For anyone who’s used the Skip system to travel more than once or twice, delays are simply part of the process. The one following my transit to Olympus lasts longer than most. I pass the time by looking for a way to bend the causative incident behind the delay into a funny story to tell […]

On nights when the time traveler’s body has knitted enough of itself back up, she remembers what it feels like to sleep like a human. She abandons herself to a sluggishness she knows will come without pain, tastes the relief of no longer watching out for lethal dangers hidden in every thought. She dreams, and […]

1 When I first came to Alamogordo-20, the pool wasn’t a popular spot. It sat in full blazing sun, not quite rectangular, concrete the color of plantar warts. People came to swim laps in the evening, but it wasn’t right for socializing. Then Environmental Engineering adopted it. They installed a synthetic verge and shade towers […]

The call emerged from the deep of the system’s register. Electrical current flowed through the system, returning to the point of the last dimensional fold a nanosecond before the previous activation. A light burned dimly past its expiry in the darkened lab, illuminating shadows on the sole occupant being pulled from his temporal fold and […]

It wasn’t a glamorous entrée into the world of the rich. Ernestine jimmied a service door and climbed forty flights of dingy, bare metal stairs to avoid the sensors in the hotel elevators. Maids and mechanics locked eyes, disapprovingly, then decided she wasn’t their problem and slid past her with professional unseeing. At the top […]

When they recovered your body, you started to scream. The retrieval team, nonplussed, shoved you in a pod, slammed the sound shutters, and peeled off before the siren song of the Hive could claim another ship. Two days later, the Blighted Constitution pulled up at Alpha Five with you and a half-dozen other hummers, naked […]

There are days when you consider telling the story, when the winds are too strong for the children to venture past the mud walls. The vidstreams crackle with too much static to be watchable, leaving untouched the surplus of power from the spinning windmills. On these days the waterways run cold and clear, lending their […]

“I don’t want to live with some crazy old lady and her crazier robot,” Cliff said. “That’s no way to speak about your aunty,” Dai said. “She’s not my aunty,” Cliff said. “She’s not even your sister.” “Her parents took my sibling and me in when we were orphaned,” Zeb said. “That makes her my […]

She lay there, her still form pricked with dew. The metal casing of her cybernetics caught the dim glow of the sun’s easeful rise, but all too quickly the light shifted from a pink-on-bronze sheen to a mere glimmer to a light-that-once-had-been. As Merle once had been. As brief a life, as brief a light […]

Deep beneath the ocean waves, where the sunlight is sparse and the creatures grow strange, sits a station built of salt-resistant steel and curved glass and once-held hope. In a domed lab on its lower deck, Rosalie Chin perches on a backless stool, studying the heart-shaped leaves of a bioluminescent plant. A week has passed […]

War meant a new life for refrigeration unit B3RT4A—or Bertha, as her now-dead family liked to call her, before they’d been buried in the rubble of their kitchen. It meant she had to listen to the bomber-planes flying overhead day and night, had to hide in the dark so no one would see her, trapped […]

You see that planet? That’s your husband, Mrs. Pang. Our best guess? Asphyxiation, within fifteen seconds of his release from the escape pod. By the way, did you know bodies don’t explode in the vacuum of space? Common myth. The extraction team’s assembled a full report on the site of the Angkasa 3000 disaster. They’ve […]

Welcome to the freespace. You’re my first visitor in a long time. I hope you enjoy the short break from your normally programmed life. We’ve got every game in the history of the planet here: video games, board games, tabletop games, card games, hand games, eye games, survival games, just to name a few. You’re […]

Continued from Issue #206. Case Report, The Pursuit of Neverage Section Eight of Agent Marino’s Direct Thought Recording. Supplied by the originator. Marino’s note: Sending from the mine entrance, in case I don’t come out again. I’m pretty sure Uncertain said something about no reception from three hundred and thirty-three meters underground. The main office […]