Willow at the Labyrinth’s Core
Reading Time: 4 minutes Trees of evil are not so easily slain.
Editor’s Pick
Humans and Androids as Societal Partners
Reading Time: 8 minutes Do we need new rules for a society where androids are becoming more and more lifelike?
In My Home
Reading Time: 10 minutes A prisoner with no knowledge of their own identity is kept in solitary confinement, visited daily by human projections designed to prevent mental deterioration. When the opportunity for escape is presented, a dormant instinct resurfaces in the prisoner, and the need to fulfill this drive supplants the desire for freedom.
The Fool’s Fiddle
Reading Time: 18 minutes Dragons can’t lie, right? That’s what the legends say. So, when Guy finds himself at the wrong end of a failed heist, he puts that knowledge to the test. Compatriots dead. Hope gone. And his last chance at life is convincing a dragon to let him go.
The Wreck of the Lorelei
Reading Time: 21 minutes Trapped in an experiment in faster-than-light space travel, the captain of the ship searches for what went wrong.
Confederate Cavalry on a Plane
Reading Time: 15 minutes A physics professor and his student on a plane argue about the possibility of infinite alternate universes, while being robbed blind by a bratty kid. The professor bets the student that even the most unlikely event possible must happen, leading to three very confused Confederate Cavalry charging down the aisle.
Take Away The Tears
Reading Time: 4 minutes Conscripted Lieutenant Lovemore Vulgaris has been instructed to design the people of the future, and he’s not messing around.
The Wellington Methodology
Reading Time: 10 minutes Science fiction meets gothic in this story of a groundbreaking discovery gone wrong, and the horrifying fall of the titular scientist.
From Below
Reading Time: 15 minutes In the aftermath of a climate apocalypse, Jeremy and Alex survive by supplying food to the wealthy people living above the water, in the penthouses of Old Manhattan. But the wealthy aren’t the only ones that are hungry.
My Brain Through Your Brain
Reading Time: 5 minutes When Katie’s brain seems to jump out of sync she discovers another, almost identical, mind living inside her own. This duplicate mind gradually is not what she seems but instead something far more dangerous.
And Water’d Heaven With Their Tears
Reading Time: 19 minutes When a bioengineered “weapon” goes feral, a kill team is dispatched to retire it.
Fractures Like Windows and Time
Reading Time: 8 minutes Parenting is hard enough without help from the multiverse.
Neighbors
Reading Time: 4 minutes Being neighborly isn’t always easy. Morgred has to hold her tongue while her daughter makes other plans.
Past Due
Reading Time: 4 minutes In a world where holograms allow us to hang on even past death, a young man needs to make a hard choice.
The Last Thing Taken
Reading Time: 9 minutes When Sophia meets Oloku, she thinks it’s the perfect, strings-free affair. But when she learns his secret, she finds there’s a price to pay for loving him.
Follow Me
Reading Time: 21 minutes When Influencer Jan Pham downloads an app from the dark web that promises fame, fortune, and – most importantly – more followers, she gets more than she bargained for.
Interlude In Gehenna
Reading Time: 18 minutes He should have killed the man when he had the chance. Now there was nothing to do but wait for retribution in a town just a shade removed from hell.
A Voice From the Past
Reading Time: 18 minutes The young archaeologist Edward Campbell, is obsessed with the idea of knowing what happened to his father, who died years earlier while exploring an unknown tomb he discovered in an isolated area of Egypt.
Auschwitz Dancer
Reading Time: 16 minutes The spirit of famous Jewish ballet dancer, Franceska Mann, is stuck in time in a parallel dimension in 1943 at Auschwitz Concentration Camp, Poland.
Portrait
Reading Time: 8 minutes In 1921, a London painter’s encounter with a beautiful Romanian woman leads to a portrait sitting with hellish consequences.
A Substitute for Salvation
Reading Time: 23 minutes A post-apocalyptic love triangle inspired by “Casablanca” that revolves around a misanthropic bar owner, a Mars-bound clone fighting for his freedom, and a repurposed sex droid.
I Got Dem Ol’ Apocalypse Blues Again
Reading Time: 19 minutes Jackson, a wanna-be bounty hunter in a post-apocalyptic city, has been hired to find the people responsible for several acts of industrial sabotage. A moral person living in a city where morality isn’t a particularly good survival trait, Jackson ends up facing a crisis of conscience.
Mortimer the Maus
Reading Time: 14 minutes In “Mortimer The Maus,” Picco conveys the childhood terror of becoming lost in a large crowd, and the perils of being found by something else.
Virtually Yours
Reading Time: 12 minutes In a world of seamless surveillance where virtual and real coalesce in a teasing dance, love is the trickster
Three Eight Two
Reading Time: 13 minutes Where past and future meet, often it’s those living in the present that feel most conflicted.
Reflections on a Loaf of Rye
Reading Time: 4 minutes Hansel and Gretel’s love of sweets began long before they met the witch in the woods.
Five Things to do on the Way to the Bottom of the Sea
Reading Time: 3 minutes Benefits and pitfalls of undersea tourism exposed!
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Heartsick
Reading Time: 17 minutes In a world where it is illegal to be unhealthy, a young doctor must choose between her heart and the career she’s fought so hard for…
Nothing in the Dark
Reading Time: 26 minutes Cosmic horrors await an astronomer on a solo observing run.
Second Bite
Reading Time: 4 minutes A dentist with a dark family history receives a request to fit a patient with a very unique set of teeth.