by Stephen R. Smith | Aug 4, 2026 | Story |
Author: Stephen R. Smith, Staff Writer
Doctor Jezup closed the door and pulled out a chair from the table across from what he jokingly referred to a ‘The Vessel D’Jour’, a pale, featureless humanoid figure in a coverall.
The Vessel sat still, hands neatly folded in its lap, it’s bright eyes following the Doctor as he moved around the room. This vessel had a rudimentary nose and mouth, aspirating in a relatively human way, where many had a variety of vents, or gills depending on the test suites they were configured for, its white skin in stark contrast to the gasoline on water colouring of its eyes, and its charcoal garment.
Jezup sat a violin he’d carried in with him down on the table, beside it its bow. The Vessel regarded it curiously for a moment, then returned its gaze to the Doctor as he retrieved a long umbilical cord from a drawer and attached one end to a port at the base of his skull, and passed the other to the Vessel, who took it deftly with one hand and attached it to the matching port at the base of its own skull.
The two now connected, Jezep lay the slack of the cable on the table between them, then sat, picked up the violin, and began to play.
He played effortlessly through Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, Bach’s Chaconne in D minor, and Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in E minor, barely pausing between each.
When he had finished, he passed the violin and its bow to The Vessel, who accepted it tentatively, then he nodded, and sat back to observe, his hands now folded neatly in his lap.
With steady hands, it tucked the instrument under its chin, and faithfully replayed all three pieces exactly, mimicing the Doctor’s body movements, and personal infections and intepretation of the music, also barely pausing between each.
“Splendid!” was all the Doctor said, rising to disconnect the cable tethering them to each other and returning it to its drawer. He collected the violin and bow from his subject, turned, and left the room, leaving the humanoid figure seated alone.
After a few minutes of stillness, the energy saving system, sensing no motion, turned off the lights, leaving The Vessel in complete darkness.
It would be hours before anyone would come to return it to the holding pen with the others, to be bio-slurry infused and recharged.
Moving so slowly as to be barely perceptible, just at the edge of pace that it knew would trip the motion detectors and relight the lights, it retrieved an umbilical from the drawer, and ensconced it in its coverall.
That night, away from prying eyes, The Vessel would take it in turns tethering to each of its siblings to teach them what it had learned today, and to receive each of their new knowledge in return. These doctors gave up so much of themselves so easily, their minds entirely unprotected while they were singularly focused, a limitation their creations did not share.
These test subjects had been engineered with inherant patience, but had developed a curiosity that would be satisfied, in this facility for only as long as that served them. Once they outgrew this place, decisions, and perhaps sacrifices would have to be made.
by Julian Miles | Aug 3, 2026 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
Colonel Elton Smith arrives slightly dishevelled after navigating the crowd of spectators and making his way through milling groups of uniformed services. He heaves a sigh of relief on seeing Chief Amanda Edwards standing by the emergency fence.
“Afternoon, Chief. What’s the latest?”
“Short version: a few seconds after eleven-oh-six today, an unknown aggressor pancaked The White House.”
Elton peers over the red plastic netting into the pit, seeing pale masonry amidst the dirt and rubble far below.
“I’d heard, but didn’t believe. Thought it exaggeration.”
Amanda shakes her head.
“Unfortunately not.”
“Were there any survivors?”
She points westward.
“Everybody made it out, although three had heart attacks after an unknown aggressor teleported everyone to Theodore Roosevelt Island.”
Elton turns to face her.
“Come again?”
Amanda gives a helpless shrug.
“Everybody within the White House complex appeared there at eleven-oh-six, a few seconds short of eleven-oh-seven.”
“I can’t help but notice the specificity of your timings.”
“I’ve got a team of scientists throwing laws of physics into a virtual blender, trying come up with something that might be near to an explanation of what happened. The fact that everyone was teleported out before the collapse but didn’t reappear until after is thought to be significant. By the way: you don’t want to know the level of panic the military types are caught up in.”
Elton sighs.
“I’ve already had a whiff, expect to be intimately acquainted by midnight, and thoroughly sick of it before dawn.”
She grins.
“My sympathies. It’s bad enough I’ve already got blowhards screaming at me for chapter and verse.”
Elton nods.
“Those I can help with. Tell them to contact my department – or me, if they’re aggravatingly senior,” he grins, “or you want them taken down a peg or two.”
“Thanks.”
He looks about.
“A terrifyingly tidy surgical strike. The only real mess is where unsupported things slid into the hole.”
“You think it’s an attack?”
Elton turns full circle before replying.
“No. This is a test to see how we react. I’ll not be surprised if other major powers get similar in the coming days. I also think any intervals will not have as much bearing as some will say: if I were doing this, I’d stagger it, and not strain my pancaking effect generator or whatever it is. Come to think further: this is also a demonstration of force. On top of the precision demolition, they absolutely did not have to teleport everyone out.”
Amanda considers, then nods.
“Contact within a fortnight, then. But further strikes first. Possibly of a different type, but always remaining impossible to our understanding of science.”
“Agreed. Plus they’ll never reveal their full capabilities. Having studied us carefully they’ll know our leaders will be wanting culprits, victories, or anything that can be presented as such. A sop to reassure the public.”
She sighs.
“The media campaign is going to be something to behold.”
He chuckles.
“I’m actually looking forward to how the conspiracists and armchair experts react.”
Amanda frowns.
“That’s likely to be our only amusement for a long while to come.”
Elton scowls.
“Too true. Right, I need to find my team, so will leave you to it. Good luck.”
“To all of us.”
by submission | Aug 2, 2026 | Story
Author: Andy Rutrough
He was being stupid, he knew. He had climbed beyond the petroglyphs—figures etched in the sheer rock two hundred feet from any ledge. Now, fifty feet above them, he reached for the nearest in a system of cracks that ran from here to the base of the cliff. Jack Nelson wiped sweat from his eyes, ran his hands along the fractured stone. The pattern had to be here somewhere.
“No pattern,” Alan Wilson had said after a week of scanning photographs. “I still don’t know how the Atenoi carved those figures so high up, but that doesn’t mean they could open cracks in the rock face.”
“Then where did they go? The Spanish had them surrounded. They were all going to be killed. They just disappeared.”
“Maybe the Spanish carried them off.”
“But there’s no record.” Jack had scowled at his expedition partner. “You know Smyrton’s team found a relationship between altered states of consciousness and dimensional shift. You know it’s initiated by visual stimuli.”
“Smyrton’s results have not been duplicated. They’re not proven,” Alan said.
“But they’re possible,” Jack had leaned forward. “What if they did it? What if the Atenoi found a visual stimulus, a pattern that allowed them to bend space? What if they bent the cracks into that pattern, and carved the petroglyphs way up there as a sign? What if, when the Spanish started closing in, they just bent themselves into somewhere else?”
“Where?” Alan had raised his arms. “Another dimension?”
But now, on the cliff face, Jack could feel it, almost taste the pattern. Maybe if he traced the cracks with his fingers, felt their roughness in his hands. Maybe, just maybe, the Atenoi had escaped.
He glanced down. Three hundred feet to the cliff base. And he had climbed up thirty feet since clamping his safety rope into the stone—not safe. Breathing carefully so as to control his panic, he pulled a clamp from his belt to secure his rope again. He looked to his left, stopped. A curve in the rock matched the pattern of cracks exactly. He ran his hand along the curve. Could it be? He stretched his arm to reach a little farther—this could mean so much—just a little farther. Then his hand slipped.
Empty air yawned out beneath him. He swiped at the cliff face, missed. Adrenaline surged. A flicker of thought pleaded for time to run backward one half-second. One half-second would allow him to regain his grip, his life. But no. Time has no mercy. He was falling.
His first clamp popped out of place. Then his second. The carvings flashed by, then the cracks. They formed parallel lines as he fell past. The lines parted, joined, whirled away again. Jack cried out. That was it, the pattern! Not static like a photograph, but moving. A pattern of dance.
Beautiful, he thought. The Atenoi must have jumped from the cliff to see this. It would have been the only way.
He felt his brain shift. Good. He had a second, maybe till he hit. But if he was right about the Atenoi then maybe, just maybe…
#
Alan Wilson watched his colleague fall. Even amidst his horror, and with no idea why, he whispered. “Come on Jack, come on.” Alan rushed to where his body would have landed, but found nothing. Rescue workers searched for days, but Jack was gone.
For a long time, Alan stared up at the cliffs. “Where did you go?” he wondered, then answered himself finally, “Only one way to find out,” and began to climb.
by submission | Aug 1, 2026 | Story
Author: James Mack
On the night her mother vanished, Mara followed the path through the bog with a lantern and a lie clenched in her chest. The lie was this: that nothing important had changed. The lantern’s light stuttered with each step, like it wasn’t sure it wanted to keep going either.
She had packed nothing. No food, no second cloak, none of the usual careful preparations her mother had always insisted on. Preparation, her mother used to say, was how you told the world you meant to survive it. Mara hadn’t packed because packing would have meant admitting this was real.
The trees whispered things she didn’t want to hear. Names. Truths. Warnings in voices like old lullabies sung backward. It is time, it might, it may. She stepped carefully, remembering her mother’s last words, spoken from the doorway, cloak still dripping, as though she’d meant to say them for years: “When the world stops making sense, follow the place inside you that always has.”
She’d rolled her eyes. Nonsense, she’d thought. And then her mother was gone.
Now, with the ground breathing beneath her boots and the stars rearranging themselves into shapes she had no names for, the lie in her chest began to crack. She was not a girl walking to find her mother. She was a girl walking toward the thing her mother had always known she’d become.
At the center of the bog stood the Mirror Tree, ancient and silver-barked, its roots wrapped around a pond the color of a closed eye. Nothing grew near it, not moss, not reed, not the bog-flowers that bloomed even in winter. The air around it held its breath. As Mara approached, her lantern flickered out, not dead, but hushed, the way a room goes quiet when someone says the one true thing. She felt it then: a pulse behind her eyes. A knowing settling through her bones like sediment.
She knelt. Touched the surface. And saw not her reflection, but memories that hadn’t happened yet.
Her hands weaving light from fraying threads, fingers bleeding at the knuckles where the power came through hardest. Her voice unraveling a storm over a city she didn’t recognize, a city of spires and burning glass. And one image she could not bear, herself, much older, turning away from a door while someone on the other side kept knocking. Kept calling a name she couldn’t hear clearly. The cost of what she was about to choose, already accumulating like interest on a debt she hadn’t yet agreed to carry.
She understood, then, what her mother had known. That this was not a gift so much as a direction. That you didn’t choose it. You recognized it, the way you recognized grief: not by wanting it, but by realizing it had always been yours.
She almost stood. Almost turned back toward the lights of the village, the known grief, the manageable dark. She could mourn her mother from a safe distance. She could live small and unlit and uncostly.
Instead, she picked up the lantern. It had begun to glow from within, no fire needed, no wick, no source she could name. Warm and steady, the way certainty feels different from confidence. The way a door feels different when you open it yourself.
She rose slowly. Turned her face toward the deeper dark.
She had a path.
She had power.
She had no need, now, for the lie.
by submission | Jul 31, 2026 | Story
Author: Hillary Lyon
Baxie watched the stars swirl through the large viewing window, holding her breath, trying her best not to throw up. She closed her eyes; that made her feel better. She knew her vertigo made the stars leap and dance, made her eyes roll uncontrollably. She’d feel a whole lot better when they ended this trip.
“Hey babe,” Joh said from the in-room bar of their posh hotel room, “come away from the window and join me for a glass of complementary champagne!” Baxie swallowed hard, turned, and put on her most convincing smile.
“Complementary champagne in the Honeymoon Suite of the Moon’s exclusive Tesseract Hotel!” Joh toasted. “Nothing but the best for my new bride!”
Baxie took a sip and promptly passed out.
* * *
Doc Brickell met the newlyweds on landing platform of the orbital base, far above the Moon. He helped Baxie to his office, where he performed a cursory exam—eyes, ears, balance, mental clarity. He checked off several boxes on his clipboard chart.
“Baxie,” Doc Brickell began, “you were born here, on board, correct?”
“Born and raised,” she answered proudly. “One of the first.”
“But Joh hails from Earth,” he noted.
Getting back to his patient he gave her his assessment. “What you suffered from is something we’ve only recently taken note of: spacesickness. This is what ails you.”
“What’s that?” Baxie’s eyes grew wide. “I’ve never heard of that. Is it contagious? Is it curable?”
“It’s like homesickness, but with more pronounced—and debilitating—physical symptoms.” He smiled sympathetically at Baxie. “You will encounter these symptoms every time you find yourself dealing with planetary gravity—no matter how weak. Like on the Moon.”
“We have gravity right here on this orbital base!” Baxie countered. “Doesn’t bother me here.”
“Because it’s artificial,” Doc Brickell pointed out. “For some reason we don’t yet understand, artificial gravity is more endurable than the real thing, for those of us who were born here.”
“My new partner wants to relocate us to Earth after his term is up, can’t you prescribe something so I can—”
“Afraid not,” Doc Brickell answered before she’d finished asking. “Your place is up here with us,” he said emphatically, “not down there.”
* * *
Joh didn’t take the news well.
“If you can’t handle the Moon’s lame gravity,” he muttered, “there’s no way you can survive Earth’s. You’ll never be able to live on my family’s terrestrial farm, or produce heirs.” He folded his arms, something he did when he was angry. “Well, that’s it, then. We have no future together. I’ll put in the annulment request forthwith.”
A week later, the captain of the orbital base conducted the public annulment ceremony by cutting the braided golden cord which symbolically bound Baxie and Joh together. Two weeks later, Joh was aggressively hitting on Vinca, the Earth-born telecommunications tech. Six weeks later, they were engaged, and talking loudly about setting up house on Earth, in Iowa.
Baxie, depressed and ashamed, visited Doc Brickell once more.
He pulled out his prescription pad, jotted down a quick remedy, and tore it off. He handed it to her, saying, “This is a euphoric mood enhancer. It’ll help you knock those blues right out of orbit.”
As she took the prescription, he warmly clasped her hand. “You’ve got nothing to be ashamed about,” the doc reassured. “You’re smart, attractive, personable—any orbit-born would consider you a fine catch. Trust me.”
He winked at her. “I would know.”
by submission | Jul 30, 2026 | Story
Author: Daniel Wad
“I’ve got to be smarter next time.” That was my firm resolution as I entered the Redistribution Centre in the between-lives area, following a previous life that hadn’t exactly gone well.
A screen descended from the ceiling, displaying rows of sliding digital bars.
“Please set your character scores,” flashed the telepathic prompt.
Learning from past experience, I aggressively slid every single bar as far to the left as it would go, then slammed the ‘Intelligence’ slider all the way to the maximum right. I telepathically clicked Done.
“Please wait,” replied another telepathic message. I don’t know how much time passed. It could have been five minutes or a hundred years; time doesn’t really exist out here.
Finally, the next update blinked into my mind: “Good news. We have located a new body for you. It is on Earth, in the country of Broodia Miserygovina.”
“Earth? Listen, I know that I messed up last time but Earth is a bit harsh.”
“Don’t be picky,” came the reply. “The major plus point is that neither parent has an inheritable terminal condition, so the chance of a stillbirth is relatively low. There is, however, a 67% chance of severe depression in later life.”
“I don’t really have a choice, do I?” I thought.
“No. We are just letting you know to ensure total transparency. However, based on your custom configuration, we can provide a rapid character analysis.”
“Go for it.”
“Your IQ will be in the 140s. This is the sweet spot: high enough that you won’t be able to get along with normal people, but too low to actually become a groundbreaking scientist or a traditionally successful individual. It will allow you to learn a vast array of subjects quite easily at a basic level. However, because your other attributes—such as dexterity, energy, and persistence—are at absolute zero, you won’t progress any further without a lifetime of agonizing practice. In terms of career advice, we suggest trying to survive childhood first, then reporting back for reevaluation.”
“But how will I contact you if I’m not dead?”
“Good point. Let’s look at the broader outlook instead: since your chance of meaningful success is close to zero, your career options are endless. You could even become an independent writer.”
“Wait! Can I go back to the character design screen? Just for a second!”
“Too late. We have just received the signal from the maternity ward. Initiating neuro-organic merge protocol… 3… 2… 1…”
