by submission | Feb 18, 2025 | Story |
Author: Emily Kinsey
I pull the string from my son’s arm. It’s long—seven inches, at least—and shimmers like spun silver. Exhaling slowly, I put down my tweezers and rub my eyes. That last string took too long; the tail almost got away. If nothing else, pulling strings is the most tedious work I’ve ever encountered.
“Ouch, Mama. That one hurt.”
“I know, baby, I’m sorry,” I say. “You always feel better after they’ve come out, though.”
I carry on despite my weariness. The strings need to come out. If I don’t pull them as soon as they appear, then they start to grow inward, toward his body. It’s excruciating for him—and for me, as well—as digging them out becomes more difficult the further from the skin they hide.
There’s knocking on the bathroom door, but I ignore it; I’m too preoccupied by the strings. The knocking increases, then becomes somewhat of a pounding, then becomes a definitive breaking. I ignore it all. String after string, I am transfixed by the fibers overtaking my son’s skin.
Police file into the room and a man with a badge, a detective, grabs the tweezers from my suspended hand. My husband, David, is with them. He’s not much of a caregiver to our son; I can’t get him to care about the strings.
Someone grabs my other arm just as I’ve pulled out a fresh string from my son’s left knee; it’s greenish brown and reminds me of how the Texas sky looks before a tornado. I grasp it in my fist, triumphant, but everyone is looking at me and not the strings.
“What are you doing?” I ask, distracted.
“They’re just taking you for the weekend, honey,” David says. “Try to calm down.”
“Don’t tell me to calm down!” I yell. Who will help my son with his strings if I am gone for a weekend? I’m forced to the floor by the police and handcuffed. “Get off me. Where are you taking me?”
“It’s delusional parasitosis by proxy, Munchausen Syndrome, essentially,” David explains. “She thinks there’s strings coming out of his body, so she picks and picks at him, creating these scab-like things. She needs help.”
“Ethan—don’t listen to him, baby,” I say, but my husband and the detective are crouched down, speaking to my son in voices so low I can barely hear them.
“Hey, buddy, where did this string come from?” David asks. He’s picked up a new string—burgundy, four inches, with fringed gold ends—and holds it up to the harsh bathroom light.
“I pulled it out,” Ethan says.
“Pulled it out from where?”
“My arm, right here,” Ethan gestures to a fresh wound that has appeared on his forearm. “There’s another right there. It hurts. You need to pull them out, Daddy. I don’t like doing it myself.”
David and the detective look closely at Ethan. So do the rest of the police. They’ve moved their knees off my back, and even though I am still handcuffed, I can now sit up.
They’re staring at the next string. It’s bubblegum pink and is poking its tail from Ethan’s left shoulder.
“What the hell?” the detective sounds incredulous. He kneels closer to Ethan and passes my tweezers to David.
David takes them and pulls…and pulls…and pulls. It takes too long—he’s not as good at the extraction as I am—but for once, he’s trying. When David finishes, he sits back, twirling a nine-inch-long candy-colored string between his fingers with astonishment.
“Thanks, Daddy,” Ethan says. “It always feels better after they’ve come out.”
by Julian Miles | Feb 17, 2025 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
He’s going to watch it again. Unbelievable.
“Any chance of a coffee?”
The stare is a definite ‘no’ with an attempt at being hard.
“You can ask for details. I was there.”
Plus I have complete recall thanks to my action audit unit. I got it turned on after some clown tried to blackmail me into assassinating someone, then died. Not my fault the police failed to arrive in time to defuse the bomb he’d intended for me. The owners of the car park even tried suing for damages.
Pushing the display away, he stretches, then looks across at me.
“You’re a lucky man, Jarn. Most of you stockers are garbage collectors.”
The link attached to my official statement should allow government types to see my unredacted specs. I’m not a stocker-
Oh, for pity’s sake. Another amateur?
Let’s see.
“I do okay. Except when people try to roust me. That brings back memories. The memories bring back behaviours, and those cause a reaction. Which is why I’m here. The dead people started it by trying to run me down.”
He gives me a blank stare. Now that one works.
“You trotted up the bonnet, stomped through a reinforced windscreen, then punched Mike so hard he expired before Tino could help him? How is that a normal reaction?”
Tino couldn’t help because my boot through the windscreen embedded itself in their chest, a detail you should have just seen. I looked straight at them before extracting my foot so the audit would get it clearly.
“It’s a combative response thing. Like this.”
I pop the restraints and flip the table out of the way.
They always think attaching the cybered arm to the meat arm means I can’t escape. I have stress plates bonded to the bones specifically for that. I bleed, it hurts, and it helps.
He doesn’t react. Where did they find him? I kick out and his chair imitates a tablecloth pulled out from under the crockery. He actually hangs there, arse in the air, before toppling backwards.
A boot to the chest keeps him down while I take his gun.
“How are you familiar with them, and why shouldn’t I kill you?”
Pasty-faced of shit creek looks up at me with a dawning awareness of how deep the brown stuff has gotten hereabouts.
“You won’t get away with this.”
“Entirely possible. But you’ll still be dead.”
And there it is: eyes going wide as realisation bites down hard.
“I was told to keep you offline for seven hours.”
“How many outside?”
“No-one. We were a three-man team. I roped in a cosplay buddy before I came to get you.”
No wonder they were quiet. Quick thinking, though. Especially after losing two friends.
“Where’s the quiet box?”
If this is a trick, there’s a signal suppression unit somewhere.
“This place is an old fallout shelter. No need.”
Clever. Thought it was shabbier than your usual police station.
“Right. You’re going to stay here for the remaining five hours.”
“Why?”
I punch him. His head bounces off the floor. Probably survivable. I’m out of here.
There’s an elderly man in an expensive suit sat by the exit. Either side of him are bodyguards. The one on the right might slow me down – briefly.
“Well done, Jarn. My name’s Ethan. I’d like to offer you a job.”
Surprise, surprise.
“No thanks.”
I walk past.
Playing games like this? You’re either arrogant or stupid. Either of which will make working for you a pain in the arse.
First coffee, then lunch. Bloody amateurs, bane of my life.
by submission | Feb 16, 2025 | Story |
Author: Alastair Millar
I should have said something. Today, I know that—but back then, I was still young and stupid. So I’m recording this now that I’m old and hopefully wiser, for all the good it will do.
I was desperate when I signed up for the Settler Corps, with nothing left after a layoff and ruinous divorce but pocket litter and broken dreams; food and a roof over my head while I took the aptitude tests, with a guaranteed job if I passed, was an offer too good to ignore. So what if that job was off-world? As far as I was concerned, Terra had done me dirty, and I had no reason to stay.
I’d never even heard of Knossos-V, but kind of assumed a planet would have a surface. It was only after they’d packed fifty of us into a warprider for a shot across the cosmos, and it was too late to back out, that they told us it was a gas giant. Why were we going? Because of the rare elements, warpdrive propellants and helium for which our beloved home system was eternally hungry.
I was assigned to a mobile construction rig. Robots put stuff together, of course, but humans were needed to make sure they didn’t screw up, break down or get lost. At start of shift I’d suit up, get a list of locations and things to check, and then be lowered down by tether to where the latest automated extraction terminal was being built. The atmosphere fritzed radio comms, so a chestcam captured everything and the footage formed part of my report. As long as you didn’t fall off the platform, it was easy enough, even for an intellectual lightweight like me.
It was on maybe my twenty-fifth terminal that I saw them – things like two-tailed manta rays, about my size, but made out of this weird jelly stuff; I don’t know if it was reflective or transparent, but they were hard to see, clustering around a set of struts. When I got close, they scattered, launching themselves off and disappearing into the all-consuming gas haze. Alien life! And I’d seen it with my own eyes!
When I got back to the rig, I told my supervisor, and he took the vids off me right away. They weren’t super clear on his office terminal, but it was obvious that something was out there.
Then he’d sighed. “Incredible. But it doesn’t change anything, Sam. We got a job to do, and we’ll do it, and maybe one day someone will come and say we should have done things different. But we’re on a deadline, see?” He hit the delete button, and that was that. I needed the job, so I didn’t kick up a fuss. Like I said, stupid.
I kept an eye out for the rest of my indenture, but never saw the rays again – and in five T-years there, never met anyone else who’d come across them. Now there are thousands of terminals on Kay5, and not a hint of life. Did we take what they needed and suffocate them? Drive them deeper towards stranger predators and oblivion? Or are they hiding from us? I don’t know.
Officially, the Settler Corps has never found life anywhere else, either. But maybe we just killed it off and kept quiet, like me and the supe. Nobody believes me, or wants to believe me, if I tell them what happened. If you’re listening to this, just know that we aren’t alone in the Void. But we need the courage to admit it.
by submission | Feb 15, 2025 | Story |
Author: K.T. Frasier
When my sister dies, she leaves a nebula in my brain. An upside-down Pillars of Creation right where my temporal lobe used to be. They discover it when my fiancé brings me in for an MRI, worried when I seem to know where all the elements in the universe reside. Astrophysicists and neurologists alike salivate at my brain scans.
“We don’t know what will happen if we try to remove it,” a doctor says.
“It could kill you.”
“We want to try, though,” my fiancé promises.
“Do we?” The other woman in the room is a particle physicist with so many letters after her name it looks like math. For the first time, she is embarrassed that she has a dog named Pluto and a daughter named Andromeda. Her eyes fix on mine as if asking me for guidance.
My nebula feels infantile when I feel it at all. I was once made of the universe and now the universe is made of me, a mother’s blood passing through her daughters from Neanderthals. Their atoms, too, were mostly hydrogen.
At night, I scroll through NASA’s public databases, body humming. One small step for man becomes apocryphal when gazing across lightyears. What are our reaches into space but a toddler’s gummy hands, still sweet from breast milk, not knowing for what it grabs?
“It could kill her.”
“It could kill all of us.”
Head shaved to make way for sensors, I smile. Their talks to remove the nebula are quaint. How often have we shunted metal into the universe? How often has it caved to our touch? Yet it remains hospitable, despite our clumsiness.
After their first attempt, they show us the video, the white bone of my skull carved open to make way for their instruments, the fleshy gray of my brain made even duller by the oranges and purples of the nebula. Their scalpels move through my atoms, swirling the astronomical dust that makes up my memory. When they remove their tools, it slowly rearranges itself, resuming its comfortable shape.
They are at a loss. They don’t know how to fix something that isn’t broken. There are subsequent surgeries, and I trace my constellation stitches with featherlight fingers. I traced my sister’s stitches this way, too, when we curled around each other in grass that had grown too long, her right eye the same color as the sunset’s wake. Her arm draped across my belly to pluck at the clover beside my hip. She had already become a neutron star, collapsed so deeply into herself that her weight was magnanimous.
I would have carried her anywhere.
My sister’s lover built her supernova word by word. This, too, was inherited down the matrilineal line.
Late at night, the particle physicist rewatches the videos with me, arm curled around my pillow. I lean my head to press scalp to palm, touch starved, craving warmth instead of latex. We re-listen to the quiet chatter of amazed doctors. One, a German, swears so impressively that our giggles shake the gurney.
“What if you’re immortal now?” the physicist asks. “What if you grow dense and become planetary?”
“What if I contain another Earth?”
“What if we shrink down to inhabit it?”
We consider each other and do not ask the bigger what if. We do not wonder at our own Goldilocks life, balancing on the edge of a scalpel in the middle of infinity. We do not muse on the matrilineal line, mostly hydrogen. I rest my cheek against her hand.
by humeston | Feb 14, 2025 | Story |
Author: Dart Humeston
“The last time I felt like this, I woke up in the year 1981.” I explained to the attractive woman after I appeared out of thin air in her kitchen.
“I sensed static electricity in my body and materialized in a video game arcade in Miami,” I continued, as she stood with her arms crossed. “I managed to survive until Temporal Traffic Control was able to downstream a software patch to fix the glitch.”
This time the glitch sent me to 2025, and to this woman’s apartment! She was a young woman with long blonde hair, smooth tanned legs and astoundingly deep blue eyes. She wore a white cotton robe.
“You are a time traveler?” She asked.
I was leaning against the refrigerator, still a tad dizzy.
“I understand that sounds impossible.”
“Somewhat.”
I tilted my head; my eyes squinted. “Somewhat?”
She took a step closer.
“You must be from 2200 or earlier?”
“What?” Why would she be asking such a question?
“That’s when Temporal Traffic Control was decommissioned, and the Transcendental Dimensional Command assumed control of all time travel,” she stated. “They immediately banned TTC travelers from this entire century. You idiots had messed up the timeline enough!”
“What? What are you talking about? How do you…”
“Shut up, John.” She said with a seductive smile.
“You know my name? What the hell?”
“Your younger self is so damn cute!” She said, staring at me.
“I’m confused.” I said, taking a step back from her..
“I am with TDC,” she said. “We married in 2210.”
I was speechless.
The robe fell off her perfect body. My eyes took in her stunning beauty as a huge smile spread across my face.
Then I sensed the static electricity again, the patch hit and I started to dematerialize.
“Shit!” I shouted.
by submission | Feb 13, 2025 | Story |
Author: GW LeCroy
Tokyo lay far below, smothered in a century-old, neon-streaked smog. A constant wail rose into Asami’s room from somewhere in the haze, sharp and setting her on edge. But above, a thousand shooting stars blazed orange-yellow trails across the navy sky. Asami’s eyes gleamed with awe, a thousand wishes flooded her heart.
Her father’s heavy footsteps, muffled by their high-rise’s thick, insulated walls, shook her bedroom door as he passed. Asami tensed, poised to leap back in bed, yet she couldn’t tear herself away from her window and miss this. Her throat went dry. What would he say as he loomed over her? The shooting stars hardened her resolve.
He would simply have to find her awake.
The wail ripped at her nerves, and Asami covered her ears as it peaked, shrill and desperate. She searched through the smog below for the source of the noise, her forehead smudging the glass, black hair framing her face. Something unsettled her about the
sound—familiar, but distant, like an old nightmare she couldn’t quite recall.
“Where are the damn keys, Emi?” Her father’s frantic voice boomed, cutting through her thoughts. A knot tightened in Asami’s stomach as she glanced at the door.
“Near the respirators!” Her mother raced down the hall, voice sharp with panic. “I’ll find them, just get Asami!”
The twins screamed from their nursery, and a shiver clawed up Asami’s spine. She turned back to the window as an orange glow glazed her room. Her breath caught in her throat as the wails bled through the city. Asami’s eyes glistened, wide.
Those weren’t shooting stars at all.
