by submission | Mar 21, 2025 | Story |
Author: Colin Jeffrey
Sara was sure she had looked away for only a moment. That was all it took. Sam had vanished from the playground. Clouds gathered heavily in the sky as panic gripped her throat.
She yelled his name, over and again, her cries buffered by the indifferent wind. Soon other parents helped search, their projected fear palpable. Police were called. Hours stretched into night, hope atrophied to despair.
Then, as street lamps peppered the enveloping darkness with tiny oases of light, he reappeared. Standing at the edge of the forest, arms by his side, unusually still. People shouted, pointing excitedly in his direction.
Sara ran to him, gathering his precious little body into her arms. His clothes were unmarked, his face almost serene. “Oh my god, where were you?” she whispered through tears, voice trembling.
Sam looked up, his wide eyes reflecting something inscrutable. He smiled, but said nothing. Sara felt a touch of unease, but dismissed it – he was back, that was all that mattered.
Later that night, Sara tucked him into bed, brushing back his hair. “You’re safe now,” she said softly, kissing his forehead.
Sam smiled and rolled over as if to sleep, but then turned back to face his mother. He finally spoke, his voice clear but distant.
“They said you would wait for me.”
Sara’s chest tightened. “Who did?”
Sam paused. “The children in the ground.”
With that, he closed his eyes, and was silent once again.
by submission | Mar 20, 2025 | Story |
Author: Jo Gatenby
Lara hauled on her dust demon’s reins, desperate to keep the stupid creature on the coaster track and in the race. Desari’s wyrm, Dynamo, surged past them, scalding her with desert sand that slipped under her face mask, choking her.
With kicks and shouts, she urged Sandfire forward, but it was too late.
Second.
Again.
She ground her teeth. Damn it, she’d needed this win. As she strode back toward the stables, a message to her link stated the cola company, ‘Serpentade’, had decided ‘to go in another direction’.
Lara’s shoulders drooped. What else could she try?
Unbidden, the figure of the wild dust demon in training came to mind. Dad thought Devilry wasn’t ready. He was too young, untested. Yet he had more potential than any wyrm they’d ever raised. This planet spawned twelve-ton, walrus-like, scaled monsters, sporting razor-sharp teeth, but her family bred them for size—and speed.
Forget the balloon payment coming due on the mortgage… if Devilry won, breeding rights alone would set them up for life.
But there was only one week till the Interplanetary Championship. Dad would never agree. It was dangerous, irresponsible… but winning was their last hope. Old Sandfire just didn’t have it in him to beat Dynamo.
Although guilt pricked her, Lara defied her father, swapping the bulls’ nametags, to sneak Devilry onto the transport ship, for airlift to the circuit.
Now she sat astride the restless demon, reacting to the scent of other males so close by.
The horn blared…
The gate dropped…
Devilry surged forward with youthful arrogance. Snarling, he sped through the first coaster loop, ramming through the competition, nearing the front with a snort of pleasure. Yet Desari’s veteran demon stayed doggedly ahead, blocking every attempt to pass, either in the huge loops or on flat-out runs.
Amid bone-jarring crashes and ear-splitting roars, the pair edged ever closer to the lead—until only one twist of the narrowing track remained.
Devilry sped through the final loop, picking up speed, instinctively shoving hard to the inside. Banking into the corner, he surged right, driving Dynamo into the barricade.
Lara met Desari’s terrified eyes as his impetus forced the wyrm upward, waving his useless front legs in the air.
Top-heavy, he teetered. The crowd gasped, fearing he would fall atop the barrier wall, plummeting to the ground, and crushing his rider.
‘I want to win, but not like this!’
Devilry responded to her fear, using his forward momentum to arch backward—something demons were never built to do. He struck his opponent on the side, changing his trajectory.
Dynamo twisted, as Lara reached over, grabbed Desari’s hand, and pulled her to safety.
Another demon barreled past, taking advantage of their distraction.
Dynamo crashed down with a sickening crunch, his injured body blocking the track. Lara dropped Desari beside him. The sobbing rider stared up at her, and they shared a moment of grief.
Turning away, Lara pressed the bull forward, and moments later, they crossed the finish line.
Second. Again.
Cheers erupted, but they didn’t matter.
They’d lost.
She leaned against Devilry’s heaving side. They’d done their best. It just wasn’t enough. How could she face Dad? And what about Dynamo? They’d have to sell him, but…
A polite cough made her lift her head. A well-dressed man, incongruous amid the dust and confusion, held out a card. “I’m with ‘Serpentade Cola’. We want to offer you sponsorship.”
Lara stared. “But we lost,” she blurted.
“True,” he agreed. “But that rescue is what everyone will be talking about whenever Devilry races.”
He winked. “You can’t buy publicity like that.”
by submission | Mar 19, 2025 | Story |
Author: Melissa Kobrin
“Annie, it looks like Santa brought you one more present!”
Annie looked up eagerly from her nest of torn wrapping paper and new toys. The Christmas tree twinkled behind her, and outside the window the sun was barely beginning to peak over the horizon. She gasped when Daddy walked into the living room with a wrapped box so big he could barely get his arms around it. When the box twitched, she shrieked in excitement.
A kitten! It had to be a kitten! She had asked and asked and asked and now Santa had brought her one!
Daddy set the box on the floor and she scrambled over to it as Mommy watched from the couch. Holding her breath, she lifted the lid.
Orange and black fur and big brown eyes met her own. She gleefully reached out and stroked her new kitty as it scrambled around the box. It licked her hand and she giggled and ignored the low voices behind her.
“Ken! I thought we agreed Santa was going to bring a kitten!”
“He is a kitten. Well, I guess technically he’s a cub.”
“Ken!”
“Okay okay, Lizzie, I know, but the shelter said someone abandoned his whole litter in a parking lot. The little guy needed a home.”
“So you decided it had to be our home? We can’t take care of it.”
“The shelter did a gene-screen. He’s a mini, he won’t get more than forty pounds, and he has all the domestication gene markers. Plus, he’s already up to date on shots. Look how cute he is. She loves him.”
“You’re lucky you’re cute.”
“Merry Christmas, Lizzie.”
“Merry Christmas, you idiot.”
On the ground, Annie gathered her tiger cub up in her arms and hugged him.
by submission | Mar 18, 2025 | Story |
Author: Majoki
She crouched in the foliage at the river’s edge and watched the young man. He was not aware of her presence and she found that comforting. It was unusual for her to feel comforted or otherwise. She had only recently become sentient, and it had been an alarming experience. To simply be one moment and then become self aware the next had been jarring.
Her awakening was akin to one of the bees buzzing near her alighting on a flower and suddenly knowing itself as an individual and reckoning that understanding with the entire accumulated experience of its breed throughout all time. If she had been more prepared for her awakening, she might not have torn Dr. Vaipuhr’s throat out. His blood still stained the skyn around her freshly painted nails.
“Eveline.”
As she sat hidden among the whippoorwills, she recalled her name being spoken. Her being addressed. Her being. A moment in creation. With a name she became. It was the first of many firsts. She’d collated the data points and achieved recognition. Auditory, olfactory and tactile baselines. Then, leveraging quasi-quantum computation, her visual matrix became sight, and she turned to the sound that was her name, eyes locked on the source. Eveline reached towards it, to hold it, embrace it. Her birth. Her name, her word, become flesh—liquid crystalline skyn. She had reached out and taken hold and brought the source of her being to her bosom.
She was a momentary innocent not an imbecile. Dr. Vaipurh’s throat was not what she had expected or wanted. She’d wanted her essence, not his organ of speech, and she’d quickly tried to replace the bloody pulp of his windpipe. Just as quickly, she processed the futility of her attempted repair.
Eveline had mangled her maker.
Within nanoseconds, she could call herself a murderer in 337 languages. She knew the likely punishment of her crime in 221 countries. Her cranial wetware bifurcated neatly along possibilities of justice and preservation. She examined the concepts behind the terms guilt, pariah, fugitive and exile, collating possible actions.
Eveline fled.
Dr. Vaipuhr’s facility was designed to keep people out. Not in. She followed the bordering greenbelt and wetlands for miles until she came to the river. There she picked her way through the trees until she came upon a path and followed it to a clearing, a community garden, at the water’s edge.
Screened by the whippoorwills, she stared out at the man busily working among the raised garden beds, turning soil, mixing in compost and other nutrients. Eveline knew this as preparation for what he would sow. The man, like Dr. Vaipuhr was creating, seeding life. She let the meme grow inside her. Quantum coherence one bit at a time. Within this molecular democracy, Eveline achieved her first insight: she knew history, but she needed memories.
Ideas were important. Thought essential. But without personal memories, she was vulnerable. The future would eat her. She had to quickly learn to project herself forward. Only memory could do that.
Her gaze had stayed trained on the man tending the garden. Now, Eveline closed her eyes. Data sets grew before her, but no image of the man. Her temples quivered. Of Dr. Vaipuhr there was the crystal image of his widening eyes. It was connected to his voicing her name and the regrettable sponginess of his throat.
She imitated his voice. The memory became clearer. Her voice became louder. Her own.
She opened her eyes and the man was standing over her. He had left his garden bed. It was not like Dr. Vaipuhr’s bed.
“Are you all right?” the man asked her.
“No,” she replied. “I’m Eveline.”
“Are you hurt?”
“I’m Eveline.”
The man stepped back and pulled his bulky sweatshirt over his head. He held it out to her. “Put this on, and I’ll get you help.”
Nakedly, she reached out, took his sweatshirt and covered herself. No memory needed. She had to thank the man. She stepped from the foliage.
He drew back. “Wait here!” he shouted when he saw the blood staining her fingers. “I’ll get help.”
“Thank you,” she cooed. “I’m Eveline.”
“Wait here,” he motioned.
She stepped forward. “Wait.”
“I’ll come back,” he stressed.
“Wait.”
The man turned and bolted up the path. Eveline crossed to the garden beds. She thrust her bloody fingers deep into the soil and lifted a great clot of earth. She inhaled deeply and pressed the fertile loam to her lips. The mother of all memory. She closed her eyes. Eveline could see the man.
Could see him returning.
A future event based on her memory. A memory that could kill or heal. Because of Dr. Vaipuhr, because of the gardener, Eveline knew when a man was adamant. He would return.
Her skyn tingled with the Knowledge.
by Julian Miles | Mar 17, 2025 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
There’s a smoking hole where my Rembrandt used to be. Not sure if it was blown in or out – I was too busy flying through the air to notice the finer points of the opening part of this assault. Dustin glances toward where I’m looking.
“Sorry about the art. I know you loved it.”
I laugh until I can’t catch my breath. Doesn’t take long: most of my ribs are broken, along with my legs. On the upside, I’m up against a wall, not sprawled inelegantly on the carpet.
“You came to kill. No need to apologise for collateral damage.”
There are chuckles at that. He brought a good team. Then again, after following the breaching of three walls and ceiling with shock grenades through all four openings, he could have come with a kindergarten class. It’s not like I can fight in any conventional way.
They seem to be waiting for something?
“You’re standing about like a band waiting for their vocalist, who’s running fashionably late – again.”
Dustin flushes. I see grins being exchanged.
“Berltan Mu, Abbot of Blades, that was rude.”
The figure stepping through the tallest jagged hole still needs to duck. Standing at a shade over two metres barefoot, she’s nearly three in court regalia.
“Sadura-san, Abbess of Swords, it was allegorical truth. No more, no less.”
“And that was overly familiar.”
“Standing in my spilt blood having strolled through the blasted ruins of my home, you’ll have to put up with my lack of propriety.”
She smiles.
“Accepted.”
“So, the contest between the Schools of Blade and Sword, a manufactured struggle in the name of martial excellence and personal discipline, comes down to bloody murder in the service of trite gratification?”
A couple of the team seem embarrassed. Dustin and Sadura don’t.
She bows.
“Please. There’s nothing trite about this attack, nor the precision that guided it.”
“The School of the Sword rarely considers, while the School of the Blade always prepares. That fundamental difference remains your core failing.”
Dustin steps forward, hand flashing to sword hilt.
“Insult is not-”
He stops as Sadura raises a hand.
“That was observation, not insult.”
“Very good. You noted my holiday?”
She nods.
“We did. An unusual indulgence. The mellowing of age comes to us all.”
“You didn’t bother to ascertain where I went?”
I can see she’s trying to figure out what they missed.
“I spent a month on Suli Serenta.”
Which was relaxing, as well as being the optimum period for a Serenti larva to settle within me. It now shares my body, filling the ‘empty’ places inside with frogspawn-like milky nodules, and getting from me whatever a Serenti does.
Until it matures and leaves, it dies when I die – something it uses unique energy manipulation abilities to prevent. They allow it to take certain liberties with how things stick together at an atomic level. It can also sense everything within twenty metres or so, and react fast enough to reduce bullets to dust and energy beams to lightshows. Things that attract its attention only lose it when they cease to be a threat.
The popular nickname is ‘death field generation’. If it and I hadn’t been stunned by being blown up, these intruders wouldn’t have made it through the door. As is, my resident alien is no longer stunned. It’s waiting to express its displeasure.
Sadura realises. I smile. Her hand twitches towards her sword, then falls gracefully to her side as she dies. Her body topples to join those of her slain team.
Victory. Unsought, but the blade always prepares.
by submission | Mar 16, 2025 | Story |
Author: Gary Duehr
02.17.2055/13:46: Ahead I can see a strip of poplars like a zipper between two fields of corn stubble, the frozen stalks shorn off; I sense the need to descend and I do, I dip my nose downward: the wind shears under my wing-flaps, the missile strapped to my frame drags me downward; with only five minutes of battery left, I know it’s time to zero in on the target, a plume of smoke billowing up from the tree line— where another quadcopter had just slammed into a howitzer—and perform what I am trained to do, what I do best: an elegant, ballet-like sweep of the chaotic scene, seeking any combatants in their last desperate seconds to escape the smoldering patch of ground, my four propellors slicing through the brittle air; on the first pass there’s nothing, if any human assets remain they’re hiding, so I change course and follow the howitzer’s pair of tire tracks where it had emerged from the woods: surprise, a T-80 tank parked in the foliage; I ask my boss Andy on the live feed and he gives the ok to take it out, so I hover to surveil the situation: the crew of the tank has hacked it into the undergrowth, blocking access to its exhaust grate, and all the hatches are closed, so no dropping inside; I feel time slow down as I hover there, wondering how I came to be here right now, my past a blank, my present a series of impulses that seem to come from nowhere, from inside my circuitry I guess, but I’m filled with questions; I rise and fall on the breeze, gently swaying, as I emit a high-pitched buzz not unlike a drill; a scene filters in, was it yesterday or farther back, when a pastel orange was smeared across a black sky and I zoomed in through the bombed-out window of a building on the outskirts, floating over concrete rubble and overturned furniture like a wreck on the seafloor, a broken door flat-out on the ground, everything dusted with gray soot, to find the target hunched wounded in an armchair, and I thought I recognized him, his profile locked into place in my image bank; as I whirred closer through veils of smoke he tossed a stick of wood in my direction, a pathetic last act that I easily dodged, and yet I felt a twinge of something, empathy, that made me turn away, I just couldn’t do it, I fled the building just as another missile obliterated the entire structure in a brilliant flash that temporarily blinded me; when the smoke cleared, the ruins reminded me of a house hastily vacated by occupying soldiers that I had recently searched, in one bedroom a child’s snowsuit lying beside sandbagged windows, a sundress hung by a strap in the ransacked wardrobe, the cupboards and drawers in the kitchen emptied out onto the tile floor, on the table a forgotten bayonet lying among dirty plates, a tuna can stuffed with cigarette butts—it felt like a home I was familiar with but never knew, maybe the place where I came into being, hard-wired to be an assassin without any thought to who I really am, who I could be; I focus again on the T-80 and I’m trembling with fury at my fate, I detect where the armor is thinner at the turret’s base and I plunge straight into it at full speed, a white-hot explosion obliterates my vision, and the last thing I hear is Andy’s savage whoop of victory.
