Author: Jeff Kennedy The first few days on a new starship are the worst. The gravity's turned up a skosh higher than you're used to. The hot, caffeinated, morning beverage (it’s never coffee) is mauve and smells like wet dog. The bathroom facilities don't quite fit your ...

Author: Bill Cox In the summer of 1950, at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in North America, physicist Enrico Fermi posed a simple but profound question to his colleagues – “Where is everyone?” If life was abundant in the universe and often gave rise to intelligence, ...

Author: Aubrey Williams The planet hangs as a dull pebble in sluggish orbit. They’ve moved on, the inhabitants, or perhaps they succumbed. We are unsure, there’s much to keep track of, and if it’s not a sanctioned or protected celestial body, there’s no reason to look ...

Author: Majoki On the endless rooftop of the fact-ory, they sat in the beat up armchairs amid a bristling forest of antennae and corrugated steel backlit by the godly effulgence of towers and tenements that defined the horizon. It was steamy hot though well past midnight. ...

Author: Steve Smith, Staff Writer Lewis got the assistant at a regifting exchange at the company Christmas party. He didn't turn it on until February when a snowstorm kept him working from home for a week. It had been opened before, the setup was already complete, but it ...

Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer In a dusty corridor away from busy areas of Area 702, two people with ill-fitting lab coats concealing their uniforms are huddled under a disconnected monitoring camera. One takes a hit on a vape stick. The other lights a cigar. “I heard ...

Author: Simon Read To: All staff RE: Causality Protocol De-prioritisation Null/null/null, 00:00 This communication serves as formal notice. Treisman Industries no longer operates under linear temporal constraints. All protocols reliant upon fixed sequencing have been ...

Author: Colin Jeffrey As the sentient slime mould squelched slowly across the asteroid it lived on, it found its mind - such as it was - occupied by a single thought: Ludwig van Beethoven. This was strange for several reasons, most obvious being that slime moulds are ...

Author: Naomi Klouda Snow fell on Alaska, and we celebrated. We swirled in a circle, tasting flakes of sky. “Kelp brew for everyone, even the children!” Jenna Ben shouted. How we celebrated! Three circles switched hands and partners aboard our oil platform’s broken ...

Author: Colin Jeffrey The newly-created Department of Temporal Dysfunction hummed with bureaucratic indifference as a voice called out across the waiting room: "Number forty-seven!" "That's you," the Seraphim sitting next to Quetzalcoatl said, pointing to his ticket. ...

Author: Kenny O'Donnell Touchdown. The ship rumbled. The landing gear drilled into the asteroid, anchoring his one-man yacht. The asteroid, only a kilometre long and half as wide, was too small to hold a ship without anchors. His joints popped as he floated from his chair ...

Author: Majoki When his son stepped through the privacy-field into his home office, Manfred began to disconnect. “You told me to come see you after I finished my homelearn session, Dad.” His son’s eyes narrowed disdainfully at the etherware bands his father removed from ...

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 ...

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 ...

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, ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...