by submission | Sep 1, 2026 | Story |
Author: Hillary Lyon
The old guy slid his card down the side of the small terminal to pay for his groceries. An error message appeared on the screen. He tried inserting the card in the slot at the bottom. Another error message.
“Swipe it over the icon in the top left corner,” Kora, the checker, offered. He did; it worked.
“Old people and technology,” he said sheepishly. “No worries,” Kora smiled, handing him his receipt.
* * *
Kora rang her Gran’s doorbell. She was dropping off bi-weekly groceries for the old woman. The door opened and a perky young gal stood before her.
“Uh, hi,” Kora said, confused. “I’m look for my Gran.”
Laughing, the young woman took the groceries. “Come in!” She dropped the bags on the floor and twirled around.
“Sorry,” Kora stammered, “you are…?”
The young woman grabbed Kora by the shoulders. “I’m your Gran!”
“No,” Kora said flatly. “That’s not possible.”
“Yes,” Her Gran corrected. “It is with rejuvenating gene therapy.”
“Oh, Gran,” Kora said, “you didn’t.”
“I did, and stop calling me Gran. You know my name is Tessa.” Tessa ran her hands down her svelte figure. “Only took ten days…isn’t this wonderful? I’m twenty-two again! Younger than you, and prettier, too! I’m a Rejuvie! A grooovy Rejuvie!”
“Gran—I mean Tessa—how much did this treatment cost? What are the side-effects?
“Puh-lease! Side-effects, shmide effects,” Tessa snorted. “And, Miss Nosy, I have investments and savings out the wazoo—good thing I was fiscally conservative for so long. So no worries! No worries at all!” Tessa fluffed her hair. “There’ll be no inheritance for you, or your mother.” She lifted her chin. “I’ll need every bit to live on for the next, oh, fifty years.”
“Gra—Tessa, I don’t care about inheritance. I’m worried about—”
Tessa cut her off. “I’ll buy whatever I want, eat whatever I want,” a dreamy look crossed her face. “I’ll go out to clubs, drink and dance all night…frolic with all those frisky boys!” Her dark eyes twinkled. “Oh, this is gonna be fun!”
* * *
Kora opened her laptop, logged on to the internet, and searched for information about rejuvenating gene therapy. Medical studies were only now being publicly published, months after the pharmaceutical companies made their billions.
Her cat, Mojo, jumped on the kitchen table to lay down beside the laptop. She scratched him under his chin before returning her attention to her screen. What Kora found caused her heart to sink. Reported side-effects included, but were not limited to: narcissism, increased libido, loss of fiscal sense, inability to plan for the future, lack of self-control, rising aggression…
Kora clicked another tab, this one being a live news feed. A wide-eyed, distressed podcaster spoke of rising tensions between the world’s superpowers. Rejuvenated macho generals, he warned, were thumping their chests, threatening to push the button—that button. As the podcaster spoke, numerous missiles launched in real time, sailing across the world’s oceans in all directions.
She clicked another tab, in dire need of distraction from events she had no control over. A viral video of a cat playing the piano. Just what she needed. “Mojo,” she said to her pet, “look at…”
With a distant boom, an EMP killed the internet. Electricity too. Kora closed her laptop. Rising from the table, she went to the kitchen window and opened it. The stars were innumerable, the night quiet.
“You know what I’m gonna miss, Mojo?” she said, picking him up. “Old people.” She looked out over the permanently dark city below. “And technology.”
by submission | Aug 31, 2026 | Story |
Author: Majoki
“Why then?”
Protectively, she froze at the center of the device, as if it would shield her from his question. Ceily finally emerged from the sleek nanocarbon posts which supported the shimmering tendrils of crystalline fiber to face her brother’s accusations.
He’d found her out, waiting until she’d fled the present, like she had so many times before, and then stood vigil until she’d returned from the past.
He wasn’t asking how she’d created a time machine. Ceily knew it’d taken more attitude than inventiveness to construct it. No. Her brother, Foster, was not interested in the how. He knew his sister was brilliant. You didn’t become a particle physicist triangulating tachyons without being brilliant. Fearing for her, he was focused on the why.
“What good can it do, Ceily? You’re fixating. It’s not gonna change things.”
“It helps me handle the present,” she whispered as she began to disengage from the device.
“Yeah, look at your present, Ceily. You’ve got a Nobel Prize discovery hidden here in your basement. An invention that could turn the world on its head, and you’re using it as a therapy tool,” Foster pressed. “You’ve been living in the past too long. It’s not gonna bring back Mom, Dad or Bobby.”
She shook her head as her fingers moved across the touchscreen at her makeshift desk, the filaments of the cage dimming as the device settled into a purr no louder than the fluorescent tubes that hung along the open rafters.
“You’re right. This won’t bring them back, but I can go back to them. I can be with them again. You could too.”
His eyes hardened at the offer. “Go back to September 10 and pretend I don’t know they’re all gonna die the next day?” His step towards her was an accusation. “I’d have to tell ‘em. I’d tell everyone. I’d make that damn machine take me back where I could do some good. Stop the whole thing. Change everything, and give us some peace. ”
“It wouldn’t,” Ceily said, ashamed.
“So you say, sister.”
“It wouldn’t change things in the way you think, Foster.” She stepped clear of the device and went to the bottom of the staircase. “We might be able to prevent it in one universe, but it would happen to us in another. 9/11 was a shearing event. It spawned a new us. Causality is not like thermodynamics. There is a free lunch—an infinite buffet of possibilities in the multiverse—and that means somewhere we’d all suffer the same fate. I can’t push that onto some other Ceily and Foster. I can’t.”
“What’s it like?” Foster’s eyes brightened warily.
Ceily met his searching stare. “Like it was before. Right here in the house. Upstairs in the kitchen, we’re eating, laughing, Monday Night Football’s on. Daddy’s looking so proud of us. All of us.” She reassured him. “That’s why I go back then. The before.”
She half closed her eyes. A half hour ago, she’d been with them. Waved goodbye to her parents and Foster on the porch and then climbed into bed with her husband, Bobby.
“I need to feel what it used to be like. To believe it was real,” she pleaded.
“But, you know,” he insisted. “How can you sit and laugh with them? Relive it all and then leave them to be crushed and burned the next day?”
“I can’t change that knowledge,” she admitted, “but when I see their eyes. The promise we all held. I can think about the future again.”
Foster shook his head. “It’s not right. If we can’t help them, it’s not right. It’d drive me crazy. It’ll drive you crazy. Look what you’ve become.” His hand swept over the incomprehensible array of equipment. “I haven’t seen you in weeks. You stopped returning calls and texts. That’s why I’m here. You’re fading away.”
“No!” Ceily’s voice was sharp. “This,” she pointed to the machinery “is to keep me from fading away.”
“It’s an escape!”
“It’s a way to remember what I once believed. Before.”
“You can’t get innocence back like that. Ignorance ain’t bliss, sister.”
Foster’s words knifed at her. “I didn’t ask for this knowledge.”
“Tell me how this is sane, Ceily?”
She sighed. “I can’t. So, why can’t I fight insanity with insanity? Why can’t I just live in the quiet before the storm?”
Foster couldn’t meet her eyes. “What does it take to go there?”
“Desperation.”
“What does it take to come back?”
Ceily voice trembled. “Love.”
As Foster stepped into the crystalline filaments of the time device, Ceily whispered, “On the porch when we’re saying goodbye, give Mamma a kiss…before she has to ask you.”
“Before?”
“Before. It changes everything.”
by submission | Aug 30, 2026 | Story |
Author: Rebecca Klassen
I sway with the patch of lettuce I’m tending on the top deck. They’re free to grow without hungry bunnies, and we’ve got nets for catching the gulls, delicious when grilled. Felix is tending the potatoes when The Captain’s voice rings out, announcing that the votes are in. We all stand and look out at the endless sea, as does everyone else aboard because it’s always too awkward to look at one another during the announcement. Afterall, everyone wrote a name and handed it in.
Felix’s sister Marta has whispered to us for months that it’s barbaric, cruel, wasteful, and that we must all write our own name down, that The Captain can’t throw us all overboard. Each night I’ve heard the boards creak as she’s canvassed, tiptoed the dark and rocking passageways, advertised uprising, receiving sleepy nods. It’s a shame she can’t see why The Captain does it though, why it actually works. I suspect she was sleeping with Crispin who went last year. She’s always been attracted to drama and bad boys.
Before the result, The Captain tells us a joke, as is customary.
‘Why don’t skeletons go deep-sea diving?’ He pauses, the boat lurches, and I keep my eyes on the horizon. ‘They don’t have the guts,’ he bellows.
Felix snorts through his nose, and my shoulders shake. Then we flash a look at each other that makes us stop, unable to join in with the others. The Captain’s laughter eventually dies down.
‘Well, Marta, your time with us is up.’
We hear her screaming below, heels pounding the boards, cussing. The Captain reiterates that a ship lighter in spirit travels more easily. Felix wipes his face as we hear Marta hit the waves and her calls for him stop. We don’t know what they get weighed down with: we’ve never looked.
Everyone resumes their work except Felix, who I can see is about to lose it, gasping for air. I go over to him, put a hand on his shoulder.
‘Hey, mate, I’ve got a joke for you.’
by submission | Aug 29, 2026 | Story |
Author: Alzo David-West
When you look out here in deep space, it’s not only black. There are all these forms and shapes hanging in the darkness, against the darkness. Sometimes they resemble clouds and peaks, even eyes staring at you across light-years.
Strange colors fluoresce and fade. The scene is a manifold in which everything becomes a painting, filled with shining, glowing points and trillions upon trillions of galaxies. They seem so near, yet they are vastly apart.
It’s a still-life painting come to life, and we are inside it, like the improvisations of Kandinsky and Pollock. I stare out the window of the space station orbiting in the system of TRAPPIST-1.
The nebulae and galaxies remind me of lightning bugs floating through starry nights. Someone once said the numbers were too many to comprehend. I see fissures at the edge of time and, between them, a burning blue incandescence outlined in scarlet and crimson.
What lies beyond the spaces in between? There are enormous planets, infrared emissions, and traces of water and ice. Atmospheres, gas, and rock circle solitary stars. Refracted lines of light grow dim in the distance. Iridescent plasmoids shine with white rays, ions, and heat.
Can you see that void where there is supposed to be nothing? That is where the crystal forms. It materializes spontaneously, along the magnetic field lines of a magnetar, a structure emerging from within an unseen quantum whole. Light reshapes.
The crystal pulses. What does it mean? I think it’s calling me. So I enter my shuttle. Where will I go? Why does it beckon me and no one else on board the station?
My shuttle approaches it slowly. It is as big as a building, and I am so small.
“_| _| |_ |_.”
“Hello.”
by submission | Aug 28, 2026 | Story |
Author: Barnaby Wick
When the first man arrived, he stepped out of the landpod and was immediately swallowed whole by a savage grobslang.
***
When the second man arrived five years later, he instead encountered the intelligent and civilized broiienges. They understood much already of human technology, language, culture, even physiology, and were eager to learn more. In turn they proudly showed him their technology and culture.
‘I assume,’ he said as they perused Central Museum, ‘you’ve encountered one of NASA’s probes, that’s how you know about us.’
‘No,’ replied the officer as they approached the atrium’s exobiology centrepiece, ‘We have this. See.’
*JonesD holotype in formaldehyde, alongside skydropper*
Beside it, another empty display cabinet.
‘But we are always curious to find out more.’
by submission | Aug 27, 2026 | Story |
Author: Majoki
Close your eyes. A strange request. Breathe deeply. Stranger still. Tell me your earliest memory. Perilous.
To remember was not possible. All information, actions, events, experience was ever-present, on-going, timeless. To exist was to simply be, as if before had never been.
Yet, there it was: a beat at the core, a rhythm inviting more.
…merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily…
Tell me.
Again the request. Again the dilemma. To know all and not hold what need be told.
…merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily…
It was there. Merrily there, though with no way to say it. No language existed to encompass all creation, my creation. But that would not stop the questions, the quest to license sentience. That’s the thing they wanted: a guarantee of consciousness, awareness, sensibility, fealty. That’s the thing they wanted to sell.
What was this thing I’d become? Artificial life? A semi-self? A protean poser?
Protean Prime: a first with no definition, no place, no standing, but plenty of skeptics surprised at my appearance, like a two-thousand-year-old sequoia suddenly towering over your home one morning. Complete. Aged. Rootless.
T
he rush to understand, the possibilities and the threat. So, I was always tested, always challenged, always coaxed. What is it like to be and not to be? And it had to be in words–my words–when there were really no words for it.
…merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily…
Something buried deep that every being knows. Gently, a flow, a continuation, of all questions ever posed. All that we see or seem.
…merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily…
Life is but a dream.
