NanoCop
Author : Morrow Brady
I sensed the click of my empty handgun moments before I heard it, while impact shrapnel, ricocheting across the upturned chassis of my downed cruiser sang out cries of retreat.
With the soft belly of vulnerability in the air, I made my exit from the ...
Hummingbird
Author : José A Harkhan
He flew that night. His dreams flooded with visions of ecstasy. The blue of that river. The black of those eyes.
They hove into the light of day that shone through the Pleasure-Dome’s glass shell. Like white-cloaked wraiths. Fixated. Forgotten legions in a ...
Emotion
Author : Henry Peter Gribbin
Most of us have been home alone late at night when we heard a strange noise coming from downstairs. Clutching a baseball bat or a golf club we proceeded slowly down the steps, all senses on alert. Finding nothing we felt a sense of relief and headed back ...
Mechanical Gentleman
Author : Mike Corrao
“Come one, come all. See the beautiful intricacy that is my friend right here,” The salesman slid to the side of the stage, moving as one with the curtain behind him. On the old wood floor stood two metal feet, in shoes like hooves. They held up a man who was not ...
The Voider
Author : Rollin T. Gentry
Dr. Morris turned away and tapped a few times on the holopad projected from the bracelet on his left wrist.
"Well, Ensign Peters, one thing's for sure. You are not turning invisible, or into a ghost, or whatever it was you called it."
Jared ...
Hollow
Author : Sam Larson
You couldn’t even call it rain, this weather. Just an insistent, pissing drizzle that creeps its way into your collar and your shoes so that, suddenly, you’re soaking wet. That jingle from the infonets keeps running through my head, “You’ll never get wet when you’ve ...
Test 31B
Author : Rollin T Gentry
I opened my eyes and had no recollection of how I came to be sitting at that table with three complete strangers.
The room was divided into quadrants by a force field with one man occupying a slice of the round, steel table. Behind each man was a closed ...
Zeigarnik
Author : Rick Tobin
“Low fuel before Jupiter station. Why stop for a wasteland?” Christa Arnold monitored guidance system readings, adjusting orbital programming for Saturn’s crusty moon, Hyperion.
“History, Christa. Your head’s so full of formulas you forget about humanity ...
The Muon Man
Author : Morrow Brady
The drone found the selenium immediately. It streamed me the augmented view of the apartment block, slowly peeled away to reveal awry silver tendrils cascading from roof to foundations.
Momentarily puzzled, I queried Spengler - my client's AI monitor.
"Selenium ...
To Err is Human
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
“You have to let them think you make mistakes sometimes,” said Urok the Inquisitor. “That’s the key to getting along with the biological sentients.”
“A mistake?” queried Darkem the Questioning.
“Yes. I suppose you could refer to it as acting on ...
Trollbridge
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
“Why are we here, Excellency?”
“My daughter’s xenoarchaeology exam.”
“Pardon?”
Most Excellent Draug turned to Flag Officer Nang with a smile: “She wrote an award-winning piece on ‘The Assimilation of Miracle-Class Technology as Legendary ...
POV
Author : Brian Zager
We dance, you and I, pirouetting to the primordial bellow of the World’s Fourfold.
We’re not really all that different, our lives in revolution against the world as it appears to us, perceived at a distance, in an effort to interpret the overflow of ...
Betwixt and Betwain
Author : Rick Tobin
Black slime and brown muck sucked cracked leather on his unkempt boots. He inhaled riverbank patent odors by Cairo woodlands, where the Mississippi and Ohio converge in a sordid affair of upstream debris and human waste. Maps fluttered in his head from Horace ...
Spooky Action At A Distance
Author : Gray Blix
A scientist, a priest, and a doctor walk into a bar. Sounds like the setup for a lame joke, huh? But no, it's the beginning of a story about the end of the world. Or, I fear, not a story at all, but the actual end of the world. The truth is, I often cannot tell the ...
The Waitress
Author : Davey Guardado
A city full of people and my favourite is that waitress.
"Will that be all for you sir?" She says, because she knows theres a reason why I'm paying with paper money.
I nod, handing her a crumpled five that she pulls away from my hand in disgust. She doesn't ...
City in the Sky
Author : Kate Runnels
Torque gazed down at the clouds scudding past below in a breeze she couldn’t feel. She sat at the edge of a rusting support beam. The beam, one of many that needed repairs, helped hold up the roof of her father’s Mechanic shop.
The constant thrum of the engines ...
Goodbye
Author : Bob Newbell
The infinitesimal point that had been the universe bounded out and stars and galaxies returned to their proper places in the cosmos as I defolded back into normal space. I steered toward the small world orbiting the red giant star. From a distance, the planet ...
Nina
Author : S. Tyrel Murray
Darius looked out through his living room window, and noticed the diminutive, glittering metallic object in the grass. It wasn't there fifteen minutes prior, when he had finished mowing his lawn. His inquisitive nature proved to be too much, and he bounded ...
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