Author: Cara Yablonski The delivery was late. For the first time ever. Every season, the Towne received a shipment full of supplies. Necessities of life. A crate: the size of a modest house and filled to the metal-clad brim with sustenance. One that you could always count ...

Author: Gabrielle Elaine Thurman James sneezed, the corn maze’s pollinic miasma tickling his allergies. Shaking fingers pulled a tissue from his pocket. He dabbed his watery eyes, which searched the crowd at the labyrinth's entrance for anyone matching the app’s description ...

Author: Beverly V Head Sandrine was up early to begin work. She had put all the ingredients out the night before so that she could get started as soon as she got up. She had a long day ahead of her with teaching, errands after classes, and a late movie with her ...

Author: Katlina Sommerberg The grey tabby crouched low to the earth, her belly collecting dust. Duchess’s eyes tracked an iridescent gleam zipping across the sky. She wiggled in place: a final preparation before takeoff. *** Her human had adopted her from a shelter, ...

Author: Morrow Brady Stavros mooned the earth like the asshole he was. Jacob, the calm, perfunctory overseer AI, had never seen such a thing in its operational life but understood that showing one's personal point of evacuation to a whole planet, meant something emotional ...

Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer Drantill’s become a regular over the last year. His arrival times vary, but he’s always seated by 12:00. From then until 12:30 he watches the long lines of the digitised clockface on his phone move, saying nothing, barely breathing. ...

Author: Michael Anthony Dioguardi I’m getting too old for this shit. Suzie Zapach. Serial number 386D1286. She’s got the m-series processor and the defect: emotional evidence displays. Category: Lacrimal system malfunction. There’s been a lot of these since they started ...

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 ...