Science Fiction
The Five Elements of the Heart Mind
The Dandelion lost structural integrity so quickly that I doubt the bridge even had time for a distress call, and this escape pod’s radio is only sub-light.
Advertisement
Science Fiction
Against Eternity
The wan gray of polluted skies will weigh on your soul, and you will recall bluer days, and wish for your childhood, when the grass seemed taller and would rub your inner thighs as you rambled through the fields.
Science Fiction
The Old Equations
I miss you already. But you know that. What you don’t know is just how proud I am of you. You were born for this, and no one could possibly be able to handle such a demanding job as well as you.
Science Fiction
The Cold Equations
There could be no alternative—but it required a few moments of conditioning for even an EDS pilot to prepare himself to walk across the room and coldly, deliberately, take the life of a man he had yet to meet.
Science Fiction
Transcript of Interaction Between Astronaut Mike Scudderman and the OnStar Hands-Free A.I. Crash Advisor
The following transcript details the last known use of the OnStar Hands-Free A.I. Crash Advisor, once a mandatory install on all craft equipped for interstellar travel.
Science Fiction
Beachworld
FedShip ASN/29 fell out of the sky and crashed. After a while two men slipped from its cloven skull like brains. They walked a little way and then stood, helmets beneath their arms, and looked at where they had finished up. It was a beach in no need of an ocean—it was its own ocean, a sculpted sea of sand, a black-and-white-snapshot sea frozen forever in troughs and crests and more troughs and crests. Dunes.
Science Fiction
The Taste of Starlight
Pelops wakes gasping and shivering inside the CryoPod. A thin layer of ice crystals coats his cheeks and hands, pricking at his exposed skin. Crackling and moaning, he raises hands to his eyes and pries their lids open, shedding ice shards like tears. The curving glass surface before him is cracked into a mass of spidery lines. Struggling to inhale the frozen air, he pushes against the glass. The door of the pod refuses to move. He is entombed.
Science Fiction
The Long Chase
2645, January. The war is over. The survivors are being rounded up and converted. In the inner solar system, those of my companions who survived the ferocity of the fighting have already been converted. But here at the very edge of the Oort Cloud, all things go slowly. It will be years, perhaps decades, before the victorious enemy come out here. But with the slow inevitability of gravity, like an outward wave of entropy, they will come.
Science Fiction
I’m Alive, I Love You, I’ll See You in Reno
We have a history of missed connections, you and I. Years ago, when you called goodbye from the shuttle launch, my flight was landing in Zurich. I’d changed planes, been re-routed from Frankfurt. That’s why you got my voicemail. I’d have answered if I could, and would’ve wished you luck, even if you wanted a life without me. I never managed to see Europa, like you did—just Europe, where I met my first husband. The one I wished was you.
