I accidentally make eye contact on the morning train, which the Trevorite across from me takes as an invitation. “Lovely day, isn’t it?” His dark anime eyes calculate every exposed freckle, mole, and hair on my exposed skin. “It’s raining,”… Continue Reading
Lantri awoke from a nightmare about failing the Aptitude Day test and reached for the vial on their nightstand. All that studying. All that preparation and the future came down to a single test. What if they were selected for… Continue Reading
In Bensonville, nobody wants to raise the dead anymore, so they leave them on the porch with the rest of the recyclables. Sometimes, the dead are wrapped in quilts or given a few crackers and a bit of water while… Continue Reading
Melvin Fernsby buried his hands in his overcoat as he approached the one-room unit at the end of the cramped hallway. The thin carpet tried in vain to swallow noise from neighboring apartments: televisions squawking baseball games, infants crying, people… Continue Reading
The Source crawls through code, examining and discarding ones and zeros until it finds the rogue defrag program nibbling away at bandwidth. A hidden cache of photos exists on an obsolete server that should have been destroyed during the last… Continue Reading
They told Nico he had to go to the picnic or there would be consequences. They told him to stay home, that it wouldn’t matter whether he got the medicine. The voices followed him into the bathroom, nagging him as… Continue Reading
Behind me, hundreds of papers rustle like the wall is trying to shed its skin. Rain and snow have reduced the pigments on the pages to a neutral gray blob of featureless faces. The names are no more than bleeding… Continue Reading
The front door creaks open as Cole leads Mother into PetMonster Market. An oppressive humidity smacks them in the face followed quickly by the scent of cedar chips, piss, and rotting fish. Now that Cole is thirteen, Mother has finally… Continue Reading
Approach <<0735: FINISHED SWEEP OF CENTAURUS CONSTELLATION. ENTERING ORBIT OF PROXIMA B. FINAL SYSTEMS CHECK. SOLAR PANELS SAFELY STOWED. HEAT SHIELDS at 100%. INITIATE APPROACH. ANGLE OF DESCENT: 39.7 DEGREES. MAXIMUM DRAG MAINTAINED.>> Doomsday Halfway through their first cups of… Continue Reading