Stretch your brain
"I thought you said the place looked abandoned," said George. "It did." "You didn't notice the hundred-yard floating alien orb?!" "Keep your voice down!" Hannah whispered. "I'm more worried about the sentry." They peeked through the wind-blasted branches of some kind of desert shrub from the lip of the valley. Ahead was a cracked and… Continue reading Turncoat
All the windows were boarded shut from the inside. Jacinthe didn't even bother with the front door. Instead she walked around the sun-scorched and weather-beaten house, expecting very little and generally having her expectations met. The midday brightness baked the earth. The heat almost seemed to rise up from the cracks in the yellow-white clay.… Continue reading Anachronic Lag
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
The object flashed by the Earth so fast that we didn't even have time to photograph it. We didn't even know what it was, but its path was perpendicular to the ecliptic, or nearly so. A piece of it broke off—or was ejected with purpose, depending on your own inclination—and made landfall. It was called… Continue reading Terra Nullius
The air was stale, but the fact that there was air at all was something of a miracle. Demetri was the first person to walk the halls of Elatus in a thousand years. He shut his visor. Breathable as the air might be, it was damp and there were thick carpets of mold overhead, as… Continue reading The Heart of Elatus
"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
Wikus stared up at the Moon, and half a billion refugees stared back. He couldn't help but think of his grandfather, Papa. He would have been proud. The atmosphere within the domed city atop Olympus Mons was thin; not for being on Mars or even for its elevation, but for the allocations underway. Olympus Prime… Continue reading New Moon
The early morning air was cool, but not uncomfortable, as Annika strolled through the unstructured wilds of Quaoar. Little insects leapt and glided away from the thin grasses underfoot, chittering softly in their rhythmic, stuttering way as she passed. The long, slender amphibians croaked and gurgled from the rocks along the edges of ponds where… Continue reading Memories of Birds
The clouds were catching on the pointed tips of the skyscrapers like stray threads on a cotton sweater. A light drizzle spilled from the tears. They weren't supposed to be here, and that's what made it exciting. They were explorers, rediscovering ancient secrets and pocketing old-world treasures. Mikey found a little black rock—a pebble, really—with… Continue reading City People
A temporal switch-box is a complicated device, to put it mildly. It made an 18th century Swiss timepiece look like a mud pie by comparison. So Will was understandably upset when Kai blew theirs to smithereens with a shift grenade. It was Thursday, October 10th, 2307—78 years in the past, to them, and three days… Continue reading Can’t Change the Past
Warmup Pages 