How to Win Against the Robots
Mom lives in a little place off the old meat-packing district, the streets full of cobblestones peeking through asphalt as hipsters turn the bones of slaughterhouses into bespoke gin bars. It’s expensive.
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Science Fiction
The Lord of Mars
The grow pods clung to a red, humped ridge about a twenty-minute hike west from the habitats. Inside one of their plastic domes, a farmer named Oliver Judd nestled potato starts in the ground with nimble hands. It was tricky work in a forty-pound outside suit.
All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt
It had been a long day of convention. All I wanted was a quiet drink in the hotel bar and quality time in my room with a romance novel. The utter cad from Planetary Industries was an unanticipated bubble in the fuel line.
See Now the Misfortune of the Thinking Tenax
See now the misfortune of the thinking tenax. It is alone. The other tenaces have been chased away. Their gore stains the thinking tenax’s mandibles, and its roar drives them further back. Their flickering eyes peer out from behind feldspathic spires.
Multi-Spatial Apartment Complex Malfunction Results in Body Horror
At 5:43 a.m. this morning, residents of Grackle Pointe Apartments awoke to a malfunction in their complex’s multi-spatial engine due to an unprecedented derecho that swept through the Montrose area of Houston. This resulted in tenants being mentally and physically fused together.
The Twenty-One Second God
We lost so many souls today. Reports stream in across five continents; icons bloom on the map like blood spatters. Broken filters, zero latency, bandwidth that somehow blew through the roof when no one was looking. The hardware plays catch-up as best it can.
The Meaning We Seek
In the pre-dawn light she lies in bed, gazing through the window at graceful trees silhouetted against a turquoise sky. The air is still, the pretty room orderly and calm. She lies motionless except for her eyes, the soft blue quilt rising and falling with her breath. At a hundred years old, breath is shallow. It will not be long now. I am remembering for her, vivid visions linked to her mind through implants and nanos and software.
Through the Machine
“Steve, over here! Turn to your right. Can we get a smile?” He falls back on his training easily enough, turns to the cameras, gives them his famous crooked smile, tilts his head just so as the flashes go off so they can capture the smoulder that highlights his cheekbones. The one he’s practiced countless times with his manager, Ethel.
The Temporal Displacement of the Graves
As dead bodies floated down the Mississippi, Mrs. Graves couldn’t shake the urge to dance. It was ingrained in her bones, dancing. Growing up in New Orleans, death was once celebrated—a spirited second line surging through Treme to the blare of trumpets and rumble of drums. But that was before the levees broke, before the waters rose, before the music stopped. “Honey, I’m home,” Mrs. Graves said, poking her head into their rundown trailer. “I found one.”
Rthing It Up: An Oral History
In 23762, the Interstellar Community of Planetary Systems began its campaign to add a new member: a distant, isolated planet called Rth. It would be an understatement to say that the annexation of Rth did not go well. In fact, it went so poorly, a popular phrase entered the vernacular almost immediately: Rthing it up.
