Cara thumbed off the launcher’s safety, wishing she could as easily shut down the monster-sized butterflies bouncing around in her belly. Though not her first time in the field, it was her first time leading a team she’d built herself. It was also her first time firing live chill-mines in…
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The Barber of Manaus
Felipe Santos da Silva swallowed. His palms were slick with sweat—whether due to the tropical heat or his nerves, he couldn’t tell. He looked at the city that, twenty years earlier, had been a boomtown, the jewel of the Amazon rain forest. Before the population decline that started in the…
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This is an Optimistic Science Fiction Story About the Future
We all have jetpacks. I’m an old, overweight man with hairy legs, and I have a jetpack. No one judges and the jetpacks don’t care. They run on clean energy and smell like sesame seeds. The right-of-way laws are complicated. The danger of jetpack injuries results in a new type…
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False Alarm
The bickering voices behind him, Mayor Edmund Parker stood at his study’s west window. He looked down Belmont Hill, out over the rest of his city, Boston, and to the pepper fields beyond. Tall, lean, famously blue-eyed and grey-haired, he allowed himself a scowl. He was a politician, yes, but…
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The Evac
The landing craft shook like an ancient washing machine as it broke the planet’s atmosphere. Staff Sergeant Jacqueline “Jax” Caruthers, 5th Planetary Beachhead Division, 3rd Space Wing, United Nations Marine Corps, sat cool as a cucumber, gnawing her bubblegum. The dropship, unwilling to land without a fight, gave one final…
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Home Sick
I was encoding a batch of classic ebooks when the ulu-aliki walked in to the library, the outdoors scent of gardenias and overripe mangoes following him. “Afternoon, chief,” I said, pushing my chair back a bit. Joseph Seru spoke Tuvaluan with his family and the other council members, but his…
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Free The Sky
It shouldn’t feel like the end of the world. Drew paid for his morning coffee and paper mechanically; held them numbly. He did not count his change. He slogged down the stairs of the Metro, forcing himself to go to work. Work? That elicited a bitter laugh. His occupation was…
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A Verdant Heart
Father’s leaves are wilting again. The bright green sprouting from his temples is tipped with crusty brown along the margins. He runs a finger across his scalp, parting the foliage on one side, treating it with as much respect as a comb-over. “Father, you need to get outside,” I say,…
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To the Havens
“Sarge? There’s a—thing—I’ve found at Pier Seventeen. I think you need to see this.” The voice on the other end of the line held just a hint of a quaver. George Aklaq grimaced at his screen. Trust the new kid to find trouble twenty minutes before the end of shift,…
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