Latent summer stirred while spring lay dormant. April had come to the Kingdom of S’ong and brought with it spells of rain. Tadpoles in the pond recently developed hind legs; above, a stray shower had been drumming at the water pit-a-pat. The rain-rinsed sky was tinged a darkening hue from horizon to zenith all the […]

: Your name, sir. : Just call me K. : Apologies, sir. This process is meticulously controlled. You are required to state your full name and surname. : It’s K Li. : Alright, Mr. Li. Shall we begin? My colleagues have completed your health and background checks. Now, I’m here to assist with the final […]

Red for temperature. Blue for ignition. Green for airflow. It takes four hours and forty-two minutes for you to finish your transformation into a pile of white ashes. I keep a patient vigil over those three primary colors on the cremator’s monitor, making sure that nothing is left behind. Nothing that can be linked to […]

“I needed a true monster, so I went with a bird.” “Why?” “It’s impossible to reach an accord with a bird.” —From a conversation with film director Juraj Herz Bird-speak was the only reason Crowley got this job. Without it, he couldn’t have dreamed of landing such a cushy, well-paying gig. He had cautiously constructed […]

1. K’un died. It breathed for tens of thousands of years and, at long last, life came to an end. Its body was washed ashore. Pale red scales plowed through vegetation as the bulging exoskeleton grazed against dunes. Its enormous carcass formed an imposing mountain range along Pearl Island’s shoreline. Countless miners abandoned their digs […]

She closed her eyes and imagined holding the boy in her arms: smooth pink skin, lush and fuzzy lanugo, monolid eyes that took after Shengyuan. She lowered her head, planted a kiss on his cheek, and lightly patted him on the back. The boy, as stubborn as babies could be, wriggled and kicked. A vibration; […]

It was never a good sign when Song Mike came looking for me at the end of the workday. “You, come out here for a sec.” He leaned against the doorway, nodding in my direction. I stuck my head out from behind my computer monitor and looked him up and down. The guy was red […]

My discovery of Guang Hansheng was probably down to random chance, in the end. It was a rainy afternoon, and I was headed for the library, striding across wet asphalt and feeling dizzy. Inside they were hosting a quiet, desolate little exhibition—just a few exhibits and a drowsy admin under bright stage lighting. Of course, […]

Gamma stretched out through the quantum foam. Virtual photons and electrons tickled her subtime body. If she were to reduce her mass to pure quanta then, hypothetically speaking, she would be able to touch the entire universe at once. Practically speaking, she possessed barely enough energy for her subtime body to reach a diameter of […]

The breaking news of the day came before dawn: a starship from Planet Monkey plunged into the port of Orange Town. When it came crashing down, it knocked over the chicken pen and laundry line of Lady Charla’s tavern, as well as the enormous sign of the local bar “Twister” and the town’s communication antenna […]

 . . . The first step to decoding memory is the insertion of liquid nanoprobes, which travel through blood vessels and membranes via interstitial fluid until they are evenly distributed along the body’s central nervous system and form a sensor network. Their dense surveillance enables the brain to transform into an intricate server that decodes requests and […]

“Humanity will die.” The first time he heard the instructors say that, he was a baby who’d just started school, with nothing more than a huge head devoid of any knowledge. That day, the instructors had been muttering among themselves when they suddenly asked him, “Who are you?” He stared blankly as he rummaged around […]

This story is sincerely dedicated to my Mother. 1 Tom called Adriana Honey-Bunny, and she called him Pumpkin. A moment by a window. An orange California morning. Tom snapped his fingers, the waiter understood and came and refilled his cup with fragrant coffee. The sun shone on their table and the street outside was crowded. […]

Strange boulders littered the Mountain of the Empty. They were ovoid in appearance and similar in size, their corners and edges smoothed away by the wind, so that even the moonlight shining upon them found no purchase. Like ghastly white skeletons, they lay half-buried in the earth, large and small. They all seemed to be […]

1. “Chi-a! Chi-a!” Just as dawn is about to chase away the night, the silence is broken by a distant, earth-rumbling chant. A roiling, dark column of smoke snakes toward the rosy clouds. The giant, towing a rusty furnace behind him, each stride infused with pride, marches into sight from over the horizon. Lit by […]