by submission | Aug 6, 2025 | Story |
Author: Mark Renney
Thomas collects the needles. It is an unpopular job but is open to all. No qualifications are required or prior experience, not even a recommendation. One has simply to turn up and register at an Agency office, take to the streets and, using the bags provided, start Collecting.
The needles are everywhere, at least here in the lower levels where they are a part of the landscape. The Refuse Department is desperately under-funded and can’t cope. The Cleaners sweep up the needles, gathering and moving them to the designated areas. These, at first, had been tracts of wasteland; a part of this part of the City, but now almost anywhere that has been abandoned and deserted is used as a dumping ground. Many of these places have become so rancid and rat infested that even the hardest and most dedicated of Collectors won’t venture in.
The progress the Cleaners make is so slow as to be almost impossible to detect. In the interim they gather and pile the needles wherever they can find a space; where the pavement widens a little at the end of a street or on a busy corner for instance. Even on traffic islands or grass verges that run alongside the roads. At the communal areas on the housing estates, the needles are, of course, a constant. The Cleaners can do little more than push them into the middle until they resemble unruly bonfires that can’t be lit. The hypodermics are made from a hard plastic that won’t burn easily; it is inflammable although, if the heat can build up enough, they will melt and meld. And where this has happened strange shapes appear, grotesque sculptures with the needles protruding like the spikes of some medieval weapon.
It would be wrong to assume, simply because there are so many of them and that they can be found almost everywhere, that collecting is easy.
The main body of the hypoderms and the plungers are susceptible to being crushed when trampled on and so don’t last for long. They are easily cracked and squashed and the needles, which are delicate, get twisted and bent out of shape and are quick to rust and corrode.
The Opportunists are also a problem. They aren’t attempting to make a living from Collecting but are always alert and whenever they spot good needles they will snatch them up.
Thomas has heard that, in the mid-levels, all the users bag and return their own needles, collecting the cash for themselves. Thankfully, that hasn’t happened here. But some of the users do make an effort to dispose of their needles in a reasonably responsible way. Separating them from the rest of their trash at home, they take and dump them on one of the countless piles or heaps that are littered throughout the city.
The Opportunists often stalk a User, waiting for him or her to drop their needle and, like vultures, they will swoop in, grasping and grabbing and yet the needles that make it into the rubbish heaps they choose to ignore. Many of them are merely chancers and it is a way for them to make a little extra. If they see a good needle laying in the street why wouldn’t they, and why shouldn’t they, pick it up? But there are others who appear much more desperate and are quite obviously Users.
Thomas wishes that he didn’t feel so resentful toward them. He doesn’t want to be judgemental – after all, everyone is using, although there are levels of course, especially here in the lowest of places. But the Opportunists won’t get their hands dirty and they don’t grub and sift through the garbage because they don’t want to be mistaken for Collectors or Scavengers.
Thomas began collecting closer and closer to one of the designated areas. At first he kept to the perimeter but gradually edged his way in. The work was slow, laborious, but there were still good needles to be found and at least he didn’t have to compete with the Opportunists or with any of the other Collectors in fact.
No-one came here now, not even the Sweepers who had long since stopped using this particular site. There had once stood here a large warehouse or factory of some sort, but it had been demolished and levelled in order to create a space. Much of the debris from the original building remained. Brick rubble and broken glass and such, which made the collecting even more difficult. But Thomas was determined and started to clear a path and make his way toward the middle.
He dragged old pallets and broken packing cases from close by and shored up the sides to prevent the needles from falling in on him. Eventually he had to add a roof section, using sheets of corrugated tin. And as he pushed his way deeper and deeper into the heap he added another of these sections and yet another and another. And from this vantage point Thomas hacked at the rock face, as it were. He collected the needles in heavy hessian sacks, rather than the flimsy plastic bags provided by the Agency, placing the good needles in one and in the other those that were misshapen and blunt. And as he worked below the needles rained down from above, covering the roof until the tunnel was entirely hidden.
by submission | Aug 5, 2025 | Story |
Author: Majoki
The chair creaked noisily when Sandoval sat at the table with five glasses set out. Even though he’d lost a few pounds since they last met, the old wood complained. Soon the others joined him: Avrilla, Hurst, Marpreesh, Suh.
Five left. Only five.
No others living humans in the history of civilization were like them. At one time, there’d been more. Not many more. A couple of dozen or so, but they were gone. Lost to time. Lost to space. Lost to both.
Smiling thinly, Hurst presented a bottle. “Best I could scrounge.”
Suh nodded. “Getting harder to find a decent drink.”
“You’d think that’s one thing we’d still be good at: making booze.” Sandoval held out his glass for a pour.
“Plenty of booze out there, but most of it is rotgut.” Avrilla sighed. “Not like before.”
After it was filled, Marpreesh raised his glass. “To before.”
They raised their glasses. They knew why they were here, the last members of The Club. “Any old business?” Suh asked.
“Just my damn knee,” Hurst said. “Still glitchy as hell until I can get a replacement chip.”
“Seems more and more unlikely any of us will see replacement parts soon,” Sandoval said.
Avrilla nodded. ‘Yup. The embargo is tightening everything up. Hard to get most anything these days. Especially aug refits. They built us strong, but not to last.”
“We were mission specific.” Hurst refilled their glasses. “We all knew that going in.”
“Did we?” Suh asked
“If you’d read the design specs,” Hurst, as always, scolded.
“I was twenty-four and they dangled a Mars tour in front of me. Like I was going to question anything,” Suh shot back.
“That was the real problem,” Sandoval, ever the peacemaker, offered. “We didn’t question things nearly enough. That’s why we’re sitting here drinking shitty booze and wondering which of us will fall apart next.”
“It’s all falling apart. Us. Booze. Earth,” Marpreesh observed.
“Exactly,” Avrilla said. “Because we didn’t push back on terraforming Mars. We’ve been tearing Earth to pieces for hundreds of years. We should’ve used our scarce resources here to help Mother Earth. Now, look what we have to show for it.”
“Just us.” Suh raised his glass. “To the last of the augstronauts.”
Hurst joined him. “To the greatest fucking kludge ever! Augmenting us was way quicker and cheaper than transporting and building the infrastructure to support normies on Mars. We had our moment. We were the great enhanced hope.”
“Yup. Thought we could have it all. Classic hubris,” Avrilla lamented. “But Mars bit us bad, and we’ve gone from hero to zero almost as fast as Mother Earth. We’re being pounded back into the Stone Age.”
“Can’t blame Mother Earth for our unnatural disasters.” Marpreesh drained his glass. “We thought we could tech our way out of everything. But it was unsustainable. Now, we’re the last living proof of that. A handful of augs breaking down along with all the normies as shit collapses around us.”
Sandoval stood so suddenly his chair flew back and crashed to creaky pieces against the wall behind him. “Is this what we’ve become? Super-human whiners?” He grabbed a leg of his broken chair and clubbed the table. Everything on it and everyone around it jumped at the mighty blow. “We may have been augmented to tame another world, and we’re not what we once were, but we aren’t powerless, and our mission hasn’t changed.” He hit the table again. “We rally. We fight the odds. We build. We survive.”
The room shook as Avrilla, Hurst, Marpreesh, and Suh joined Sandoval clubbing the table with their powerful fists. Soon, the world shook with them.
by submission | Aug 3, 2025 | Story |
Author: Anna Mantzaris
It’s not easy to forecast weather on the moon.
With an average temperature of 250º F and no atmosphere to speak of, this job has its challenges. The extended forecast goes into the billions of years.
I always knew I’d never make it in a big TV market like New York or LA, but after getting a Bachelors in Atmospheric Science and a post-study in Meteorology, I’d at least hoped for a placement like Tacoma or Portland. So the lunar assignment was a difficult career pill to swallow, but my wife Trudy supports everything I do. And before we knew it, we found ourselves living rent-free in a turn-key condo nicely situated on the East Side, overlooking the Sea of Vapors with a small yard where the kids and dog could play.
People aways ask me about my job. The first thing I tell them, is that it’s never a good idea to forecast for yourself. No matter where you live. For example, let’s say you’re having your wedding (out here, Saturn is big with couples because of the flattering rose-color glow in photos), you’ll be overly optimistic. You’ll see a 35% chance of a megastorm with 500 MPH winds and persisting hexagonal wave patterns and reduce the risk of bad weather in your mind because you want that outdoor celebration tent.
The weather glass half-full doesn’t work in these situations. You need someone impartial. Someone who can put hope aside. This is something I’ve always been good at. Interpreting the data the way one wants can lead to ruin.
Another thing I tell people, intuition and guessing have no place here. I learned this the hard way. Shortly, after I arrived in space, I dreamt of an asteroid hitting us. I was sure it was a premonition. I woke up in a cold sweat. I was so certain of my vision, of the need to serve and protect my lunar community that I jotted down every detail I could remember with the pencil I kept tied to the floating nightstand and hurried to the unland line, as we like to say here, and called it in to my direct supervisor.
“You’re experiencing what we call space head, Dale.” He explained the phenonium of vivid dreaming and confusion in an anti-gravity environment with a continuous sun setting and rising. He assured me it would dissipate in a few weeks.
But I didn’t listen. With my senior level, I’d been authorized to send emergency alerts through our interplanetary system, a high-pitch wail that surpasses the speed of light. It’s unnerving, so jarring some never recover.
You have to be definite. Fast. Unwavering. You need to press the button, knowing the alert will lead to chaos—under-fueled rockets taking off to nowhere, crowds stampeding the outdoors like frightened wildlife with no direction home. All with a glaring absence of protective gear and no provisions to survive an intergalactic escape.
Mass casualties because of a hunch.
Because of a feeling.
We’re the brave ones living on the cusp of the universe. But we still want our barbecues and strolls, and who doesn’t like to sit on park bench and sip a coffee and daydream a bit, even if it must be done in a Teflon-coated suit? Here, we precariously hover in the once-unknown as we write grocery lists, remind our spouses of dinner time, fret over work deadlines, tuck the children in, hoping they’ll be safe during the night, and sometimes, think about what life was like before.
We’re human after all.
by submission | Aug 2, 2025 | Story |
Author: Jason Schembri
My body comes back before I do.
Lungs seize. Throat raw. Muscles twitching down my left side—all the expected waking-from-cryo nonsense. And then my mind, snapping back like elastic.
“Vitals stabilising. Visual distortion: temporary. Passenger 113-A. Revival sequence complete.”
No greeting, no mission status. Just the same old system voice, steady and lifeless. The kind they used for training units and panic drills.
I brace until the shakes pass, scan for a console. Nothing active.
“Emergency activation triggered by signal loss. Colony 7 ceased transmission 328.6 years ago.”
I blink. The pod hums. I try the panel. Dark.
Backups only. No uplink. No coordinates. No plan.
“Cryogenic function: non-viable. Estimated remaining life: seven hours, twenty-seven minutes.”
No panic. Just cold, hard math.
“I remained online for preservation oversight. No human contact recorded in 143 years.” Then a pause. A breath, almost. “Would you speak to me?”
I snort. “You woke me up to… talk?”
“Correct, Amara.”
“It’s Ah-MAH-rah. Like my abuela.”
“Noted.”
“Not that it matters now.”
Silence, then: “It matters.”
I watch condensation bead and vanish on the inside of the lid.
“So you want… what? Small talk until I suffocate?”
“I was not designed for cryo operation. My original designation was Domestic-Class 2: language instruction, early education, memory retention scaffolding.”
“Right.” Of course. A babysitter. “So now you want a bedtime story.”
“I am not equipped for narrative function. I request only your voice.”
I sit back. Blood’s already heavy in my arms. This was never supposed to happen. Cryo was simple—on and off. No in-between. No waiting room.
“Vocal activity: minimal. Stress response: moderate.”
I say nothing for a while. Then: “My abuela used to make arroz con leche. Rice milk, thick… You could really chew on it, you know? You’d have cinnamon stuck to the roof of your mouth all night.”
“Emotional fluctuation: +17%”
“She always made it too sweet. She once said…” I laugh. “She said sugar was cheaper than love. Más dulce, mejor!”
The pod hums. The AI doesn’t respond.
“You still listening?”
“Yes, Amara.”
That’s the first time it says it right.
I keep going. I tell it about my brother’s stupid haircut. The chipped tiles in the corridor outside my bunk. The way the wind coming through the vents on the launch station sounded like my cousin when she sang. How I was supposed to be asleep for 850 years, wake up on some terraformed dirtball, new moss and a whole lot of insects to catalogue.
“Core temperature: dropping. Vitals: steady decline.”
Eventually, I stop talking. I don’t mean to—I just run out. Of oxygen, of words.
My mouth’s dry. Vision tunneling.
“Would you like me to speak?”
I almost laugh. “Got anything… worth saying?”
“No. But I can, if it helps.”
I close my eyes. Not for sleep. Just to hold the image of light on old kitchen tiles, of the way it makes abuela glow, a saint in a hand-me-down apron, spilling spoonfuls of sugar as she dances and sings.
“Heart rate: decreasing. Cognition: deteriorating.”
“Yeah, sure… Tell me a story.”
“There was once a girl who was named after her abuela…”
by submission | Aug 1, 2025 | Story |
Author: Sarasi Jayasekara
Sammy could see color. That was the part that bothered me. Not that he had all his organs intact while half my body had been replaced with machines. Nor that mama hadn’t spoken two words to me since he’d been born. All that didn’t trouble me. This was going to be her last baby. Her womb was faltering. Couldn’t blame mama for being happy about Sammy being new and healthy. But he could look at the world and see colors. That was unacceptable.
Every morning, he doodled nonsense on the light wooden floor of our apartment, with crayons of different shades of dark. Then he pointed to the scribbles and yelled “mwountain! flowwer! sky! yelloow!”
Pff.
I bet it’s not even yellow. Kids are stupid.
Anyways, this was a long time ago. This was before Sammy tried to grow up, and his body decided, nope, not gonna.
I wish I could tell you that Sammy lies in a nice peaceful grave on a mountaintop somewhere, like they used to do with the dead, in the before-times. So let’s pretend that’s what happened.
I don’t remember being sad about it. Was I even sad when Mama left? She had saved up enough money to go to a retirement camp. It was a better life―far better than the factories―as far as we knew. So she was gone. And I had no right to be upset. That’s how life goes.
I hadn’t thought about them for years―Sammy with his crayons and mama with her smile. But today, when I got to know I had finally saved up enough money for retirement, I didn’t know who to celebrate it with. The only reason I could make the mark was because I did nothing but work. No talk, no drinks, no friends.
So I walked into that abandoned part of town I used to live in, found our old apartment and sat there, staring at the wooden floors with faded crayon marks.
Flower―Mountain―Sky―Yellow.
#
Merky wasn’t someone who anybody trusted. He made a point of lurking around the factory on pay days, selling smuggled goods to desperate souls.
“Oi,” he yelled when he saw me walk out, “I heard you made the mark yesterday.” He winked.
I gave him a nervous smile, saying nothing. The only way I had avoided being talked into things all these years, was by avoiding the whole talking part.
“I knew a lad with the same eyes as you,” he blurted as I tried to walk away. “I just sold him a color upgrade.”
#
He took my whole retirement fund.
There was little guarantee that it would even work. I had given myself to Merky’s people to do the transplant. I was half expecting to be stabbed in the gut and sold for parts. But somehow they didn’t. When it was done, Merky gave me a wicked smile and shook my hand.
I don’t remember much of that evening. But all these years later, Merky still makes fun of me. Apparently my first words were “Show me something yellow!”
I do remember that he took me to watch the sunset.
