by submission | Feb 20, 2025 | Story |
Author: Daniel Rogers
I’m to be sacrificed tomorrow. I knew I wasn’t going to like this planet, but when your fighter decides to crash, it doesn’t ask how you feel about it.
Gline-doth is a class C Primitive. I’m a little rusty on my planet classifications, but I believe it means they use rudimentary tools and practice human sacrifices. I’m very confident about that last part.
Unauthorized contact on a class C will land you in a dungeon ship for twenty years. Good thing the Confederacy trained me to assimilate while waiting for rescue. Unfortunately, that’s why I’m being sacrificed. I assimilated too well.
I discovered a village nearby, observed their costumes and daily life for a few days, and then used my replicator to replicate clothes and money. I intended to visit the public bathhouse, as I desperately needed one. However, when I activated my translator, some keywords were mistranslated, and I ended up volunteering to be the next sacrifice. I always said technology would be the death of me.
The villagers treated me like royalty. The village Shylamin never left my side. Apparently, he accompanies the sacrificial candidate the week before the deed – I can’t imagine why. I was incapable of pronouncing his name, so I programmed my translator to say his name when I said Bob.
Bob fulfilled the roles of shaman and medicine man, caring for his people’s physical and spiritual well-being. He taught me about the god I’d be meeting soon. I happily learned this god disliked violence and provided a ladder for the sacrifice to enter heaven without being killed. Bob never liked plunging his dagger into hearts and hated seeing all the blood. He confidentially admitted to me he preferred this god over the others. And as far as nonexistent gods go, I agree.
The day of my sacrifice arrived. The villagers paraded me to the sacred rungs with songs, mostly singing of my imminent demise. To my surprise, a ladder was suspended in mid-air when we arrived. It ascended into a stationary cloud, dark, with flashes of lightning. The music ceased, and Bob kneeled before the ladder.
“Oh, great Provider! We offer a willing sacrifice! Please accept him, and bless our village!”
There is room for debate on “willing.”
I approached with apprehension. Ladders have never been particularly dreadful to me. I mean, I don’t walk under them, I was never one to tempt fate. But I was a tad bit anxious about this one. Bob placed his hands on my shoulders and blessed me.
The thought of bolting did enter my mind, but I wouldn’t get far, and I feared how the locals might deal with an unwilling sacrifice. So, I ascended.
Heaven looked a lot like a ship.
“Welcome, Captain Williams.” A Talamarian Captain stood with his First Captain and Lieutenant. I’m not sure what I expected to see, but a Talamarian observation ship never entered my mind.
The Captain continued, “We’re terribly sorry for the whole god-thing.”
“You’re the Ladder god?”
“Well. Yes. Sort of. You see, it’s really just a huge misunderstanding.”
“They’re worshiping you down there.”
The Captain looked embarrassed. “I did say huge.”
by submission | Feb 19, 2025 | Story |
Author: Majoki
Some swear by King James. Some will only settle for King Lear. But give me The Prince. Machiavelli all the way. His flavor. Assertive. Unrelenting. Unforgiving. Unapologetic.
That’s the power we seek in this day when all is utopic and bland. A fine cut of Prince 1532 is just what the doctor, if it weren’t a medibot, would order. You had to fight the vanilla blues some way, and, in 2074, it was with fine literature. Escapism with the choicest sheaf in the land.
I became a purist just a few years back when a crime—an old school crime—was reported. A theft. Which was a rarity since most folks had everything they pretty much needed after the skurnikan was invented. Back about 2025, a proselytizing power engineer named Skurnik developed a system of micro capacitors that could reliably store electricity for years. The original skurnikan was the size of a water heater, but held enough electricity to run a typical house for a year.
Within a decade, the typical skurnikan was the size of a cinder block. Completely portable. Once electricity could be stored on such a large scale, fossil fuels became a thing once again of the dinosaurs. Wind, solar, tidal energy took center stage. We even exploited the triboelectric forces of our movements. We harnessed everything because it could be easily stored and used on demand.
With ubiquitous clean, cheap, renewable energy the world changed. Possibility outpaced piety. Fanaticism died. The Power Age empowered everyone. Heady stuff. No more energy-resource apartheid. Water could be desalinated cheaply. Abundant clean water meant abundant food and fertility. No more scarcity. The world prospered and our collective psyche suffered. Without strife and conflict, we became soft. Crime became passé. Police activity dealt with virtual attacks that were more like major pranks, really.
And that’s the context when I got the robbery call. It was just Velasquez and me in the 57th precinct. That’s all the job demanded anymore. Two phone jockeys with decent ‘puter skills. We weren’t really equipped to deal with real criminal activity. An actual theft of property.
And a book at that.
A very old book according to the academician who called. He was quite hysterical. “It can’t be replaced! Do you understand? A first edition of Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography. The flavor of the writing is indescribable. I can’t bear to live without it. You must find it!”
I have to say the gent’s passion surprised me. Only webaholics these days got that obsessed with anything. We’d created a pretty even-keeled society. Of course Velasquez and I were intrigued, though we hadn’t a clue how to begin with an actual property crime. Luckily, there were archives in the precinct and a million and one cop shows from the past century. It wasn’t really that hard. Kind of fun. Until we fell upon the truth.
And the truth was deeper than both of us.
When we began to dig we found quicksand and it swallowed us up. Rare books were being stolen the world over, but there was an uncanny hush surrounding the racket. Seemed no one wanted to talk about it except our academician who reported Ben Franklin’s theft. He was the key that unlocked Pandora’s box and then removed the hinges.
My world came unhinged. One classic read at a time. David Copperfield. War and Peace, The Tale of Genji. Old old books gone. The trail faint until Velasquez followed up on a tip from a well connected politico. Velasquez went deep under and never surfaced. I waited. But he never came up for air. Until it was rarefied.
That’s the upshot. Rarefied air. Do you see? Velasquez found the source and then we were hooked. In a world where happiness was easy, ecstasy was not. That was the new extremism and it was doing the unthinkable. Huffing our heritage. Smoking our very foundation. Oh, but the flavor, the high of sinking so low.
Who would’ve believed that the crumbling pages of ancient texts could deliver such a rush? What strange science in the ink and paper, the soul of the writer. Flaubert, Tzu, Dante, Basho, Hume, Gallegos, Khayyam, Cervantes, Twain, Crane, Paine. Oh what was a first edition of Wordsworth worth? It took you to the mountaintop and split you asunder!
It was the only drug left, and it corrupted all who breathed in the brittle pages of our literary past. Evermore. Nevermore. Who could resist a first edition Poe? To the core we smoked away the only evidence of our once proud form. We who had once striven with war and disease, crime and inhumanity. Our greatest thinkers borne from the madness of scarcity, the prey of want. One by one, smoked in the new hedonism.
It was to be savored.
Maybe it was the only answer in an age of plenty. To turn us back to our badder selves—our more perfect form. A burnt offering to the gods we would never again imagine, if we didn’t push ourselves to every writer’s purpose: The End.
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.
