Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer The sirens start to wail behind us. I hate this bit. “Time to do one!” Adey swings his backpack onto his shoulders as he starts running, dodging the spotlight of a hunting drones as he goes. Must be nice, being that fit. “Auntie Jin?” I look down at Little Em. […]

Author: Hillary Lyon “Hey, citizen!” A voice rasped from the shadowed alleyway. Bhodi glanced at the man but kept walking. “I said, hail citizen!” Bhodi stopped to look in the man’s direction. “Yeah, you,” the man rasped, waving Bhodi over. He approached the old man, assuming he wanted to sell him a contraband gadget. Grinning, […]

Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer “Have you decided, Jared?” Eagle. The disk spins high into the air in the low gravity, polished metal reflecting the light from the fires about him. Jared smiles. If he had the acuity of vision, he could probably distinguish the reflections from the spotlights of the waiting army. Watching from […]

Author: Majoki I fancy myself quite a reader. I mean, I read everything. Everything. Even “Know your 8-inch Howitzer” published in 1984 by the Department of the Army, Headquarters, US Army Armament, Munitions and Chemical Command. I’m not particular. I wasn’t programmed to be. I’m a brute force. Scraping and scooping up every bit of […]

Author: Cliff McNish Eventually, once we’d screwed up everything in the ecosystem, Naomi and I were the final ones left – the last man and woman on Earth. Unfortunately, we didn’t get on. We felt some vague responsibility to repopulate the world, but kept avoiding sex. We did it politely, but even so. ‘Mm, what […]

Author: Timons Esaias This would be a nice planet, if not for all these places where the seabottom is sticking up out of the worldocean. It is most unseemly and immature. We are trying to be generous about it, trying to convince ourselves that this planet is too young, that the worldocean will tear down […]

Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer The microwave is telling tales on me. I had an extra chocolate pudding I took from the restaurant. The family left and it was just sitting there unopened. So I took it. I’m recycling. But the bloody microwave scanned the barcode. I heard it: ‘mmmzzt’. It knows the pudding didn’t […]

Author: Jenny Abbott For Harold Culpepper, the concept of dying had, until now, seemed like a relatively abstract event—something everyone had to do at some point, but tried not to think about and avoided discussing in polite settings. But now, as he lay bleeding by the darkened roadside, he was forced to reassess things. Struggling […]

Author: Mark Renny When Time stopped it was harsh; a blurred still but dense and difficult to navigate. When it happened to Damien it was fleeting, only for seconds really, a few minutes at most and he simply stood still and closed his eyes and waited it out. They, the men and women in the […]

Author: Henry Peter Gribbin My name is Ben. I am a middle-aged schoolteacher from Pittsburgh. I am also a homeowner. I recently bought a house that sits on a busy street in a thriving community. The previous owners were an elderly couple who recently passed. The husband was a successful stockbroker who made his fortune […]

Author: Lynn Finger “How much to fix this glitch?” I said. “You can’t afford it,” he tossed back. We were suspended in our respective amplifications, parked in an enabled space elevator made from light. We were formed and holding in the black expanse, our talk focused by the radios in our helmets. I, waiting to […]

Author: Michael Edwards The Introduction. “He who knows, does not speak. He who speaks, does not know.” — Lao Tzu As for me, it may sound rather grand, but I am called a seventh degree master of The Mountain Pathway tai chi system: movement, mantra, and meditation. Since I cannot live forever, I have encoded […]

Author: Nisheé An enormous clear lake mirrored the cosmos. Water and sky danced in unison as the rhythm of the waves echoed from the sapphire mountain cliffs on the other side. A warm breeze blew through the rows of magenta palm trees that lined the white sand shore. An occasional beep from our trusty aqua-droid […]

Author: Tobias Hope Young The falling star landed about fifteen years back. Killed everything in a ten-mile radial. Science folks say it did this by changing the center of cavity in the area. Ya see cavity is the thing that keeps us from floating away, and the center of cavity is at the center of […]

Author: Ruhsen Dogan Nar “Here it comes, get ready!” shouted Mehmet from atop a heap of dirt dumped two nights ago. Ali’s high-pitched, adolescent voice echoed from the roof of a three-story building at the entrance of a shantytown adjacent to Izmir’s skyscrapers: “I’m ready, bring it on.” Ali, unusually tall for his age, carefully […]

Author: Mark Renney The ‘Visage Wipe’ was promoted as a grand project. The language the campaign used was both simplistic and pompous. It was claimed it would unite us and yet only those aged between fourteen and twenty-four were eligible. For anyone older, it had been decided it was too late and we couldn’t be […]

Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer Don gives Ted a grin, then turns back to the dishevelled man standing in front of them. “Tell me again.” Ted snickers quietly. “I liked the bit where she rode in on a dinosaur.” The man sighs. “Short version: we’ve been messing with time travel for too long. We’ve broken […]

Author: Majoki I plotted interplanetary trajectories with a buggy whip. I routed the whole of the Infonet with a dot-dot-dash-dot. I was the perfect blend of the new and old. And loony as a toon. They called me Quantum Annie. My processing schizophrenia can be traced to the great integer overflow of 2038. Becoming self […]

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 […]

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.

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 […]

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…

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 […]