Stretch your brain
Space is a big place. Remarkably, unfathomably, soul-crushingly big. And all that space is essentially empty. The black vastness is not somewhere you want your ship to break down. That's why there's a mandate all ships are obligated to respond in good faith to any distress signals of space origin (once you make planetfall you're… Continue reading Answering the Stravinsky
Aero was in some kind of forest. The ground was solid stone with only loose bits of gravel surrounding the rents where the trees had broken through. They were thick, impossibly so, some so much that they first appeared to be sheer walls of wood extending beyond the clouds. A great canopy of leaves of… Continue reading Ghost Walk
"There is only one true God," said the Exoform, addressing the prisoners. "You gonna tell us it's you?" shouted a man with more courage and less sense than I. "No," said the Exoform. "The only God is Entropy." And then it vaporized the man. Slowly. I dared not turn away, but I unfocused my eyes… Continue reading Dead Matter
Catalina thought she opened her eyes but it was hard to know for sure. She was suddenly blind. She held up her hands but couldn't see so much as a shadow of a shadow. Vertigo swirled in her head like a vortex. The ground was solid beneath her feet but she could've sworn she'd been… Continue reading Too Short a Visit
"First are the golds." Jaylah squeezed paint from the tube. She mixed her colors with meditative patience and focus. She'd spent the week working ahead at a feverish pace. Traffic was cleared; packets were outbound; scrubbers and filters and purifiers were fresh. Islet N114S7-12 was unburdened for the day. So there was no need to… Continue reading Painting by Numbers
Zyon Genna had been away at war for more than two standard years, but the hardest part was going home. The small dropship taking him back to his farm also carried his eldest son, Alistair, and his middle son, Rome. The little cabin was weighed down by the ghost of Emerald, Rome's twin sister. Her… Continue reading A War Like Any Other
He'd called it a bunker, but it was really just a series of empty square chambers carved out of the Tritonian ice, pressurized, and separated by heavy hatchways. Whatever you called it, he wasn't here. Leah could sense Captain West's impatience. "Give him a little time," she said. West snorted. "You'd think he'd be punctual… Continue reading The Time Slip Man
I had to get some more RAM for my dad. He'd been getting slower for a while, but yesterday he totally locked up midway through a game of gin rummy and I had to restart him. He hates being restarted. Sulked around the rest of the night just pacing and mumbling, his slippers shuffling and… Continue reading RAM
Jericho felt like dogshit. His spring allergies had been especially rough, and that was before he got the call from the top. Before he'd biked home, his mind racing faster than his legs could pedal. Before he packed his shit, kissed his partner, and said, "I'll call you when I can. Hopefully soon." That was… Continue reading 21st Century Sirens
A swell of nausea pulled Private Elowen Dextre out of darkness. The spinning in her head was a very specific sensation: gravity flux. She felt she was strapped to a flight chair, but her arms and legs were restrained, too. She opened her eyes, and the sight before her gave her stomach a new reason… Continue reading 88 More
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