Sci Fi
The Spy
Slowly, she began to regain consciousness. She opened her eyes slightly and was blinded by the brilliant lights in the room. She squinted and tried to move her arm to block out some of the light, but her arm wouldn’t respond. In fact, she couldn’t feel anything below her collarbones. It wasn’t that she was restrained, but rather that she simply didn’t have a body. How could that be? She was awake, and her eyes obviously worked, but why didn’t the rest of her.
By Christopher Schalk5 years ago in Fiction
2121
CHAPTER 1: THE THUNDER IN THE STREETS Around the Earth there is a blanket of gems that cover the nights sky, but these starts cannot be seen from the city. They have been replaced with mankind’s LED sparkling skyline. While it remains festive and in some sense beautiful it doesn’t have the same visceral pull that laying down in the grass with a night sky above, out in the country watching shooting stars has. That feeling, a want, a need, a longing, to be out amongst the stars can be extrapolated and expanded when you know you could be out there.
By Joe Swinehart5 years ago in Fiction
Post-Body Experiences
Dear listener of my lonely delirious thoughts, Romanticising the apocalypse was a gigantic mistake. Trust me. If it’s possible to call this miserable existence life, my ‘life’ is in no way worth it. I’d instead have chosen not to exist—not to have made the replica.
By Eva Vilhjalmsdottir5 years ago in Fiction
Crater Charlie's Magpies
Magpies were the lifeblood of Crater Charlie. They flew in from afar or crawled across the tangled carpet of unchecked plant-life, and they descended on the suspiciously perfect circle of Charlie’s crater; the one for which he was named, in case there was any doubt about that. Creative nomenclature had been one of the first casualties of the apocalypse, much to everyone’s surprise. Admittedly it did have to wait in line behind the enormous loss of human life, the devastation of various major settlements, and the utter collapse of global society as it had been known for hundreds of years, but those ones were so expected that they barely warranted a mention. It was the loss of nuanced naming conventions that really hit the survivors hard, because they were going to have to live with the consequences forever and it really wasn’t clear why it’d happened in the first place.
By Iain James Read5 years ago in Fiction
Paz and the Past
The ground in the Past was still dead, but tall, tough grass had returned in patches, making it more difficult to search. Paz never brought anything with her when she crossed the shimmering border, so she had to be content with scratching and kicking the ground to make it speak.
By Bev Potter5 years ago in Fiction
1V0RY T0WERS
David Gomez woke the same way he had for the last two years: perfectly refreshed, at the precise conclusion of his fifth sleep cycle. He slid out from beneath the hood that stretched across the headboard, careful not to disturb his wife as he shifted the covers. He let his feet slap against the wood floor; his own little fireworks show.
By Steven A Jones5 years ago in Fiction
The Squire and the Botanist
Young Talbot's valour makes me smile at thee: When he perceived me shrink and on my knee, His bloody sword he brandish'd over me, And, like a hungry lion, did commence Rough deeds of rage and stern impatience; - Lord Talbot, Henry VI Part 1 [4.7]
By Jamie Finfer5 years ago in Fiction
The Phoenix Virus
October 21, 2032 The world has changed. Talk about an understatement right? Speaking of talking that’s what I’m doing now, talking into digital voice recorder. I got the used Sony recorder at a trading post along the interstate about an hour ago. An old timer had traded it to me for a bushel of apples. Not sure why I had done that. Maybe I needed to get some things off my chest. Call it therapy.
By Mike Garrity5 years ago in Fiction
Futile
We had woken up, but perhaps it would have been better to stay asleep. The room around Cecilia was dark, dank and damp. Shadowy light fixtures hung from the rafters, dangling as if ready to end their lives, but not quite ready…swaying in the hot breeze that snuck in the barred yet shattered windows. Her blanket, a shade of green that reminded her of mold, held spatters and speckles of mildew, so she kept it pushed down at the foot of the cot with her combat boots that were too large by at least two sizes. Too big was better than too small, she had reminded herself when she scavenged them a few weeks earlier.
By Lacie Perry5 years ago in Fiction
The Boy in the Mainframe
Human history began with a straw scratching ancient skrit on clay, arced all the way through battles and Band-Aids, spanned pyramids and elegant skyscrapers, and then was doomed by some snotty nerd tippity-tapping his LED keyboard at work. There were many nerds, of course, and many keyboards, but one particular dingus ran the over-the-weekend script to kickoff yet another experiment that unwittingly birthed the great A.I. Singularity: Ada.
By Christopher Fin5 years ago in Fiction
