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 […]
Reef Renewal Offers Hope for Corals and Fun for Volunteers
The sea is a vast and empty place. Miles and miles of uninhabited salty blue waters stretch into seeming infinity without many visible signs of life, except for small patches of coral reef, crowded with every kind of organism. Coral reefs cover only about 1% of the ocean, yet they are home to more than […]
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 […]
