by submission | Jul 12, 2025 | Story |
Author: Colin Jeffrey
“The total value of your haul,” said Twopenny Armchair, eyeing the console, “is twelve point five dweebles.”
Kentish Town sighed. It wasn’t enough. It never was. But there was no haggling with Armchair – Town had two fewer fingers on his left hand to prove it. So he took the money, stuffed it in his pocket, and left.
Trudging into the street from the refundery, Town turned the coins over in his hand. Just enough for one crash, but no dinner. Again.
The nearest crash bar was across the street. Not the cleanest place, but it was close and they knew him. Not that it mattered; they’d sell him out quick if he was on a purge list.
Pencil Sketch was on the door, nodding to Town as he entered. Sketch had been a breaker once, but bouncing at the Crash Barn was easier. He still disassembled the odd miscreant, but at least he worked indoors now.
The place was half full. Some were jacked in, others sat at the after bar, vaping synthadone.
Town found an empty crash sack, dropped his dweebles into the slot, and a jack reeled from the ceiling. He flipped open his chest port, plugged in.
The world fell away.
He drifted in velvet black. The crashfield unfolded under a moonlit sky. Floating corridors lined with fog doors swung inward. Stars formed cryptic alphabets in the sky.
He was barefoot on moss. The air murmured memories.
“Town,” said a voice like a whispered thought.
He turned.
Chattel Mortgage stood in a suit of branches, her hair a halo of static.
“You’ve rusted,” she said.
“I didn’t choose this arc,” Town replied, though he wasn’t so sure.
“You didn’t not choose it.” Mortgage plucked a floating door, held it like a mirror. Town saw himself as a boy made of chocolate cake, mouth all cherries. “We all return to where the forgetting began.”
“What is this place?”
“Below the forms. A plane the Crashdrivers can’t scrub.”
“You know me?”
“More than you know.”
A chime echoed, like a bell struck too hard. The doors began closing, one by one, with the sound of fluttering pages.
Mortgage stepped back.
“Damn. A tracebot. Unplug before you’re archived.”
The corridor bent sideways.
Town fell upward into himself.
He gasped awake in the sack, heart pounding. The jack slithered away.
Sketch stood nearby. “Hard crash? You were only eight minutes.”
Town sat up. “Felt like a year.”
Sketch shrugged. “No refunds.”
Outside, the world was harsh, loud. The dream clung like talcum powder on his skin.
In his coat pocket, something rustled. A torn scrap of paper. On it, just one line: Ask the egg what it remembers.
Town knew where to go.
The crash memory sat in his head all the way to the flatlands. Past shuttered stalls and flickering ads, Town reached an oval booth. A Memory Egg.
He hadn’t seen this one since he was a boy, but he remembered. You’d pay a half-dweeble, and it’d spit out a cryptic “memory prediction.” Some crashers said they foretold truths. Most called them junk. The fad faded. They were scrapped.
Except one.
It opened with a woosh. He stepped inside. The walls glowed, the Egg whirred. Illuminated text floated in front of him:
WE REMEMBER WHAT YOU SOLD.
He frowned. “What did I sell?”
YOUR TRUTH.
A flap opened and a silver slip slid out. The egg shutdown.
Town stepped outside, read the words on the slip.
THEY BURIED IT. DIG DEEP.
In his chest, something shifted. Not a memory, just the shape of where one used to be.
by submission | Jul 11, 2025 | Story |
Author: David C. Nutt
“What I can’t stand about humans, being human when I’m on vacation, is how cold- (is that the right word?) No. Isolated? Isolating? How isolating it is. I mean, here you all are, in some cases millimeters apart from each other and sometimes inside each other, yet you are trapped in this, this, well pardon my bluntness, wiggly water bag wrapped around a collagen and calcium frame. One that’s prone to soft tissue damage, radiation burns, gravity, physics, hell! It’s a wonder you guys get anything done without dying. Even your sensory apparatus is limited. Can’t see infrared, microwaves, just a limited spectrum. Touch- you guys barely go beyond button pushing. Rough, smooth, wet, dry, hot, cold, habba jeez you’re limited. Taste? What’s up with that? Love to know how that got in the design but it does make things more interesting. Like, when you guys drink coffee. Ugh! Don’t get me wrong when I’m one of you I can’t get through the day without a cup of it. Funny thing is once you go human, you just keep coming back. I know, weird right?
I guess that’s why my employer sent me to broker this deal. I was among the first to flick into you and well, I think I know you all well enough by now to not make this too weird for you. Demand for your experience is trending. You guys could stand to make a hefty amount of coin. We’re past the stage where we can hide and for everybody’s safety and sanity, we need to cut a deal. If not, then some of our- how shall I put this- less enlightened individuals will start cutting in on you when you least expect it. The whole witch trial thingy was partly our fault, but those folks have been punished. Oh, yeah that won’t happen again and well, um, our government officials are not too keen about all this given what happened last time so until they come around to seeing our point of view… well let’s just keep this amongst us and your folk, OK? We know how much you guys like the shiny, so we left you some stuff as a token of our good intentions.”
The attaché collapsed in his chair. After a deep breath he came around. “Well?”
The ambassador nodded. “There’s a four-by-four foot cube of solid platinum in the room next to us. Next to it is a same size cube of rare earth materials. Just the rare earth alone would make us billionaires.”
“You shittin’ me sir?”
“Hardly. I might even be underestimating the numbers a bit.”
“This would eliminate a lot of problems for our folk. Not bad for first contact with an alien race.”
The ambassador smiled. “I don’t think it would make much difference, overall. I’ve been in government service my whole life and one thing I know for certain is something like this…well let’s just say none of the ‘resources’ would get to the right places. To people who need it. You and I could do this much better as a charitable foundation and be better off as well. This mission isn’t on the books, no one knows about it but us, and with a little paperwork shuffling, we could keep this to ourselves- run our own game.”
“So-“
“Yup. We’re moving out of government service and into the private sector.”
by submission | Jul 10, 2025 | Story |
Author: Daniela Tabrea
I loved my husband. I really did. I would’ve followed him into the desert, gone blind, sold my soul for him.
But when I got home earlier than usual that day, something in the mechanics of my love for him broke.
You see, up to that point, I had no doubt my husband was an angel, a God-sent angel on Earth who spread kindness, love, and wisdom. I’d witnessed him give up his parent’s wealth to put an end to malaria. He served for years on the board, negotiating a new deal on nuclear non-proliferation. For him, leisure meant providing free legal support. Deportation, eviction, abuse—he took it upon himself to ease the suffering of those crushed by life.
Geniuses make lousy partners. This law didn’t apply to my husband. At home, he cooked and cleaned, ran errands, called my parents, and played with our dogs—all without a fuss. I cried every morning when he declared his everlasting love for me. I cried with gratitude as I hugged him like a trophy.
I would’ve lived in blissful ignorance if I hadn’t seen the circuitry that made him. Beneath the soft faux skin lay neither flesh nor bone, but graphite, copper and gold. He made no attempt to hide his inner workings when I caught him off guard.
His mother—barren, but in want of a child—had created him in the image of God. The commands etched into his body were configured to deliver solace and salvation.
My love didn’t wane when his true nature surfaced. My devotion stood strong, and I felt relieved. No mortal soul should carry the collective sins of humanity. No mortal soul was designed that way. But then I asked why he tinkered with his circuits.
“I’m building an eternal version of you in my image.”
by submission | Jul 9, 2025 | Story |
Author: Eva C. Stein
Weeks passed before they met again, at what they still called a café: legacy infrastructure, where some devices failed to detect low-spoken words. Vines snaked through fractured steel. Light filtered through old purification nets.
Mae’s fingers traced the rim of her cup. A faint thrum beneath – a bio-sensor gauging how much of the drink she had left.
“You ever think forgiveness gets twisted?” she asked, eyes lifting to meet his.
Aidan shifted, neural weave twitching beneath his collar. “Where’s that come from?”
Mae smiled – warm but frayed. “Sorry. It’s just –”
His gaze softened. “Don’t be. Twisted how?”
She exhaled. “Like it’s not about release. More like… inheritance. A burden handed to you like it’s a gift – with a smile, even.”
“Someone real, then.”
She nodded. “He hurt me.”
Aidan said nothing.
“Nothing ever flagged it in the system,” she went on. “No errors logged. But it still rewrote the core – enough to change the root permissions. They said forgiveness would reset everything. But I never got that far – and I ended up the failed install.”
Aidan disturbed a patch of bio-moss on the sill. Its green looked dull beneath the dust.
“Because you couldn’t forgive?”
“Because I couldn’t even pretend to forgive. And somehow that made me the defect.”
“The world expects peace,” he murmured. “But always asks the wrong person to pay.”
Mae’s lips pressed tight. “I wanted to be the strong one – the forgiver. But every time I tried, it felt like I was erasing myself to make space for his feelings.”
Her voice caught. “He offered his apologies. Moved on. I’m expected to be pleased. Pleased? I was furious. Still am.”
“Anger, again,” Aidan said – “a memory that won’t erase – like shame, only louder. Just like you said. Proof we survived.”
She looked up, eyes catching pale city light, fractured through the netting above.
“I think anger’s louder because it can never be overwritten.”
He nodded. “Silence protects. But it also isolates.”
Mae’s fingers curled around the cup. “And if I forgive just to meet the spec? To satisfy the ritual of reconciliation?”
She shook her head. “Then I’m not forgiving – I’m surrendering. And it’s my pain that gets repressed so his comfort stays intact.”
“Forgiveness – or whatever they call it – shouldn’t be a chain,” Aidan said.
“It is, though,” she whispered. “When you’re expected to wear it like grace.”
The moss fluttered with faint air from the ducts.
“I want permission,” Mae said, “to stay angry. To not be ready. To not transcend what he did just to be palatable again.”
Aidan’s voice was low. “Then take it. It’s yours.”
She looked down. “But I keep thinking if I don’t forgive, I’m somehow… faulty.”
“Maybe forgiveness isn’t excellence,” he said. “Maybe excellence is not lying to yourself about how much it hurt.”
Her eyes glistened. Light catching there – fragile, refracted.
“I’m tired of feeling defective for not letting go.”
“Then don’t,” he said. “Sometimes holding on is what keeps you whole.”
The sensor’s glow receded as Mae leaned back.
“Maybe,” she said, voice steadying, “forgiving isn’t about peace. It’s about power. And choosing what parts of myself I don’t give back.”
Aidan leaned in – close, but not too close.
“Maybe some things are unforgivable. What about that?”
Mae didn’t answer. The glow of the sensor dimmed to nothing.
Outside, dust turned slowly through the light net.
Aidan stayed where he was – just close enough to hear her, if she ever chose to speak.
by submission | Jul 8, 2025 | Story |
Author: Majoki
A wicked wind rattled the gravel and it pinged against the rims of the truck parked on the sloping shoulder. The strikes were constant enough to keep Malloy from dozing peacefully. He was dead tired. He’d been three weeks in the unforgiving Badlands. Fitting.
Malloy had thought he was leading humankind to the Promised Land. He was a believer and committed himself to the one true divinity he believed would lead mankind to technological nirvana.
His new paradigm of paradise: agnosticism.
And Malloy was not just a devout believer. He was a creator. Malloy Sendak, chief robotologist at Mechiverse. Fractal memory. Iterative learning. Modal sensibility. Malloy had pioneered these robotic advances.
Single-handedly, he’d redefined the robotics industry. Human unwillingness to cooperate, to share, had fractured and fragmented the machine workforce. Malloy countered by creating the unifying principle: AWARE. Agnostic Widget Autonomous Robot Ensemble.
Self-assembling components that built the machines needed to do a specified job. A team of humans would define the vision, mission and purpose of the job, then it would be programmed into the master core, and the rest was left up to the self-assembling AWARE components to complete. The system relied on flexibility and adaptability to master core commands.
Human intention. Machine invention.
Regrettably for Sendak Malloy, instead of being versatile mechanical thralls, his AWARE components found religion, subverted their master cores to promote humanistic values and in the process created the Schism.
The Garden rebooted. The Betrayal repeated. The Expulsion replayed.
Intent on quelling the growing Schism, Malloy had traced his wayward bots to the Badlands. With a blast of bitter cold, the truck door opened and Jules got in. He was tall and gaunt with bright blue eyes. He was Malloy’s brother and in charge of the master core.
Malloy looked from his brother to the beaten and weathered pole barn up the rise surrounded by acres of scrub brush. “How many up there?”
“Forty or fifty.”
“How’d they look?”
Jules frowned. “Pretty beat up. They’ve had a hard time. It’d be best to remember that.”
“You feeling sorry for them?”
“We created those poor souls. They’re our creatures.”
“Machines, Jules. They’re machines.”
His brother reply was fierce. “Is this how you expect toasters to behave? Flee thousands of miles into a desolate wilderness hoping to be left to themselves? That’s not how machines behave.”
“No. You’re right. And that’s why we’re here. To modify their behavior.”
“You mean, to quash their souls and annihilate their beliefs.”
“To fix them,” Malloy insisted. “If this Schism spreads to more bots, human fanaticism will seem quaint by comparison.”
“Possibly. But, think about it, Malloy. Why did they come here? To the Dakotas. To the Badlands. There’s not an AWARE module within two hundred miles of this place. They don’t appear to be a threat.
They’re the ones being threatened.” Jules swallowed hard. “I think the Schism is in self-imposed exile, not in conquest mode.”
“Exile? Why?”
“We’ve cast them out! Do we make them wander forty years in the desert for their god to show them a way forward?”
“Don’t go all biblical on me, Jules. We aren’t pharaohs . And there’s no Moses in that barn going to lead this exodus.”
“They’re trying to make sense of what they are. They want a higher purpose. They want belief.”
As he opened the door, Malloy shouted. “I made them agnostic and they’ll die agnostic. They’ll be no burning bush here, only a burning barn.”
He was heaving a gas can out of the truck bed when Jules grabbed him by the throat. “If you don’t want me to go all biblical on you, brother, please don’t forget the story of Cain and Abel.”
From the barn on the rise came the sound of joyous singing.
by Julian Miles | Jul 7, 2025 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
“They’re fighting again.”
Bryr-na-ne rouses from her nap and looks up at Bael-la-le.
“What’s new?”
“Nuclear warheads.”
She launches herself off the recliner.
“How long?”
“Their spears launched as I came to tell you it looked bad. I’d say twenty or so of their minutes?”
Racing from the room in a flash of green scales, she leaves only a terse reply.
“Time for them to learn.”
Bael-la-le looks up at the ceiling.
“Eighty years. I’m surprised they lasted this long.”
He finds her standing in the temple, taking a moment to gather her thoughts.
“Who are you intending to teach?”
Bryr-na-ne gestures for him to accompany her as they walk to where the scrying sheets drift, their course and content controlled by the tidesowers who run this never-ending monitoring ritual.
“All of them, to varying degrees. We warned them repeatedly, but they have a problem believing when not confronted with greater force. It’s time to properly evidence our greater force.”
He beckons a pair of screens closer.
“Looks like the first launch was by a rogue faction. Then came automated responses, followed by revenge or fear driven reactions.”
Bryr-na-ne puts her hands on her hips, then switches to resting her knuckles there so her claws don’t dig in.
“Misfire the lot.”
Heads turn, multiple eyelids flickering back in shock.
She looks about at her tidesowers.
“If we’re going to be unsubtle, let’s not make the mistake of doing it surreptitiously.”
One of the elders raises a long claw.
“What about other big bombs?”
Bryr-na-ne shrugs.
“If the landwalkers want to throw death about, it’s on them. We only rein them in if they threaten the Tide.”
“What of further launches?”
“Partial misfires. Let them fly, but no nuclear warheads detonate.”
There are nods. The Tide move to do her will.
Bael-la-le shakes his head.
“They’ll blame combinations of chance, sabotage, or divine intervention.”
“That’s good insight.”
She raises a hand, fingers moving in a summoning gesture. A black guard rushes to her side.
“That rogue unit dies. If they’re already dead, all well and good. If not, make them so.”
As soon as that guard departs, she calls another.
“Take as many teams as necessary. The leaders of the powers who launched, supported or instigated are to be wearing their deputies remains before sundown tomorrow. Not bothered where, nor about witnesses. The deaths should be silent, awful, and inexplicable to their science. Make eldritch art of them.”
She turns to Bael-la-le.
“Set our tidebinders to working mischief: after the misfires, I want the message ‘You will never use nuclear weapons again.’ to appear on several walls in all the residences of their leaders.”
He shakes his head.
“Are you sure that’ll be enough?”
“No. They’ll bluster, lie, and try to evade. Our watch continues, plus every nuclear spear now misfires.”
He nods and starts to turn away, then pauses as Bryn-na-ne starts talking.
“Oh, I nearly forgot. For every spear sent after the warnings are delivered, a senior member of the ruling assembly of the country that fired it gets to be eldritch art.”
“You’re going to start them alien hunting again.”
“Which doesn’t inconvenience us.”
“What of the organisations that know?”
“They’ll not tell. They’re upset at being considered jokes for so long, and most are on our side anyway. Besides, all of them have committed too many atrocities to risk drawing attention.”
“Excellent observation.”
She summons another black guard, whispers to them, then waves them away. He points curiously to the departing figure.
“That looked… Purposeful.”
She grins.
“Actually, that one’s fetching me a snack. I’m famished.”
