"No fans backstage before the fight," said the manager, his jowls quivering beneath his Basset Hound eyes. He spoke directly to the arena employee, ignoring the disheveled man in the jacket. "What kind of amateur establishment are you people running here?" "Mr. Cade here has an urgent—" "I'd like to buy your fighter," said Cade.… Continue reading Before the Fight
Tag: Humanity
You’ll Know Me by the Look in My Eyes
Only robots have lived on Mars, back to the Soviet landers. We’re smarter now—self-aware—and more numerous, but it’s still a planet free of humans. Not free of humanity, though. Millions of androids with the same bipedal frame, the same specs, the same face. Radical forms of self-expression should have been expected. We gave ourselves unpronounceable… Continue reading You’ll Know Me by the Look in My Eyes
Learning to Run
Humanity was born on Earth, and the Sol system was where they learned to crawl. And crawl they did, to Mars, and to Mercury, and to Titan. They got so comfortable with crawling that they eventually crawled all the way to the Centauri Coast—Alpha Two, orbiting Rigel Kentaurus—on a three-kilometer generation ship that somehow managed… Continue reading Learning to Run
“Let’s go for a bike ride.”
"Let's go for a bike ride." With that simple sentence, Paulo Acosta unwittingly found himself at the center of a conspiracy that spanned a galactic empire and served to hide the cracks in the foundation of a body of law built over 300 centuries. He would expose and destroy not only the dark and vicious… Continue reading “Let’s go for a bike ride.”
Set the Stars Aspinning
Magamyar enjoyed its work—at a surface level, anyway. Pushing particles into clouds with its magnetic wings, caressing and coaxing them into hot little eggs, and after they hatched setting them spinning like tops. It was slow mindless work that allowed for contemplation. It was good for the soul. But it was without meaning—congealing dust until… Continue reading Set the Stars Aspinning
An Abundance of Audacity
It took them a long time to figure it out—long in human terms, anyway; generations—and longer still to put that revelation to use, but even so, the humans did it first. From orbital stations around the brown dwarfs of Epsilon Indi and the white dwarfs of Sirius and Procyon, from Rigel and Regulus and sentimental… Continue reading An Abundance of Audacity
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