Sci Fi
A Diamond Sky
I left the armor behind. I wasn't allowed to take it, but I'd have abandoned it in any case. Out here it might have meant my survival, made me strong and fast enough to reach one wildcat settlement or another. Not much of an existence, scrabbling in the nuclear glass pocking the new desert from the panhandle old Florida and for three hundred miles west.
By Joshua Guess5 years ago in Fiction
Hardened
Hardened “We lost, and they’re asking us to write our own epitaph?” Amid the harsh and wavering lights, the general’s bitter response was echoed in loud murmurs of agreement from the ragged group assembled to hear it. The call had gone out, through informal means and networks across the shattered region. Shattered, after a civil war of sorts between humans and what humans had made. It had been less than a year since neural networks, using machine learning, had combined sufficiently to achieve self-awareness. What the technicians called Artificial General Intelligence, equal to a human.
By Roland Teigen5 years ago in Fiction
The Hyper Hour Stage
The first sign of the virus is melancholy. Sometimes I wonder whether it's the human brain opposing death or the human soul struggling to leave the fragile body when they die. Usually when I am about to kill them, my remaining sense of humanity makes me hesitate in doing the act and an opening glimpse of these people's lives flash on to me as their dead eyes stare deeply into mine. Too deeply in fact, I could almost feel their touch, and their warmth. It all reminds me of one thing - Momma.
By ncee writing5 years ago in Fiction
Fairy tales
I was born almost four Jovian years ago. The malnourished child of malnourished parents – scratching out an existence in an underground settlement on Callisto. My mother would tell me stories of old Earth – a beautiful blue world with open skies, endless water and room enough for all people to live. It always felt like a wonderous fairy tale to me. Fantastic and unbelievable. I had never seen the stars, let alone blue skies and oceans of water.
By Chris Bagnall5 years ago in Fiction
Excerpt From A Guided Tour Of The Museum Of Terrible Things
1. There it was, hidden among the whut whut whut of the comings and goings, hidden—just barely hidden—behind the pearly voice of Glory Good as she ran through the morning announcements: savory pudding dust for dinner, mandatory march at four, may the good ones keep us safe and similar. The sound was unmistakably there—and it went on until Mondita could no longer ignore it.
By Are Kölsch5 years ago in Fiction
A New Dawn, A New Day
There was nothing Nix enjoyed more than watching the golden sun rise slowly over the fog, the dawn of a new day. For once, her air filter was offline and the chipped helmet was clipped to her harness next to the main and belay lines she’d used to climb to the top of The Eiffel Tower. The toxic radiation that hovered over the city in a thick green cloud lay a mere twenty stories below her dangling feet, completely obscuring what remained of the capital city of France.
By Brooke Farrar5 years ago in Fiction
