via FREE Fiction / Raindrop.io https://raindrop.io “Don’t act rash. It’s a small glitch. The error log’s sent and the patch fix will be here soon” Her voice now a car crash, teetering on the edge of conviction. Slumped in the kitchen drawer, I rose, wrestled despair from my hairy eyelids, then caugh… The Bad Patch | 365tomorrows via Instapaper https://ift.tt/2FZJBHT

via FREE Fiction / Raindrop.io https://raindrop.io It’s not easy being a psychopath. I’ve never felt a connection, and I’ve always been curious about what would happen if I did certain things to people or animals. via Pocket

via FREE Fiction / Raindrop.io https://raindrop.io The fan on the ceiling turns slowly, another kitsch feature of this fake colonial era hospital. I do not know when hospitals started to compete for trade, but the ‘healing ambience’ vogue has been out of control – and good taste – for a while. via P… Dark Chambers of My Heart | 365tomorrows via Instapaper https://ift.tt/2JHEmi0

via FREE Fiction / Raindrop.io https://raindrop.io Summer 2039, Tokyo: Goats read the evening news on TV. Goats? Yes! Take it, or leave it! Not goats, Sam! Kamala had once corrected me. I had been silent then. via Pocket Goats in my Family | 365tomorrows via Instapaper https://ift.tt/2OhQmuS

via FREE Fiction / Raindrop.io https://raindrop.io Distant stars blinked over Buguma island in the lower southern delta of West Africa. Sea waves turned, crickets droned, and guinea fowl warbled. I was on a forest path, walking to my village, looking over my shoulder, for I could hear something lurk…

Author: Brooks C. Mendell Day jobbers think offices clean themselves. They show up in the morning at their desks, put down their gourmet coffee on coasters their kids made, flick the mouse and check the Inbox without wondering who swept the floors o…

Beneath a stark winter hue that washes but never cleans a young woman lays naked, the cold winds filthy besom scratching as it dusts her with crystals that flurry as ash. The upward gaze that meets it is as vacant as it is piercing. via Pocket

A Devil’s Trade | 365tomorrows via Instapaper https://ift.tt/2PX4o1t

The Zeppelidrone hovered soundlessly outside the window blinking its countdown, indicating less than twenty minutes to make our decision to sign the contract. via Pocket

“London is ours! Zero-ing in on infamy!” announced Haggard Elsson, winking to the air steward and striding purposefully from the First Class exit from BA0171 with his Executive Assistant Freya trailing him, awkwardly wheeling both of their suitcases…

Her fingers are young but they feel wrapped in the heft of ancient mountains as she writes. Her nails are blotched with ink but she remembers the taste of the paint, that which she mined from beneath their tips as she thought with the edge of her te…

Bg’lkk Ut’rk had found the blue jewel with its eccentric inhabitants and decided he wouldn’t make contact. via Pocket

Author : Q. B. Fox Simon looked up from what he was doing, and even in the dim light of the rack mounted servers I recognise the pinched expression. via Pocket

Marshal was a photographer, an anachronist and a killer. Before we met, he hadn’t bothered to iCap any of the women he had finished with: he used an old camera, the print kind. That’s a throwaway fact- an affectation- for someone who isn’t a killer.…

We dash around a long curve that should get us out of their sights for a while. “In all those old films we watched, fighting the evil empire involved a lot less running away from angry warriors with frighteningly accurate weapons. via Pocket

In all my days on Gulliver’s Rest, I never believed that the War would reach us. From the window, I see the sky is pitted with scars from the wreckage of an Artari Sunskipper, ripped from history in a series of blinding flashes. I came to this plane…

The manual had been totally inadequate. For a start the Chinglish translation was hopelessly out of date, there were archaic digiverbs in it that must have been superseded at least three authorisations ago. via Pocket

The metal clasps dug into my arms as they strapped me to the chair. I spat on one of the guards and called into question the loyalty of his wife. He raised his hand to strike but the other guard stopped him with a simple movement of the eyes. via Po…

I regain consciousness in a small hut made from sweet-smelling grass and blue sticks. A male garbed in the same type of grass stands over me. When he notices my eyes are open, he looks away and begins clicking and whistling. I ask about my crewmates…

Rebecca set her fork down. “Be honest with me. How is work going? I mean, really.” He sighed, shoulders rolling forward. “It’s bad. Real bad.” Damn, she hated to see that look in his eyes. She reached across the table and snaked her fingers through …

The box sat upon the table. It was inanimate, but strange waves of light moved across its surface and Roman felt a tingle in the back of his head like the beginning of a headache. via Pocket

I rested my eyes upon the tessellated sphere. It was such a beautiful dream. It was such a spectacular failure. If the world is a golf ball, then I’m the one who drove it straight into the bottom of the lake. My club? A thing so simple, so deadly, s…

Perhaps it would have been better, somehow, if this had been sample #142 or #96 or #305, something innocuous and meaningless but no, it was sample number one, the first, and he already wanted to taste it. via Pocket

My grandmother is five hundred and ninety-two years old. Left to her own devices and the pitiless march of time this wonderful woman, who is actually my many times great grandmother, would have slipped away and into the finality of whatever the fuck…

“I give this gift to the people of tomorrow. On the precipice of this great twilight I take comfort in knowing that as our ports run dry and our rails rust the people of the world will always have access to the materials needed to shape the world ar…

The thing I just saw dead on the road is huge. It’s not human. I’m glad of that. via Pocket

On a far balcony, people are starting to panic. A crystal goblet flashes rainbow reflections as it tumbles, the hand that held it snatched backwards so quickly the goblet falls straight down. The holder was my target: now more a thing of art and geo…

Author: Hari Navarro, Staff Writer “Will there be zombies?”, she asks and I shake my head no and we weave around the discarded limbs and the stalled cars and sodden newspapers with pages that no longer flick and away from this city of rot. via Pocket

Clarke peered mesmerised through the tiny pod’s porthole at the forested planet, verdant, moist and fertile stretching to the horizon. He smiled, doubting it could save his soul, but it was certainly rescuing his mood. via Pocket

It was a clear Tuesday in May at the Eden Garden Center when a new universe commenced between the petunias and marigolds, just left of the snapdragons. Initially the size of a speck, it was easily mistaken for atmospheric sparkle. via Pocket