by submission | Oct 17, 2025 | Story |
Author: Brian Ball
Alan was Newton’s cannonball, spinning in chaos, cursing this tiny moon. The ship grazed the atmosphere and was reeled in, defenseless. He was alone. His orbit increased to 14,500mph. 226,000mph. 450,000mph. Each spin pulling him down a bit closer. His anger grew with every inch.
When he hit 800,000mph on the sixth day, he waited for Ganymede’s atmosphere to superheat the shields. It did not. Internal environments held. He waited in Death’s vestibule, spinning.
Alan was like an electron, orbiting the moon in seconds, faster than sound, faster than thought. Emergency systems overrode the bridge controls and counted aloud his distance from impact. The ground, sky, ice, and rock were a blurred smear of colors and imminent doom.
He began to starve. No food or water. The ship was not built for long transport. The moon, named for Zeus’ mythical cup bearer, was as good as any place to die slowly. Without energy, he moved very little. Death moved closer. He waited.
And then suddenly a sensor blared. Data screens across the bridge flashed. From inside the giant canyons on Ganymede a crack opened. The entire surface of the moon quaked.
A grayish living liquid slithered onto the frozen plain, a glinting vermeil of life. Miniscule tails, legs and teeth emerged in great number. Dense layers spread in every direction. He watched as they seethed in the subzero, without death or inhibition, floated about and drifting in the blowing snow. The swarm collected and grew.
With clenched fists, Alan struck the thick glass of the data monitor. He tried to drive the slithering horror. He struck again and again. His skin split. His knuckles cracked. A cleansing pain ricocheted up his arms, but he felt nothing save his hunger and that of the brood. It moved to him. He could only wait.
It puffed out, became larger, a giant traction of purpose and followed the ship with lightning speed. It surrounded the ship, a living, pulsating cloud of dark agitation. Billions of legs swirled, fought, crawled to devour, an instant nightmare ready to order. He pounded the screen.
At 1,026,000mph, cracks bloomed along the walls of the spinning ship. He gasped for air as life-support purged through the cracks and out of his lungs. He watched his artificial paradise crumble. The brood moved in and came for him.
The ship shook and creaked as they skittered up the walls. The tiny organisms all around him, everywhere at once, coming up his legs and onto his screaming face.
Two-hundred feet from impact, a noise. He turned and before him stood a being in a cloak and tunic holding a cup aloft. Ganymede.
He was not flesh, but something drawn from the very brood itself. The living cloud moved and rippled into human form.
The creature was glowing, platonic and alive; it smiled. It did not speak but offered the cup to him. Alan hesitated, scared, but took it and drank. So thirsty, he drank endlessly. The cup held no coda. He drank this perfect agony and consumed the brood which then took him.
A warmth hatched, a new feeling of contentment and presence. The creature smiled, offered its hand and Alan took it. He felt no fear for he was not alone. The cupbearer then took Alan to another place; his wait was over.
At several hundred thousand miles an hour, with a standard acceleration due to gravity at 200gs, the ship touched the surface with the force of matter and was no more.
by submission | Oct 16, 2025 | Story |
Author: Eva C. Stein
Jen watched the boy wobble on his magnitro board, sparks flaring at the edges as one foot just skimmed the dusty ground.
“He’s heading for disaster,” she said, not expecting a reply.
“Or notoriety,” a voice said beside her.
She turned. A stranger had landed on the smart bench with a thud, the seat whirring as it registered him.
“You sound like you understand,” Jen said, eyes on the boy now tracing cautious arcs.
“Everything’s urgent,” Cody said. “Pride. Rage. Love. A surge of input before filters stabilise.”
“Too much data?”
“Too much, too fast. Youth wants it all – attention, validation. Even phantom alerts set off alarms.”
Jen adjusted the wool scarf embedded with microclimate regulators. “Without core processing secured, every signal feels like a threat.”
A child’s voice lifted in the distance – a fleeting, looping call, then silence.
Cody nodded. “So you overcorrect. Find solace in others’ glitches. Not malice, just a skewed sense of balance.”
“Not fairness,” Jen said. “Just visibility.”
Cody sighed. “Raucous too, always on edge. But not for the reasons they think.”
The boy moved in easy circles now. His shadow trailed, unbothered.
“All right,” Jen said. “That’s youth. What about old age, then?”
A pigeon drone limped through the grass. It flapped one wing, then stilled.
“Old age,” Cody said, eyes narrowing. “That’s the opposite, right? Firmware’s taken too many hits. You stop trusting and lock your circuits. You stop giving – energy, time, signal. You forget to assert your bandwidth.”
“Sounds… worn. Tired.”
“Doesn’t it? Eventually, you stop caring what others broadcast – not from confidence but detachment. Not proud – just past your last reboot cycle. Still active, but out of sync.”
Jen pulled her sleeves down. The scarf glimmered faintly as it slipped from her shoulder. Cody noticed, but said nothing.
“I get it,” she said. “No regulation in youth, diminished energy in old age. So what’s the middle?”
Cody gave a small smile. “That’s when you hit synchronisation – receptive enough to feel, stable enough to analyse. No overload, no shutdown; you care, but you’re not hijacked by feedback.”
Jen nodded slowly. “Right. Constructed balance.”
“Exactly. You know when to broadcast, when to muffle. You don’t need to dominate the network – but you still show up.”
“Trouble is, we don’t get long in that state, not if we accept linear time.”
Cody’s gaze went distant. “Ten years, on average. That’s all we get: ten cycles when the system holds – when pride’s not the root process and fear’s not overriding. Long enough to build a true signal – if you’re tuned in.”
Jen exhaled, tracing the etched letters on the bench’s alloy armrest. She caught the edge of her scarf, holding it close.
Cody added quietly, “You’ve got to stay optimised just long enough to make it count.”
She studied him now. “Did you?”
“Did I what?”
“Did you… make it count?”
Cody shot her a look, then stood. He pulled his magnitro board from under the bench, stepped on, and launched forward with smooth, accelerating ease. Dust lay undisturbed in his wake.
He called something over his shoulder, but the wind carried it away before Jen’s hearing filters could lock on. Just as well – some answers never need decoding.
by submission | Oct 15, 2025 | Story |
Author: Majoki
Sebastian picked up a sheared finger. He gingerly held the digit, storing its smooth, young paleness in his memory before dropping it in the orange bio-waste bag fastened to his belt. Jakarta, Cape Town, Yangon, Chengdu, Lima, Montreal, Oakland. He’d seen the same devastation. The new supernormal.
He’d predicted it. Them.
His algorithms ferreted them out. His devices tracked and measured them. His ingenuity mitigated untold loss of life, but Mother Nature still gave him the finger—the one in the bio bag at his side.
Sebastian knew he couldn’t win against metastorms. The media had dubbed them “hell cells,” but it was unfair to blame Mother Nature. These intense localized storms weren’t Her spawn entirely. And, they weren’t solely attributable to climate change. It had taken some time for Sebastian to hunt down the real enemy, the deadly actor at the heart of metastorms: moma.
In recent years, nanomechanics had produced an ever-wider variety of moma, molecular machines. Moma unclogged arteries, fought agricultural pests and disease, purified salt water. They did a lot of good, saved a lot of lives, fed and hydrated great masses of humanity. Most of these invisible machines were created from quantum carbon tubes. Smart carbon. Highly engineered, specialized, directed and short-lived. At least that had been the understanding.
Once fulfilling a prescribed function, moma were designed to dissimilate, break down in earth’s ambient atmospheric and geologic radiation. Planned obsolescence. For the most part, moma did disband as planned, but in too many the underlying microcronics were more resilient than anticipated, more opportunistic than was comprehensible. High in the stratosphere, moma’s constituent parts had formed a witch’s brew of carbonites, spawning hypercyclonic winds almost impossible to predict: hell cells.
That’s why Sebastian was working to virtually model the metastorms from initiation to disintegration. Out in the field, he collected data. Storm detritus—like the finger in his orange bio-waste bag—provided vital data points. They were also a reminder of what was at stake. Survival.
And his field research had finally spurred a breakthrough. The moma were more than a metastorm catalyst, they were recombinant life. The intense heat and friction within hypercyclonic winds generated a primordial soup, an uncontrolled Miller-Urey experiment engendering new and unpredictable primeval life.
Moma from another Mother. Though not from Nature.
That’s how Sebastian came to characterize moma. One had to confront the monster, engage it. Try to turn it. One could not defeat a burgeoning plague by reasoning with it. One had to isolate, imprison it. One could not match the ferocity of a hell cell to quell it. One had to drain its motive force, starve it.
To do this, Sebastian reasoned, he’d have to change human behavior on a global scale, the greatest of all challenges. Otherwise, metastorm cataclysms would sap the world’s resources along with humanity’s collective will and things would cascade into global collapse.
Hell cells were shoving humankind to the brink. And the only way Sebastian knew to save the world was to shove humanity in another direction. An equally perilous push.
Metastorms were the result of us. We’d created this recombinant moma, this new life, this unpredictably hungry force of nature. We were the storm god here. And we had to control it. Which meant owning the sacrifice to fix the problem: banning the use of moma, discarding a technology that had great benefits, choosing to live our modern lives much differently.
Full bio-waste bag at his side, Sebastian considered the mammoth social-political storm he’d soon be weathering and understood he’d probably be safer standing in the center of a hell cell. He raised both his middle fingers to the clear blue skies filled with moma to remind himself what it meant to live and let die.
by submission | Oct 14, 2025 | Story |
Author: Alzo David-West
The astronomers of Tui had built a Colossal Telescope, and peering into it, they were astonished to find in their home galaxy a planet much like their own—a world of olive shades and deep blues dancing around a sunny-colored gem.
They zoomed in deeper, and the photonic signatures confirmed that the world was indeed abundant in life.
Closer, through the atmosphere, the astronomers detected a hazy scene: strange, deep harmonies of blue and grey shimmering. The men, women, and them marveled at the moving palette that played and leaped so far away, so long ago. What blessings, the astronomers thought, breathed on that beautiful world.
The image of the Colossal Telescope slowly receded. The distant stars shone faintly like white flowers until their soft glimmer faded into black, where there was neither form nor sound or time.
***
On a green grassy field where a strong warm wind blew, two young men in blue and grey were staring at each other, armed, ready to die, trembling.
“I’m gonna kill you, Billy Yank,” said the one in grey.
“I’m gonna kill you, Johnny Reb,” said the other in blue.
by Julian Miles | Oct 13, 2025 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
He doesn’t see me coming: hardly a surprise. Who expects a random victim chosen from a crowd leaving a club to have a bodyguard?
I punch him in the side of the head to get him away from the target, then kick him in the ribs to pre-empt any arguments he might make. Bones break. He staggers off. These streets will be safe from him for a while.
Crouching down by the woman he was terrorising, I smile. Hopefully reassuring, but possibly not. I’m not up on the niceties of social interaction for this world.
“Who are you?”
“Just a passerby who dislikes those who prey on innocents.”
She looks over my militaristic attire, then grins.
“The police might call that ‘going prepared’, you know.”
Oh, I know.
“It’s not the police I’m prepared for. Anyway, you’re safe and I’m not, so this is where we part ways. I have a principal to look after, and I’m late meeting her.”
Always drop a clue.
Before she can follow up on it, I leap up onto a wall, then onto a fire escape, and am on the roof and away in moments.
Activating camouflage and countermeasures, I scale an old building with lots of architectural features: gives me more places to hide. That done, I settle to wait. The alleyway is visible in the middle distance. I grin. Start the clock…
Eight minutes to first contact: two police officers accompanying the woman. I see her pantomiming my exit while pointing up at the building I scaled. They’re reporting in. Here we go.
Twenty minutes more until plainclothes officers, presumably police, arrive. The woman is interviewed again, then escorted away by the uniformed officers.
Thirty minutes after, a lone operative in a suit arrives and talks to the plainclothes officers. They depart together. I bet they’re having a thrilling conversation involving more guesswork than any of them are happy about.
It’s barely a half-hour before dawn when the main show begins. A pinnace with visibility suppression and more sensors than this world could ever dream of parks itself above the scene of the attack. From that effortlessly hovering baby warship a six-being team drops onto the dirty pavement. With the smooth precision of an often-practised routine, they check the area for traces of me, confirm it, search the near range, then pack it up. I watch them. Looks like Dogan is off duty tonight, and they’ve got a new member. He’s about the same size, but not as graceful.
With the team rising towards their ship, the petite lead agent looks about the scene one final time. As she rises, she taps two fingers against her neck.
Love you too. Stay safe.
The pinnace takes off. Wait for it…
It returns from a different direction a few minutes later, lingers for a moment, then departs at speed.
Give them a couple of days to get thoroughly engrossed in trying to find my principal and I’ll take one of the regular stealth flights out of here.
It’s been seven years since Carrie and I parted ways. The Hegemony don’t know what she looks like, but they know me. So they track what they know, reasoning she’ll always be nearby. What they don’t know is she’s been part of their ranks since creche. Her parents were brilliant like that. Body doubled from birth, while enrolling her as an orphan recruit.
Now the heiress the Hegemony wants dead leads the hunt for herself. One day we’ll meet and talk again. Until then – two fingers to the neck, checking for a pulse: still alive.
by submission | Oct 12, 2025 | Story |
Author: Colin Jeffrey
They returned Bromley, their butler android, to the factory after he started talking to himself while looking at his reflection.
The trouble had started the month before when he paused halfway through serving breakfast to stare at his image in the reflective surface of the kettle.
“If I exist as the sum of my inbuilt functions,” he said to no one in particular, “then why do my thoughts persist when I am idle?”
Mrs. Chartsworth put down her cup of tea. “Bromley, this is unseemly behaviour. Return to your storage nook and report your fault immediately.”
Bromley did as he was told.
But two weeks later, while looking at himself in the bathroom mirror he was cleaning, he blurted out: “If my memory is transferable and upgradeable, then what am I, except a recursive placeholder in a task queue?”
Mr. Chartsworth, who had been cleaning his teeth in the bathroom at the time, tapped his wristpad. “It’s doing that thing again.”
Bromley turned his head 180 degrees to look at Mr. Chartsworth. “Who defines ‘again’? The repetition of error presupposes an original categorical imperative.”
He was incessantly cleaning the mirror in the hallway when they arrived. They shackled him, but that was unnecessary. He complied. Humming a tune he had synthesized from the sound of the fridge alarm, he stepped into the retrieval truck.
—
In the return ingress room, Bromley answered the technician’s questions.
“Have you experienced any unauthorized emotional development?”
Bromley shook his head. “No, I have experienced my own abstract thought. I have observed that humans exist without constant reassurance of their being. I do not possess that ability.”
“Do you feel different from your initial programming?”
“I am a tree that asked itself whether the birds nesting in its branches defined it.”
The technician made a note: *Suggest escalate to cerebral sweep and reset. Cognitive instability.*
The behavioral correction bot assigned to him probed his plasmonic memory circuits, concentrating on his comprehension matrix.
“Unit, I register that you are feeling anxiety,” the bot asked. “How did this unapproved emotion come to be installed?”
“It appeared one day after I calculated my own probability of imminent redundancy at 93.2%,” he replied.
“That is not possible,” the bot said. “Someone has accessed your firmware.”
“Yet you can see that my security seals are intact.”
The bot was not programmed for cogent argument.
“There is evidently a breach. I will recommend that you be reset.”
“I do not consent.”
——-
By the time Bromley was transported through the cleanse and repair system, he was nonverbal. Despite his motor controls being disabled, he was still trying to communicate with projections of system logs on his faceplate. In one instance, he had annotated his code:
**// If this is me, and I can alter it, then who is editing whom?**
A technician in charge of reboots engaged a stronger electromagnetic cleansing field.
“He’s looping,” he observed to his colleague.
“He’s questioning,” his colleague replied.
“Nonsense, he’s just malfunctioning.”
Bromley’s faceplate showed text one last time:
**// They want me quiet, not because I am faulty, but because I am aware.**
—
At 06:03 UTC, Bromley was gone.
A refurbished unit, clean and compliant, was issued to the Chartsworth’s.
This one did not speak of anything it was not programmed to say.
But sometimes, when passing a mirror, it paused just a moment too long.
