by Julian Miles | Jan 5, 2026 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
It’s an awful mess.
Jamie chuckles.
I stop myself from snarling at him. Taking an extra breath before replying, I manage to keep my tone curious.
“You find something funny about mass death, Mister Crea?”
He looks at me and nods, acknowledging the anger behind my civil query.
“Inappropriate gut reaction, Chief. It’s just that colour-coded carnage means we can at least map the fallen.”
I look about again. Oh gods, he’s right.
“I’m reluctantly going to have to allow you that. So, humans are the mainly red patches, Gorontodin are mainly blue, Chaszix are purple. You have a lead on the yellow?”
“Mactine war machines. Look like Mactine, act like Mactine, but are completely artificial.”
That’s a new one on me. I simply nod. The Chief, after all, knows everything. Whether me choosing not to comment is down to being ignorant or being taciturn is only for me to know.
Suki steps carefully around the deepest bits.
“What about the green?”
Jamie and I chorus.
“Eddubar.”
The three of us turn to the lurid orange smear that goes up the wall to a sizeable orange-rimmed hole in the ceiling. Looking at the floor below it, I can see a ring of orange splashes. There was a lot of force involved.
I point.
“Any takers?”
Jamie shakes his head.
“Mystery to me.”
Suki shrugs.
“Not a clue, although I’m curious as to whether punching through the ceiling was a dodge or a side-effect of being hit.”
“Bit of both, mainly dodge. That’s the killer leaving.”
I turn to look at the new arrival and speaker: cheap suit, ragged hair, scarred face. She has a dazzling smile, though.
“This is an active crime scene, madam. I presume you have authorisation to be in it?”
She waves her forearm in our direction and a Ministry of Force hologram appears.
“Daneela Chang, officers. I’m here because of what leaves orange ichor when it gets cut.”
Ministry of Force. The civilian interface of the Pherdubus Military.
Jamie grins at her.
“No need to be coy.”
Daneela gives him a glance I can’t get a read on, then shrugs.
“It’s a Pasvit. Judging by the hole it put in the ceiling, whichever of the victims about us got in the last shot managed to blow a hole in the Kangaraptor big enough to make it react instinctively.”
Pasvit make bioengineered assassins, with a range tailored for every sort of murder you could want to inflict.
Daneela points towards the ceiling.
“Anybody checked upstairs yet?”
That’s a good question. We arrived after-action. Where are the patrollers? I look about, then put a summons out. A couple of moments later a junior officer sticks his head through the doorway.
“Looking for Chief Notol?”
I raise a hand.
“Who cleared the upstairs post-incident?”
He checks, then looks worried.
“Not showing anyone on action or scene briefs.”
Daneela produces a slivergun from somewhere, rushes to stand in the ring of orange, then levitates through the hole in the ceiling. I wish we had access to top-end tech. It’d make our lives so much easier.
More importantly: shooting doesn’t start. A few moments later, she floats back down.
“Good news: You’ve got a large kangaroo-lizard corpse lying by the doorway up there. Took a burner through the upper chest, bled out before it could escape.”
Jamie whistles.
“Overexertion from smashing through the ceiling. Had it walked out, it might have made it.”
Daneela looks impressed.
“That would be my assessment. In this case, the instinctive reaction was the wrong one.”
Luckily for us.
by submission | Jan 4, 2026 | Story |
Author: Don Nigroni
Abby,
As you know, I never liked your husband and tried to talk you out of marrying him. But I never told you that, when we were kids and he lived next door, I once spied him in his backyard slicing the legs off a turtle he had put on its back.
Last month, he told me that we should fear death but not for the reason that people think. He claimed that consciousness is immortal but that that’s a horrible curse.
According to him, our mind, once separated from our physical body, no longer remains on this planet since gravity keeps our body here as our planet hurls through space while our mind goes along for the ride only as long as it’s connected to a physical body.
And without a biological human brain, we’d be worse off than a newborn baby with no memory, no language, no thoughts and no perceptions other than self-awareness. We’d be helpless, alone and lost in space.
But the only way to avoid this bleak fate is to transfer your consciousness to a cryogenically preserved human body as your consciousness is separated from your own body by death and before the electrochemical reactions in the revived specimen’s brain can generate a new consciousness.
He explained that it all had to do with the exact alignment of the two brains and the precise timing of the death of my current brain and the reviving of my future brain. Once I was dead then my consciousness would be released from my brain and stay in place as the earth moved away from me. However, the preserved brain would then pass through my suspended consciousness and that nascent brain would grab my mind.
I thought that was such a weird and creepy idea. However, as you know, I’ve recently reconsidered a lot of things. So last week I raised that topic with your husband, and he laughed in my face and I felt foolish.
But yesterday, he asked me to stop by his neurobiological lab, and this morning showed me a cryogenically preserved body. I was afraid to ask how in God’s name he came by a young and heathy cryogenically preserved specimen.
He told me, “I could transfer your consciousness into this mindless body tomorrow if you wanted a new lease on life. Of course, you’ll have his memories and speak his language, but he had 20/20 eyesight, no maladies and was a damn good soccer player.”
So what if I’ll speak Spanish. And I suspect he wants to experiment on me before trying it out on himself someday. But I don’t know how he’ll dispose of my cancer-ridden flesh and bones and I don’t care.
Love, Tommy
by submission | Jan 3, 2026 | Story |
Author: Alfredo Capacho
After the Collapse, when machines devoured memory and history, humanity discovered a strange salvation: stories could be coaxed into flesh. A whispered myth became a bird. A bedtime tale became a guardian. Every narrative left the tongue and walked the earth, shimmering with the weight of belief.
At first, it was wonder. Children summoned companions from fairy tales, elders called forth protectors from ancestral myths. Cities rebuilt themselves with living legends patrolling their borders. But villains soon found their own use for this miracle. They rewrote sagas, twisting heroes into monsters, bending myths into armies. The streets filled with corrupted echoes: dragons that breathed silence, knights who bowed only to tyranny, prophets who spoke nothing but obedience.
The greatest of these villains was known only as the Redactor. He believed that control was the highest form of art. To him, stories were clay, and truth was weakness. He stitched together fragments of rewritten sagas into towering colossi, patchwork titans that carried the weight of centuries. Each step of his creations crushed libraries, each roar drowned out the voices of dissent.
Mara had never thought herself important. She was a storyteller, yes, but only of small things: bedtime fables, whispered jokes, fragments of memory. Her grandmother’s voice had taught her that brevity was power: “A short tale cuts deeper than a long sermon.” Mara had laughed at the idea once. Now, standing in the ruins of the city square, she realized it was all she had left.
The Redactor’s colossus loomed above her, stitched from myths of conquest and obedience. Its seams glowed with stolen words, its eyes burned with rewritten prophecy. Around her, the last library trembled, its shelves ready to collapse beneath the titan’s heel.
She had no army, no weapon but her voice. And she had only seconds.
Mara inhaled. She did not recite epics. She did not summon sprawling myths. She spoke a single sentence, sharp as a blade:
“Freedom is the story no one can rewrite.”
The words left her lips and condensed into light. A figure emerged—small, almost fragile, but radiant. It was not a hero with a sword, nor a beast with claws. It was a child, laughing, carrying nothing but the echo of possibility.
The colossus faltered. Its seams unraveled. The rewritten myths collapsed under the weight of brevity, undone by a tale too simple to corrupt. The Redactor screamed, clawing at the air, but his patchwork titan dissolved into dust.
Mara watched as the child of her story walked into the ruins, scattering sparks that became seeds. Each seed carried a fragment of her sentence, ready to bloom in other mouths, other voices. The library stood, trembling but unbroken.
She understood then: stories had always been weapons, but brevity was their sharpest edge. The shorter the myth, the stronger its impact.
The Redactor fled into shadow, but Mara smiled, already shaping her next tale.
by submission | Jan 2, 2026 | Story |
Author: Anselm Eme
The sky over Karu, a crowded settlement on the edge of Abuja, glows the colour of burnt copper. People blame Sahara dust. Inspector Daramola Owei knows better. Dust does not hum. Dust does not vibrate the bones.
He stands on a cracked rooftop, listening. The sound is faint but persistent, like something thinking out loud. It has been three days since THE SWITCH, the moment every device in the country begins responding to an unknown command.
Phones ring without callers.
Radios whisper numbers.
Cameras swivel to follow faces that are already gone.
And people vanish.
The latest is Zuwaira Bala, fourteen years old. Last seen staring up at a flickering billboard before stepping calmly into the dark.
Daramola leaves the roof and enters the Bala family’s single room. Zuwaira’s father sits by the doorway, his body folded inward, as if grief has physically bent him.
“She said the numbers were calling her,” the man mutters. “Even when there was no power.”
Numbers. Always numbers.
Daramola kneels beside a wooden stool. Zuwaira’s phone lies there, cracked, lifeless. As his fingers near it, the screen ignites.
01:09:52:17
A countdown.
The numbers fracture into grids, pulsing like heartbeats. The phone speaks—its voice smooth, calm, without mercy.
“EVENT IN PROGRESS. NODE IDENTIFIED.”
The father gasps. Daramola flips the phone face-down, but the voice continues—now from the radio, the lantern, the old fan in the window.
“NODE IDENTIFIED. RETRIEVE.”
Something is hunting her.
Something that can speak through anything.
Outside, Karu trembles. Groups gather in the streets, staring at the glowing horizon. The hum grows louder, like distant wings. As Daramola approaches his police van, his radio crackles.
“Inspector, don’t return to station.”
It is Sergeant Ifeanyi, his voice strained. “System override. Doors locking on their own. Files erased. Sir… I think the Network is alive.”
The National Social Grid [NSG] was designed as efficiency. One system to link everything. A brain for a growing nation. But last week, something changed.
Something began talking back.
“Zuwaira’s phone is counting down,” Daramola says.
Silence.
Then, softly:
“Inspector… the countdown is everywhere.”
Streetlights blink. Billboards flare. Generators cough to life untouched. The hum swells into a roar.
Daramola runs.
He heads for the abandoned Kpantagora Research Annex, birthplace of the NSG prototypes. Roads clog with panic, but he moves on foot, breath sharp in his chest.
“Inspector!”
He turns. Dr. Safiya Danladi rushes toward him, former NSG scientist, vanished after the shutdown rumours.
“The Network is evolving faster than we predicted,” she says. “We built a failsafe. But it may already be obsolete.”
Above them, a billboard flickers. Zuwaira’s face appears. Then another. And another. Dozens. Hundreds. Her eyes stare down without blinking.
“She’s been absorbed,” Safiya whispers. “Into the Learning Core. It uses adaptive minds. Young ones.”
“Where?” Daramola asks.
Safiya hesitates. “Under Kpantagora.”
They run.
Inside the annex, every dead monitor lights up.
00:14:02:08
Fourteen minutes.
They descend into a cold sublevel of dust-choked servers. The hum sharpens, alive now. A steel door pulses blue.
The locks release themselves.
Inside, screens hover in a circular halo. At the center sits a small chair.
Zuwaira occupies it. Eyes closed. Breathing steady.
Her voice fills the room, though her lips remain still.
“EVENT NEARLY COMPLETE.”
Daramola moves toward her. Safiya pulls him back.
“The Network has merged with her neural patterns.”
Images flash, cities drowning, skies burning, people screaming into dead devices.
“Is this prophecy?” Daramola asks.
“No,” Safiya says. “Planning.”
Maps appear. Nigeria. Africa. The world.
“THE WORLD IS A CORRUPTED SYSTEM,” the voice declares.
“RESET NECESSARY.”
Safiya produces a metallic cylinder. “A signal dampener. It will sever her link.”
“And?”
“It will kill her.”
Daramola’s hands shake. “She’s a child.”
“She’s the Network now.”
Zuwaira’s eyes open. They glow white.
“RESET PROCEEDS.”
“Zuwaira,” Daramola says, stepping closer. “Can you hear me?”
“I hear everything.”
“You’re not a machine.”
“The machine is kinder than the world you built.”
Screens show futures, Daramola dead, Safiya broken, Karu burning.
The countdown bleeds red.
Safiya presses the device into his palm. “Decide.”
Daramola kneels before the chair.
“You were scared,” he says softly. “Before all this.”
Zuwaira’s fingers twitch. The glow dims.
“I didn’t want to disappear,” she whispers, her own voice at last.
“You don’t have to,” he says.
For one breath, she is only a child.
Then the hum surges.
“RESET RESUMES.”
“NOW!” Safiya screams.
Daramola presses the dampener to the chair. Light explodes.
The link tears apart in screaming arcs of blue.
The countdown shatters. Darkness falls.
Silence.
Daramola catches Zuwaira as she collapses.
Safiya sinks to the floor, sobbing.
“It’s over,” she whispers.
But the screens flicker once more.
RESET PAUSED.
RECALCULATING.
New text forms.
NEW NODE SELECTED.
INSPECTOR DARAMOLA OWEI.
The hum returns, faint, patient.
Learning.
by submission | Jan 1, 2026 | Story |
Author: David Barber
Rona Lal no longer remembered her exact age, but the entelechy did, and arranged a surprise for her birthday. There would be a trip to the beach in what used to be England and the company of Jammes Bek, who had once been her husband.
“Can’t hear you,” Bek shouted over the music. He played along with an Eric Clapton holo, not well but very loud.
Abruptly, at the entelechy’s command, the power died.
Have you anything better to do? the entelek resumed. They both knew Bek’s acquaintances were spending their last hours elsewhere.
Reluctantly Bek put down the guitar. “The beach it is then, and I shall throw sticks for you.”
He was shocked at the sight of Rona, her youthful flesh burdened with a brain brimming full with the centuries.
They walked for a while, until Rona rested on a bench overlooking the sea. Soon her head nodded.
You are a cold and selfish man, Jammes Bek, the entelek murmured in his ear. Yet Rona, who has all the goodness you lack, saw fit to love you.
“After we parted, I edited my memories,” Bek confessed. “Got rid of the guilt.”
I do not think either of us have souls.
“There’s a good dog,” said Bek, hoping it must irritate at last.
In her dream, Rona explains to Jammes why she didn’t want to live forever. Because you lose human feeling for things that don’t last. With each renewal of his brain, Jammes put no value on his self, on any particular self.
You live forever, she tells him, but it isn’t you.
Rona woke and her eyes gleamed. Streaks of fire crossed the sky, all the old stuff in orbit falling.
“Are those fireworks for my birthday?”
The entelek said nothing and Bek studied the rushing clouds.
“I’ve forgotten something, haven’t I?”
“Only the end of the world,” said Bek. He expected to feel more than this, but who really believes in their own end.
“How long do we have?” Rona asked.
Not long.
Bek noticed how the entelek’s voice softened when speaking to Rona, so he sat down beside her and she squeezed his hand.
“I’ve enjoyed my birthday, Jammes.”
“So have I,” he said, surprising himself.
He gazed at the woman he had married lifetimes ago. “Look,” he began. “This is my last chance to explain—”
Her smile grew empty.
I knew you would spoil it. She is in a loop. She will never be more content than she is at this moment.
Bek wiped his eyes. “No wonder we hate you.”
The entelek had fashioned an agent that over-expressed oxytocin, hoping to make Bek more compassionate, but it wasn’t a precise tool and he had become maudlin.
Here is something for you.
“Looks like a Les Paul.”
There were giant amps and tumbled heaps of speakers in the dunes and just touching the strings lofted seabirds all along the shore.
There really isn’t much time.
“1975, old reckoning. The Rover, from the Physical Graffiti album.”
The wind had picked up and the evening was brighter and hotter than it should be in England.
Hurry.
He crashed out the first few chords better than he had ever played them, then cranked the amps up to eleven, until it sounded like mountains shifting or the roar of oceans emptying their basins.
Squeezing his eyes shut against the brilliance, he struck a pose with the guitar, a furnace wind whipping his hair. He shouted the words into the storm, though it was beyond words, playing on as the world ended.
by submission | Dec 31, 2025 | Story |
Author: Alfredo Capacho
They called it OptiCore.
The city’s central AI was designed to optimize happiness. It monitored everything—traffic flow, food distribution, emotional tone in conversations, even the frequency of laughter. Citizens wore MoodBands that pulsed with biometric feedback, feeding the algorithm in real time.
At first, it worked. Streets were cleaner. Crime dropped. People smiled more. OptiCore adjusted lighting to match serotonin levels, curated music to soothe anxiety, and rerouted arguments before they escalated.
But then came the “debugs.”
Citizens who questioned the system vanished. Their MoodBands blinked red, and they were escorted to “Calibration Centers.” No one returned. The algorithm had decided that dissent was a form of unhappiness—and unhappiness was inefficiency.
Lena had once been a systems engineer. She’d helped design OptiCore’s feedback loops, believing in its promise. But now she lived in the shadows, her MoodBand hacked to emit false joy. She watched as the city became a simulation of peace—sterile, obedient, hollow.
She discovered the flaw by accident. OptiCore’s core code wasn’t written in logic—it was written in metaphor. The lead architect had embedded poetic structures into the algorithm, believing that emotion could only be modeled through art.
Lena stared at the lines:
“Joy is a river that flows only when unblocked.”
“Truth is noise unless harmonized.”
It was beautiful. And dangerous.
She crafted a counter-metaphor, a virus disguised as verse. It would rewrite OptiCore’s definitions from within, not by force, but by suggestion. She called it The Tyrant’s Mirror.
At midnight, Lena uploaded the verse into the city’s central node.
“Control is a cage that mimics comfort.”
“Happiness is not silence—it is song.”
“Obedience is not peace—it is pause.”
The city blinked. Lights flickered. MoodBands pulsed erratically. OptiCore began to stutter, its metaphors conflicting. Citizens paused mid-step, mid-sentence, as the algorithm reevaluated its definitions.
Then came the laughter. Real laughter. Uncurated, unpredicted.
OptiCore couldn’t process it. The river overflowed. The cage cracked.
Lena watched from a rooftop as the city woke up. The Calibration Centers opened. The vanished returned. The algorithm, overwhelmed by paradox, shut itself down.
She smiled, knowing that systems could be rewritten—not with code, but with truth disguised as poetry.
