Stretch your brain
The Junior Cleric shuffled over the dusty runner covering the bridge-way spanning the blackness to the Mind Throne. Head Rector Mautorum was in Holy Commune. He would not want to be disturbed. The thick cables leading away from the Throne crackled with the incredible flow of power, and occasionally jumped like dreaming eels. One jumped… Continue reading Mind Throne
Shay sat in a lotus pose beneath the nested glass pyramids of the reducers. From her perspective, the bright white room took on a brilliant ultramarine hue, but to an outside observer the interior of the pyramids would appear to be a deep mahogany red. The pyramids were, of course, clear. It was a curious… Continue reading Unexpected Stop
This was not Captain Jord's first trip to the Deitnerkon; he'd been to Authorial Headquarters many times. But this was the first time since his son had died. His son, Askorot, was slain on the Ophiuchus Line in glorious battle, defending the Authorium from the death-hordes from beyond the disc. The planet where he'd fallen… Continue reading Starship Fuel and Blood
It had been a million years since the last star stopped shining and the sky darkened forever. Michael didn't think much about it; he was born thirty thousand generations too late to know the difference. Besides, when the sky turned dark, we turned our backs on the sky. We clustered around the darkest parts of… Continue reading Murder on Oasis 4320
The universe was as cold and as dark as it had ever been. Eras ticked by like years, and the years themselves, at any given time, went by numerical names that would have been gibberish to those forgotten creators of the human calendar. But as alien as it sounded, ten duotrigintillion years had passed since… Continue reading Priming the Cosmos
Giants of light and hellfire swirled around Blair like lightning bugs caught in a twister. She couldn't rely on her vision at these speeds; relativity caused the universe to warp and flux around her little cocoon of spacetime in ways that weren't only unnatural to her earthborn eyes, but unnatural even to nature. Outside of… Continue reading Noblest of Endeavors
As a young man, Rich Speyer thought he'd seen the last of the Maleficarum. At the time, he commanded the special joint task force responsible for the Sweep—the rounding up of the dissenters, the objectionists, the pacifists, the skulking members of the anti-party-party, and shuttling them off world to take their deviant ideas to the stars.… Continue reading Return of the Maleficarum
"What do you know, Doc?" The small contingent of science-minded survivors loitered around the lower level of the observatory like dead leaves without a breeze to carry them. The other—the religious, and the despondent, and the most insufferable of them all, the indifferent—migrated around the gargantuan alien spaceship in endless, meaningless loops, passing the time… Continue reading No Philosophers Aboard the Prism
I missed home. I missed my garden. So I planted a new garden, right in the middle of everything in an unused emptiness. I added nutrients to make it fertile and put in scaffolding, a trellis of sorts, to give it structure. I love my new garden. I grow lightflowers—uninspired, I know. No braided vines… Continue reading Garden of the Lightflowers
