Stretch your brain
The posters in the recruitment offices on Earth were brightly colored, depicting psychedelic landscapes and brandishing phrases like Adventure Awaits and See the Unseen! Abe couldn't wait to sign up. Then they sent him to oversee the auto-mines scraping niningerite from the regolith on DCKX1023. He was all alone, from one dark dead horizon to the other.… Continue reading Adventure Awaits
Shivam awoke to strange constellations. Red stars that didn’t glimmer, looking not so far above the tops of the Western white pines. Then he felt a tremble in the earth like an orchestral brass section playing dissonant chords in infrasound somewhere just out of sight within the dark forest. There was a Behemoth ship overhead.… Continue reading Helping Hand
Whenever her mother needed a fresh bucket of water, Karmina always volunteered to get it. For starters, it got her out of whatever chore she was muddling through. Often times one of her brothers would finish her chore for her before she returned. But more importantly, she loved to see the array. Mother told her… Continue reading Ghosts of the Array
The metal container was the size of an old refrigerator and weighed a lot more. If it weren't for her exo she would have had no chance of moving it, not all at once. And Alexa only wanted to do this once. One big payday. It was a simple scam. It really started 150 years… Continue reading A Simple Scam
The waiting room must have been 100°, and it was only the middle of springtime. It didn't bode well for the summer fires. There was a clean little stand with hot coffee, and hot tea. Inconvenient, but fiscally responsible, he thought. Who could afford to give away water these days? So showy. He dabbed his… Continue reading Appraisal
Norman Braider looked down at the landscape around Idyllia on Theta Librae III as the shuttle punched through the atmosphere. The settlement sat on the shore of a great winding river that looked now like a dead python sprawled over the plains, its dark belly turned skyward. Grim. The situation below was coloring his thoughts… Continue reading The Idyllia Disaster
The hydronets looked like the white sails of a thousand three-masted ships above the arid desert skies of Solace. Maisie craned her neck to look up at the taut structure stretching a kilometer into the air, viewing it through the filter of the ocular shifters integrated into her fragile biological eyes. There was a tear… Continue reading Gifts From the Wind
Cerys kept nodding off, her head tipping downward and jerking back up again. It was a special kind of punishment. Three days. They'd been pursuing the sapphire class freighter for three days as it tried uselessly to lose them beyond the horizon as it fell endlessly around the incomprehensible curvature of Mu Cephei. The hypergiant… Continue reading Losing Steam
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