Author: Jennifer Thomas Esteemed benefactors, honored guests: Thank you for attending today’s repatriation ceremony. We begin with our customary Planetary Acknowledgment. We gratefully recognize the communities on whose ancestral and unceded planet we gather today. We acknowledge the planetary dispossession and involuntary removals suffered by the inhabitants. While we have no intention of ceding the […]

Author: Igor Dyachishin Today may be the most important, and last, day of Anatoly Kravnikov’s life. When he was 25, Anatoly founded Kravnikov AI mostly using borrowed money but also some that he inherited from his mother – a stock market player with incredibly effective cognitive augmentations. Kravnikov’s enterprise turned out to be successful. As […]

Author : Patricia Stewart, Staff Writer To say that my head hurt, is to say Canis Majoris is just a big star. My probing hand felt a large knot on my forehead, and a substantial amount of warm sticky blood. Despite the pain, I managed to force open my eyes. The first thing I saw […]

Author: Aubrey Williams My job is a strange one, but it pays well, and only takes me a few hours, so I can’t complain. The company I work for— one of those powerful computer research firms, I won’t say which— has a very large office in the city. It’s the fourth-tallest skyscraper, a huge cage […]

Author: Jennifer Thomas “Friends of space, how are you all? Have you eaten yet? Come visit us if you have time.” —Greeting in Amoy, one of 55 languages on the “Golden Record” sent toward interstellar space on Voyager 2, 1977 CE [Transcript: Testimony of Android 32XX, International Academy of Sciences, March 9, 2072] Ladies and […]

Author: David Barber The machine followed the edge of a shallow methane lake, picking its way between ice boulders scattered like plump cushions along the shoreline. Because it was getting near to the recovery site, the machine decided to halt for a while to upload the backlog of weather data to the satellite link in […]

Author: Don Nigroni The Time Scope is a device that can detect knowledge about the past. This knowledge can then be converted into images and sounds by the Presenter, a special super-computer. Say you want to know who the murderer is. You could use the Time Scope to learn that the killer had dark wavy […]

Author: Bob Freeman You’re riding on a carousel. The horsey rises and falls as the carousel spins. Look! A brass ring! Grab it. Good for you! You’ve succeeded at the “grab the brass ring” level. There’s another carousel spinning counterclockwise, half-a meter above yours. Saying goodbye to your trusty steed, you step from your carousel […]

Author: Steve Smith, Staff Writer Jan could taste metal, and feel the pressure and heat outside the cockpit pressing in, the latter slowly baking him inside his flight suit while the former threatened to reduce him to a single dimensionless point in space-time. He’d done what he’d never imagined possible, pushed the limits of flesh […]

Author: Alastair Millar How hard could moving be? All I needed to do was mount the antigrav plates at the corners of my unit, then hook the place up to my hex bike and haul it off to its new location. Simple, right? Except Hygeia III seems to delight in making sure that nothing’s ever […]

Author: Majoki It’s peaceful now. I can concentrate better. Even reflect a little. It hasn’t been like that in a long time. Living in a city that’s eating itself is a noisy place. Even on the calmest days at the lab, there was always the sound of far off sirens. Plaintive calls, as if from […]