Forward Momentum and a Parallel Toss
On the marching-band field, everything echoes of Alex. Lacey’s students spread across the sideline and cue their robots, and Lacey sees herself as a teenager in a giant sweatshirt, Alex next to her, looks at the bots and remembers Alex’s head on hers when she curled up around him in the last row of the […]
The Fisherwoman
This is your fourth visit to the botanical biosphere. Something always draws you back here, even though you have only one hour of leisure time. You scan your wristband and enter the glass dome. The biospheres are teeming with healthy plants and trees. Mechanical bees flit between the groups of coloured flowers. Today, you’ve come […]
The Inevitablist
It was called Moon Base Daintree, but it was less a base than a tube. A long, subway-car-sized tube, with a hatch at either end. Inside was a conference table, life support, and a fridge filled with refreshments—in case the alien was humanoid. Preston Jorgenson paced his end of the tube as the alien ship […]
Lost Beyond the Lights
“Wake up, Paola, it’s time.” My daughter shifts in her bed in a way that reminds me of when she was a child, but she has children of her own now—the oldest a teenager already. How did so many years pass so quickly? Tonight, my own childhood seems close enough to touch, the echoes of […]
Drumming Song
No one really knows where oceans end and where they begin. Sometimes there is a hulking piece of earth in between, but there is no barrier between the Pacific and the Indian. The waters there are blue abysses, no land masses abruptly halting flow. There are archipelagos stretching from the tip of Asia to the […]
Lunch Failure
Doctor Jessica Scanlon was half expecting the text message. “Lunch?” it read. Short and sweet, unlike her brother. On the way down to ground level, she resisted the urge to backtrack, to recheck the setup for the next experimental run. To wait, expectant, for the results. They were sure to disappoint, like all the other […]
Farmers
Bhola, Bangladesh, 2033 Nayeem Abedin dumped out food for the geese and chickens. They dove for the food hungrily, oblivious to the rain. Nayeem, dressed in a short-sleeved khaki shirt and a tube-like lungi around his waist and legs, was not quite so immune to the downpour, but he had work to do, so he […]
Replanting the Garden
The airborne drop ship Yggdrasil, TREE class vessel, soared through the clouds of gathering CO2, claxons blaring a warning that go time had arrived. Each Planter’s indicator light flashed green in a blinking series of eagerness. Every bioengineered drop pod’s fully formed payload was ready to be fired directly into the soil of the Houston […]
Stones of Särdal
If you don’t mind, I’m going to do this in English. Even though I emigrated here 40 years ago, I’ve never quite mastered the Swedish accent. What can I say? I grew up in America. Are you sure there’s no script? I thought this needs to be educational, like a museum. Yes, I know there […]
Three Little Arcologies
Once Upon A Time, there were three little buildings that dreamed of being self-sustaining. One was covered in stone, one in vinyl siding, but the third little building was covered in discarded things, in tar paper and tin foil and whatever happened to be on hand, and it was the strongest of them all. • […]
