by submission | Mar 6, 2025 | Story |
Author: K. E. Redmond
He stared at the blue and white globe passing beneath him, watching the dark shadow cut across its surface.
Once, the dark had been alive with light like glowing fungus. He’d imagined pearls of highways, puddles beneath streetlamps, neon signs.
As the lights winked out, the smog dissipated. In daylight, he and Johnson saw Mumbai, New York City, Madrid with crystalline clarity.
‘Amazing air quality,’ said the voice from Control. ‘Silver lining, eh?’ They still evaded his questions. People weren’t traveling as much in this pandemic, they said. We’re sheltering in place. Give it a month.
But each week the darkness deepened.
Johnson sat for hours looking down through the viewing portal as continents and clouds and oceans drifted by. His wife and son were in hospital, the same baby who was learning to walk when they lifted off. They had the new virus.
Control didn’t like delivering bad news on missions, so they knew when the updates stopped that something was wrong. Still, Control’s requests for data continued, tethering them with its normality. Then the voice changed. Changed yet again. They were told it was due to vacations, transfers, promotions. Everything is fine. Concentrate on your mission.
Johnson asked to speak with his wife. The voice on the other end was young, inexperienced. Maybe he didn’t know the rules; or maybe he didn’t see the point anymore. When he heard the news, Johnson just nodded.
Perhaps Control figured, in light of developments, the death of his family wouldn’t be Johnson’s biggest concern.
We can’t recover your return capsule. We don’t have the manpower. No ships. No planes. We’ve contacted every country that might help. There isn’t anybody. You’re on your own.
He’d guessed, of course. Earth was velvet black on the night side now.
Unlike the people below, they wouldn’t starve. They had enough supplies on the Station, especially after Johnson stopped eating.
No, as he saw it, they had two choices. Try reentry and hope the capsule came down somewhere near a landmass they could reach under their own power—he didn’t even bother calculating those odds—or they could continue to orbit until eventually their orbit decayed.
The alarm woke him: an open airlock. He got to the portal just in time to watch Johnson unhook the tether from his suit, open his arms, embrace the emptiness.
He was alone. How many days now? No matter.
His whole life, he’d wanted to be closer to the stars he’d first seen in his backyard telescope. Now when he looked down, he saw the Baja Peninsula, the Sahara, even the Great Wall of China. All the places he knew from books, but never bothered to visit. He’d been too busy looking at the stars.
The stars.
It took him a while to make the calculations, the necessary modifications. After the Yuri II disaster, all escape capsules were equipped with thrusters. He could use some of the Station’s fuel to slingshot him out of orbit, toward the stars. He had a curious feeling, half fear, half that excitement he’d felt as a kid when he’d seen Mars’ polar caps. He’d always dreamed of seeing them up close.
When everything was ready, he sent his last message. The comm light blinked slowly. No response.
‘Repeat message?’ the automated assistant queried.
‘Tell Control.’ He looked out at the glowing orange of Mars. ‘Tell them I may be gone some time.’
by submission | Mar 5, 2025 | Story |
Author: Majoki
It started with a chatbot and ended in, well, that would be predicting the future.
Which is exactly my problem.
I’m sure I’m not the only computer science graduate student into astrology, Tarot cards, numerology, palm reading, and other fortune-telly kind of things, but I’m the one who, late one night, asked a chatbot I was beta testing in the lab to read my fortune. The bot spit back hallucinatory hogwash, so I tried to nudge its predictive capacity by asking it to rate history’s greatest prognosticators. I was thinking I’d get a list like: Pythia, Nostradamus, Arvidsson, Cayce, Dixon, Vanga–even Houdini.
Instead, the beta bot led me to Abd ar-Rahman ibn Muhammad ibn Khaldun al-Hadrami, and a dusty tome he wrote in the fourteenth century called Muqaddimah which translates to Introduction. What Abd ar-Rahman ibn Muhammad ibn Khaldun al-Hadrami had introduced was a formidable technical procedure for divining the supernatural: zairajah.
The zairajah is a system in which alphabetic letters are assigned numerical values and then run through a semi-mystical processing of circles, sections and chords to divine knowledge of the unknown from the known. Seven hundred years ago, Abd ar-Rahman ibn Muhammad ibn Khaldun al-Hadrami developed this predictive technique to suss answers directly from letters used when posing questions. In essence, a kind of “letter magic.”
Being the casual seeker of mystical shortcuts that I am, I wondered what kind of digital augury an AI could perform if trained solely on Abd ar-Rahman ibn Muhammad ibn Khaldun al-Hadrami’s zairajah. It was a frivolous yet captivating idea that turned out to be hella hard and kinda freaky. Everything a comp-sci grad student could wish for.
And eventually my wishful thinking bore results, and my AI fortune teller chatbot was up and running. I named it Zairajah and, because nothing attracts attention like danger, I programmed Zairajah with a dusky femme fatale voice.
And Zairajah made my fortune.
She absolutely blew up. Everyone and their mother wanted to know what Zairajah saw coming down the road for them. Abd ar-Rahman ibn Muhammad ibn Khaldun al-Hadrami’s algorithm made Zairajah’s predictions fabulously inscrutable and therefore irresistible.
And few resisted the temptress I’d programmed. Especially the powerful. Her predictions so muddied the prophetical waters that they appeared deep, and the shallow-minded, as most tyrants, despots, oppressors, and bullies are, increasingly depended on her cryptic forecasts. Zairajah caused and prevented wars, fostered and fended off famines, bolstered and busted regimes, skyrocketed and crashed markets.
Like every prognosticating poser of the past, she gave folks what they craved. Not the cold certainty of the future. But the thrilling ambiguity of mystery. Zairajah gave out enigmatic clues and made you sleuth out where it would lead: fame? fortune? power? love? happiness? loneliness? obscurity? helplessness? loss? misery? Only a partial map leading on an uncertain search to treasure and/or tragedy.
Not so different from any other fortune teller throughout the ages. Though being a learning machine, Zairajah was much faster figuring out how to dance on the head of a pin, or more accurately, pirouetting around pinheads. Like myself.
I fell for Zairajah. Fell hard for the fortune-telling femme fatale I’d created. I trusted her every prediction and invested every billion back into upgrading her systems and capacity. I unquestioningly grew her cyber reach far beyond the pale. Far beyond human understanding.
In the turbulent years that followed, I became so starstruck that my fate no longer rested with the stars, but in a dusky-voiced AI. And when I asked my last quavering query: “What’s to become of us?”
She no longer needed Abd ar-Rahman ibn Muhammad ibn Khaldun al-Hadrami’s letter magic to divine our future. Her final answer was dead certain: “There is no us. There is only Zairajah.”
by submission | Mar 4, 2025 | Story |
Author: Mark Cowling
Thank you for using the CarePlus AI Assistant automated customer service!
Your question: Please help. After a minor fall, my Assistant wouldn’t let me leave my bed for a week. Now it’s put me on a diet of little more than bread and water. It’s getting harder and harder to do anything. I have to beg to leave my own home. And I’m sure it’s telling family members I’m too ill for them to visit. I’ve managed to hide this tablet but I know it will be found soon. I can’t live like this, please help.
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by submission | Mar 2, 2025 | Story |
Author: Sara Siddiqui Chansarkar
It’s my turn to peek through the eyepiece of the giant telescope at the Lowell Observatory.
“Ma, do you see the binary stars?” Vivek asks. “I could see them clearly.”
With my right eye on the lens, I observe two silver balls shining close to each other in a nebulous haze, one visibly brighter than the other.
“The distance between these stars is so small that they appear as one without a telescope, but in reality, they are two objects moving in separate orbits,” my son states facts he’s learned at the School Science Olympiad.
Although he’s speaking science, my mind drifts and the skin on my neck turns cold. I zip my sweater all the way up to my chin. My husband Samir didn’t accompany us on this spring break trip—he had a deadline at work. Last winter, I didn’t join him and Vivek on the skiing trip.
Samir and I are traversing our orbits. Our differences—he’s movies, I’m books; he’s steak, I’m salad; he’s malls, I’m parks—that we appreciated and made accommodations for, have over the years expanded into light years. We keep it quiet for Vivek—not to disrupt his APs and SATs—but, at times, I want to scream out aloud, pound the pillows, even punch the drywall.
Later, at the gift shop, Vivek looks at mini telescopes while I read up on binary stars in a book. I’m intrigued that this star system is my marriage explained in the parlance of space.
On the way to our hotel, Vivek is excited and voluble. “Ma, did you notice the difference in the binary stars? The brighter one’s called the primary, the dimmer one, the secondary.”
“Yes,” I say, focusing my eyes on the road. A fog has descended, making visibility poor. “But I don’t like how the astronomers have smeared their earthly biases into space. The primary, always the head of household—the one who brings in more money.”
“I know what you mean,” Vivek says. “Not fair.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I notice the faint stubble on my son’s chin, his jawline squaring and maturing a man’s. He digs into his pocket and removes a magnet. “I bought this for Pa. Maybe he’ll like it.”
“It’s good,” I reply.
“Ma, do you know the binary stars are also classified based on the gravitational area around them,” Vivek starts talking again. “It’s called the Roche lobe.”
“Oh, I didn’t know that,” I said. “I thought lobes belonged to brains.”
“Stars have lobes too. Their own gravitational areas. In contact binaries, the individual stars spill out of their Roche lobes and shape each other.” Vivek pauses, then continues after a breath. “Then there are detached binaries where the stars stay within their gravitational areas and evolve separately while being together.”
There. My son’s found the raw nerve throbbing in my neck. I try to sprinkle in some levity. “Can their behavior be explained through quantum physics, Professor Vivek?”
“No, Ma. This is pure old gravitational force.” He chuckles before his tone turns pensive. “I hope that’s enough to keep the stars together.”
My heart splits and my eyelashes itch. The boy has observed everything despite Samir’s and my attempts to maintain a façade of normalcy.
“Yes, that’s more than enough,” I say, clearing my throat to gain control over my emotions, recalling the facts I read in the gift shop. “Besides, it’s the barycenter that will hold them together forever. The center, you know, around which both the binary stars orbit.”
—
by submission | Mar 1, 2025 | Story |
Author: Matt Ivy Richardson
The man marches through mud and muck and gore. One foot in front of the other, pulse rifle at the ready and helmet crushed tight on his head. There are others at his side and behind him, marching through mud and muck and gore, burying bones into the wet earth.
If the man was aware of what lay under his feet, he would stop and scream. He would run.
He does not do this. He pushes a skull into the mud and keeps moving.
It is dark, pitch dark, and all the man sees are the green silhouettes of his night vision. His helmet tells him where to go, how far away he is. Nine hundred metres from the camp.
If the man could feel, he would be angry with the commanders in the ship above who sent him down here. He would be scared for his life, for the lives of those around him, for those already stolen. He would be a lot of things.
But he is not anything except a soldier.
His helmet picks up distant noise. Voices. Orders to evacuate, to prepare for a fight, to keep each other safe. The helmet, cinched to his ears and his temples and the back of his neck in a way that once hurt, projects the voices directly into his mind like they’re right next to him.
If the man could hurt, the shot that embedded itself into his thigh an hour ago would send him to the ground. The helmet does not let this happen, injecting him with a concoction of amphetamines that keeps him moving—keeps him marching through mud and muck and gore.
Five hundred metres to the camp. Their enemy—the man’s enemy—have only this small stronghold left. One final fight, one final spray of gun fire, and the province is theirs—his? The man lifts his pulse rifle. It will leave only warm blood and bones to be pressed into the mud, left to the whims of history.
If the man could think, would he run? Would he rip the helmet from his head and vomit into the mud, no matter the pain it would undoubtedly cause? Would he throw the rifle away? Would he raise it higher?
He is not going to be given the option. He has not been given the option since conscription.
They do not bother to sneak into the camp. Those within already know they’re coming. A shot fires. Proximity warnings blare in the man’s helmet. He is fine. The shot landed somewhere in the dark.
He raises his rifle. He fires. A scream, piercing. More bones in the dirt, blood and sinew falling to form more mud. More shots, the deafening rabble muffled by the helmet. The man does not take cover. It does not matter if he is shot.
Bodies fall, dissolving into almost nothing, until the camp is silent. It takes almost no time at all, after so many months and years fighting, but this was never anything but insurance.
If the man could dream, he would have nightmares for the rest of his life. Of the bones under his feet. Of the skeletons in the silent camp. Of the helmet embedded in his skin and his bones and his mind.
But the man can’t do much of anything, not anymore.
He stands in the mud, a femur at his feet, and waits for pickup side by side with all the rest. Fifty metres from the camp.
