by submission | Sep 6, 2025 | Story |
Author: Alexander Paige
“Christ! Will somebody please go and get Stalin out of that damn Colosseum before one of the lions eats him?”
Pete might as well have been shouting at the ceiling fan. As he looked up from his array of screens and scanned searching eyes around the open-plan office, it was immediately clear that none of the fast response teams were available, and casting his desperation leftward turned up nothing but the empty desk which confirmed sweet, reliable Judy was still off sick. He cursed quietly. Just another day of chaos at the Department of Timeline Preservation. The cliché was well-worn but comforting.
He looked back at his screen, winced, and thumbed in an order for a full clean-up job.
“Hey, Pete.” Simonne was leaning back in her swivel-chair, phone in hand, and had turned her head to shout across at him.
“Yes?”
“I’ve got the New York Times on the line. They’re bringing out a story about all the slaves we’ve re-enslaved. They want to know if we’d like to comment.”
“For the love of God. Just give them the same statement we gave on their piece about us stealing those sandwiches from Ukrainians during the Holodomor. ‘We act according to our mandate as dictated under the law passed by Congress, moral justifications for alterations to the timeline are not within our purview.’ ”
“Got it.”
“That’s the second article attacking us on that this week. I tell you, if those vultures don’t let up, I will personally go back and pay a very smashy visit to Gutenberg’s workshop.”
Simonne gave a quick smile of sympathy and then swivelled back, already talking fluidly into the phone as she did so. Pete tried to return attention back to his monitors but couldn’t regain focus. Bloody press. It was always the same, and when it wasn’t moral grandstanding, it was endless picking over their faults — Yet more failures at the DTP, Unforgivable sloppiness as iPhone image found on Sumerian tablet, Hagia Sofia believed forever lost in religious superposition, Museum director suicide rate skyrockets — disaster after disaster, hardly a single mention of all the successes, yet not one mistake could go without comment, and all that was to say nothing of those wretched think pieces parroting lobby group talking points about how it was ‘high time that preservation of the timeline be privatised.’ Well if those clowns in Congress would just fund us properly then maybe we could—
“Oh Christ! Not again.”
“What is it, Pete?”
“Oh nothing.” He allowed himself a long self-pitying sigh. “Someone’s managed to get through our defences; we need another baby Hitler.”
by submission | Sep 5, 2025 | Story |
Author: David Dumouriez
Daniel opened his eyes and blinked. At first, he thought that this was the answer to the great mystery, and he didn’t know whether to feel disappointed at the sheer mundanity of it or simply relieved that he’d turned off the unbearable noise in his head. Then he began to reconsider. That flickering light and those grimy walls were very much of the living, as was the slightly-too-bright smile that was lowering itself over him.
“Daniel, my name is George Simmers. Welcome back!”
“But I thought-”
“Yes, you thought …” Simmers raised his jagged eyebrows. “… But it didn’t happen.”
“I wanted … I wanted it to be over.”
Simmers nodded, not without sympathy. “I know. But did you? Did you really? … Look, there’s another way. It doesn’t have to be so radical.”
Daniel looked away from Simmers’ smooth face for the first time and noticed that he was wearing a light blue windowpane suit rather than a white coat. A consultant maybe.
“Take a look.” Simmers presented Daniel with a rather large, seemingly leather-bound volume.
“What’s this?”
“Oh, that’s the menu.”
“The …?”
“The menu.”
While Daniel read, Simmers disappeared into a corner of the room. After ten minutes Daniel’s eyes relocated him. “So it’s saying that you can just … take a break from it all?”
“Exactly.”
“For as long as you want?”
“Well, yes. The minimum is one year. But if you have the funds, there’s no limit!”
“Would my mind still be working?”
“Of course.”
“And dreaming?”
Simmers thought about it. “No. No, you wouldn’t be aware of anything.” His voice seemed to echo around the room. “You just make your choice. Then we monitor you and wake you up at the appointed time. Couldn’t be easier as far as you’re concerned.”
Daniel studied the menu again, then pronounced: “I’ll take 75.”
by submission | Sep 4, 2025 | Story |
Author: Alastair Millar
“They can’t do this!”, fumed the Officer Commanding. The arrival of the memo from Staff HQ had interrupted the usual morning routine of carefully reviewing the battlefield monitoring reports. It was always better to form an independent judgement about what they meant, and now it would be necessary to start over.
“I’m afraid they can, comrade field commander,” said the deferential adjutant who’d had the joy of bringing the message to the OC’s attention, retreating into neutral formality.
“But the training camps have been sending us plenty of troops. New defensive and ground assault units have being arriving daily. There are clearly no holdups in the system of getting them to the front.”
“I am aware, comrade field commander. We’ve actually been receiving slightly more than our requested allotments.”
“So then why on Earth are we suddenly being fobbed off with flesh and blood combatants at such a critical stage in the campaign?”
“The Ministry Thinker responsible seems to feel that their inherent instability could turn the tide, comrade field commander. Intel suggests that the enemy AI has come to expect logical countermoves to its offensives at both the theatre and local levels. Human unpredictability might fox it completely.”
“Please tell me that they’re at least enhanced.”
“I’m afraid not, comrade field commander; all available cyborg and enhanced troops have been moved to the southern front for urban combat roles that require greater target discernment.”
“Well that’s a crying shame.”
“I hear what you’re saying, comrade field commander.”
“Still, the officers will be artificial people, I suppose.”
“Unfortunately not, comrade field commander.”
“They… Alright, I will not over-react. But you know my view. There’s nothing wrong with human soldiers in a pinch; on a good day they can even achieve as much as real troops. But they need to be led by robot officers.”
“I respect your opinion, and share it, comrade field commander. But the other issue is apparently that we simply don’t have enough officers coming through. The leadership brainset facility took a direct hit from a bunker-buster kamikaze drone last week, and the Planning Mainframe says it will take at least another week to bring it back online.”
“A week! We could be pushed back along the whole line by then!”
“There’s nothing we can do, comrade field commander.”
“Look, you know as well as I do that human officers can’t do the job. They can’t process all the battlefield situation data fast enough to make good decisions.”
“I know, comrade field commander. And HQ shares your concerns. But for the next two weeks or more, we simply have no choice. Supply was only just keeping up with attrition rates as it was.”
The OC let silence stand in for further comment. The objections and justifications were now on record, come what may. Orders were orders, and whether they disagreed with them or not, it was not just duty, but the officers’ very nature, that would ensure they were carried out–whatever the casualty rates incurred.
They turned their metallic faces to the monitors, plugged themselves in to the sensor arrays, and got on with the business of planning destruction.
by submission | Sep 3, 2025 | Story |
Author: Rick Tobin
Professor Gerard faced his second warning message from HR with a controlled fury. Decades of honors and accolades meant nothing after he refused to bend his knee to the anvil will of a new science department director. Now past fifty, he was ridiculed by younger, hungry astronomers who called him addled and unstable, despite the facts backing his hypothesis.
His cell phone rang—the call was from the Caracas lab.
“Doctor Gerard?”
“Yes.”
“This is Pablo Gutierrez. Your hunch was right. All my colleagues were baffled that Oumuamua had no gaseous signature like a proper comet. Its tail had no water, carbon dioxide, or methane. You know the tests. I pulled up the old spectrograms. There it was: nitrous oxide. What led you to that? What does it mean?”
“Pablo, I’m not sure, and I won’t offer a guess at this point. I found the same trace gases from 31/Atlas, especially after it took that unexpected turn and approached Titan around Saturn, as well as a close contact with Venus and Earth. There it was, again, nitrous oxide.”
“What would cause such a release?”
“NASA specialists told me it is theoretically possible that a perfect rocket engine could expel that as waste, but no such technology exists. Odd, isn’t it? It would have to use free nitrogen gas, which is one of the rarest chemical compounds found naturally in the known universe. Maybe these odd visitors were searching for that resource. It’s a wild idea, I know.”
“Surely. And what do your American colleagues say?”
“I have serious detractors. One of my past competitors for a Nobel calls me a laughing gas comet guru, fixated on fantasy. I thought my years of research merited serious consideration, but influential forces threatened my tenure here—science be dammed.”
“Good luck. I’m sorry I can’t do more. Did you hear about the new huge interstellar object they discovered yesterday? If it’s real, something serious is brewing based on its proposed trajectory.”
“No, Pablo. I missed it. Doesn’t matter to me now. I’m packing up my office and submitting my retirement papers. There’s no place left for me in my field.”
Gerard abandoned his treasured post as a broken man, while a new cosmic interloper approached the solar system, but this time the object was larger than Africa. Alarm bells rang for months from the media, offices of world leaders, and self-elected experts. Fringe elements went unhinged. ARIS 35W approached with what seemed a designed path, putting it both near Earth and then Titan. Myths from ages later, passed among scattered human tribes, described a powerful god that visited Earth, stealing part of the air, leading to environmental disaster and destruction of lost civilizations. All of this collapsed after an alien culture captured three percent of the planet’s free nitrogen gas for its engines without regard for life on Earth or the impacts on Titan. where free nitrogen was plentiful and completely stripped away. For the visitor, it was merely a stop for fuel on its march through the stars.
by submission | Sep 2, 2025 | Story |
Author: Majoki
“Farther? We’re at the ass end of the system!”
“Farther.”
Galihl slapped the navigation console. “Why? What’s the point? There’s no gateway beyond. We risk getting stranded between galaxies.”
“Farther.”
Being a seasoned pilot, Galihl could see that shipcrafter Verstaay was fixated on the destination and not the route and so pivoted to a safer path. “If that is your intention, then perhaps we should return to the gateway to resupply before entering uncharted space.”
“The only supply I see we are lacking is courage.”
“How about common sense? Seems you’re running dangerously low on that at the moment.”
Verstaay smiled. “That’s why you’re the only pilot for this journey, Galihl. You have no fear of me.”
“Please. You are a tyrant. An altruistic one. The very worst kind.”
“So none of this surprises you.”
“It always does.”
“And, yet…” Verstaay let the following silence say everything.
Galihl turned and worked at the navigation console for a time before turning back. “You are the greatest shipcrafter of the era. You have opened the entire galaxy. You have nothing to prove. Nothing to regret.
And yet it is always the same command: Farther.”
Verstaay nodded.
“Will I ever understand this need to go farther and farther and farther?”
“I think you must have when you first signed on to pilot my flagship. Its mission has never changed and the goal has always been spelled out as clear as day right in front of you.”
“Spelled out where?”
“Right on the hull.”
Galihl frowned.
“Where else would a ship christened The Wild Blue be going?” Verstaay asked before humming a very ancient tune.
by Julian Miles | Sep 1, 2025 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
Someone scorched words into the blacktop of this car park. Don’t know what all of them mean, don’t know what they used, but it went deep and left the surfaces glassy.
Cease, ye chariots
End thy noxious vapours
Quiet thy steely clamour
Still the wheels at last.
Cease! Ye chariots
Let cracks claim thy ways
For blooms to rise anew.
Cease, ye rolling cages
Release us all
To live.
My Da told me about them, as his Ma told him. Nobody knows when the words were cut. Elda Harold says it was during the oil wars, when great armies fought to save the us from the same things that powered them. Biddy Mac says it was written by a witch as a curse upon the chariots, but Da says she’s a witch too, and is just talking up her myth.
Sylvan says it musta been near the end, because thems what owned this place would’ve had the letters filled in, which makes sense to me.
“Danny, can we go? I’m bored.”
“Hush you, Mikey. Danny’s thinking.”
I grin at Mike and Annie.
“Not long now. Just wait.”
They go back to playful bickering. I look about. This place is huge. So big I can’t see our planting beds and water traps from here. Scurry Jo says there are two other groups settled around the edges of this place, and the remains of a fourth camp at the northernmost end. She worries about what made them quit. I think if it was a pack, we would’ve been attacked by now.
Da says the packs are dying out. They turn on each other too much. Bo Blades agrees, and he should know – he used to run with one before it froze out two winters back.
Winter is the worst time. This all started in winter, the really bad one, back when dead great-great-great-grandma was a kid. There were winter storms like never before or since, the sun threw something big at us – I still don’t understand that. It set off or woke up – I’m not clear about that, either – Supremp, which was something really bad that lived in lots of places in the sky. Sorta like a pack gone rogue up there?
Anyway, all of that made things down here change. Come to think about it, must’ve happened soon after these words got cut. Now there’s a thing. Maybe Biddy and her curse ain’t too far off after all.
“What’s that?”
I look up. It’s right on sundown, and the thing Mike is pointing at is what I brought them to see. Just the once, because there ain’t nothing like a first time.
Against the darkening sky above, something flickers. Closer to us than the clouds, but high off the ground, the flickers become shaking black and white blocks. Then, with a grey flash, it appears. Mike screams. Annie gasps.
Great round ears atop a big-eyed head, with baggy pants held up over a pot belly by chequered braces. Skinny legs fade from view before showing feet or reaching the ground. Struck me as menacing first time I saw it. Still does. There are coloured flashes circling it’s waist. Ma said those used to be words, but they done wore out. I’m not so sure.
Moments later, it fades away until next year.
“Why was that?”
I look down at Annie.
“We’ll never know. Not to worry, because it doesn’t matter anymore.”
Mike pulls on my trouser leg.
“Don’t like rat in the sky. We go now.”
Thinking about chariots and rats, I take the kids home.
