoki
In my line of work, I hear it all the time, “Why do we have better maps of the surface of the moon and Mars than our own ocean floors?” To most folks it sounds like a reasonable question, but to a hydrographic surveyor it can be triggering.
A few weeks ago when I was asked that very question by a reporter interviewing me, I said, “If you really want to understand why, let me take you to the top of the Empire State Building, blindfold you, tie your hands behind your back, and then send you out to map what’s beneath you.”
The reporter said that’d be absurd. I agreed. But it’s a fair analogy for how we map the ocean deeps. Not by seeing or feeling, but by listening. You have to hear your way around them. Sound not sight is what allows us to map those staggering depths. And, though much improved in recent years, sonar mapping technology still involves the methodical criss-crossing of the world’s five oceans in specially outfitted ships.
Which means it is a slow, expensive, and often risky undertaking. It also means that creatures like the Ziphius (aka Cuvier’s beaked whale) went unconfirmed for ages. Not undocumented, just unconfirmed and monstrously exaggerated by crusty seafarers.
The same with Buss. An island in the North Atlantic sighted in 1578 by the crew of a busse, a Viking longship, and ostensibly so named. Nearly a hundred years later the island became known as the Sunken Land of Buss after it could no longer be found where it had been charted and was assumed to have disappeared beneath the waves. Nothing too sinister about that. To old salts, phantom islands were nothing new and land masses sank and rose all the time without any undue Atlantis hype.
But the Sunken Land of Buss turned out to be quite hype-worthy because that missing land mass turned up dramatically in the Tonga Trench. I was part of a crew surveying the ten thousand meters depths of the Horizon Deep when our mapping sonar went, for lack of a better term, batshit.
The depth readings began fluctuating crazily. We thought it must be a malfunction. Maybe even unprecedented volcanic or tectonic activity. Until we double checked the instrumentation and found everything working properly meaning that something massive at the near bottomless Horizon Deep was on the move. And then suddenly rising towards us.
This unbelievable anomaly should have sent undersea researchers like us into nerdvana, but we’d all knew the ancient lore of sea monsters: Leviathan, Scylla, Charybdis, Kraken. So, when something the size of lower Manhattan begins surfacing rapidly toward your relatively puny ship, you tend to flip out.
Luckily, panic is no match for viral media fame, and most of the crew had their phones out, waiting to video whatever was rising out of the deeps and threatening to send us there. I was no different. I shot video as the thing breached the surface a hundred meters from our ship. A mighty eruption of froth and foam that totally obscured the thing–for a moment.
Then we were rocked by a devastating wave.
Not an ocean wave caused by the thing’s surfacing, but an electromagnetic one that instantly knocked out all electronic equipment on board. All devices, including our phones, were fried. There’d be no viral video sensations of what we’d seen. No record of any kind, but our unbelieving eyes.
The ocean deeps hold many mysteries, but the Sunken Land of Buss has moved to the top of my list. I now believe that the island when discovered was named not only for the Viking busse that first sailed by its shores, but by the very shape and topology of the island which I now suspect looked much like an enormous longship.
How could I possibly know that? When the thing from the Tonga Trench rose out of the depths and fried our electronics, we may not have any recorded proof, but I know what I saw: an enormous, gleaming vessel, reminiscent of a Viking longship taking to the heavens and vanishing in a sun-flare instant.
So, next time you’re on a beach admiring the horizon where sky and sea meet, consider how we’ve only dipped our toes in the surf when it comes to grokking the vast alien depths of the ocean and space. It’ll make your head swim.
