The Long Night
I’m alone now, except for Mother’s whispered reassurances that this is what’s best for us all. The long night brings with it many memories: the sunlit park, the clouds bullied from the sky, leaving nothing but uncluttered blue and my true love. “I’m leaving you.” She sat next to me on a park bench in […]
The Trials of the Thorsten Haugen
Captain Matt Peasley paced the bridge of the bulk carrier Thorsten Haugen, his low-top hard-sole shoes wearing a path on the painted deck. The relative quiet of his ship, compared to times when its engines ran at full throttle, unnerved him. Speed mattered in the shipping business, and in the past, the thrumming of the […]
A Sea of Plastic
The sun was barely up over the plastic sea, but it was already stifling hot. The almost horizontal rays bounced off the bleached, matted remnants of last century’s excesses. The great raft housing the plastic reclamation factory chewed slowly but steadily through them. Phlox checked her diving gear. If she dove off the back, she […]
Cetacean Reprocessors, Inc.
“Can you understand me?” I call through my underwater translator over the gentle slap of cold, oily blue-green water. The massive smoky-grey Bryde’s whale next to the boat doesn’t react. I look timidly up to the top of their open mouth, jutting from the water like a giant white arrowhead, trap collecting their assigned section […]
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 […]
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