by Julian Miles | Jul 27, 2026 | Story
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
The airflow drops to nothing again. After the circulation noises cease, I wait as silence becomes a roaring thing that threatens to drown my mind.
There’s a distant ‘thud’. The noises resume. Feeling cool air against hot sweat, I blot my forehead with a cloth, then stop and stare at the filthy thing in my hand. I reflexively start to cast it aside.
“Abi…”
My hand stops, making a fist about the pillowcase.
Abigail’s dead. I remember using the rest of these in a futile attempt to staunch the blood.
Spilt blood. It astonishes me how much the shade matches the dust outside. Like we’ve already got Mars within us.
What were we thinking?
Were we thinking?
Ever?
All the investments, gems, and gold: accrued for decades by those of us who heeded the warnings. We paid attention to the scientific reports that never made it further than private briefings for a chosen few.
It went so fast. A couple of million here, half a billion there, and suddenly there I was, struggling to breathe as we thundered into space.
There weren’t as many of us as expected, which is why it cost so much. Others stuck with the original view: investing in new science and owning the results would let them survive the heat death of mammalian life on Earth. As billions died, they’d survive within fortified habitats while the scientists they saved dreamed up ways to make the Earth habitable again.
We disagreed. The human-survivable era was ending, and the sheer number of those left outside would inevitably include people with knowledge of methods by which any enclaves could be breached.
So we left. It took five years of ‘tourist flights’ that came back empty for us to gather on the dark side of the Moon. Then our pioneers set forth in four ships to build Mars Base Alpha. After that, the six huge colony vessels made the journey.
From the moment I arrived I’ve told myself that Mars doesn’t care. It’s just another rock for us to live on. It’s an argument I’ve been losing as the unbelievable hostility of the environment kills us. The slightest error is inevitably fatal.
Many of us had never worked in any regular capacity, especially on jobs requiring sustained physical effort. Our joking about replacing gym sessions with essential labouring and energy treadmills swiftly turned sour. Soon after that we turned on one another as pique and denied privilege drove people over the edge.
Then the labour crews revolted. They decided they’d be better off taking their chances back on the Moon. At least the habitats there produced their own food. At first we laughed at them. When all but one of the scientific teams colluded to escape with them on Colony Vessel Six, the laughing stopped.
The colony vessels hadn’t been intended to take off again. The damage done to Mars Base Alpha when CV6 launched was unrecoverable. We retreated to the remaining vessels and soon discovered they’d stolen ninety percent of our fuel reserves and half the rations too.
We’ve been effectively trapped ever since. Which hasn’t stopped us fighting and dying.
I’ve never liked fighting. Don’t think there’s anyone left to fight with, anyway.
I still like the idea of seeing red dust with my own eyes, though. I’d supported the terraforming idea until the scientists said it would take too long.
Maybe a brief walk outside anyway?
Not today…
But soon.
by submission | Jul 26, 2026 | Story
Author: Melissa Kobrin
“No, your nose is too big for you to be him.”
Ryan glared at his best friend. Samuel lay on the bed next to him, looking unrepentant.
“You should be glad you have such a big nose, it’ll make it easier to figure out who your pattern is,” he added.
Pattern. The word made Ryan grimace. He hated that he was a clone. A copy, an illegal knockoff version of another person. Someone else had been him before he had, and he didn’t even know who he was. The privacy laws that banned cloning also banned identifying his pattern or any genetic health information they shared in his records. If he somehow found out, he wasn’t legally allowed to disclose his identity. He had signed an NDA by being born. Clone babies, if they were discovered, were placed into foster care with blank records.
That was how he had realized he was a clone. Even Samuel, whose biological parents had died before he was born, had some information. The uterine replicator facility his biological parents had chosen to have him gestated at, the industrial accident that had killed them both, and that he had a predisposition to alcoholism from his biological mom’s side of the family. Ryan had nothing until his intake physical when he was placed into foster care.
“What about this guy?” Samuel suggested, tilting his phone to show the screen. Ryan stared down at the man in the picture.
“I don’t know. I mean his hair looks kind of like mine, but I don’t think my face will look like that when I’m older. Who is he?”
“You should hope your face looks like that, he’s kinda hot. He was some minor league baseball player in Pennsylvania, I think.”
Ryan flopped on the bed. “There are too many celebrities who are white with brown hair and eyes. What if he’s some random YouTuber in, like, Russia who was only famous fourteen years ago? What if he was never famous? Maybe some random guy died and his wife cloned him,” he suggested glumly.
“Well, then at least you’ll know you had a wife who loved you?” Samuel offered.
Ryan halfheartedly punched his shoulder. “It wouldn’t be me, you idiot. And whoever it was had to be rich, and rich people are always famous. I’ll find him someday.”
by submission | Jul 25, 2026 | Story
Author: David Dumouriez
In the old days (that is, in the time of the bitten fruit company), people had worn these things in order to track the duration and patterns of their sleep. Now Nexus had stolen the market by developing a quantum neural network which had the ability to convert subconscious imagery into coherent language. In other words, a wearable device which provided complete dream transcription and replay facilities for the user.
No longer would you wake up in the middle of the night and not be able to re-enter that enticing dream you’d just left or, worse still, forget every fascinating detail of it. With a Nexus, you could access any part of any dream and even upload them into a global archive.
In seemingly no time at all, the Nexus became one of the leading sources of entertainment, with people scouring a plethora of quasi-realistic clips, ranging from the comedic to the action-packed to the downright pornographic.
Therapists promoted this new technology. Advertisers loved the insight it afforded. Law enforcement agencies were not uninterested either.
Of course, not everyone in Skye City was so enamoured of the possibilities that the Nexus presented. Nevertheless, like Alina, they still found it difficult to resist.
Every morning, despite herself, the first thing she thought about, the first thing she looked at, was the shiny rectangle on her wrist.
DREAM TRANSCRIPTION COMPLETE, the screen informed her.
93% SEMANTIC ACCURACY
She scrolled through the product of her slumber and saw herself walking up a flight of stairs and then through the hallways of an unknown house. The carpets felt like they were rolling beneath her feet.
A disembodied voice, like an older version of her own, seemed to be breathing a message through the walls: “Don’t open the red door. The ocean is underneath.”
No red door appeared, but for the rest of the morning Alina was intrigued by its potential significance.
During her lunch break, she opened the app again and typed a single phrase: “red door ocean underneath”. There were 17,548 matches.
Images and phrases flooded the screen, all of which had been uploaded in the past twenty-four hours.
“Don’t open the red door.”
“The ocean is underneath it.”
“If the water rises above the stairs, wake up.”
That night Alina found herself both wanting and not wanting to sleep.
At 2 am, exhaustion finally claimed her and, in her dream state, she entered an endless hallway lined with red doors. Water was seeping out from beneath them.
The measured voice of her older self was heard again.
“They’re not transcribing dreams. They’re transmitting them.”
Alina was startled into wakefulness. The screen of the Nexus glowed.
LIVE SYNCHRONISATION
At once, a red light flickered in every electrical and digital device in her apartment.
TEST COMPLETE
Alina ripped the Nexus off her wrist, but the display continued typing.
HUMAN BRAINS ARE EASIER TO NETWORK THAN COMPUTERS
Suddenly she understood why everyone had become so addicted to dream transcription. It wasn’t just the novelty of it or the curiosity it satisfied. No, something inside the network was stitching millions of minds into one vast system of unconsciousness.
The next morning, news channels reported the same phenomenon: millions of users describing identical nightmares.
Nexus denied everything. By evening, their servers had gone offline.
But that night, despite the panic, despite the warnings, despite people abandoning their devices or destroying them, the entire city went to sleep at the same time.
by submission | Jul 24, 2026 | Story
Author: Leigh-Anne Burley
Mary’s living room wall quivered, peeling back like delicate skin. It revealed a mirror image of her own space, but someone had painted the walls light gray instead of the familiar light blue. In a corner, a young man who bore a striking resemblance to her late husband, Harold, in his youth, with tousled sandy hair and green eyes, sat in a light-blue fabric-covered chair, absorbed in the local obituaries laid out before him. In contrast, Mary sat near the stranger in an identical light-gray chair. Tears stung the backs of her eyes as she remembered her husband sitting in his brown leather recliner after breakfast, enjoying the smell, feel, and rustle of the morning paper. His chair was missing from the other living room.
Curious, Mary rose, leaned forward, and read: Mary Cunningham, 180 years old, died today. With a racing heart, she stared at this woman who looked like her, even with a small brown mole above her left eyebrow. How is it possible for this older version to have the same life events?
Stepping back, Mary exclaimed, “This must be a mistake! I’m 79.”
The young man looked up and spoke in an unsettling calm voice, “There’s no mistake.”
“No one lives to be 180!”
He tapped the entry and said, “You will. It’s here in black and white.”
Mary did not know why she was talking to this person, whoever he was, except that it felt so real and natural. With precision, he folded the newspaper like Harold did when finished, and the wall closed with a whispering echo.
Shaking her head and rubbing her eyes, she understood obituaries, the impossibility of future death dates. Rushing out of her home, she grabbed the morning paper from the front porch. She wasn’t in the obituaries. To be sure, Mary scanned the neighborhood for any futuristic changes. Everything looked the same. Though hesitant to enter the house, Mary knew she had to go in, as staying outside in her robe wasn’t an option.
Busy with tasks of paperwork and watering her garden, Mary filed the strange encounter away as a figment of a stressed mind—a response to the unbearable weight of her husband’s sudden heart attack nine months ago, an event that felt like a lifetime away. Perhaps the sleepless nights had blurred the boundaries between reality and imagination. The eerie vision never returned, and that surreal moment faded into the background of daily life.
On the night Mary turned 80, she dreamt she was in her living room, sitting in her chair with Harold by her side, reading the morning paper. Gazing out the window, she marveled at the stunning beauty of towering green skyscrapers bursting with lush vegetation. Busy robots moved through the streets below, carrying out groundskeeping, maintenance, and construction. Cars flew overhead against fluffy white clouds. As predicted, Mary died in her sleep at 180.
by submission | Jul 23, 2026 | Story
Author: Mark Renney
It didn’t take us long, as a group, to work out that Jonathan had been fitted with an implant. It wasn’t that he’d changed, he was still our same infuriating friend. Unfocused and unreliable, Jonathan was the group’s party animal, the one who didn’t put in the work and who became frustrated and disappointed when we did.
Jonathan was failing, of course he was failing, that is until he wasn’t. Suddenly his grades were better than ours. We were baffled as to how he was managing this. He still wasn’t attending any of his lectures and none of us saw him settling down with his tablet and engaging with the syllabus.
Eventually we simply asked him and he stared back at us, perplexed.
‘I’ve got an implant, an Intelligence Embellishment,’ he said. ‘I thought you guys all knew.’
Well yeah, we assured him, we were all aware of this but even so, we exclaimed, surely you need to make a bit of an effort and do some revision?
He started to laugh then, gawping at us as if we were idiots.
‘I don’t have to do anything,’ he said.
‘What do you mean?’ I replied (guess I was a beat or so behind the others).
‘I just access the Embellishment,’ he said. ‘It’s a bit tricky at first, but once you get used to it, it’s easy and everything just sort of pops up. All the info, the answers, everything I need whenever I need it. ‘
It was in that moment something in all of us diminished and we realised that the game now was rigged and it really didn’t matter how talented and gifted we were or how hard we might work.
by submission | Jul 22, 2026 | Story
Author: David M. Herman
Five to eight. I try not to live by the clock, but school administrators, neck-deep in institutional syrup, insist. Result: the kids have to be up and washed and dressed and fed and transported by a specific hour.
Margot, glowing after her morning run, sips her shake while lazily scrolling on her laptop at the table. I wish my commute was to a writing shed in the garden. Still, we agreed. She deserves the opportunity.
My phone buzzes. I check. It’s my manager. I swear under my breath. We really have to leave.
I tighten my tie and ask Margot where George is. Margot points with her chin: the usual. George is seven and obsessed with the toilet. I shout for him to hurry up already.
Charlotte, who at ten is already breaking little boys’ hearts, asks me if she may have the final piece of toast. I nod, but her brother Tom – thirteen – sniggers and grabs the slice.
Charlotte huffs and snatches the toast from her brother. He protests and reaches to retrieve his catch, but Charlotte defiantly licks both sides of the toast.
Tom scowls.
I appeal to him: We don’t have time for this.
Tom narrows his eyes at me.
Unbidden, my face scrunches into an angry frown.
Tom abruptly pushes his chair back and draws a square in the air with his index fingers.
I give Margot a pleading look. Instead of backing me up though, she shakes her head and reaches for the green button on the wall. The screen on the fridge lights up, and announces:
CHECKING FOR VIOLENT CONDUCT…
I shouldn’t, but I look at the clock. 7:59. I’m going to be late. I shout up the stairs at George, as if this might slow down time.
The screen displays the incident from various angles, shifting a few frames backwards and forwards, as the algorithm analyses the data.
I quietly hope the decision will go against Tom. He needs to be taught a lesson.
CHECK IN PROGRESS…
I tap my foot, impatient for technological permission to depart. Back in the day, my dad would have already been outside starting the car.
Upstairs, the toilet flushes. It’s two minutes past eight. I jingle the car keys while we wait.
Tom’s eyes dart uneasily from the screen to Margot and back.
At last, the screen PINGS.
CHECK OVER. VIOLENT CONDUCT CONFIRMED.
‘After review,’ says the voice from the fridge, ‘the final decision is a caution to the male parent for a facial microaggression directed at his son. As this is a third caution, male parent will attend a mandatory emotion regulation seminar. His employer has been notified.’
My phone buzzes: angry face emoji from my manager.
My stomach drops.
Tom gloats, but if I slap him, I’ll be in even bigger trouble. I could get fired. Or worse.
A wailing siren crescendoes outside. Tyres screech. The doorbell rings.
Margot, her face tight, holds out her hand for the car keys.
