by submission | Oct 11, 2025 | Story |
Author: Hillary Lyon
The room fell silent as the Admiral strode into the briefing room. He snapped on a holographic representation of a small solar system. The planets on display swirled in their orbits around the ghostly sun.
“For the last several generations,” he began, “we’ve been grooming the inhabitants of this particular planet. A beautiful, wonderful world teeming with diverse life and resources.” He pointed to the third world from the sun. “When we had proof positive they’d managed to create—and employ—nuclear weapons, we knew it was time to establish contact.”
He walked into the middle of the whirling display. “First we came as creatures from their religious traditions. We appeared tall, beautiful, well-spoken, and peaceful. Our mission then was to reason with them. Convince them to disarm. Our mistake in that endeavor was not contacting their leaders directly.” He snorted. “No one listened to farmers and lonely travelers.”
“We attempted next disguised as small gray-fleshed insect-like creatures. We thought perhaps we could scare them into giving up their weapons.” He scowled. “Didn’t work. Like the first time, we failed to inform their leaders directly. Nobody paid attention to the warnings of artists and writers.”
He backed out of the holographic display. “Our latest tactic has been to embed agents in the sciences and governments. Influential positions of power.” For the first time in this presentation, he smiled, revealing compact rows of needle-like crystal teeth. “At last, we have success!” His prehensile tail swished with delight.
A hand shot up in the audience. Now that the Admiral was visibly happy, it was safe to ask questions. “You there,” the Admiral said, “have a question?”
The grunt stood up, trembling. What an honor to be recognized by the Admiral! He stuttered his query: “Why are we being so diplomatic with these creatures?” He puffed up his chest to bolster his appearance. His kind despised those who appeared weak. “Why treat them differently from inhabitants of other worlds? What makes them so special?”
“You ask not A question,” the Admiral answered as his eyes stretched into slits, always a warning sign, “but THREE.”
Quaking, the grunt paled into camouflage coloring that blended him into the background. He became almost invisible. The Admiral laughed at the grunt’s anxiety, a grating sound like a blade scraping against a whetstone.
“Because these inhabitants,” the Admiral answered, “are still in their civilizational infancy. We want to persuade them. Influence their decision.” As he spoke cold fog leaked from the corners of his mouth. “Make them think disarmament is their idea.”
“But why?” The grunt pushed on.
The Admirals eyes returned to their normal oval shape as he pondered the question. “Theirs is a wonderful world. One of the most pristine eco-systems we’ve yet encountered. Its resources are perfect for our needs.” He snapped off the holographic display. “Wouldn’t want to do anything to damage it.”
He pounded his fist against his chest once and scaly armor tore through his skin, covering his entire body. The grunts followed suit. “You see,” he said addressing his audience, “voluntarily giving up their nuclear weapons will make these emotional, immature creatures feel righteous and self-satisfied.” The Admiral smiled again, a full glinting smile that stretched from ear to ear. “And this will make it so much easier for us…” He reached behind and grabbed his helmet, set it on his head. “When we invade.” He lowered his visor.
by submission | Oct 10, 2025 | Story |
Author: Robert Gilchrist
You know what it will do to you. The warnings are everywhere. The PSAs on holovision. The billboards on the highway into work. Your social circle has even been impacted by it (Sophie’s cousin’s boyfriend is still in recovery). But that’s not going to stop you. Not now.
MmryLne was developed as the be-all end-all designer drug. It’s said it was supposed to mine the biggest business outside of sex – nostalgia. You’ve never been into that crap. After all, the past didn’t have grocery stores or social media. Besides, we only remember what we want.
But the planet is cracking. Any day now the core will spill onto the surface and burn away whoever’s left. All the scientists are saying so, and aren’t we supposed to believe them? If you’re going to go out, why not take some solace in what used to be?
It’s bigger than you expected. Viseos always make these kinds of drugs seem tiny but carry a big wallop. It has the appearance and viscosity of a bull’s eye. They don’t even know how it works – does it send your consciousness into the past, or just hyperfocus your mind on bygone eras?
You choke down this horse pill on an empty stomach, take several swigs of thirty credit bottled water, lay back on your couch, and wait for it to –
Theon augh ire wanly sandwiched.
Your brain spazzes as the pill dissolves instantaneously in your stomach. Before your eyes is a rancher herding cattle across a dusty vista. The taste of baking clay lingers as you suck in fresh breath. It’s hot, but manageable. Better than –
Mil kids join oidium oat demon audit?
Thrown forward to the floor by your seizing stomach. Hands smush into brown muck. Smells like shit. Voices calling, don’t recognize the language. Flies buzz everywhere. A hand touches your shoulder –
Sofa just deft defog herbier harm abaca relive wharfmen!
Boardroom. People screaming. Shots ring out. You weld your eyes shut and hope this –
Echoic jading horn fibs quaffed froth Kong tend by Zschau roe handgrip.
It continues. A surrealist nightmare as you bounce through time, sensing what the past was like but continuing on before it can take hold. History and time and reality and the self and existence blending and melding into five-dimensional sculptures. You’d puke and void yourself if you hadn’t already done so. Over and over.
Ancient Rome. Rainforests as developers dig out the last of the vegetation. The fray of battles – Attila the Hun, Alexander of Macedonia, Dwight Eisenhower. The universe spins around you. The shakes start after your fourth trip to the American Nineteen Eighties. Muscle spasms like you’re freezing hit your arm as you wipe away rivers of sweat. Did you just have a seizure? Will this kill you before the apocalypse outside your –
Upright sky erect egg waxy vuggy bank kooky jabs fava mi hybrids sag ion seraph.
You’re back. Curled in the fetal position on the kitchen floor. Lying in a pool of sweat, vomit and blood. Head pounding. Voice hoarse. Shaking uncontrollably. Feeling you don’t belong here. Like you don’t belong anywhere.
Your phone begins bleeping at you. Slowly your arm moves from clutching your tattered shirt and turns off the braying. You force yourself up gingerly. Wet chunks stick to your face. The tiny window that looks out on the hazy, smoke-stained sky offers a sliver of light.
It’s time to begin another day at the end of everything.
by submission | Oct 9, 2025 | Story |
Author: Linda G. Hatton
Juniper’s steel-toed boots weighed down on the gas pedal like a cement anchor at the bottom of the sea, letting up only as she pulled her new fifty-thousand-dollar investment into the slot marked “service.”
She ducked out of the car as soon as the A.C. shut off and eyed the room. Then she saw him—the first man, or at least man lookalike—she had seen in weeks.
She examined his face for signs of his origins—pores or razor stubble. “I have an appointment for a knocking in my engine. I just bought the damn thing online last month. I’ve already had three issues with it.”
The salesman with his shirt half hanging over his fly, fingered his tie as he shouted out something about singing happy birthday. He turned to her. From the eyes up, he resembled “The Rock.” From the eyes down, he looked like Fred Flintstone. The droids had become so realistic, she couldn’t tell if he was real. “Who with?”
“Huh?” Her eyes darted from his nametag—Jared—to the blaring TV switching from a documentary about housing astronauts on the moon in new condominiums to a pirate cartoon centered on a hidden island and a map back to the “old world” that had been torn into three pieces.
The room, lined with ten black stiff-looking chairs resembling the polished heels of an army platoon standing at attention, was studded with tabloid-reading housewives that looked like they had been dressed by their toddlers. The first one, a smiling redhead, her legs tightly crossed, her hair thrown into a messy bun, refused to offer eye contact—only a master of body language could know she was hiding something. Was she harboring one of the few real men left on earth?
The next one shuffled through a handful of credit cards, sinking deeper into her seat as she pulled one from the pile, rubbing it like gold, then setting it aside. Once she had pushed the others all back into the empty slots in her wallet, she picked up her smart phone and hung her head low, her face glowing from its light like a candle inside a jack-o-lantern.
“Hey, Miss!” Jared slapped the counter. “Who is your appointment with?”
“I dunno. I didn’t get a name.”
“Right. I see it here. You were scheduled with the Perceptive Engineering Drone. Sorry to say we had a malfunction with that member of our service team. So you’re stuck with me today.”
She squinted and cocked her head.
“You know, a human?”
“Oh, right. I don’t care who handles it as long as I can take it home today.”
“We’ll see.”
After checking her car in, she hid in plain view in the back corner of the room under a spotlight where she had a panoramic view of the abundance of visitors to 21 Rosewood Street. Visitors so preoccupied with their own problems—and blank-faced droids gliding around in matching outfits, droids that had taken over the old way of life—that nobody noticed her until several hours had passed.
“Looks like you’ll need to leave it. We haven’t been able to quite figure it out.”
She scoffed. It figured.
They could develop a substitute human but not get her car to run right.
by submission | Oct 8, 2025 | Story |
Author: Majoki
You’d think I’d be happy about beating the odds on my very first try, of hitting a hole-in-one, winning the lottery, finding a needle in a haystack.
Not so much.
Not when you beat the astronomical odds of folding space-time to the exact system that is likely to spaghettify you in the next few days. I thought it would take lifetimes to find this place. So did most of the exo-specialists who were running the program. That’s what they told me and the dozens of other field team members who’d signed up.
They said it was a one-in-a-million chance one of us would actually fold into the problematic system they were searching for during our tenure. Lucky me. I hit the apocalyptic jackpot on the very first pull. Three lemons as bright as the collapsing megastar that was inexorably drawing my foldship into its hungry maw.
Foldships were great for scrunching space-time between two given points to make the vastness of interstellar space crossable. But foldships were not built to resist the pull of a caving giant that was likely to destabilize this sector of the galaxy for millennia.
I mean, this kind of enormous black-hole-in-the-making was exactly what we’d been sent to find. It was just highly unlikely that one of us pilots would stumble into such a system on the first go. Bingo!
I suppose I could be happy for the program. Rah, rah for science and all that. The exo-specialists were ecstatic. They now had a collapsing system to study at a fraction of the time and expense they thought it would take to locate such an event.
But, it was coming at my time and expense. As in, my time was up, and I was expendable. Yup. I knew the score. I knew what was coming, though no one had been in my current position before. The instrumentation on my foldship had been designed to record and relay the very moments of spaghettification as I was sucked beyond the event horizon.
No one knew for sure what would happen as I disassembled, but it was a pretty sure thing that I would literally become one in a million…pieces.
Lucky, lucky me.
by submission | Oct 7, 2025 | Story |
Author: Rick Tobin
“Sir, shouldn’t we turn about? Maybe hide in the asteroid belt?” Ensign Murphy stood to the Captain’s side, expecting an immediate order to retreat as a fleet of hostile aliens approached at maximum speed.
“Hardly, Murphy. You were brought on this mission to learn. This challenge should be a major boost in your understanding of field operations and a captain’s prerogatives in crisis.” Melosis sat back in his high-backed chair, ignoring the furtive tone in his young officer’s voice.
“But, Captain,” Murphy continued, “we have no idea what the Tsosis are capable of outside of myths and stories from unreliable sources. We’re in open space, but what if they’ve already claimed it?”
“You mean survivors, Ensign? The migrants from Lemayo called them the Tentacles. No human has ever seen one and lived, but the stories of their omnivorous consumption of other life forms is documented. Those few Lemayians were survivors…lucky victims. No, we aren’t running from this fight. They’ll be in our quadrant soon enough if we don’t send a message. Ernst, call up our inventory logs for the Everything Hold.” Melosis turned to his tactical officer for critical research.
“I have it, sir,” Ernst replied, as a flush of red from excitement rushed to fill his male Moon-based countenance.
“I must advise, Captain, that scanners indicate advanced weaponry on their armada. We wouldn’t have a chance if…”
“That’s enough, Ensign. Don’t interrupt me again. Ernst, do we have a displacement barrage package still in storage?”
“Yes, still in its original wrapping. I’m sure it’s functional.” Ernst smirked while staring at Ensign Murphy’s sudden flapping arms.
“Captain!!” Murphy’s voice rose. “You can’t be serious. That weapon is forbidden by every race, including our own. How did you get it? You can’t use it. You know what…”
“What it will do, Ensign?” Melosis interrupted. “Of course. But, they won’t. Our little secret warehouse onboard holds many surprises. Now, Ernst, is it illegal to buy such a weapon?”
“Absolutely,” replied the officer as he directed the weapon to be removed and placed for activation at the spaceship’s bow.
“Did we order it from Earth and have it shipped to us?” Melosis asked Ernst, sarcastically.
Ernst laughed. “No, sir. Two missions ago, we found an ancient Baroozian battleship adrift in the Pleiades. It was a leftover hulk from the Razonic Wars of the twenty-third century. You have the authority to remove anything from abandoned wreckage.”
“You see, Murphy, back home we had this drawer in our kitchen where my mother threw every kind of gadget and cooking tool she might use only once a year, or maybe only once ever. It was our Everything Drawer. We have one on this ship. The Tentacles were never within a parsec of that conflagration. They have never seen what a displacement tool can do. They’ll soon find themselves separating into cellular goo as their bodies forget to hold their forms together. Their fleet will be full of jelly before they can fire a single weapon. So, if I could never have such a weapon, how could I have ever used it to stop an invasion by a ruthless horde?”
Murphy stood still, wide-eyed, as he felt an unusual vibration ripple through the ship’s hull following the deployment from the ship’s Everything Drawer.
by Julian Miles | Oct 6, 2025 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
He sits there like some statue against the rising full moon, hook nose and narrow chin in profile, eyes lost in shadow beneath tousled curly hair from which wisps of smoke rise, describing silver trails in the moonlight.
“You’re burning.”
“It’s residual slipcharge. Nothing I can do. Pour water on it and I’ll just bubble and steam as well as smoking.”
Which brings us neatly to the important question.
“How are you even here?”
The profile lifts for long enough for a sigh and a cough to escape, then drops back.
“Professor Tifuro told me it’s a confirming anomaly. It means that what we achieved with the Daggerbolt Mission is without precedent in the temporal history of this reality.”
Mission? I thought it wasn’t official?
“So you succeeded?”
“When did Shanghai fall?”
It what? I check my datapad.
“It’s not even under attack. Do I need to alert anyone?”
He shakes his head and smiles at me.
“No… No, you never will. Not now.”
I’m missing something.
“Reo, what happened? You and the Professor disregarded safety guidelines and legal challenges, setting off on an experimental temporal journey to prove time travel was possible, despite it being called reckless, dangerous, and impossible. That was three months ago! Then I come up here tonight to raise a glass in your brother’s memory – and yours – to find you here like it’s our usual memorial night.”
“Three months…”
He closes his eyes and nods his head, then stares at me.
“In the original timeline, a nameless race invaded Earth two years ago. Humanity had lost a horrific war, marked only by the increasingly desperate measures we used while trying to defeat them. By the time the Professor proposed his crazy plan, the Earth was a toxic wasteland. Ninety-nine percent of humanity were dead. He said he’d run projections, and the only way to save ourselves was for the original scouting mission from the nameless race to not find Earth. In fact, he confided in me that alternate timeline versions of himself had left notes telling him the only sure way was a paradox inversion.”
“Paradox what?”
“To rearrange the timelines so this peaceful world is the primary and all versions of the invaded Earth become aberrant realities that dead end in the catastrophic backlash of our temporal meddling.”
Hold on –
“Then how are you here?”
“Slipcharge, again. I can be anywhere because I don’t exist or belong in this reality. So I chose here. To see you. To share a last memorial night.”
I poke his arm.
“You’re pretty solid for a ghost.”
He frowns.
“Don’t know how it works. Tifuro wasn’t sure. Reckoned I’d be good until the residual charge dropped past a certain threshold. He couldn’t even say if you’ll remember me being here.”
“Unlikely to forget this.”
“Purely because you’re confronting the paradox. When that’s over, amnesia is the easiest way for causality to fix things.”
I raise a glass to him, then towards the sky.
“One part of me thinks you’re mad, another thinks I’m mad and hallucinating. So, on balance, here’s to you two for saving the world. I think your brother would be proud.”
“I th-”
There’s sudden cold breeze. Looking round, there’s nothing up here with me. Must have been a bat or something.
