The Fall of Acheron
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
The clouds are limned in blood. Carmichael said it was a trick of the light; I have to take it as a warning ignored.
We came to Acheron - actually Acheron IV, but as the rest were uninhabitable, we dropped the designator – to build a paradise. The ...
Creepy
Author : Beck Dacus
“Oh my God! I found life!”
Kenrin was kneeling on the ground, peering at something in the dust. As Ederford, Roana, Viccison and I walked over to him, he shifted position, suggesting that whatever he was looking at moved, and rapidly. He had found an ...
Desolation
Author : Indiana Fairhurst
Confused, I open my eyes, it’s blurry. I slowly become aware. The sound of the ocean becomes louder and louder.
“I’m alone. Where am I? Who am I?”
My dry throat causes my voice to come out raspy and harsh. I struggle to stand up. It’s apparent I’ve been ...
Paradox Lost
Author : Bob Newbell
"You're gone, aren't you, Pete?" I ask my beloved dog who now stares up at me without recognition. His breathing is fast and deep. There are flecks of blood around his mouth. I've been coughing up blood, too. So has every surviving member of the human race, I ...
Selfy
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
Detective Narda looked about the scene in horror. Some of the colours of blood on the walls and ceiling he didn’t have a name for. A couple weren’t even in his visible spectrum – his forensic scanner added them to his augmented vision as blue dots ...
Digestible
Author : Kristin Kirby
Monday, March 7:
Hi, loyal readers! Remember last week how I blogged about that guy in front of me at the salad bar who held the tongs hostage so long they developed Stockholm syndrome? Well, today he must have spent fifteen minutes arranging his cherry ...
Lights
Author : Farah Rahman
Intelligence on the ground was that insurgents from the Afghan border were hours away from seizing control of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal with the help of North Korea.
So NATO drops the bomb on Waziristan and Pyongyang.
Meanwhile, a woman gives birth in the ...
Quaratined by Loneliness
Author : Kate Runnels
Asker station orbited the now uninhabited planet of Asker II. Yun was the only one left on the station; the only one left in the system for all he knew. No one had responded to his distress signal, no one responded from below and the only craft were on the ...
The Handshake
Author : Hillary Lyon
Casey waited in line for more than two hours when the rain started. A soft, misty rain that chilled him to the bone; he tightly crossed his arms and shivered. Even if he caught a cold, attending this event would still be worth it. Maybe, he wondered, he'd get an ...
Pricy Vision
Author : Alfonso P. Posadas Jr.
"Here you go, hun." Byron McGrath placed the Prosthetic Sight head strap upon his daughter, Molly. It had taken over a year to acquire the necessary papers and signatures for both the hospital and insurance company to allow Molly to enter the ...
Markovian Parallax Designate
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
“Hello darkness my old friend –”
“Really? Nigh-on twenty years of this and you still think I’m your friend?”
“It was in reference to a song. As you only ever visit when everything else is dark, it seemed appropriate.”
“I know the bloody ...
Orbital Decay
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
Lewis unzipped the duffle bag on the table so the stacks of paper bills were visible.
"Space suits are expensive," Sweet had told him, "and you not bring back."
Sweet eyed the contents of the bag from a distance. "It's all there? I don't ...
A Party
Author : John Carroll
I wade deeper into the syrupy present as the drug saturates my blood. It is a hallucinogen. The deck party envelopes me like a parrot’s wings. The air becomes delicious. Through the interactive viewscreen of this observation deck that extends outward from our ...
The Engine Room
Author : Philip Berry
I placed the flat of my hand against the thick wall and felt the vibration of a hundred thousand pistons moving in synchrony. Pressing an ear, I heard the high hiss of gas igniting under pressure, expanding, driving the piston heads and collapsing into vacuums. ...
Bad For Business
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
Mark waited just inside the shadows of the alley. Outside, people bustled past with their heads down. Nobody made eye contact with passers-by. Lens readers and the urban legends about malware being zipped into your headware by opti-flash kept ...
The Print Shop
Author : Sallie Lau
I am listening to Ocean Acidification and the Prisoners of Omega when they come in.
It’s the 0.05 mark of this Mu-sec. Of course it’s them. Them and their perfectly-proportioned domains.
I doodle on a spare beta sheet, feigning indifference. But now they’re ...
Recruited
Author : John Carroll
I wondered if the pain in my ribs had woken me up, or if it was the sterile stench of the gelatin. It was probably a combination of both. The pirate standing in front of me noticed that I was awake. She didn’t look any older than 24 standard.
“Good morning,” ...
Ecophagy
Author : Bob Newbell
I'm running out of material, at least material that can be readily utilized. A year ago it was the waste heat generated by my own replication process that necessitated slowing down my expansion. Now, it's the geothermal gradient. On average, for every kilometer ...
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