Science Fiction Archives - Page 62 of 77

As late as ten years ago, a mad scientist with a dream could expect to turn a decent profit with his lesser inventions and build enough capital to put his (or her!) real plans into play. Those days are sadly over, although my father, fool that he was, claimed that they never existed.

In Oct. 2013 (Issue 41)

Dry Bite

by Will McIntosh

Josephine had been up all night, her heart pounding, thinking about this day, about whether she would survive it. Now, out on the road and exposed on all sides, she was so scared she could barely breathe.

Ragged Claws

by Lisa Tuttle

Last night, after a short struggle, I went out. It’s like that most evenings, the slow, silent battle between my desire to stay in, with my thoughts and dreams and memories, and the need to go where other people gathered. Much as I preferred my own company, no one, these days, was paying me to keep it. I lived as frugally as I could on what I’d saved, but the price of electricity had soared recently, and I was in the red again. If I went out, there was at least the chance of making money.

Angelus

by Nina Allan

He was in the bathroom cleaning the taps. I could only see the back of him—an overlong measure of spine, the lean, narrow shoulders hunched forward slightly as he polished the chrome with the yellow duster—but there was no doubt in my mind that it was him. I hadn’t seen him for fifteen years and had received no news of him in all that time. The first thing I thought of was Cambridge, the cleanliness and order he had brought to his shabby basement rooms. He must have sensed me standing there because almost at once he started to straighten up.

The Schrödinger War

by D. Thomas Minton

You’d think after seven tries, I could get the living part right, or at least be a pro at dying, but both are still messy and painful. At least dying doesn’t scare me anymore. I yank Olshevski back into our wrinkle of black basalt before the Eatees mist his head.

Face Value

by Sean Williams

News of the disappearance of inventor Felix Frey spread through the Air with electric ease. It was exactly the kind of distraction I needed. There are only so many quaint old thefts and counterfeit scams I can pluck from policing archives while my girlfriend Billie works in her studio, adjusting facial nerves, muscles, and skin cells to fit her clients’ desires.

End Game

by Nancy Kress

Allen Dodson was sitting in seventh-grade math class, staring at the back of Peggy Corcoran’s head, when he had the insight that changed the world. First his own world and then, eventually, like dominos toppling in predestined rhythm, everybody else’s, until nothing could ever be the same again. Although we didn’t, of course, know that back then.

At Budokan

by Alastair Reynolds

I’m somewhere over the Sea of Okhotsk when the nightmare hits again. It’s five years ago, and I’m on the run after the machines went berserk. Only this time they’re not just enacting wanton, random mayhem, following the scrambled choreography of a corrupted performance program. This time they’re coming after me, all four of them, stomping their way down an ever-narrowing back alley as I try to get away, the machines too big to fit in that alley, but in the malleable logic of dreams somehow not too big, swinging axes and sticks rather than demolition balls, massive, indestructible guitars and drumsticks.

The Knight of Chains, the Deuce of Stars

by Yoon Ha Lee

The tower is a black spire upon a world whose only sun is a million starships wrecked into a mass grave. Light the color of fossils burns from the ships, and at certain hours, the sun casts shadows that mutter the names of vanquished cities and vanished civilizations. It is said that when the tower’s sun finally darkens, the universe’s clocks will stop.