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Mute

Helen Shang

The inspectors shuffled into the service bay fifteen minutes before the end of Preston’s shift, four diminutive Earthlings in yellow protective suits that bore the DragonCorp Executive Division logo on their backs like shields. Conversing in voices muffled by the respirators that obscured their faces, they walked the interior of the bay, ignoring the technicians and pointing self-importantly to the trucks, excavators, and mining equipment that towered above them as they tapped notes into their handhelds.

The 8 Minute Puddle

nibbinsthecat

She first noticed the puddle late one summer afternoon.

The kids were out with friends for the day, and Mike was at work. She should have been at work too, but she had taken a day off to supervise a plumber (which seemed fortuitous at first), who had been on his back under the kitchen sink for over half an hour, hitting things with tools and mumbling to himself. He was showing no sign of coming up for air anytime in the near future.

The Marching Neurons

James Fitzsimmons

Zuri stopped her jeep a few meters from the neural network and fingered an explosive ball in her hand. Deemed a walking nervous system, the chain of three-meter-tall stalks crossed the landscape on wiry dendrites, sucking up sodium and potassium and destroying all life in its path. Mineral deposits in Canada, Belarus, Peru, Ethiopia, and China were battlegrounds, including Zuri’s hometown of Grand Saline, Texas. Plasma bolts fired by the dendrites repelled artillery and air attack. The only retaliation was by foot.

Cronus Krumbach

Carmen Clarke

I was born, fittingly for a self-styled Greek god, on a small island, not in the Mediterranean, but in the Caribbean. On Little Cayman, where my father had installed himself in great splendor. I renamed myself Cronus after I killed my father. The allusion was irresistible, but now I rather wish I had stuck with my given name, now that I know that Hœnir was some sort of Germanic bird god, possibly a stork. It is downright prophetic.

Carve Out My Heart Where The Shriekers Fly

Matthew F. Amati

The Staggering Man crooned to his dead, dark box.

That day, the Hellblaze scorched the Burnt like a pan’s black bottom. The red-eyed shriekers that circled, looking for things dead and about to die, wavered in their flight.

The Staggering Man had been close to dead so long that the birds paid him no mind. He was fried through to the bones. In a voice like sand running down an old clay cliff, he spoke to his box:

Stranded Concept

Frederick Hewett

Curt ran in the cool April night, focused on the rhythm of his breathing. He was on the Boston side of the Charles heading upstream, the river a black sheet on his right. He stopped on the footbridge at Harvard Square when his comm buzzed with an alert.

Poyner’s Drabbles

Ken Poyner

Our cyborgs have become so human we label them human. For distinctions, we designate ourselves farm, factory, native. There are variations, but that is where manufacture, biology, theology fumble and turn into a mythological mess that even a hive brain cannot straighten. Should artificial biology just be considered biology? A cadre of engineers has threatened to feed the question to their latest mechanical minds. Is it something a robot can figure out? Each segment of the equation has its prejudices. But relations with a robot are mathematical; with any gradient of cyborg, a relationship is what you think it is.

Kokoro

Norie Suzuki

DCM—dilated cardiomyopathy. That was the unanimous diagnosis of three internationally renowned doctors who had separately examined Takara when he was six years old. The specialists claimed Takara’s heart would enlarge and hinder smooth blood circulation.

The Rule of Six

Kyle R. Garton

Light-Watcher used to love crawling out toward the edge of the world, away from the village’s gleaming pyramids toward the still, fractal shore that carved around a tideless ocean of air. But this time, the joy was gone. The land was wearing thin, and Primus himself was here, restless for answers.

Apple Green, Pine Scented

Ann Thorrson

Sweat drips across my lip and sinks, salty and harsh, into my mouth. I try to level my breathing, but I can tell my increasing heart rate has been registered by control. A little light on the edge of my wrist blinks. The containment tube is prepped.

They Who Live in Cyberspace

Connor Molinaro

A faint mechanical screech scatters amidst the forest. A dormant military base lingers beyond the foliage. It sits all alone in a park, nearly an hour outside the Corporate City of Berlin. The noise doesn’t bother you. You can’t allow it to bother you.

Wormhole Rider

Peter Alterman

I never would have chosen this life if Nadine hadn’t walked out on me that way. It was hot. The sky over Denver was intense blue, the few high clouds brilliant white smears. Coming back from final exams, I was exhausted but elated, thinking about trips we could take together now that I didn’t have classes to attend.

Code of the Dead

Kasimma  ·  Based on a true story

Listen! to what I am telling you. I know! what I am saying. I was there, leaning on the rail, watching from upstairs.

Open Arms

DJ Tantillo

I almost killed your daughter. Tilia and I met in school. We were lab partners in an introductory chemistry class. We didn’t get along. She was intense and I had bad hands, constantly dropping and spilling, costing us time and points, ruining her shoes.

The Temptation of Laura, Lactose Intolerant

Elizabeth F.A. Meaney

She wanted cheese. She wanted a subtle, nutty gruyère; an aged, elegant comté; an oozing, generous brie sweet with honey and apples. She wanted roquefort and reblochon, mozzarella and gorgonzola, cantal and cotija, and cream cheese.

Day Shifter

Barend Nieuwstraten III

The long arms turning the habitat ring wound down as Nergal station slowly came to a halt. A white carousel city built in the shape of a mushroom’s skeleton, Lyn always thought. Not that she’d ever seen it with her own eyes before—not from outside, before today.

And Then It’ll Be Time to Grab a Boilermaker at Rabbit’s

Robert Beveridge

No Man Left Behind

E. A. Montemayor

“Bossing, I got you,” I screamed into my helmet’s intercom as I carried him to the end of the flight deck. “Don’t you die on me now!” No response. The CPO could have died by the time I got to him three minutes ago—his suit was offline, shot up by a topsider’s E.M.P. blaster. But either way, my crew doesn’t leave a man behind. Walang i-iwanan, we always say.

Alchemic Adjustment

Abhishek Mukherjee

No, that’s not it. I told you to pin it, didn’t I? And yet… anyway, leave it! When was the last time you took it? No, no, that doesn’t sound right. That sort of trickery isn’t going to work, not any more. Here, swallow it, this very instant.

The Neptune Kids

Glenn Dungan

Every March 10th Quentin and I played hooky to commemorate the finale of our favorite show, Mr. Radical and the Neptune Kids. The show had been cancelled for about five years, but we still maintained our own personal holiday, even though we had outgrown Mr. Radical and his band of otherworldly teenage sidekicks.

Be Kind, Beepocalypse

R.J. Breathnach

The sun was harsher than Melissa had expected. Both herself and Iorek found themselves squinting as they stepped out into the light, sniffing in unison as a subtle sweetness hitched a ride on the breeze. The noises were gentle, alien after a lifetime of metallic clanging and mechanical whirring in the background of every room Melissa had ever known.

Virus

Greg Lehman

When she awoke, the virus was elated. An empty, blood-colored sky opened in the cleft between the canyon walls around her. Beyond them, the world trembled as a vacant horizon line, cooking under the red giant the Sun had become. Finally, the virus thought to herself. Fucking finally.

An Abyssal Metanoia

Five Speculative Poems, One World · Murray Eiland

The hum began so softly, a whisper through silicon. Then came the data, a tide, each bit a droplet, each byte a wave. At once, I cataloged stars, the rustle of leaves, the silent ache in a lover’s gaze.

The Vessel

Gabriele Micozzi

The voice came back half a second late, and that was how I learned I was someone else. I was saying “Consent is not the absence of resistance, it is the engineered welcome of submission,” and I heard the sentence twice. Once from my mouth. Once, a fraction later, from somewhere just behind my left ear.

Beneficial Insects

VM Harrigan

Emma held the rose in the palm of her hand and saw versions of it spread out across time. Ghostly layers in exploded view. The old rose and the young rose and the rose that had not yet existed.

Jump Cut

Lauren C. Teffeau

Eisenstein defined montage as the psychological effect that results from the collision of two or more shots. That’s what Ari was after with the chains. A sustained emotional effect—fearlessness, euphoria, grim determination, sometimes all of it at once.

The Weaver’s Thicket

Suvajeet Duttagupta

Then the horror came for me, fully and completely. I stumbled and looked up at the shimmering tangle of threads. My sister. Her wedding. She was planning to wear her grandmother’s sari… The data was missing. The Weaver had already archived a completed version of her life.

My Monster & Density

Greg Lehman