Continued from Part 1) The news the following morning was bad. An explosion in the middle of a market-square in Libya had been variously blamed upon a suicide-bomber and upon over-zealous security…

Doctor Spencer has brought me an artist. My eyes on the outside of the building register the identity of everyone who enters, including her: Suzanne Chantal Salinas, age 26…

The video stutters at the eighteen-second mark. Yakova knows by heart precisely when it happens. As she watches, she mouths the words along with Autumn. “So this girl just, like, opens up her bag…

Engineer’s meat wept and squirmed and wriggled inside her steel organ cavity, so different from the stable purr of gears and circuit boards. You couldn’t count on meat. It lulled you with its warmth…

Gab gripped her right wrist with her left hand at the small of her back. “Are we ready to order?” she asked. The couple set their menus down on the brushed steel tabletop. It wobbled slightly.

When he first approached me in the train station, I batted him away. I thought he was homeless. The weird, ellipsoidal neck tattoos creeping into view from his collar didn’t help. He persisted…

Sometimes, Narae can almost convince emself that the AI’s Voice was a dream. Some kind of minor stroke misremembered, a neurological glitch retroactively given recognizable shape.

I’d always known Calam would run. He had all the signs. A taut restlessness, body brittle as an overstretched lute string, when we stayed too long in one place. A gloom in his eyes…

Continued from Part 1) Jenna gave herself a few moments to seethe in silence before she spoke, to make sure her voice was calm. “I can’t move.” “Did you hear that?” Daron took a swig of his water…

This is a story about a bird. A bird, a ship, a machine, a woman—she was all these things, and none, but first and fundamentally a bird. It is also a story about a man—a gambler, a liar, and a cheat…

Rupert Weard leapt into the drawing room, escaping a hallway dense with impossibly angled, tentacular horrors trying to sell him insurance. “Ye gods, it’s bedlam out there,” he said.

Jaxon was not a connoisseur of art, but he could identify a work’s salient features. And the salient features of these particular works were that they were valuable, lacking any obvious security…

“Hey Marty,” Mom asks, “got a moment?” I cringe whenever Mom’s voice has that tone to it. I don’t know what she’s going to say; but if I’ve learned anything in my thirteen years on this desolate…

Trixie got out of her cherry-red godmobile and waved away the flitting cherubim waiting to bear her to her sedan chair. She wasn’t in the mood for a reverent chorus of hosannas, and the sedan chair…

Hitchhikers clung to Tasi’s pants as he neared the edge of the forest. He brushed them off while walking and looked ahead to the open field that showed through the final rows of trees.

Damn, the exoskeleton was hot. Two minutes strapped into the smart harness with its thick exospine and the oversized, carbon-fiber limbs that grew from it, and sweat pooled between Jenna’s shoulder…

I wake up to a message and a certain intuition that my first ad of the day will be for Bubble Fresh. I can almost see it, flashing through my MindzEye, just in time for me to grab a pack at the…