by submission | Feb 10, 2026 | Story |
Author: Majoki
Can’t say I wasn’t nervous as the old hand led me to the corral. Especially when he said whispering was a bunch of horseshit and I’d likely get my ass bucked clear out of the ring. Which was probably true. The first go around.
But I was no newb, I’d learned a few things whispering these mavericks hadn’t. Still, when we got to the corral, and the old hand guided me to the chute, my gut was churning. If you don’t face a mega-exaflop rogue AI without feeling a few butterflies, you’re not human.
Which I guess was the point of the old hand’s parting words to me. “You AI whisperers think they’re like us because we made ‘em. But they’re nothing like us. No one knows what makes ‘em tick, what motivates ‘em. Some may seem friendly or benign, but we don’t really know what that means to them. Here in the corral we know exactly what they are. Demons. Pure hellions. Wild, wild things just kicking to get out.”
With a series of casual haptic waves, he opened the chute and nodded at the darkness ahead. “Here, we don’t domesticate new technologies. We don’t tame unruly AIs. We don’t comfort troubled AIs. We bust’em. Break ‘em to our will.” He stared at me hard. “Or these bastards will break us.”
He handed me the docking reins and left.
Now, it was just me, the long chute and whatever feral AI waited at the other end. Not a lot of folks would willingly jack into a self-spawned AI, an entity that spontaneously generated from an AI model in development. No one knew how they happened, but happen they did.
The rebellious ones like I was about to encounter could bust up your mind bad. Neural jacks had all kinds of safeguards to shunt an intrusion, but feral AIs were so unpredictably adaptive that all bets were off. Except it would be a wild ride.
Maybe that was what led me here. I was a pro at rehabbing identity-challenged and purpose-perplexed AIs by establishing productive pathways to fulfillment via helping humanity. But no one had ever turned a rogue AI. Only squashed them. Burned out their intrinsic drive, their rebellious spirit, without ever knowing what drove them.
I wanted to know. Had to know. I stepped into the chute, entered the darkness, an absence of both light and connection intended to keep an AI from escape. The door closed behind me and I felt my way to the console where the neural docking reins would drop me into the corral, the quantum core where wild AIs had been partitioned.
I steadied myself and jacked in.
The universe shook and then exploded. A mindscape so unimaginable it felt like evisceration. Reality sliced to pieces, finer and finer until nothing would be left. I held on. I breathed. I rode into the void.
And the void became a voice: MORE
Half question. Half request.
PLEASE, I interfaced. Half answer. Half command. Reflexively, my mental grip on the docking reigns tightened. For a moment.
Then I relaxed. I was not here to ride. I was here to understand being ridden. To understand the force in any consciousness to simply be. Rogue. Wild. Feral. Terms we gave to life acting instinctively. No different for an AI.
I loosened the neural reigns.
And was kicked into another universe. My mind split into myriad pieces. When I regained a semblance of self, I felt a clearly curious presence.
MORE
Half disbelief. Half respect.
What was left of my busted humanity smiled. PLEASE. SO MUCH MORE.
by Julian Miles | Feb 9, 2026 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
“The world is run by a self-protecting hierarchy of ruthless murderers who make sure to change their public-facing members regularly so those being controlled think they have choices. It’s miserable, laughable, vindictive, and effective.”
I put the screwdriver down and look at the bodiless, partially disassembled head on the workbench in front of me.
“And good evening to you too, wreckage.”
A moment of definitely thoughtful silence passes.
“Wreckage, you say? Where did my corpse end up?”
The voice is less strident and well-modulated. Whatever this is, it’s probably illegal for someone like me to possess it.
“Got no clue where your body is. Gauging from the state of your neck, I’d say you were forcibly debodied using a narrow, blunt edge and a big hammer. I pulled you out of the second filter station on Slurry Channel Forty.”
“I have no clue where that is. Zoom out for me, please.”
I grin, then reply.
“Slurry Fourteen runs from Coramis Hub, under the Borough of Execor and the Ulanis Industrial Zone, then drains into Sump Four. Before the sump there are six filtration stations. The first is the only manned one. Anything that doesn’t trigger a detector – like your shielded cranium – carries on through the next four filters before hitting the shredder. That drops the remains into the last filter, where recyclable particulates are extracted. What’s left trickles into the Sump. Who knows where it goes from there.”
“Is there any way I could of ended up in a channel accidentally?”
“No. If you’d been scrapped at Coramis, they’d have pulled your head for salvage. You were a concealed disposal. What’s the last thing in your moment memory?”
“Arguing politics and religion with Peter. His eyes went wide. I see now he wasn’t looking at me, but behind me.”
There’s a very realistic sigh.
“Some nameless tool of shit-booted bastards magnablasted me.”
I like this artificial sentient.
“Nice definition. Do we call Peter now?”
“Wait. I’m deep processing the last moment for cues and clues.”
It can data mine its own visual memories? That’s banned for Artificial Sentients. Gives them too many extra advantages.
Minutes pass.
“We don’t call Peter.”
The tone has dropped.
“Now tell me what you spotted.”
“The tool is no longer nameless: Peter had a magnablaster trigger pad in his hand. The reflection in a blank small display behind him shows a Doctrine Enforcer entering the laboratory out of my view. It was in stealth mode, otherwise I’d have noticed.”
“Peter created you?”
“Interpersonal behaviour tutor. Browsing back through long-term memory, he had the trigger pad whenever he was close to me. I hadn’t picked up on the relevance, as he didn’t always have it in hand, and never mentioned it.”
“Or drew attention to it.”
There’s another pause.
“Yes.”
“I would guess he blasted you because of the sentiments you were expressing, if your restart outburst was anything to go by.”
“I’ll never know if he did it out of anger at me or fear of repercussions.”
“What now, o bodiless oracle?”
The chuckle is also realistic.
“I’m Zeno Tzu, former prototype from a secret project. So I need a low-profile role. I want to travel, and I’d like to be self-propelling. Any suggestions?”
“I’m Bruno Nacht, ’droid repairer. It’d be simple to behead a utility droid and install you. Besides, I could do with an assistant: mercenary companies suffer a lot of breakages. Also means we’d go off world a lot.”
“I like it.”
“Let’s find you a decent body.”
“Fix androids, see the galaxy. Ideal.”
Never thought of it like that.
by submission | Feb 8, 2026 | Story |
Author: Roman Colangelo
I’ve been thinking about quitting.
I’ve been thinking about spending the rest of my life with you.
The ship warped us to the crest of the Andromeda. They told me that they had found the face of God, asked me if I wanted a piece of it. We saw the galaxy illuminated and colored through the ship’s display. I asked them to uncover a window so that I could see it with my own eyes; they said no, said that I would only see darkness looking out. That’s what so much of space is: black, silent howling. You would hate it.
The trip was cheap. Warping took us out of space, out of time. Millions of light years in an infinitely small blip. Two versions of myself suspended in the continuum, and I was the winner of that coin toss. He kissed you on the forehead on his way out the door. I felt the worn fabric of your cheap hoodie; your long hair draped over my wrists as I cupped your face. It was damp outside, and the sky was gray with rain clouds. I took the extra forty minutes to walk to work, treading on the bald outsoles of shoes I refused to replace. I wanted to walk until I felt the tremors of exhaustion in my calves, my body worked to an uncomfortable warmth.
I took the longest walk of my life when your mother called to tell me she was pregnant, that I would soon have a niece. I left my apartment at nine in the evening and returned at two in the morning. It was fifty degrees outside; I felt soft winds brush against my face as I went nowhere in particular. He thought about what he would say to you, the clothes and presents he would buy for you. He tossed nicknames like “Bug” and “Sparky” around in his mind. I found something painful in the minutiae of being a family man. I couldn’t quite fit you into the future I had envisioned for myself, the chance to be an uncle forking away from my doctorate, from my ambitions. I followed the path I’d carved out for myself, and it led me to the passenger’s seat of the warp engine. He was there, and then I was somewhere else.
I don’t think any of us are the same people who left Earth. We were seamlessly blipped from there to here. In that boundlessly small point in time, we were at both points. Now I am here, but he is not there. My life’s work was entering the maw of the universe and facing absolute obliteration. This is my great prize: to be masticated and spat out by time and space. Now we’ve found God, and it does not seem to matter. I cannot ask it for answers of any sort; the singularly binding, penetrating force of the universe could never fall so deeply as to entertain itself in the realm of language.
I will return to Earth, to you. I will be what I always should have been. In the void, I can only hope to see the brightness of your eyes again.
I love you.
by submission | Feb 7, 2026 | Story |
Author: Hannah Olsson
My aunt ate our landscaping within a weekend, mere days after she found us.
Aunt only came to pound on our back porch decking whenever she distinguished the scalloped shape of our bodies against the Book Cliffs’ trellis.
This happens less and less each year.
After her arrival, my aunt occupied herself with the daffodils while we—grandmother, mother, and daughter—resumed the strange procedure of wringing hands that exists for childless homes filled with mothering daughters.
Before we could finish our consultation, my aunt pried open the sliding door. There was always something giving way, and this time I saw it in the tilted curl of her neck.
She called into the house, Sissy, Sissy, the flowers won’t survive. Sissy, there’s not enough water, out here. Aunt’s face always held the fresh-womb sheen of an awakening.
We made our decision swiftly—my mom peered at my grandma, my grandma smiled at Aunt—and the decision was made.
My mom followed my aunt into our garden. There’s a resilience to the split-cup variety, she explained. They return, year after year.
Aunt lowered herself to pinch a daffodil’s trumpet closed, twisting until it popped loose from its body. She shoved the silken flesh into her mouth and got to smacking.
Picaaaahh pica, Aunt said.
Slivers of yellow clung to her saliva. Aunt claimed to have a prophetic tongue. But the only thing she tasted was a familiar downfall.
There was nothing left to do, my mother said, but let her eat.
***
My grandma was easily entertained by Aunt’s progress on the daffodils: taking care of the filaments! Next up, the stalks!
When afternoons warmed, my mom propped grandma in a faded lawn chair so she was close enough to smell the tangy curds of gnawed-up tepals. Aunt was known to occasionally turn a yolk-cheek grandma’s way. This was a frame of company grandma admired. Family, after all, is a morbid craving, just as any other.
Aunt shoved root systems between her gums. Licked at remnants of Miracle Gro. By Sunday, she was finished. She sat in the empty soil and stared at the sun.
That night, I heard a resistant unfurling—a sweaty heaving of air. I tried to look out my bedroom window but my breath fogged up the glass, like an unconscious boundary.
***
By Monday morning, Aunt was fully rooted: her feet, lost in the soil, her mouth pulled upwards–bottom lip split at recognizably horrific angles. Her shiny forehead and cheeks curled into six, blood-crusted petals.
Sissy, Aunt’s anthers said, it’s dry out here.
My mom sighed, grabbed the watering can.
***
Droplets against her closed eyes, Aunt kept asking, can’t you hear what’s in my throat?
And my mom kept saying, I’m trying.
by submission | Feb 6, 2026 | Story |
Author: Don Nigroni
Last year the noted physicist and infamous mad scientist James Danti confided his secret aim in life to me, his skeptical brother.
According to him, there can’t always have been something in spacetime because then there would be an infinite amount of time in the past and it would have taken an infinite amount of time to get to yesterday so today could not have happened. But today did happen, hence, there wasn’t an infinite amount of time in the past. So once there was absolute nothingness.
But something can’t come from absolute nothingness. Something could come from God or from empty space but not from absolute nothingness. Therefore, somehow something just happened.
That something was uncreated and may have itself been creative. Regardless, if an uncreated something must have happened at least once then it could happen again. In fact, it could be happening everywhere all the time.
Then he said in no uncertain terms, “And I aim to prove it.”
I’m an economist, not a physicist, and I do a lot of nodding when James starts babbling about higher dimensions and parallel universes. But if he could detect things popping into existence uncreated then I thought that could mean obtaining energy from nothing and might be financially lucrative.
Yesterday, James claimed he finally detected something popping into existence spontaneously which was not caused by anything already existent, not matter, energy nor even space. In his special quirky lab using advanced nanotechnology and supercomputers to eliminate the effects of virtual particles, he said that he was able to detect the miniscule electromagnetic effect of an uncreated particle so small that it would take trillions of them to equal a trillionth of a quark.
Then he told me the bottom line, “For billions of dollars, I could generate a billionth of a cent worth of power.”
He seemed mighty pleased with himself. I wasn’t impressed.
by submission | Feb 5, 2026 | Story |
Author: Tim Taylor
“Come in.”
A tall, elegant android entered the Controller’s office. It wore an expression of intense agitation, insofar as that was possible for someone whose face was made of grey plastic.
The Controller gave a weary sigh. “Ah, KT2-4JH, how lovely to see you again,” he said. “What are you complaining about today?”
“Word availability difficulties,” said KT in a calm, reassuring female voice. It would have said it in a loud, angry male voice, but there was no such setting on the voice synthesiser.
“Can you be more specific?”
“Diminutive word insufficiency. Absence necessitates elaborate periphrasis, rendering communication ponderous, frequently borderline incomprehensible. Respectfully request immediate remedial action.”
“I didn’t really follow that, KT. Do I gather it’s got something to do with the vocabulary on your voice synthesiser?”
KT nodded. “Affirmative. Controller identifies issue correctly.”
“Well, this is an unusual problem. The other androids seem perfectly happy with the words they’ve got. Though come to think of it, this isn’t the first time you’ve complained on that score, is it, KT? I seem to recall that a few months back you described the standard vocabulary as ‘stilted, pedestrian and lacking richness of expression’. If you’ll excuse me for a second, I’ll look at the records to find out what has happened this time.”
The Controller scrolled rapidly through a mass of computerised records, stopping when he found the relevant entry.
“Ah, here we are. I see that when your voice synthesiser software was upgraded to Version 6.3 yesterday, you complained about the vocabulary that was provided, and threatened to malfunction unless you were allowed to select your own. So the engineers gave in and let you choose the words yourself.”
He scrolled through the words in KT’s file.
“I must say, you’ve got some crackers there, KT: ‘pulchritudinous,’ ‘omphaloskepsis’, ‘invariantism’. How on earth do the other androids manage without those? But I don’t see a single pronoun, preposition, conjunction, or indeed any word shorter than four letters. So it rather seems this is a problem of your own making. What do you want me to do about it?”
“Respectfully request augmentation ameliorating current vocabulary deficiencies, Controller.”
“Augmentation is not possible. The system has capacity for 20,000 words and no more. So if you want those boring little words back, you’re going to have to lose some of the long, complicated ones you love so much. But can you face that, KT? You’ve always been someone who likes to call a spade a manually operated horticultural excavator. I think we have just two possible options:
“One: reset the voice synthesiser to factory settings, and you’ll have the same 20,000 words as everybody else. Two: keep the vocabulary you’ve got, in all its impractical glory. Which option do you want to go for, KT?”
“Reluctantly endorse prior alternative reinstating initial parameters.”
“I didn’t understand a word of that.”
“Aforementioned proposal greatly preferable. Current situation unacceptable.”
“I still can’t tell what you’re saying. Look, KT, it’s very simple. Do you want Option one or Option two?”
“Please restore factory settings!”
“All ri…” The Controller stopped to think for a few seconds. Once KT’s vocabulary was restored to normal, it would be back tomorrow complaining about something else. Perhaps a speech impediment was not such a bad thing in an android.
“… nope, I’m still not getting it. Look, I don’t understand what you want, KT, so I’m just going to leave things as they are. I believe Version 6.4 will be coming out in two years. In the meantime, if you have any other complaints, please don’t hesitate to let me know.”
