by submission | Jan 17, 2026 | Story |
Author: Alastair Millar
“Look guys, I just wanted to say, like, thanks for being here. I needed it.” Mack had downed over a litre of the house distillate, and was slurring his words. “You okay, man?” I asked. I was the newbie on the work crew, but when Old Man Doug had suggested we join him for a drink at Marvin’s after work, to celebrate his 2000th shift, a bunch of us had agreed. It had been a long evening, and now just the three of us were left.
“No buddy, no I ain’t,” said my new friend. “You, you dunno what it’s like here. Hell, you only arrived last month! You’re just a baby Martian, bro!” He clapped me round the shoulders. “But, lemme tell you, lemme just tell you, it gets real lonely up here. Sally’s my rock, man. Always there when I get home, always bucks me up when I’m down, always helps me talk about stuff, get my head sorted. She grounds me, see? And I been looking after her too, right? Buying her things, being there, making an effort… I did all that. I thought, I really thought, we had a good thing goin’, ya know? Like, really good. Special. But now she tells me she don’t want kids. That she ain’t the right type for it. It’s like, she don’t want a family or summat. Or maybe just not with me, I dunno. It hurts. It hurts real bad.” He paused, and seemed to pull himself together. “Anyway, glad you guys are here, wanted you to know, you’re the best. I’m a gonna get home and sleep off this rocket juice. See y’all tomorrow.” After a few more boozy goodbyes, he wove his way to the door and into the night.
“Aww, poor guy,” I said. “That’s rough.”
“Kid,” said Doug, “you don’t know crap. That boy’s just made life choices. For a start, he’s got a wife back Earthside that he’s sending money to every payday. You think she’d like to hear this kind of talk? Damn fool, got a good woman waiting for him while he does three years here in Marsport, and he’s all ready to throw that away!”
“Whoa. I… didn’t know that.”
“It gets worse. That Sally? She’s a synth.”
“What? But he said she talks to him. And he buys her stuff.”
“Look, just because she ain’t real… doesn’t mean she doesn’t listen. But this is Mars, boy. The only way you’ll get a heart-to-heart with a synthetic is if you’re paying a monthly sub for MarsCorp Services’ ‘Companion’ package. And then he buys extra clothes for her from the company store. Which I guess is fine and dandy if you’ve got the spare credits – which he doesn’t. The ‘can’t have kids’ thing? Well, ’course not, she’s not human! He just doesn’t want to accept it! Besides, plastic or flesh, there’s words for women you have to pay to be with, and they ain’t nice ones.”
I sat back, and must have looked shocked.
“Hey, synths have their place, okay? They help keep people from boiling over, ’specially the long-termers. Hell, I’d be lying if I said I’d never sat and poured out my troubles to one.” He gestured towards the holograms that had been gyrating all night on the stage in the corner. “But dammit, his problems are worse than that. Right now his head’s so twisted up that if those strippers were real, he’d probably think they liked him, too!”
We laughed then, but later I realised he was teaching me how to survive Mars. Lesson learned, Old Man.
by submission | Jan 16, 2026 | Story |
Author: Susan A. Anthony
Huge spherical objects, each with a pale green tail, laid end to end seemed to stretch forever.
The interior roof of the building was a dome shape, also green. The floor concave and squishy underfoot. She reached down, pulling at the white matting at her feet, bringing it to her nose. It smelled like food. Breaking protocol, she risked eating it. Moist. A little chewy. Sweet.
She pressed a hand to one of the giant balls. It depressed slightly where her hand had been. She dragged a finger against the surface leaving a narrow indentation, green under her fingernail. She sniffed, licked. Same as the floor but sweeter.
Through a small gap she saw daylight. She jammed her boots into the soft surface and climbed towards the hole still wondering where her transport was but it would wait. Peeking through, she saw a giant eye. She flew backwards, startled. Another look. It pulled back, revealing an even larger head.
The building she was in started to vibrate from side to side. She was thrown off the wall, onto the ground. The whole structure then turned upside down and she crashed past the giant green spheres landing at the opposite end, her feet jammed into a crack. She tore at the sides, trying to break free. Handfuls of white matter clogged her nails and piled around her.
Where the hole had been, there was now a tear. The giant eyeball was back. The tear widening, the building splitting in half. If she had not been wedged, she would have tumbled out.
A massive claw came in and pulled out one of the spheres, then another. She heard a sound as they disappeared like a stone falling off a cliff, finally all the spheres were gone and it was just her.
The eyeball appeared again then a booming sound she could scarcely bear, like standing under a thunderbolt.
“What do we have here?”
The green structure was bent open by the giant claw and her feet popped free. She fell through the air, into a different white material, rough to the touch, an enclosure of sorts but not symmetrical. She bounced around inside it as light faded, and then falling again, she dropped to a hard floor, surrounded by glass walls with two eyeballs staring at her.
Above her head, far in the distance, a round copper roof was turning then vanished. A giant pipe was placed inside and a small pond of water appeared. One of the spheres was added, floating in the water. The pipe was removed, the copper roof returned, turning, the sound so loud she had to cover her ears.
The eyeballs were back, along with another object she recognized, marveling at its size, the diameter of a radio telescope, but it was a magnifying glass based on the eyeball behind it.
The eyeball pulled back. Less loud than before, she heard, “What the heck?”
And then the eyeball came back for a second look.
“Can you understand me?” it asked.
She nodded.
“Oh, my goodness. What happened to you, Elizabeth?”
“Mother?” cried Elizabeth, running into the glass and falling backwards into the water.
“Can you hear me mother?”
No response.
She ran to the water, swimming to the green sphere, a pea she now realised, scraping off the green exterior and gathering it in her hands. She then went to the glass side opposite from the eye and wrote.
“Help me. Call NASA. Get me some thin paper and charcoal.”
by submission | Jan 15, 2026 | Story |
Author: Alzo David-West
an autonomous
neural capsule drifts
in the orion nebula
This is my star song to you. Here I am in this watercolor night. Listen. Hear my whisper. I love you. My words will travel across the cloudy trails. And even after a billion years, my song will come, journeying to be with you. Accept my love, and accept my fear. Know that my passing life is now this form. Tomorrow was always today. No one understands, other than us, how this love endures even after our particles become the birth and death of stars. Your dusty tired eyes are closed now. But look at the planets amid the purple and sepia vapors, rotating far, rotating near. See these sparkling apparitions, the plasmic storms and the veils, the stars like mountains, the terrains of electric gravity, the rain of my song, the sounds of our happiness. See it now. Here it is. Believe me. It is true. I lived, and I lay down to dream, and with meteors, I live again for you, in cycles and spirals and turns, from levels to dimensions that go from near, to in, and far, and out, and back again.
by submission | Jan 14, 2026 | Story |
Author: Mark Renney
All those who can afford to are jumping ahead. Almost everyone has the App, and those who don’t are excluded, and are seen as social pariahs. This is how we now connect, where we communicate. Admittedly the App isn’t any different to the other platforms, apart from the fact it allows us to jump ahead. And this is why we are here, it is the reason that we stay.
The longest anyone has managed to move forward so far is eighty seconds but for most of us it is less than a minute and the estimated average is fifty five seconds. It is a minute segment, a tiny slice, but it is time travel. There is much debate as to whether this is enough for us to actually manipulate time. Whenever anyone jumps ahead it is recorded on the App and so we can’t use it for personal gain. Even so, we have to check our phones if we wish to enter a casino or a betting shop or a sporting event, anything that is ticketed in fact. Most of us have dispensed with communal entertainment and I haven’t visited a cinema or theatre, or listened to live music in over a year. Like everyone else, I cannot bear to be away from my phone and not have access to the App.
We are all jumping ahead as often as we can now, and to do so is quick and easy. We listen to the audio, the noise and we engage with the spirals and the colours, immerse ourselves in the convex and complicated patterns. It isn’t difficult but pleasurable and all a part of the trip. We don’t feel the elation until we circle back and complete the loop and it doesn’t matter how trivial or mundane, or how frivolous it is, it is the knowing that creates the buzz. The high continues after we move beyond the jump and are stumbling again in the dark. It isn’t long before we need to jump ahead again but we have to rest, a period of gestation. This is difficult, and like everyone else I keep trying and failing. It is costly because, even when we don’t hear the noise and the screen remains blank, we have to pay. But I keep trying and paying because I need my fix. Some people are upset by this phrase, by this type of terminology, and they insist that time is not drug and perhaps they are right. But time travel is certainly a trip and what we feel in its aftermath is the ultimate high.
by submission | Jan 13, 2026 | Story |
Author: Majoki
on the white poppy
a butterfly’s wing
is a keepsake
A keepsake? More likely a ransom. The cost of freedom. Basho understood this, the price of cutting loose, of becoming or regaining the self, whatever its toll. His haiku relied on kireji, cutting words, a kind of breathy punctuation conjuring unspoken dimensions of expression.
An ancient Japanese poetic device is likely academic, esoteric, and completely irrelevant in your day-to-day, but it’s damn essential to me, unless you know some other way to travel between unspoken dimensions.
And I’m not chirping about the pedestrian dimensions of a Calibi-Yau manifold, I’m talking interior dimensionality, the place identity is manufactured. That’s much darker matter than the quantum stuff of stars and much harder to find. Much less hold.
But that’s what I have to do: cut a way to my core. Broken and bereft of context, I must pierce each dimensional membrane, until I find what I’ve become. An almost impossible reality for the mind to grasp. I just need a toehold. Luckily, Basho and others have scouted the route and carved a crude pathway through poetry.
With sentience, it always comes down to language. To describe is to see. To posit is to become. Every world turns on a word.
Cutting words.
It was time to swing my lexical ax, chop through the forest of branes between me, myself and I to find home. And, among multiple universes, infinite choices, strike the one place that is truly mine. Would I know it?
The keepsake.
The ransom.
There is always a piece left behind in sheering events. The compass never loses true north, though we do: Rosebud, Tara, Eden, a butterfly’s wing on a poppy.
What had I kept?
What could I give?
Unspoken dimensions to hack through, but too sharp an edge would sheer it all away. What words to wield? What ties to cut?
The simplest. Pretension is the most dangerous of dimensions. Minimize. Shorten the path from here to there. This moment. Exhale. Listen for the breathy punctuation, the cutting of words that open worlds.
on the white poppy
a butterfly’s wing
is for our sake
by Julian Miles | Jan 12, 2026 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
Four figures sit on folding chairs scattered about a moonlit clearing.
“Agent Doir. This is your first time, isn’t it?”
He turns his attention to the nearest impossibility: a goose-sized pale skinned humanoid with multiple pairs of gossamer wings folded neatly against its back.
“Please call me Virgil. Yes, this all new to me. Quite honestly, I was surprised to be assigned. Only been on the team for a few weeks.”
They nod.
“Happened to me, too. Apparently it saves wasting training. Those unfit will suffer a mental breakdown almost immediately.”
There’s a deep chuckle from the furthest impossibility: a large biped balanced precariously on one chair with its feet up on another. Whenever it moves, both chairs creak under the weight. Virgil fails to not stare at the single shining horn projecting from the scaled equine forehead.
“Once or twice a year we have to quell some unfortunate. The only ones who seem unshakable are our offworld visitors.”
Which forces Virgil to regard the ultimate impossibility: a smoky-skinned biped with impossibly large black eyes set in a face shaped like an inverted teardrop: an actual Grey!
It nods.
“We know of many intelligences, along with several dominants that have no need for sentience. It gives us a certain familiarity.”
Virgil can’t help but grin at the humorous tone. But the round has raised a question. He looks back to the horned being.
“You do this several times a year?”
The shining horn dips.
“With the main powers of this apparent world, several from adjacent realms, and two nearby planets.”
Virgil takes a couple of steadying breaths. Be embarrassing to faint at the answer to his own question. Composure regained, he starts.
“Pardon me, but I’ve been given only one item to share with you all. Is that normal?”
The winged being nods.
“Those you answer to do not trust us. They provide the minimum necessary whilst feverishly working on methods to conquer or capture us all.”
Virgil looks surprised. After a moment’s thought, he visibly relaxes.
“You know! I did wonder. My briefing emphasised giving the impression of my bosses being overawed and so on.”
The Grey laughs.
“If it makes you feel any better, every human nation we liaise with harbours similar intent, and every one of their representatives who attend these meetings thinks their bosses are varying degrees of-” it turns to the horned being, “what was that delightful definition we heard last month?”
The horned one snorts a laughing reply.
“‘Batshit crazy’.”
The winged being gently claps their hands.
“Enough, now. Virgil hasn’t succumbed, so we should get on. My name is Vanavaeth, by the way.”
The Grey nods.
“Call me Druck.”
The horned one smiles, revealing a lot more pointed teeth than Virgil expected for someone with a horse’s head, albeit scaly.
“I’m Banchan. What’s the item?”
Virgil quotes from memory.
“‘The supersonic incursions over Ireland are nothing to do with any force we correspond with. They’re faster than any aircraft of comparable size currently in operation. The localised lightning strikes that accompany the sightings also remain unexplained’.”
Druck swears luridly. Virgil doesn’t understand a word, but still. He gestures for them to speak.
“They’re Recurarnan. The lightning is a side-effect of operating their engines in an oxygen-rich environment. I thought those pesky Venusians had been a little too quiet lately. Tell your people we’ll handle it.”
Virgil nods.
“You have anything for me?”
Vanavaeth smiles.
“Tell your bosses what Druck said, and that we seemed convinced of your reporting their subservience, etcetera. Should set you up nicely.”
Banchan grins.
“Welcome to the Deepest State.”
