Parade of the Mute

Author : Ian Hill The dense battalion of grey-clothed workers strode through the militant capital, their stiff legs rising and falling in finely tuned unison. Their perfectly timed footsteps echoed around the dark square like gunshots, deafeningly loud compared to the enveloping ...

Angels

Author : Anthony Rove The night when Joey saw his first drop-off, dense grey fog hung over both sides of the Line. Across it, through the pea-soup clouds he saw the Liberator’s outline. Joey imagined that he could see Ben sitting upright in the driver’s seat with his noble stare locked ...

Speed of Lies

Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer Jams took the offramp still pressed flat against the fuel tank, arms outspread, hands clutching the handgrips with intent. The suspension fought to press the tires into the asphalt while mass and velocity tried to launch bike and rider into ...

Rove

Author : Anthony Tick-tock. Tick-tock. Look up on the cracked concrete wall. Do you see the slick digital screen chirping happily? It doesn’t need to tick. Clocks haven’t needed to tick for over two hundred years. But they used to. In long-forgotten analogue clocks, metallic guts would ...

Reality TV

Author : Willis Weatherford Omni leaned back in his bowl, rubbing his furrowed foreheads with a long, many-jointed leg. He gazed at the large screen and tried to squeeze inspiration from the last few rotations of his boring life as a writer. … Shent froze as the Permissors implanted in ...

Waves

Author : Nils Holst Many say space is a void, a looming blackness that extends to the end of forever. It is nothing but a great emptiness, a barren wasteland waiting to feel the touch of human expansion. It is the antithesis to everything humanity stands for. They are wrong. Space is ...

Pride

Author : Tony Taylor A klaxon blares again in Suda’s ear, dragging him toward consciousness. His groggy eyes strain open to find error messages flooding his helmet’s display. Replaced by fear, the fog of his mind begins to part. A distant scream snaps back into the foreground of his ...

The Dome

Author : Ian Hill They all gradually woke up, rising from the steely cradles to stagger to their feet and peer around in confusion. The mismatched assortment of befuddled people shuffled around the large circular room, taking in every detail of their surroundings while trying to find ...

Off the Menu

Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer “Yngtranzian Harvester incoming! Genghis Class - it’s huge!” Janice sounds terrified, but she’s new. She’ll get over it. Many pre-spacers compared the depths of space to the seas of Earth. Truly prophetic words. A wise man once said: “The ocean ...

Space Age Pilgrimage

Author : Jorge Mendoza The gash on her forearm stopped dripping thanks to the two ounce can of epithelial hemming gel she stored under the bathroom sink. Survival instincts simmered down as muscle memory seized control over the bandages being wrapped across the exposed flesh. There ...

The Doorway

Author : C. E. Page Silt rained over her as she crawled from her hiding place; a pocket of air in the pile of rubble that had been her habitation tower. Others, some familiar, were emerging from the crumpled buildings to bay at the sky and drag grey hands over their anguished faces. ...

Them

Author : Art Klein I know there are more of them than before. Why have they stayed so long and why have even more of them arrived? “What’s going through your head now, Jack?” I looked at Tom across the table in a bar we frequent, and realized that I had once again fallen into that ...

What I Wasn't

Author : Tony Bertauski It started with a flash. Like the Big Bang, an explosion that swallowed everything. The pain sunk deep into my head, and then was replaced with blurry colors. There were no edges to the blobs floating before a background of gray. The pinks and the browns and ...

Man vs Nature

Author : Desmond Hussey, Staff Writer I call it World War Bee. Perhaps not an apt label for what’s really going on, but it gets the buzz out. Sorry, bad joke. Levity is the only thing keeping me sane these days. In all fairness, the war wasn’t the bee’s fault, but it did start with ...

The Missing Element

Author : C.T. Jackman There was no flash of light. There was no puff of smoke. Such a waste of energy would have been unacceptable during the teleportation, and so Dr. Mueller was very happy to have missed the flower and its pot disappear when he blinked. His colleagues on the other ...

Who Wants to Live Forever?

Author : John Raymond Wilson My mother was hesitant because of the burden it would put on my wife and I. She didn’t want to be a bother. But she also didn’t want to die, so when she relented and asked us if we would take care of her while she was an infant, we were prepared. We knew ...

Infantem Gradus

Author : J.P. Flarity We were too busy planting flags and making speeches those first times our planet's inhabitants touched the moon. But eventually, hidden in the crevasses on Luna's dark side, we found it. The first Tablet. Made from a tungsten superalloy of impossible purity, it ...

Prometheus…?

Author : Mark Jacobsen In the middle of a dark, lightly wooded area, three figures can be seen moving against the black background of night. An older man is talking with a younger man. The older man is trying to start a fire by friction. There is a third man there, who remains ...

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