According to orbital observations, the aliens wouldn’t rise from their hibernation caves today. The three moons weren’t in position yet. Leena dialed a cup of coffee, checked her instruments, and settled down with her knitting. Observing the Amphim’s once-per-seventy-nine-years mating rituals sounded like the front lines of science, but in truth it was years of […]

The cadaver drone makes an incision along the inside of each finger. My stomach curls, waiting for the blood, but of course there’s none left. The body has been dead for days, all the blood drained and replaced with a sweet-smelling formaldehyde formula. The drone slots in the nanomachines along each phalangeal segment as the […]

Up on the spoil heap Morag found a robot. This wasn’t that unusual in and of itself. She was always finding them, or parts of them anyway, frozen in contorted attitudes like dinosaur fossils, plastic housing cracked and aluminum limbs splayed. What was different about this one was that it was walking. Morag would go […]

Absurdly, Bek’s first thought is that this is why Tiri-al had called her into his office, well, to his desk rather, and made her sit down before uploading the files to her tablet. Her people, who she had spent the last fifteen years convinced had been killed when that seven kilometer-asteroid had hit their planet, […]

The second time I met Xin, she was in a junkyard. I tracked her signal through stacks of rusty machinery, half-cut cars, wheel rims, and old tires to a shipping container cabin where she was assembling an egg-sized gadget under a magnifying glass. I said, “Xin? I’m Zakaria from Phylla. Remember me?” She looked up […]

Start at the cleave of it, not at Zed’s meat death or Ep’s centuries-long destruction, but at the moment that Zed halves his own mind and walks away. Or as was reported in the internal memorandum, the moment when Pilot-Commander Zeta San Tano killed himself at his infinite post on the M.K.S. Epsilon, leaving behind […]

The Pirate Ship sailed past the first buoy and into port, just as the city turned on a light rain shower. Rover, the smallest on board, perched on the safety rail to watch a train scream by on the intercontinental sea rail. It had been four months since they last left international waters to pay […]

I. Ingestion Unknown sensations trigger unknown reactions leading to instinctive states. They have names. Hunger. Sadness. Fear. Others lurk beneath cognitive lineaments, but none drive like the hunger reignited by its ingestion of this organism. The Host knows me as naegleria fowleri, but this organism, not yet an I, does not even know itself. Extant […]

Something, somewhere in her body, quietly crumbles. The dust slowly spreads over the water, the momentum of the collapse pushing it away, the trapped words of commands and programs breaking free—those which used to give her existence a meaning. She is smaller and lighter than she was when she landed on this planet. The lost […]

The Winter of Your Own Heart Lacuna knew winter. Winter was the vast distances between the stars. Winter was the cold of space. You couldn’t measure cold; it was not a thing in itself. It was only the absence of heat. As darkness was only an absence of light. Yet both of these—the dark and […]

Tight, tight. A sharp flex, a crack, a sudden a wash of air, then—the scent of a guru upwind! Guru guru guru! Larva831’s eggy thoughts gushed away, its ejected cognitive fluids mixing confusedly with the ejected fluids of its 100012 hatching sibs. Obsolete embryonic ideas flowed under a dozen dozen dozen cracking shells, swirled through […]

My cat hops up to his favorite spot by the window to observe the nebula, the pitter-patter of his paws and the low hum-rumble of the engine the only sounds in the room. Misty tendrils amble past, glimmering and cloudlike, carrying an entire medley of warm hues, and his black coat is gilded with a […]

A silo is a good home. It is snug, secure, and shielded. It maintains optimal temperature and humidity. The walls are all perfectly equidistant from my fuselage. This pleases me. A silo is a good home. But it is wrong that it is still my home. I failed. My siblings soared, while all I did […]

It’s six weeks ’til Going Time. I never really got used to that naming convention. The phrase has “Going” and “Time” in it, the latter carrying the entire weight of the definition. The former is vague. Going where? Beneath the crusty morass of our dead-lead roads. Beyond the white veil of the digital everforest. Inside […]

When I had been chosen to have a child, I was apprehensive more than ecstatic. All the other “lottery winners” seemed to be joyous. On the holoscreens, I saw them cry happy tears. I tried to mimic that but could not. I tried to smile like I had won a bag of chocolates. I wish […]

Those who came before us believed they lived in the early days of a new nation, and they left documentation for posterity the way their forbears left garbage fouling their environment—simply as a product of how they lived. The records are vast and interesting to some, especially those who can trawl through the data with […]