Send to KindleDear Sara,
Who was Forrest J. Ackerman?
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Send to KindleThe Clean War
by Shelly Li and Ken Liu
“AMI, have you found any nearby friendly structures that are still operational?” Sarah Bennett whispered. She swallowed hard, trying to hold down the mounting panic that threatened to jump out of her throat.
I’m not a soldier. I’m just a woman who programs computers. I don’t know what I’m doing. This was a mistake!
The Autonomous Military Intelligence’s voice, calm and androgynous, spoke in her ear. “There is a repair depot about one kilometer to the north. It appears intact, but it is highly unlikely that it has not been compromised. I urge caution in approach.”
Silently, AMI overlaid a map of the surrounding region onto Sarah’s helmet’s HUD. The bright lines of the map provided some relief against the dark, dense jungle lit only by dim starlight. Her location was marked by a blinking dot in the midst of the neon shapes that represented the hills around her. The repair depot appeared as a green square at the other end of the valley.
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Send to KindleThreads of Pearl, Writhing
by Gwendolyn Clare
They tell you it won’t hurt—that part is the lie. It does. But afterward, you won’t feel any pain at all. Ever again. They believe the lie because they can’t remember what “hurt” means.
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We don’t need the schematics to find our way through the space station’s air ducts anymore. After so many trips back and forth, we’ve worn a path into the film of dust and grease that thickly lines the ducts. We crawl on hands and knees, (we’re expert crawlers now, Angelo and me) and the metal feels slightly warm against my palms. A familiar sensation.
Angelo drops out of the air duct first, landing quiet as a cat on the deck of the control room. He reaches up to give me a hand, though I don’t need one. It’s cute in an old-fashioned, occasionally infuriating sort of way, as if I haven’t had plenty of experience with ducts and maintenance hatches since the station was infested.
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Send to KindleThe Farm
by George Right
The leisurely sunset of the July day washed the valley with gold, filling the world with bright saturated colors like a 1950s film; the rare ruffled clouds in the west simply glowed high in the blue sky, and it seemed that even the unpainted posts supporting the porch roof shone an amber light from within.
A warm breeze pleasantly fanned the face of Fred Marlowe. This was the face of a man who had spent his whole life in the fresh air, weather-beaten and sunburned, grooved with large, deep wrinkles, in the folds of which twinkled small drops of sweat. Grey locks poked out from under a broad-brimmed straw hat. Fred was dressed in a faded checkered shirt unbuttoned to his chest and threadbare jeans worn through at his right knee. His bare feet rested on the boards of the porch, which had been warmed by the sun, and his dusty sandals lay next to them. Fred pulled a wet can of beer out of an ice-filled cooler and pulled on the ring; the cold foam fizzled out to splash him on the arm, and several drops fell on the porch to form small brown blobs in the dust. Fred took his first sip with pleasure.
“Ahhh,” he said, dropping the hand holding the can. “This is so good. Too bad you don’t drink, Jim.”
Jim did not react to this comment and continued to lie on the porch, resting his muzzle on his front paws. Even when some cold drops fell onto the back of his neck from the tilted can, he barely twitched his left ear. Fred especially valued Jim for his calm and imperturbable disposition?so much in harmony with his own.
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Send to KindleReformed
by Michael Haynes
Marshall churned away on an elliptical machine at his gym. His attention wandered from the news during a commercial and he noticed a woman running on a treadmill across the room. He only saw her in profile, but she looked like Carol. Not Carol right before she died, lying in a hospital bed. Carol when they first met, several years ago. Carol when she said “Yes” to his proposal and accepted the ring he offered.
This woman’s body shape wasn’t quite right and her hair was auburn, not blonde, but it took his mind a half-second to notice those differences. The similarities were what it processed first, bringing back all of the wonderful and sickening feelings he associated with the woman he had loved. He looked away, pulled his focus back to his workout.
A few minutes later, he saw her again. This time she was walking straight towards him. His mouth went dry as he saw her face in full. She did not merely look somewhat like Carol. Her face was Carol’s face. The chin, the lips, the curve of the ear . . . he couldn’t help but stare at her, trying to make sense of it. Then she was past him and gone. His arms and legs kept working away, his mind and heart stunned. When he came to the awful realization of what this encounter meant he felt weak, ill. Marshall fumbled with the machine’s controls, finally bringing it to a halt, and bolted from the gym. Read More→
Send to KindleA Stolen Bicycle
By Abbie Bernstein
Gwen was not in the habit of asking people if they were crazy when she first met them, but she made an exception for the man standing on her porch in the rising dusk. He was nice-looking, African-American, a little taller and younger than Gwen, and wearing glasses with thick black rims and a well-pressed, though sweat-stained, shirt. “Ms. Skipner,” he said, offering his hand to shake, “I’m Louis Deschance with law enforcement here in District 218.”
Gwen shook his hand. “What can I do for you, Officer?”
“Ms. Skipner, would you like to become a police officer for District 218?”
Gwen blurted a laugh. “Are you crazy?”
Louis chuckled back politely. “Only according to my friends. You seem a likely candidate.”
“Based on what?”
“Our records, for one thing.”
“You have records on me?”
Louis nodded, his tone reassuring. “Yes, ma’am. First grade teacher, laid off, and you were one of the organizers at the Lake Cantona refugee center . . .”
“That’s wrong,” Gwen felt obliged to say. “I wasn’t an organizer, I was just there, a refugee.”
Send to KindleTHE ONCE AND FUTURE CAKE
By Michaele Jordan
That’s the thing about time travel: all those leftovers.
It started as soon as I recruited me. And don’t give me that whole paradox spiel. Of course it’s paradoxical—it’s time travel. Just take my word for it. You’ve got to go back and recruit yourself to get into the TransTemporal Corps, and you can’t do that unless you’re already in the Corps. Until you do that, you’re just a wraith.
What’s a wraith? It’s a ghost, a ghost of you, or maybe a ghost of what you might be, a hint of all your possibilities. I heard the wraiths live out on some weird little low-probability world where all the stuff that could never really happen happens. Most of them never make it up to the high probability levels, and when they do they usually only just make it in time to catch you before you die.
Send to KindleEXOTIC PETS
by Ken Liu
I look through the adult section of the city classifieds until I see the code phrase: “exotic and wild.” The address is in a part of the city where people with jobs and families and clean clothes never go.
Quietly, I make my way through the dark night, passing under broken street lamps, between empty lots filled with trash and gutted buildings taken over by squatters, to a run-down two-family house. A single light is on upstairs.
I crouch down and push off with my powerful legs. In a few silent, long arcs, I leap through the alley between the house and the warehouse next to it, until I’m in the backyard, and nobody has noticed me. My skin is clammy again, and I take a large gulp of water to keep myself hydrated.
I pick up a rock from the ground, and climb up the back stairs, moving slowly so as to minimize any noise, until I’m on the second-floor landing. In front of me is a door with a glass window, and I squat and slowly lift my head until I’m peeking into the kitchen. A man is playing with his phone while a TV drones on in the background. There’s a cash box on the kitchen table.
