The queue was massively long. Fridays were always the busiest. Everyone would clock off early so that they could get a decent night’s sleep. Garth was probably thirty people away from the check-in point and the building’s entrance. He checked his wa…

Author: Jae Miles, Staff Writer Where did your rock ‘n’ roll fable go, Ella May? Did it get lost way back amongst the evergreens, or did it get too close to the railroad tracks, and go under them drivin’ wheels? “Can I help you?” I remember when you…

Author: David C. Nutt The Bailiff stood and took a deep breath. Once he prided himself on being able to do his entire spiel in one breath. However, with the newest fad of rolling one’s last three past lives into one’s current name…well, breath frequ…

Author: Alex Z. Salinas I pressed my palm against the reinforced window in my bedroom. The glass felt cool, exactly like they felt in my previous life. The difference was that on the other side of this one, there was stretched before me an infinite …

Sean sighed as he leaned his head back against the tree. The good ones always left him with this amalgamation of thoughts and feelings, this clash of excitement and longing with the realization of routine and boredom. via Pocket

It made headlines. It was the talk of social media for a week which is, like, forever. No one knew who and that was cause for amazement too; since World Citizenship came online there simply weren’t any unknowns left. It was crazy! via Pocket

Rick saw the Universe in folds. He coded a program that could make anything in origami. You put in, say, a rhino, and it would make the plan, complete with lines for the folds, and when you were finished, it looked exactly like that rhino. Exactly. …

Author: David C. Nutt “How’d did your last trip go Vincent?” (Sigh) “Not good Director. We keep hitting the same walls. No matter what we do, nothing has an effect.” “Nothing?” “You heard it right chief, nothing.” “Maybe we should go for a larger ef…

Tapestries hang on the walls of a room where anatomical diagrams and scientific charts would have been, centuries ago. Two men stand reading a display that floats above the supine form on the chrome table at the centre of the room. via Pocket

‘So, what’s your star sign?’ Mary asked, and took a sip from her glass, she watched him closely over the rim. It was one of her stock questions on first dates. You could tell a lot about a man, depending on how he reacted. His actual star sign was i…

Two neutron stars, ten times the mass of the sun collided, unleashing a cataclysm—an explosive kilonova, whose massive gravitational waves undulated through the dark mantle of spacetime, forging in their course a planetary system composed of fifteen…

The disease passed quickly and no one was spared. First, it neutered the men. Women became infertile. Men atrophied and women thickened. Hair sloughed off and torsos turned flat. The two sexes equalized and thus division was lost. via Pocket

In the beginning, humanity looked to the stars, and saw gods. In their golden age, they went among the stars, as if they were gods. via Pocket

Miriam opened the door of the caravan-turned-time machine. Dry, hot air blew in. She shaded her eyes against the brightness. They had landed where they had planned: at the base of a range of hills, nothing around them but arid land that matched the …

The spokesman for the Nui, Jesús the Giant, considered me with a foreboding and weakly threatening glare. “I have negotiated successfully with races on twenty planets. I know you have something to tell me, Gloria.” via Pocket

Perhaps the most famous planet in the colonized Galaxy– aside from Earth, of course– Centauri B Prime may have the highest standard of living in the Milky Way. via Pocket

I make the coffee in the French press like I do every morning. Then, I regret it by the time I reach the City Freezing Works. A doubled edged elixir, the coffee rouses me from my bed and then inspires uninhibited vomiting by the time I reach downtow…

Red emergency lighting makes more shadows than seem possible. President Booker leans back from the table and looks sideways at the one shadow he knows. “Clarence Dimitri. via Pocket

From the couch, engineer Stanislaw Hast looked past the grey-suited, female psychiatrist and through the broad window. The star, a long dying sub-giant, threw a dusk of burnt ochre over the orbiting city, its rays painting the sunward face of tall b…

Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer “It’s a pure stroke of genius that I was able to downsize the stabilizer assembly in time for the conference.” Stuart fiddled with his bowtie with his free hand while piloting the sedan with the other. via Pocket

It emerges from whatever variety of nowhere that allowed it to traverse the vast distances between the worlds of the Beacon, and I know that it’s a Stranger. via Pocket

A software bug killed 64 people this month before it was discovered. The administrators have brought the system down and a patch is working its way through the emergency release process. via Pocket

Slumped in the alley, the woman repeated the name like a prayer, mostly forgotten long ago. No, that wasn’t it. Passersby ignored her: just another failed rebel unable to move on. via Pocket

It’s the lack of sleep that’s the worst. I can live with the brutal beatings, the agony of untreated broken bones, the drugs that fuck with your head, the insidious cold, the gnawing hunger, the burning thirst and the routine rape, but I would liter…

“He’s up. Turn it on,” someone says. The doctor. As I open my eyes, the whiteness hits. It’s like I’m having an idea, but it’s too much for my brain to hold. I squeeze my eyes shut and gasp, trying to… via Pocket

Author : Jae Miles, Staff Writer Doctor Jessup is terribly polite. We’re stirring our coffees before he asks his first question. “What started it?” I smile: “Why do they all add up to six?” “Pardon…

Author : Jae Miles, Staff Writer You had to fall into mine. Lord, but you are a sight for jaded eyes. Hair like liquid night, eyes a man could drown in, lips that form a bow Robin Hood would kill f…

We’re glaring at each other across a gap that is – as we have repeatedly tested – exactly nine metres wider than either of our best reaches. The ground for kilometres around us is nothing but churned mud and scoured rock. Not a leaf, not a lifeform.…

Lieutenant Tann wiped his fuzzy torso. Months in a Chrono-tube caused the growth of a downy hair that matted together on the backs of his legs and arse. The computer suggested both Lieutenant Tann and Major Spar rub themselves with oil before taking…

I took my shot and it landed true; a beam of light, passing briefly through the void and extinguished in a collapse of reality. Well, not exactly. There is no direction, or time, in the Manifold–only the roiling chaos of the quantum fields. I’ve wal…