Found

Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer The Man in Charge wears a transparent faceplate. The only muscles still present are the ones needed to move his eyes, eyelids, and jaw. The rest is just chalk-white bone under two inches of glossy, transparent resin. The irises of his ...

The Needs of the Few

Author : Patricia Stewart, Staff Writer Slowly, the door of my stasis chamber lifted up. Warm cabin air eddied in, rippling across the exposed hairs on my arms and legs. The tingling felt good. I had started this mission more than seventy years ago, a mere decade after the invention of ...

Priest Hole

Author : Morrow Brady It wasn't unusual that Captain Boscobel wanted the Priest Hole built on his flight deck. What was unique was that he wanted it directly connected to a portal. Portals offered instantaneous escape to a predetermined destination, but like most emerging technologies ...

Uptown

Author : Derrick Paulson “Uptown” When Principal Wallace came back from his mid-morning meeting his secretary informed him that a student had been sent to see him; but, when he opened the door to his office, he hadn't expect to find the sophomore girl kneeling on the carpet, her hands ...

Cavale

Author : Clint Wilson, Staff Writer The other twenty-nine prisoners of Asteroid Mine 119F stood around me in a tight circle, their faces besieged by both fear and anger. Henderson, almost sixty, yet fifteen kilos my better and as hard as the rock around us, screamed at me, spit ...

War is Hell

Author : J.D. Rice No one ever comes into manhood dreaming they'd one day go off to war. Sure, some boys sign up voluntarily, in peacetime and besides, with good notions like “defending one's country” and “promoting democracy.” But those are just words. No one ever really goes to war ...

The Inheritors

Author : Desmond Hussey, featured writer When the Quantum Drive was invented in 2023 the world was transformed; not all at once, mind you, but by degrees. Initially, it was just the career explorers who ventured into the vast and unknown regions of space in their state-of-the-art ...

The View From Here

Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer After the successes of breeding for telepaths and telekinetics, they moved on to the more esoteric strains. My mum and dad had the right genetic markers for rarest of them, precognition. So they joined the program and had two kids with everything ...

A. I. of the Beholder

Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer We should have given them feelings. It was decided in the beginning that to give Artificial Intelligences a baseline gamut of the twenty-seven identifiable human emotions would be a horrible mistake. Giving a robot the ability to love, to feel ...

Red Jizo

Author : James McGrath “One of us is going to have to make a move, y’know?” I did know, but that didn’t make it any easier. We’d been in a stalemate for three minutes; our pistols pointed at them and theirs at us. However, the advantage lay with them, as while the two damned ...

Broken Things

Author : Adrian Berg A man and his son stood together on a mound, surrounded by a vast field of garbage. They were ragged, the boy with wild, uncut hair and the man with a knotted beard. The setting sun painted the sky red above them as they sorted through the junk. The boy picked up ...

Game Changer

Author : Desmond Hussey, featured writer The troop ship hovers fifty feet above the drop zone under heavy fire from hostiles in the tree line. Low caliber bullets rattle harmlessly against the ship’s thick armor. I clip a rope into my belt carabineer, lean out the hatch and ...

Conscious Feedback

Author : Patricia Stewart, Staff Writer We first noticed it three days after we left the orbiting platform on our way to Mars. Initially, Tom and I thought it was just the years of extensive training. You know, you’re functioning so well as a team that you seem to know what ...

Suriel

Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer The problem with early FTL journeys was the failure rate. Just like the first elevators, the disappearances were hidden from the public to prevent the rejection of the innovation. It was the mid twenty-second century before better ...

It's The Little Things

Author : Clint Wilson, Staff Writer I sat there pondering my sorry lot in life, wondering aloud, in a slurry voice, as I sloshed my glass of merlot around, “Why have I befallen such, hic! …circumstances? I don’t deserve this, sniff! All I want to do is give Tommy a good ...

Pan-Galactic Travel Agency

Author : Desmond Hussey, featured writer “You the new guy?” A massive Velorian Lobster asks me, a clawed hand over his head mic as I stand in the doorway of the busy office. There’s a muffled squawking coming from his headphones. I catch the hawkish profile of an elderly ...

Intoki

Author : Helstrom “Do you like them?” The voice snapped me out of my concentration. Things reverberated in my head. I turned it right and saw nothing. “Who said that?” “I did.” My eyes pivoted down and found a small girl looking up at me. “Oh. Hello. What?” “Do you like ...

Time Cop

Author : Bob Newbell It seems like it was only yesterday when Neil Armstrong set foot on the Moon. From my perspective, of course, it literally was yesterday. July 20, 1969. But it shouldn't have happened then. It was April 18, 1966 when Alan Shepard, not Neil Armstrong, ...

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