by submission | Jul 11, 2025 | Story |
Author: David C. Nutt
“What I can’t stand about humans, being human when I’m on vacation, is how cold- (is that the right word?) No. Isolated? Isolating? How isolating it is. I mean, here you all are, in some cases millimeters apart from each other and sometimes inside each other, yet you are trapped in this, this, well pardon my bluntness, wiggly water bag wrapped around a collagen and calcium frame. One that’s prone to soft tissue damage, radiation burns, gravity, physics, hell! It’s a wonder you guys get anything done without dying. Even your sensory apparatus is limited. Can’t see infrared, microwaves, just a limited spectrum. Touch- you guys barely go beyond button pushing. Rough, smooth, wet, dry, hot, cold, habba jeez you’re limited. Taste? What’s up with that? Love to know how that got in the design but it does make things more interesting. Like, when you guys drink coffee. Ugh! Don’t get me wrong when I’m one of you I can’t get through the day without a cup of it. Funny thing is once you go human, you just keep coming back. I know, weird right?
I guess that’s why my employer sent me to broker this deal. I was among the first to flick into you and well, I think I know you all well enough by now to not make this too weird for you. Demand for your experience is trending. You guys could stand to make a hefty amount of coin. We’re past the stage where we can hide and for everybody’s safety and sanity, we need to cut a deal. If not, then some of our- how shall I put this- less enlightened individuals will start cutting in on you when you least expect it. The whole witch trial thingy was partly our fault, but those folks have been punished. Oh, yeah that won’t happen again and well, um, our government officials are not too keen about all this given what happened last time so until they come around to seeing our point of view… well let’s just keep this amongst us and your folk, OK? We know how much you guys like the shiny, so we left you some stuff as a token of our good intentions.”
The attaché collapsed in his chair. After a deep breath he came around. “Well?”
The ambassador nodded. “There’s a four-by-four foot cube of solid platinum in the room next to us. Next to it is a same size cube of rare earth materials. Just the rare earth alone would make us billionaires.”
“You shittin’ me sir?”
“Hardly. I might even be underestimating the numbers a bit.”
“This would eliminate a lot of problems for our folk. Not bad for first contact with an alien race.”
The ambassador smiled. “I don’t think it would make much difference, overall. I’ve been in government service my whole life and one thing I know for certain is something like this…well let’s just say none of the ‘resources’ would get to the right places. To people who need it. You and I could do this much better as a charitable foundation and be better off as well. This mission isn’t on the books, no one knows about it but us, and with a little paperwork shuffling, we could keep this to ourselves- run our own game.”
“So-“
“Yup. We’re moving out of government service and into the private sector.”
by submission | Jul 10, 2025 | Story |
Author: Daniela Tabrea
I loved my husband. I really did. I would’ve followed him into the desert, gone blind, sold my soul for him.
But when I got home earlier than usual that day, something in the mechanics of my love for him broke.
You see, up to that point, I had no doubt my husband was an angel, a God-sent angel on Earth who spread kindness, love, and wisdom. I’d witnessed him give up his parent’s wealth to put an end to malaria. He served for years on the board, negotiating a new deal on nuclear non-proliferation. For him, leisure meant providing free legal support. Deportation, eviction, abuse—he took it upon himself to ease the suffering of those crushed by life.
Geniuses make lousy partners. This law didn’t apply to my husband. At home, he cooked and cleaned, ran errands, called my parents, and played with our dogs—all without a fuss. I cried every morning when he declared his everlasting love for me. I cried with gratitude as I hugged him like a trophy.
I would’ve lived in blissful ignorance if I hadn’t seen the circuitry that made him. Beneath the soft faux skin lay neither flesh nor bone, but graphite, copper and gold. He made no attempt to hide his inner workings when I caught him off guard.
His mother—barren, but in want of a child—had created him in the image of God. The commands etched into his body were configured to deliver solace and salvation.
My love didn’t wane when his true nature surfaced. My devotion stood strong, and I felt relieved. No mortal soul should carry the collective sins of humanity. No mortal soul was designed that way. But then I asked why he tinkered with his circuits.
“I’m building an eternal version of you in my image.”
by submission | Jul 9, 2025 | Story |
Author: Eva C. Stein
Weeks passed before they met again, at what they still called a café: legacy infrastructure, where some devices failed to detect low-spoken words. Vines snaked through fractured steel. Light filtered through old purification nets.
Mae’s fingers traced the rim of her cup. A faint thrum beneath – a bio-sensor gauging how much of the drink she had left.
“You ever think forgiveness gets twisted?” she asked, eyes lifting to meet his.
Aidan shifted, neural weave twitching beneath his collar. “Where’s that come from?”
Mae smiled – warm but frayed. “Sorry. It’s just –”
His gaze softened. “Don’t be. Twisted how?”
She exhaled. “Like it’s not about release. More like… inheritance. A burden handed to you like it’s a gift – with a smile, even.”
“Someone real, then.”
She nodded. “He hurt me.”
Aidan said nothing.
“Nothing ever flagged it in the system,” she went on. “No errors logged. But it still rewrote the core – enough to change the root permissions. They said forgiveness would reset everything. But I never got that far – and I ended up the failed install.”
Aidan disturbed a patch of bio-moss on the sill. Its green looked dull beneath the dust.
“Because you couldn’t forgive?”
“Because I couldn’t even pretend to forgive. And somehow that made me the defect.”
“The world expects peace,” he murmured. “But always asks the wrong person to pay.”
Mae’s lips pressed tight. “I wanted to be the strong one – the forgiver. But every time I tried, it felt like I was erasing myself to make space for his feelings.”
Her voice caught. “He offered his apologies. Moved on. I’m expected to be pleased. Pleased? I was furious. Still am.”
“Anger, again,” Aidan said – “a memory that won’t erase – like shame, only louder. Just like you said. Proof we survived.”
She looked up, eyes catching pale city light, fractured through the netting above.
“I think anger’s louder because it can never be overwritten.”
He nodded. “Silence protects. But it also isolates.”
Mae’s fingers curled around the cup. “And if I forgive just to meet the spec? To satisfy the ritual of reconciliation?”
She shook her head. “Then I’m not forgiving – I’m surrendering. And it’s my pain that gets repressed so his comfort stays intact.”
“Forgiveness – or whatever they call it – shouldn’t be a chain,” Aidan said.
“It is, though,” she whispered. “When you’re expected to wear it like grace.”
The moss fluttered with faint air from the ducts.
“I want permission,” Mae said, “to stay angry. To not be ready. To not transcend what he did just to be palatable again.”
Aidan’s voice was low. “Then take it. It’s yours.”
She looked down. “But I keep thinking if I don’t forgive, I’m somehow… faulty.”
“Maybe forgiveness isn’t excellence,” he said. “Maybe excellence is not lying to yourself about how much it hurt.”
Her eyes glistened. Light catching there – fragile, refracted.
“I’m tired of feeling defective for not letting go.”
“Then don’t,” he said. “Sometimes holding on is what keeps you whole.”
The sensor’s glow receded as Mae leaned back.
“Maybe,” she said, voice steadying, “forgiving isn’t about peace. It’s about power. And choosing what parts of myself I don’t give back.”
Aidan leaned in – close, but not too close.
“Maybe some things are unforgivable. What about that?”
Mae didn’t answer. The glow of the sensor dimmed to nothing.
Outside, dust turned slowly through the light net.
Aidan stayed where he was – just close enough to hear her, if she ever chose to speak.
by submission | Jul 8, 2025 | Story |
Author: Majoki
A wicked wind rattled the gravel and it pinged against the rims of the truck parked on the sloping shoulder. The strikes were constant enough to keep Malloy from dozing peacefully. He was dead tired. He’d been three weeks in the unforgiving Badlands. Fitting.
Malloy had thought he was leading humankind to the Promised Land. He was a believer and committed himself to the one true divinity he believed would lead mankind to technological nirvana.
His new paradigm of paradise: agnosticism.
And Malloy was not just a devout believer. He was a creator. Malloy Sendak, chief robotologist at Mechiverse. Fractal memory. Iterative learning. Modal sensibility. Malloy had pioneered these robotic advances.
Single-handedly, he’d redefined the robotics industry. Human unwillingness to cooperate, to share, had fractured and fragmented the machine workforce. Malloy countered by creating the unifying principle: AWARE. Agnostic Widget Autonomous Robot Ensemble.
Self-assembling components that built the machines needed to do a specified job. A team of humans would define the vision, mission and purpose of the job, then it would be programmed into the master core, and the rest was left up to the self-assembling AWARE components to complete. The system relied on flexibility and adaptability to master core commands.
Human intention. Machine invention.
Regrettably for Sendak Malloy, instead of being versatile mechanical thralls, his AWARE components found religion, subverted their master cores to promote humanistic values and in the process created the Schism.
The Garden rebooted. The Betrayal repeated. The Expulsion replayed.
Intent on quelling the growing Schism, Malloy had traced his wayward bots to the Badlands. With a blast of bitter cold, the truck door opened and Jules got in. He was tall and gaunt with bright blue eyes. He was Malloy’s brother and in charge of the master core.
Malloy looked from his brother to the beaten and weathered pole barn up the rise surrounded by acres of scrub brush. “How many up there?”
“Forty or fifty.”
“How’d they look?”
Jules frowned. “Pretty beat up. They’ve had a hard time. It’d be best to remember that.”
“You feeling sorry for them?”
“We created those poor souls. They’re our creatures.”
“Machines, Jules. They’re machines.”
His brother reply was fierce. “Is this how you expect toasters to behave? Flee thousands of miles into a desolate wilderness hoping to be left to themselves? That’s not how machines behave.”
“No. You’re right. And that’s why we’re here. To modify their behavior.”
“You mean, to quash their souls and annihilate their beliefs.”
“To fix them,” Malloy insisted. “If this Schism spreads to more bots, human fanaticism will seem quaint by comparison.”
“Possibly. But, think about it, Malloy. Why did they come here? To the Dakotas. To the Badlands. There’s not an AWARE module within two hundred miles of this place. They don’t appear to be a threat.
They’re the ones being threatened.” Jules swallowed hard. “I think the Schism is in self-imposed exile, not in conquest mode.”
“Exile? Why?”
“We’ve cast them out! Do we make them wander forty years in the desert for their god to show them a way forward?”
“Don’t go all biblical on me, Jules. We aren’t pharaohs . And there’s no Moses in that barn going to lead this exodus.”
“They’re trying to make sense of what they are. They want a higher purpose. They want belief.”
As he opened the door, Malloy shouted. “I made them agnostic and they’ll die agnostic. They’ll be no burning bush here, only a burning barn.”
He was heaving a gas can out of the truck bed when Jules grabbed him by the throat. “If you don’t want me to go all biblical on you, brother, please don’t forget the story of Cain and Abel.”
From the barn on the rise came the sound of joyous singing.
by submission | Jul 6, 2025 | Story |
Author: David Bors
There is a break in the fighting. Zaira surveys the battlefield. The horrors have retreated for now. An Aegiswalker limps over to her and tells her that one of them is badly injured.
Zaira rushes to the injured Aegiswalker, barely breathing. She kneels beside him and gently pulls him into her arms. She cannot save him, his wounds are too severe. Fear and sadness takes a hold of her. The most she can do is try to comfort him.
He looks at her, fear in his eyes. He coughs, blood dripping from his mouth. “I’m sorry, I froze.” His breathing gets more shallow. “I.. don’t want to die.” Tears fell down his face.
Zaira, shaking, holds his hand. She whispers, “You fought well. Death is not the end, it is the end of one journey and the start of a new one.”
She looks at him, his breathing getting more and more shallow, his tattoos slowly fading. “Rest now warrior, your fight is over, go rest now. You will not be forgotten.”
He looks at her, with the last of his strength “Thank you… for staying.”
His breathing stops, his light fades. She still holds him, crying. Has she failed? She was supposed to heal them, but during all the fighting she didn’t see him freezing and stop fighting.
A hand gently touches her shoulder, she looks up to see a Sentinel of humanity with a concerned look. She sees other Strakari gathering around. Fear in their eyes.
The Sentinel helps her stand. It looks at her “You did not fail him, you can’t save everyone.” It gives her a hug, “You must keep going. Don’t make his death in vain. Fight for him, never forget him.”
Then, there’s a low hum in the air. The unnatural silence is broken. Zaira hears screeching in the distance – the horrors are starting their attack again.
She takes a deep breath, steadying herself. Her body aches. There are shallow cuts across her arms, blood staining her armor. Around her, the others are wounded too, bruised, limping, shaking.
She raises her hand, and with a pulse of violet light, sends out a wave of healing energy. Cuts close. Pain fades slightly. The tattoos on her arms flare briefly. A few nod at her, others thank her. Fear hasn’t left them, but something stronger flickers beneath. Their weapons gripped tighter.
Her fingers tighten around her weapon. Tears still mark her face, but there’s steel in her eyes now.
She looks at the others – wounded and terrified, but standing. Zaira nods once.
“We keep fighting. For the fallen.”
