Author: Leon Taylor Despite the sheets of cold rain, Barry hummed a cheery off-Broadway tune as he straightened his loud red tie. “Don’t forget your umbrella,” his wife said. “Won’t need it. Marty is picking me up.” “And don’t forget Family Night. Try to come home a ...

Author: S.R Malone None were allowed to upset the status quo. This was the point of the neuro-signalling headsets, to stem the tide of those whose thoughts proved too much for society. Were these dangerous folk? No, not always. In fact, they’re your regular Joes: ...

Author: Torion Oey The Future is Now. Dwight Crosby frowned, narrowing his eyes at the bold text that had appeared on his eyeglasses. Despite his conscious distaste for the clichéd ad, the text enlarged and filled his vision, an automatic process resulting from ...

Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer I’ve been a fool for many things, but she who survived the cyber-conversion with me has always been my only weakness. That was true even before we fought and bled alongside each other for six years. At first, we kept a distance. When we ...

Author: Joshua Daniels 10 Was how many years Jim and Sally were together before the Global Aeronautical Service called 'all intrepid adventurers willing to travel to the great unknown!' 9 Was how many astronauts were finally whittled down for the 'Voyage of a ...

Author: Richard Jordan The truth is you can’t tell much about a world from orbit. You can scan as much as you like, you can send out probes and even scouts – and we do all these things – but unless you set foot on the surface yourself, you can never really understand a ...

Author: Alzo David-West The day had been long and busy. I was on the Marsport Metro on my way home. The pilotless shuttle shook and rattled and made its usual stops. The time was late, and not many people were on board. At one of the stops, a woman of thirty-eight or ...

Author: John Albertson The doctor is sat trimming his nails with a scalpel when I float into the surgery. He glances up and grunts, nodding his head towards a bed covered in a white sheet. The entire surgery is white, sterile, except for one wall which is glass. And behind ...

Author: John Teets The gentle rumble of truck engines filled the museum backlot, accompanied by the soft crunch of gravel beneath tires, and the occasional rustling of pale, haphazard fields of grass in the wind. The warehouses and loading bays painted a dull light gray to ...

Author: Glenn Leung This happened so long ago, so I’ll understand if you doubt this story’s authenticity. Nevertheless, I swear on my honour, whatever that’s worth, that everything I’m about to describe, really happened. I don’t think I need to tell you about the ...

Author: Michael Anthony Dioguardi Only one man had ever landed on Pallas Palu—a meter-wide asteroid composed entirely of palladium. He was my former partner, Denton Fitzpatrick, and he’d been mining the Taurus cluster for decades. The asteroid wrangler snuck in without me ...

Author: Robert Beech My brain is dead. I should feel nothing. After all, the brain is the thing that thinks and feels, is it not? “Garbage in, garbage out,” that was the rule taught by the first computer programmers. So, with no input, there should be no output. I should ...

Author: Ilias Stroulias Ever since I was little, bad memories dragged me down like weights chained around my neck. I still recall vividly that time in English class when the teacher called me a monkey for messing around with my friends. The whole class laughed and all I ...

Author: Alzo David-West Dust whirled in a sunbeam. The early dawn was sapphire. A monomorph somewhere about seventeen, with gentle eyes and regrown arms, walked down a vernal glen. They saw two hares and three toddlers in the bordering woods. Branches of a birch wavered in ...

Author: Morrow Brady Time has no business in a cemetery. It stands by the gates, weeping at each new monolith. Within the pine casket, at the bottom of the open grave, the red chrome tendril pushed inside the corpse like a train entering a tunnel. Mechanical discs tore a ...

Author : Kathy Kachelries, Staff Writer Ollie McNeil used to be a person, or so the rumors said. He came to the glades when the glades could still grow grass, before the floating villages, when the mosquitoes were smaller than the shrimp and the shrimp were safe to eat. Not that ...

Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer Space, the never-ending frontier, the long night, the sea of stars. That last one should have given us a warning. Look what we did to the seas of Earth: filled them with our discards to the point where we nearly choked the planet. “Ping ...