Author: Michael Walton How do the stars feel, you ask? You are right to inquire of one of us – we are the ones who know, after all. You little bags of carbon and water, who can't even see most of the light that we emit, have no idea how we feel. How do the stars feel? We ...

Author: Olivia Black, Staff Writer It’s 4 am and Leed’s alarm doesn’t go off for another hour. It feels like she’s barely closed her eyes and the socket at her temple is hot and achey from overuse. There’s no use trying to force more sleep, she knows from experience that ...

Author: Rick Tobin “Don’t feel threatened, Melissa.” A squat, balding officer faced off a bewildered woman in a beekeeper’s outfit, shackled to an interrogation desk. “Threatened? Your armed thugs dragged me inside for just crawling ten feet over your fence. What the ...

Author: Alzo David-West In the age before Adam, somewhere between the branching of hominina from panina, there was a small tribe that found a tree. They were a shortish nation of forty—large browed, flat faced, wide nosed, and slate skinned—with three infants and five ...

Author: Morrow Brady The darkness enveloped me once again. I felt it veil my thoughts like it always did. Nothing ever prepares you for the rancid thought streams that ooze out during the shredding. My only solace was to lock myself away, so the dark core memories could ...

Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer Two figures stand on the observation deck of the patrol ship ‘Camelot’. The taller of the two points at an object silhouetted against the planet. “That has got to be the ugliest spaceship I’ve ever seen.” “It’s not a spaceship,” replies ...

Author: Paul Warmerdam Melissa never dreamed. Or at least, she had no memories of dreams. She shuddered at the thought of being trapped in your own mind like that. She imagined a consciousness grieving its purpose, resorting to stumbling around in its own recesses, feeding ...

Author: Ken Poyner This is randomization night. Some nights it is the classy brunette with gentle elastic curves and an alluring fragile shyness. Others it is the bold blonde with an opulence of everything, leaning at the line of overdone. Yet for others, it is the ...

Author: Andrew Bird Al’s circuits approximated an aching sensation as the drop pod struggled upwards through the soupy atmosphere of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot. The automatic extinguisher had failed to suppress the electrical fire in Number Three engine. He was still locked ...

Author: Morrow Brady "This, is a bad pistachio" The deep southern drawl echoed against the dirty concrete walls. The voice metallic, buzzing from an aging squat robot with Investigator MkII painted in fading piss-yellow across its torso. Scraping sounded as it panned its ...

Author: Kate Lu Perched on a hard chair, Vivian stared at a sharp-lined logo on the opposite wall: The Murphy Corporation Clinic for Genetic Testing. The blue of the font looked almost black in the otherwise all-white room. Vivian felt like a stain. She didn’t realize she ...

Author: Glenn J Hill “Poachers. Ugh, I hate poachers.”, I muttered under my breath. Since way before I came along, my family’s ranch has been beset by poachers. The property is way outside normal populated areas, and it takes a long time to get here. Nobody accidentally ...

Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer Wish I’d been braver. I knock. Nineteen. Kim opens her door. Eighteen. “Pete? Are you crying?” Seventeen. “I’ve always loved you.” Sixteen. “I love you, too.” Fifteen. Now she’s crying. Fourteen. Wish we had ...

Author: Dave Williams When the warnings blasted on radios and TVs and cellphone texts, Sasha called Tony and their frantic voices collided. “Is this real”—“Do what we planned”—“I’ll come get you”—“Get in the bunker”—“It’ll be faster if I get you”—“Stick to the ...

Author: Glenn Leung The two of us stared at each other for a tense second of silence. My face was reflected in his eyes, which were also my eyes. We both scratched our chin and were startled by the discordant mirror image. He was wearing a navy blue polo-tee, I was in my ...

Author: Paul Warmerdam I navigate the metropolis ruins with compromised optics. The ash storm has yet to break. A whole continent of organic life has been reduced to dust and now seeks to penetrate my circuitry. I maintain a marginally acceptable survival rate in these ...

Author: David Barber Wu was already waiting outside the offworlder craft at dawn. He’d glimpsed it by chance, drifting like thistledown across the Plains of Gold, and had set out at once. “I hear your kind buys history,” he said to the offworlder. “Yang has found a prize ...

Author: Michael Hopkins The root scurried across the garden and stopped. I had just dug and chopped it free from the ground, ripped it up with my bare hands, and threw it to the side. I was clearing some new space behind the old barn for potatoes, garlic, onions and other ...