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 […]

The world-organism is awake and has spent the last decade playing round after round of tic-tac-toe with itself. Hearing this the first time, Anais reacts like anyone would to a stranger sitting next to them on a plane, insisting on conversation for the flight’s three-hour duration. She nods and smiles. She takes the man’s card. […]

Sure enough we could not outrun the hoverbikes. Understandable—yes? Yes. We were a new thing, a sharp thing; not a fast thing. So we stood and panted, and the bikes idled a few handsbreadths above the rain-slick tarmac. The Nero’s men fanned out before us. We said, “Boys!” and also, “Let’s not do anything hasty,” […]

For Vera Florence Cooper RubinAstronomer, pioneer in the discovery of Dark Matter and the “Galaxy Rotation Problem” [Transcript of the inaugural LOUOU mission launch press briefing, delivered by Dr. Florence Maxwell-Rubin, Codirector, VRMT] Published in The Solar Citizen, 2180:34 (3). The Vera Rubin Memorial Trust is thrilled to host the launch of the Large Observatory […]

The fact that they insisted we keep calling them “killer whales” should really tell you something. The orcas of Puget Sound are vicious in negotiations. “Listen,” I say. “The talks are in two weeks. We can’t just throw away months of work when we’re so close to the finish line.” The old matriarch spyhops once […]

A maintenance request called Ina down to the old dispensary on the sixtieth Reclamation. Her wife, Maya, was pulling lemon grass from the belly of a roasted suckling pig, wood-choked and salty fine for the guests of the Reclamation Feast. Twelve other young pigs were placed by their chefs throughout this western part of Palawan, […]

“I knew it all along. The heart of the world is blue.” —Maggie Nelson: “Bluets” On the edge of the desolate wreckage of a crashed ship, the honeybee trembled, climbing downwards from the motionless stalks of the machine’s antenna. In its bee mind, it feels only order and structure, and something that might have been […]

From the first time I visited Mariah Lee-Cassidy in prison, she radiated defiance. The poisonous orange of her prison jumpsuit might have been the decision of the state, but everything else about the twenty-nine-year-old, from her aggressively spiked hair to the rakish tilt of her chin, seemed calculated to scorn others. I was the first, […]

They had left her to die. Binu had realized that too late. At the time she thought she was only being pragmatic, and perhaps a bit noble. “Leave me, I’ll be all right,” she had rasped, gritting her teeth against the pain, looking into Niko’s eyes as he bent over her. Her mouth had tasted […]

Andy’s arm had belonged to a dead man before it had been screwed into his socket, wires spliced onto his nerve endings, and the thrumming metal drum plunged into the cavity of his ear. The doctor had done his best, of course, as well as could be done with a part hastily severed years ago. […]

Trish is only a month along when the Goolan parents die. She doesn’t speak Goola well enough to understand the details, but the point gets across. A freak accident. Stupid. Meaningless. The kind of thing that makes you pay attention to randomness, to fragility. When she finds out, Trish goes to Annie because she has […]

I was ten years old when my father broke the world with the sweet notes of a steel pan. He created a new version, called it the S-pan, short for soul pan. Like any other, he made it from a repurposed steel drum. Streaks of gold ran up the sides of its five-inch skirt tucked […]