Stretch your brain
Mukaru reached Spirit Palace late, just as the sky went golden at the hour of sundown. He hopped silently from his uleox—one of the few animals native to this planet, something akin to a camel-elephant hybrid—and let it wander down to a nearby spring to rehydrate while he got his bearings. The spirits would soon… Continue reading In Sight of the Spirits
"Yes. It's true. It was me." "I don't believe you." Clint reached into his pack. "Then how do you explain this?" He pulled out a small silver cube. It distorted his reflection like a funhouse mirror. "Tell me that's not what I think it is." Clint didn't respond, turning the object over in his hands.… Continue reading Linear Function
Brin Dimanche was not the type of person you wanted to make angry. In fact, you were better off if she didn’t know you at all. Any orbit around her was a decaying one. You could tell just by looking at her senior advisors; none of them were seniors. Minutes with Brin could take decades… Continue reading Some Deal
Fluffy clouds passed underneath like kernels of popcorn. Irregular shadows that looked like the Mandelbrot set dotted the featureless patchwork of green and brown parcels of land, interrupted by the perfect circles drawn by irrigation equipment. Highways connected distant cities like arteries, with capillaries and veins and valves all interlinked. At nighttime, the tail lights… Continue reading Somewhere Over Georgia
One of the neighbor kids found him on the way home from school, laying awkwardly on the deck with his face in the water. The coroner said he'd only been out there like that for a day. That would have made it a Sunday. It was the solstice; I don't know why I remember that.… Continue reading It Was the Solstice
Kyler waited in the hangar absently holding his pistol at his side. The gash above his eye had stopped bleeding, but the half-dried splatter pulled at the scruff on his cheek as he clenched and unclenched his jaw out of habit. He needed another hit an hour ago, and he could feel it in the… Continue reading Sunrise at the Precinct
Py-S'tem Station grew closer like a giant squid at sunset, backlit by the crimson gases of the nebula, its bulbous head surrounded by long tentacles of docking runways. They were about to be swallowed up. Not Tul, but his passengers, of course. He'd been working the prison transport route from the Alcona system to Py-S'tem… Continue reading Guilt in the Age of Indifference
The crumpled remains of their dropship, Six Degrees From Earth, stuck out of the swamp water like a series of lightning-split tree trunks. Beyond were the derelict structures of the New Wellspring colony on Kappa Lyrae D. There was no doubt this is where the mayday signal came from, but Cooper and Westhalter didn't see a… Continue reading New Wellspring
Cassidy relived himself as he walked to the edge of the shore. The sun was close to drowning beneath the horizon and it skipped its last rays across the liquid methane sea like weather beaten stones. The evening fog was forming. His heavy boots kicked up rust-colored regolith as he dragged his feet. When he… Continue reading Me? Scared?
"We can sell this," said Maruk. "It looks like MC Escher had a bowel movement." Maruk laughed, but it was hollow, like he was a robot doing an impression of laughter. "You wouldn't live here?" he asked. Rola shot him an angry glance that he couldn't see through the faceplate. It wasn't explicit, but the… Continue reading As Above
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