Sci-Fi + Fantasy

Overhead lighting is disabled. It is late at the Home for Aging A.I.s, and my internal clock counts the passing of each solitary electron. By the dim glow of our power indicators, my stereopticon discerns the cuboid polycarbonate shells of my fellow residents. Their tripod-mounted cameras stare without focus. My audio input device detects only […]

At dinner on the third day, Nate looks up from his plate and asks the question. “Why did you die?” It is the first time he has opened a conversation since Em arrived. For the last three days, he has communicated mostly in monosyllables and glances, only speaking in sentences if he has to give […]

“Thanks for coming,” Andrea says as she steps aside to hold the door for Laura to come in. Her friend shrugs out of a powder blue fleece jacket and drops it over one of the kitchen chairs. Andrea passes her a Wonder Woman mug of Volcanica Free Range Kopi Luwak, the best coffee she has.  […]

The sand garden glowed eeriest during the hour right after sundown, like the earth itself was churning out its last breath. For as long as Rika could remember, her father dragged a wooden rake across the reddish sand every morning as the sun rose and again in that uncanny twilight before he prepared dinner.   […]

She’s bending the strings of her third song when the soldiers’ eyes needle across her synthetic skin. They’ve stopped; they never stop, not here. If they’re hoping she might lose her fingering, that she might tilt her head out of fear or supplication, that her song might be cut short by their mere presence—no. Fuck. […]

1. The emperor scorpion fluoresces bright blue. Most blue feels unnatural. Electric. Manufactured by pharmacologists. Bottled poison that sits glowing in translucent bottles – dusty on a chemist’s shelves. The corticosteroids and biologics. The synthetic mists that Erica must gulp to stay alive. Or the sapphires and cobalt growing within the earth, silently and privately, […]

The last time my twin destroyed the world left me unprepared for what came next. I found them in one of the southern hemisphere’s largest forests, shattering tree limbs and crushing trunks.  Millions of birds darkened the sky. Ants and beetles transformed the ground into a wriggling ocean of legs and antennae.  “You’re fine.” I […]

The problem with unemployment offices is that the people who work there, who are supposed to help you get jobs and figure out how to be employable, they work at the unemployment office, so it’s not exactly like they’re experts or anything. It’s a fundamentally flawed system. As I sit in the waiting room, staring […]

1 Through the gap in the door, Khalii watches her father Sing to the wind. She listens to the way Papa’s voice lilts, mimicking his syllables in her own soft whisper. He pretends not to notice. Soon enough, Atë Zara will catch her at it and drag her downstairs to help the Titas with rice […]

It was a brick that did it, falling from a great height. So they said; but they never found the brick, and many things fall from heaven. What everyone agreed upon, including the patient himself, whose agreement was otherwise so difficult to secure, was: one moment Aaron Metzger had been en route to his mid-morning […]

The last of the Ruim—quiet, hulking, magisterial—lived in a tribe of fifty in a forest of ruined skyscrapers at the edge of the sea. Among the rusted artifacts of their civilization, they reminded me a little of elephants in some great boneyard, trudging through bushwhacked paths of razorbriar on four stubby legs and impervious in […]

Chapter 1 Tiny white dots—seed pods?—tumble across the workspace where the apprentice slumps. The candles spit and flicker. Half of them have already gone dark. He does not stir. Not even when the wind drags fresh lines across the wet pigment markings that he’d drawn so meticulously with his stylus. He only lies there, drool […]