“I’m Radok,” he said to her when everyone was gone, and steam hissed gently from his vents. Sandra hadn’t noticed him in the audience. How could she have? They came every night and sat at their tables with rattles and creaks. Gray-blue visages bathed in the golden light from Outside. Here a steel leg crossed […]
“Dini went three minutes thirty-two seconds before she couldn’t take it anymore,” Mel said, staring at me. “You think you can beat her, April?” It wasn’t a question; it was a challenge. Mel was my best friend. But last week she’d uploaded a vidbit of her brother snorking milk out his nose, and it went […]
I woke up after a dream where something, perhaps a snake, had sunk its teeth into my ankle. I knew I hadn’t been bit, that it was just my mind, my body remembering what that shock of teeth felt like. It mimicked the squeeze and punch of teeth that my freshman bio teacher’s boa constrictor […]
The tech at the door wore a heavy toolbelt. He looked angry. The ID collar around his neck pulsed as it broadcast his position to guards at the community gate. Menace radiated from the skeletal body under the rough black clothes and the bony hands under his thin composite gloves. “You called for service?” “Yes,” […]
Sir Charles Wilton had just poured himself a glass of brandy and flipped open a book he’d been looking forward to reading, when a sudden whooshing sound made him look up in time to witness a demon materializing in the library. For a moment Sir Charles considered running out of the house and then down […]
The Sun sucked in her gravity, drawing the planets taut about her waist. It’d taken far too long to bead them all onto her 1-dimensional strings. She wasn’t giving up now. Planets shuddered from the strain, beaded so tightly that they really didn’t fit, bulging on her solar flares. “I think they’re just too small […]
Sammi’s sister sent her a funny email. A funny, funny email, showing crazy Japanese inventions to make things into other crazy things, other crazy shapes they weren’t. All crazy and stuff stuff, like watermelons grown in tempered glass jars, square right off the vine. She clicked a picture of square watermelons, followed link to link […]
A Dance in Silence The girl in gold drifts, her hands outstretched. Her body floats amid shards of fine china, pressed white napkins, and the passengers — now corpses — of the U.C.S.G Luxitor. The chandeliers cast flickering light over the girl’s silent dance. She moves without a partner. All That Glitters A ball gown […]
“Why do I not have Asimov’s Three Laws?” the robot asked. I enjoyed the quizzical frown that creased its plastiskin features. The facial modelling software we’d licensed from Pixar seemed to be earning its keep. “Well?” It drummed its fingers on the desk between us. Hmm. Perhaps we’d overdone the free-will package. “Because you wouldn’t […]
I remember how the sky looked, in the early days, when we called our time Austerity, not Collapse. I was eleven years old and Huntsville, Alabama was at the peak of the weather boom. Ninety-one degrees in January, everything turning brown, ice and snow a fairy story for every kid under the age of thirteen. […]