by Julian Miles | Jun 2, 2025 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
Joey looks around at the crowd.
“I see we’ve some new faces tonight. Thanks for coming.”
He presses his palms flat on the table.
“You’ve done what each of us has done at some point in the last few years: you’ve realised there’s something deeply wrong with our world. Those we’re told are leaders, and those we’ve had held up as experts, are all lying.”
Sounds of wordless agreement swell, then fade.
“Some of you have already lost friends and family over this. For those who haven’t, trust me when I say it’ll happen to you. Every person returning here tonight has been cancelled by people they thought strong. People they thought loyal. It’s a hard path we walk.”
There are nods. Sympathetic glances and pats on the shoulder are exchanged.
“You can’t explain to them. You’ll try, but until each of them takes the steps you have, they’ll reject the truths you offer.”
“What truths are they, though?”
Joey swings his gaze to meet that of a short, wiry guy. He sees himself reflected in the lenses of the spectacles this retro-styled apparition is wearing. Are those video glasses? No. Just deeply vintage. The exotic earbuds kind of spoil the ensemble, though.
“Welcome, friend. Before I answer, let me ask where you are in the Matrix? Shadow government? Slave cities? Project Eurostate? Tartarian Empire?”
He adjusts his glasses.
“I’m from beyond the ice wall.”
Everybody turns their attention to him.
Grinning, Joey straightens up.
“Another veteran reality pilot! Well, those territories are still out there, but only a select few will get to see them.”
The short guy nods.
“Because of the Satanic Cabal?”
Joey waves his hands dismissively.
“That’s just another diversion. Tartaria didn’t fall. It’s the hidden Fourth Reich. Until we’re ready to colonise the lands beyond the wall, they’ll keep us here. No point in invading until we’re sure to conquer.”
The short guy bursts out laughing.
“Oh, by the gods! A new conspiracy!”
He leans forward to stare Joey in the eye.
“Is it your truth, or did someone give it to you?”
Joey nods.
“Took me a while to see it, but the only thing that makes sense is we’re being restrained.”
“You think the stagnation has a cause beyond the maniacal thirst for power?”
“Without question. There’s no way the population of an entire planet would let itself be ruled by a tiny group of self-centred sociopaths without some sort of intervention.”
“Something beyond the abilities of those sociopaths and their schemes?”
“Absolutely.”
The short guy smiles.
“Can I run the alternative past you all?”
There’s a pause, then nods and looks of surprise.
Joey grins.
“Go for it.”
The short guy claps his hands together.
“All of the conspiracy theories are true, but not all are true for this Earth.”
A voice comes from the back of the room.
“What?”
The short guy checks his bulky wristwatch.
“Quick version, then: beyond the ice wall are twenty-six other Earths. Each has two active conspiracies. However, right now, your Earth has no conspiracies because it’s the control world for this century. The simple truth is that you only have yourselves to blame for what you’re living through.”
Joey looks about at the stunned faces, then bursts out laughing.
“That’s too far gone to even be funny.”
The short guy slowly looks about, then shrugs.
“Have it your ways, then. Cheerio.”
He turns and leaves. People chat and laugh. More drinks are ordered. The evening carries on.
Joey wakes just before dawn, heart pounding. Why did the short guy count how many people were nodding?
by submission | Jun 1, 2025 | Story |
Author: Aubrey Williams
I’ve been looking for work for months now. After the chip company got all-new machinery, the bean-counters did a review, and I was one of the names that got a red strikethrough. I can’t live on redundancy forever, and I’m not poor enough to get a rare welfare payment, so I need to find something in this nest quick before I’m shuffling along the vents and tubes looking for discarded fast-food. Okay, I won’t actually be homeless, but a person worries. Like a robot I’ve been standing in lines at job centres, mechanically sending CVs and letters to all manner of firms, hoping to hear back something. It seems like half of the jobs I see don’t actually want me, but I’m told I have to keep persevering. On my way to and from the main job centre, I pass by an alley that leads to a confluence of other alleys behind the backs of the major buildings here— an all-boys secondary school, a medical supplies warehouse, of course the job centre too, a cheap canteen, and some sort of plumbing firm. There’s a sort-of concrete courtyard of scorched cement and forgotten dumpsters, a few scant weeds here-and-there, and disused loading doors. I’ve noticed that each time I pass by, there’s always a few men standing there. They’re not lounging around, not really, and they don’t seem to be doing all that much. Most of them seem like employed men, or at least they’re either wearing high-visibility jackets, pressure overalls, or suits. As I’ve passed by, I’ve realised it’s always the same men, or at least none of the men I’ve seen ever seem to vanish. New ones join occasionally, and end up also standing around. I think there’s about ten.
Weird, right?
My curiosity wouldn’t go away, so after another week of failing to get even a modicum of acknowledgement, I decided to pop into one of those alleys and observe the group. I saw six of the regulars there, some with their hands in their pockets, slightly bobbing around as fellas do when they’re waiting around, one man leaning on a pillar, the rest stood tall and straight. As I watched them, a tall man with a good head of hair and a suit from ten years ago brushed by, and he turned, curious. He looked me up and down before smiling, and asked:
“You want to join us? Not got anything much either, right?”
I nodded, and he motioned for me to follow. This man in the old suit walked over past some ragwort poking-out of a crack and settled on a spot next to a rusted bolt about the size of my wrist. He didn’t say anything or motion anything to the other men. I hesitated for a few seconds, but I followed, wanly smiling at the others before taking a spot next to the man I’d spoken to, with a discarded crate to lean against. In the next ten minutes, three more men came from different alleys: one looked like he worked in construction; another had on the kind of apron that reminded me of the medical building; and the third had a look that screamed “teacher”. All of the men took up what were clearly the positions they were accustomed to.
Nothing was said, nothing happened. We were there for an hour. In that time, I noticed a regularity to all the men’s movements, a repeating of patterns. I also realised that none of them ever exhaled or inhaled.
Come to think of it, I didn’t breathe either. I couldn’t, and didn’t know how.
by submission | May 31, 2025 | Story |
Author: Eva C. Stein
After the service, they didn’t speak much.
They walked through the old arcade – a fragment of the city’s former network. The glass canopy had long since shattered. Bio-moss cushioned the broken frames. Vines, engineered to reclaim derelict structures, crept along the walls.
Mae’s jacket was too thin for the chill that seeped through the open airlocks, but she didn’t seem to notice.
“Do you ever think people get shame wrong?” she asked, not looking at him.
Aidan kept his gaze on the cracked tiles beneath his boots, feeling the throb of the neural weave in his spine. “Wrong how?”
“As something to run from. Like it… hurts.”
She slowed her step. “But what if it’s trying to tell us something we’ve been avoiding?”
He nodded. “You mean, like a warning?”
“Not quite so simple. Shame isn’t a wound – it’s a lasting scar in the code, a memory that won’t erase.”
He considered that. “And anger?”
“Anger is louder. Shame waits.”
They passed a rusted data terminal, half-swallowed by vines. Its screen blinked beneath lichen-like growth. Aidan paused beside it.
“But both show up uninvited.”
“Most things do,” she said.
“And some don’t leave.”
“Maybe they stay until we stop pretending we can’t hear their signal.”
She brushed a spray of moss from the terminal’s edge. “Until we stop closing the door.”
He looked at her. “You really think feelings can be met like that?”
“Better than treating them like corrupted files to be quarantined.”
Aidan exhaled. “I think I kept rewriting the entry protocol – hoping nothing would get through.”
They walked on. Somewhere, a window shutter scraped.
“When shame is earned,” Mae said, “maybe it’s the part of us that remembers who we wanted to be – the original upload.”
Aidan didn’t reply. His steps slowed.
“And anger?” he asked at last.
“Maybe it’s what won’t let the world forget. Or won’t let us forget that we cared.”
“You make them sound almost noble.”
“I’m not trying to. Maybe they have reasons – even if we can’t name the code that drives them.”
A breeze moved through, carrying the smell of damp brick and something faintly medicinal – from the chapel or the hall, or both. Aidan adjusted his sleeve.
“Sometimes I think I lived the last ten years quietly. Not because I felt nothing, but because I was never sure which were my words to say.”
Mae nodded once. “And when you did speak?”
“I was careful. Too careful.”
He paused. “I used to think that was strength. Now I wonder whether it was just another layer of security.”
“Maybe it was fear,” she said. “Of hurting someone.”
He looked away. “Or of being known.”
The arcade opened onto the street. Afternoon light fell across the paving stones. Near the kerb, a child’s bicycle leaned against a lamppost. Its front wheel turned, though there was no wind.
Mae stopped.
“Do you think those feelings – shame, anger – ever leave us?”
Aidan watched the wheel spin. “If they do… maybe it’s not because we chased them away. Maybe it’s because we finally stopped talking over their signal.”
Mae didn’t answer. She didn’t have to.
They stood for a while, turned just enough not to face each other. The street lay quiet ahead. A bird flew across the light above the rooftops, then disappeared.
When Aidan finally spoke, something in his voice had changed. “Do you think she knew?”
“Yes, I do,” she said. “She told me.”
by submission | May 30, 2025 | Story |
Author: David C. Nutt
It was an alien invasion, not in the sense of “War of the Worlds” but more like what historians called the “British Invasion” but without the Beatles. What invaded us was close to five million overprivileged alien tourists, all here for one reason: to inhale us. No, this is no metaphor. They are here to literally, sniff us out. They love our scents.
Turns out, the rest of the galaxy doesn’t smell like much…some rot here, smoke from different kind of fires, and the odd change in air quality differing from planet to planet based on what kind of dust and water was indigenous. One wonders why evolution gave the various human adjacent aliens olfactory senses at all.
Their cultures had no flowers. No essential oils. No animal scents. No complex pheromones. No body odors. Just a dull scent palate, at that was it for the galaxy.
Except for earth, and well, us.
My son and daughter-in-law ran a candle shop, a business they started when their profitable cleaning franchise closed due to the home robot revolution. They were doing all right but struggling.
Then the invasion came. Now my son and daughter-in-law have more money than they actually know what to do with, and that’s after spoiling me and his mother (and the rest of the family) absolutely rotten. But it doesn’t stop there; and it’s not a good thing.
One cannot walk down the street without being accosted by aliens of one stripe or another wanting to come closer for a sniff. It doesn’t matter who we are or what we’re doing. Lovers walking arm-in-arm, business folk rushing off to a power lunch. Kids on bikes or boards careening down the sidewalks. DOT workers filling potholes. Without so much as a I-beg-your-pardon we all get a nose shoved somewhere on our bodies, going beyond any accidental violation of personal space. It has gotten so bad the UN has complained to several off world governments and banned at least three alien species from coming to earth.
The rest of the galaxy doesn’t see it that way. Nope. Think we are being “primitive,” and “oversensitive.” The common view is, and I quote from one of pamphlet of a consortium of planets, “Earth has no right to deny the greater galactic community this incredible resource.”
Things are getting more and more out of hand. A tour group of aliens over-ran a gym last week. Bad idea, especially when coming between powerlifters and their work outs. Two humans injured, 16 aliens put in the hospital before police arrived. Four aliens pummeled with baked goods at a farmers market outside of Niece. An enraged crowd in Bangalore tipped over a tour bus. Alien visitors in route to Manitoba, turned away. Hell, its got to be pretty bad if it’s pissing off Canadians. Now, Earth has kicked all the tourists out. The last of the shuttles departed to cheers and jeers.
It’s been almost three months and all of us are finally getting back normal. We’re told by our military folk there are alien battle cruisers on the way, an armada if you will. Fortunately for us the last decade or so of reverse engineering and just plain tech left has put us on an even footing with just about any other species in the galaxy. Maybe even ahead of a few.
All of this because we happen to be the defacto Pot-Poruri of scents for the galaxy. All I know is that all this really stin- no sucks. Yeah, all this really sucks.
by submission | May 29, 2025 | Story |
Author: K. Andrus
Where was the best place to murder someone and get away with it?
A question that had been fun to ponder, back when Albert had been at home accompanied by nobody else but a chilled glass of scotch, the comforting roar of a June snowstorm, and his most recent work-in-progress novel.
Yet here, stuck on Mars, Albert found himself seriously contemplating the question as he was yet again turned away from the captain’s quarters.
It would only be retribution, he rationalized. After all, Albert had to leave behind his mansion for a single bedroom apartment, his silk robes for an uncomfortable space suit, his employed help for an AI in his wall, and his favorite foods for pre-packaged rations. Truly, Albert was experiencing what could only amount to poverty. However, the biggest tragedy of all was the fact that there was not a drop of alcohol available.
Albert had made his complaint known, of course, but he had been told that such ‘frivolous’ comforts would have taken unnecessary space in the ship. And that to carry, ‘the most people possible,’ some sacrifices had to be made.
Bah! Surely one or two of the scientists scurrying around here could have been left behind? What sort of space resort had scientists, anyway? But when Albert had made such a logical suggestion for the next supply shipment, he had been told to skedaddle. Imbeciles!
Albert huffed to himself as he entered his hotel room. When he got back to Earth, he was going to cut spending on a few senators who had suggested the trip in the first place. Fire-smire, so what if almost all of America was currently burning? He could have flown to one of his many vacation homes and waited out the toxic smog instead. Surely, a trip to another planet had been an overreaction by their government.
Albert sighed and collapsed into his chair. He stretched out his legs and gazed at them sadly. With no ottoman to put his feet upon, his legs were left to sprawl pitifully in front of the coffee table.
“Martin, get me a cup of coffee,” Albert asked his room’s AI before he closed his eyes so he could pretend he was still in his California mansion.
Albert listened to the soft sounds of his door swishing open and the quiet footsteps of someone approaching, no doubt entering with his requested beverage. Surely, once he drank his coffee and was a little more awake, he could once again try to talk sense into the owner of this resort. A place without alcohol, bah, what a farce.
However, all plans went out the window when someone grabbed his neck and squeezed.
Albert’s eyes shot open, and he choked in surprise at the sight of a masked assailant standing over him. He scrambled to grab the man’s hands, doing his best to pull them off his neck, but the blinking light of a mechanical arm told him he was fighting a losing battle.
“Did you think you could run away?” A wicked smile, the gleam of yellowed teeth, and the acidic smell of smoke. “I won’t let you.”
As Albert’s vision began to darken, he was reminded of his earlier question. Where was the best place to murder someone and get away with it? Why, space of course. It was far enough away from society to easily avoid prosecution. Not to mention, such an oxygen-rich environment would be an arsonist’s wet dream. Why couldn’t Albert have thought of that sooner?
by submission | May 28, 2025 | Story |
Author: Majoki
Standing among some of the oldest living things on earth, Mourad Du, felt his age. Not just in years, but in possibilities lost. And, now, the impossibility he faced. Who could he tell? Would it even matter?
They would all be gone soon. Nothing he could do, we could do, would change that. Mourad breathed deep and continued up the trail to the Grizzly Giant one last time. There are about 500 mature giant sequoia trees in the Mariposa Grove near Yosemite’s south entrance and once a year Mourad visited them all, but only the Grizzly Giant spoke to him in a special way.
In an unbelievable way. An impossible way. It spoke. Not aloud, but clearly in his head: Mourad Du, Mourad Du, Mourad Du.
The Grizzly Giant spoke to him. To him, a destitute Algerian who’d emigrated to Oakland forty years ago. To him, who’d struggled to find his place and purpose in his new country. Until a friend had taken him to the Mariposa Grove in Sequoia National Park and he, the stranger in a strange land, finally felt welcomed and comforted by the immensity of life and mindfulness of time in these sequoias.
Mourad Du could conceive of no greater miracle, no greater proof of the majesty of the divine, than the Mariposa Grove. Mourad made a pilgrimage each year to the seemingly ageless sequoia wonders. Vigilant sentinels, ever watchful, ever present.
Until now.
Until the ecological balance tipped well beyond survival, and the Grizzly Giant told Mourad that his kind were leaving. Ancient beings akin to pure thought that existed on the fringes of quantum probability, migrating through the ethereal fibers of the metaverse, taking root in local, long-lived life.
They’d settled in the sequoias of the Mariposa Grove thousands of years ago and mused upon our planet. Appreciated the wonders of our world. Sensed our sentience and hoped for our longevity, to become as they.
But, we are we, Mourad Du lamented. Our stewardship of Earth found lacking, and they were leaving. Mourad Du was asked to bear witness. The Grizzly Giant gave a time.
There is nothing like a night under the sequoias. Mourad Du stood among the titans beneath the shimmering depths of the Milky Way. Before they launched, the Grizzly Giant assured him that all was not lost. The tree of life large and humanity young. We could still find a place.
Just as Mourad Du had.
