Author: A. R. Waking up to a blaring alarm while in a war is nothing out of the ordinary; for Atlas, it happens daily, or a couple of times a month. He would have never thought today would be any different. ​ Stationed on a planet controlled by the Terrestrian Coalition, ...

Author: D.P. Reitman Energy can neither be created nor destroyed, only transformed. The sun is a local manifestation of this law, its energy traveling a modest 93 million miles to feed the trees of this world. Meanwhile, 27,000 light-years away, Sagittarius A* churns, ...

Author: Majoki At 16,400 feet on the Chajnantor plateau high in the Atacama Desert in central Chile, Sabyll fell off her saddle when the light finally went, the muted sun expiring. Darkness should’ve prevailed. She was prepared for that—the immensity of emptiness. But it ...

Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer “There’s a devil on ma shoulder It’s doin’ real good fer me It’s not about breakin’ any rules It’s all about keepin’ free…” Greaseman Don’s on form today: dirty overalls attracting flies, red cap on backwards, boot stomping time on ...

Author: H. Young The monastery was often quiet at shadow-time. There was something about the darkness that inspired a meditative silence among the monks of the Godhead. The giant metal beast that lurked in the sky cast its massive shadow down upon the earth beneath, bathing ...

Author: Logan S. Ryan They landed and attacked faster than we could name them. They flattened armies like moist clay. They didn’t swarm the skies with high-tech ships or storm our streets with laser rifles. Our extermination wasn’t cinematic at all. They just rolled over ...

Author: Emma Atkins There was a snail on the wall: a little circle of brown marring the white cladding, innocuous enough that security hadn’t removed it and repainted the entire block. Inside, they were making the future, showing it off like Sammie had his science-project ...

Author: Katherine Sanger She reflected on “The Metamorphosis” and discovered that she was jealous of Gregor Samsa. Sure, he woke up and found himself a giant cockroach, and that sucked for him. But she’d fallen asleep watching a made-for-TV-movie on the couch and woken up ...

Author: Em S1: The overhead lights flickered; irritation surged through his systems at each pulse. Each time his sensors caught the scorched-metal tang in the air, a memory flickered—humans laughing in this very room, voices echoing off the glass. He looked around at ...

Author: Majoki While the xenologists, Cherinet and Litskovic, had gone on ahead, the survey team exogeologists, Vinnu and Samaan, hunkered down in their autopods battered by one of the unpredictable cyclostorms that made collecting samples and readings challenging. Coms ...

Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer The spires on the distance give an illusion of peace. It’s only when you get closer you can see they’re gutted frames sticking up like headstones. We used to call the city Heltarvon. It was the trading capital of Briss, the biggest ...

Author: Amanda Todisco Klaudia slit a perfectly straight line down the belly of a frog and cut the skin away from the muscle. She found comfort in the solitude afforded by the lab, the quiet precision of scissors, forceps, organs an ode to the recluse. It'd been 387 days ...

Author: Shinya Kato I click. The system thinks. Between shifts at the hospital, I sit at a terminal with my hand resting on the mouse. Faces pass behind me—colleagues, patients, families—and lately they look unfamiliar, like another species of ape that has misplaced ...

Author: Hillary Lyon After three lonely weeks of bountiful mining in the shadow of the Red Cliffs, Tyros packed up his tools and trekked into town. First he’d visit Akadian Assayers to get his reward in hard earned credits, then he’d hit Bossman’s Saloon and Travel Agency ...

Author: Ayden Vojnic At 02:14, the lights in Ward D dimmed by a fraction. Not enough for alarm, only enough to suggest that somewhere else, power had become more necessary. Klementina looked up from the bed. The child was breathing in short, frightened pulls, each inhale ...

Author: Jonathan Sauzier “A rabbit met its end in the jaws of a wolf dog only months ago in this winter barren, by this tree,” Shyla said, pointing. “Is that so?” I asked. She was eager, and, like always, I was already mesmerized. “Yes, right there, right there at the ...

Author: Kewei Chen On that planet, memory was not confined to a single organ. It existed as distributed biochemical patterns within neural tissue, transferable between minds. Death no longer erased experience; memories could be preserved, copied, and integrated. Yet ...

Author: Majoki Scientists in the early 19th Century were distasteful number crunchers. Human abaci of little worth or note. They should have remained so. What of numbers? What of measurement? Metrics only make us more necessary beings. Why run the numbers when you can ...