Sci Fi
Oil & Water
1 Falling – like the bass drops in a good slow-banger, or a spirit broken – falling like tension in a dim club when the rhythm picks up – the sensation was unmistakably like falling. A few of us were dancing, thick kids and punks with dreadlocks, long fingers lit up at their tips with neon extensions. Looking alien wasn’t hardly a thing in downtown that year, like the sky was black and red, peaking in by the warehouse slats up above us. Just another night in a dive, I remember thinking, not the wild scene, but these dancers’d fit that role. I sat apart, slouched a bit, hiding behind my hair.
By River Alison5 years ago in Fiction
C.A.R.I
There was one body the sight of which had not left the mind of Cleo Myrth in the eighteen months after she found it. The young woman witnessed a great deal of brutality in her twenty years, so seeing a body wasn’t much to write about. Although Cleo admitted to herself every lifeless figure carried a cosmic weight in her subconscious. Maybe not now, not in the middle of The Scatter, but eventually those bodies would morph into nightmares. Still, the body that stayed with her was that of Dr. Joy Garcia; sprawled out with her white coat dirtied, her hand clutching a book, glasses tossed from her face, eyes closed, and lips held in a soft smile. No one smiled in death, and that was what bugged Cleo. Cleo knew of Dr. Joy Garcia as she had read every one of the mechanical engineer’s papers she could get her hands on. Between leaving Detroit, Michigan and traveling south to Tortuga, Peru by foot with the rest of her battalion, Cleo never passed on a library. Leveled to the ground, brick by brick pouring out as if buildings bled concrete and rebar alone, books scattered for streets before and after, and Cleo would find Dr. Joy Garcia’s collections in the rubble.
By M. J. Luke5 years ago in Fiction
A Century Since Green
“Our luck with meat today. Uncanny.” “It’s a sign of good fortune for us!” “Us.” “Yes, all of us!” “All of us. Sure.” Undi brushed Ovi’s suspicions to the side. Everyone in the village has been on the receiving end of it, or her equally natural anger, or her bitterness, her jealousy. Of course, no one had to endure Ovi as much as Undi, and as long as Undi lived with Ovi, everyone who wished to be with Undi will be susceptible to Ovi for all eternity.
By Zserilyn Finney 5 years ago in Fiction
Migration of a Hunted Herd
This is her eleventh time doing this. It’s busy. Crowded. Claustrophobic as always. Too many people for what the chipped placard at the sliding door allots. Yet here they all are. The commuters. The citizens. Standing like birds in a storm, they sway with each turn or dip in the tracks. There was a time when people sat. But she can’t remember it. Just another memory the older generation tells the younger. Another inheritance from a time without relevance. A distant golden age of ancestors who built this city and then moved on, having either escaped or died. The seats were stripped from the compartment long ago. Now everyone stands rigidly upright, staring this way or that. She beholds those buildings beyond which occlude the falling sun, imagining its light warming the skyline’s far face.
By S.P. Michael5 years ago in Fiction
Entropy's End
Entropy’s End Lights up. There is a small bed stage right covered in rags. Shelves with mechanical parts and provisions line the walls. A fire burns in a small chimney. A strange metallic doorway stands stage left. Everything is dirty and built from scavenged parts. EVE enters, she is dressed in a jumpsuit, breathing mask and cloak. She carries a large sack. She shuts the door behind her and seals it. She walks to the table and sets down the squirming sack, and a large makeshift crossbow. She sits at a chair and removes her mask. She is a woman of about 30. She stands and cautiously opens the sack. She pulls out a large insect. Its physiology is alien and asymmetrical. It has too many eyes. She takes it to the fire and pushes a large metal spike through it. It squeals and its limbs flail then grow still. She sets it atop the fire, it writhes but quickly stops. She returns to the chair and sits. She picks a remote control and presses a button. She takes a heart shaped locket from her neck and holds it out. A hologram of a young woman wearing a 1950’s housewife dress and heels appears, generated from the locket. She is tall and blonde with short hair. AIMEE begins to speak.
By Michael Watkiss5 years ago in Fiction
Promised
He heard a faint snap off to his left. Stopping, he tilted his ear to listen further, lifting the brim of his darkened boonie hat slightly with his finger. His other hand slowly moved to his hip, coming to rest on the top of the kydex holster that housed his sidearm. The silence weighed heavy around him, and his lack of motion contributed to the eerie peace he had found himself in. Calculations zipped through his mind, a reflex at this point.
By Robert Plante5 years ago in Fiction
2070
It was all so brain deadening. The jelly in my eyes had become sweet and sticky from the light of LEDs. I no longer counted time by the second, but by the heartbeats of the sphere. The lab remained dark so we could at least imagine something new were there. Every documentary and film about Elvis Presley had been digested. We spoke to his image I plastered upon the door, which read “Nine and nine make fourteen, four and four make nine, the clock is strikin’ thirteen, I think I lost my mind.” In our isolation and boredom, detail was our only source of novelty. Fennec had 37 seam-like scars running across her. I found Max’s signature mark under her left eyelid. She had not been aware of either factoid until my every sense was imbued with her dissection.
By Kadon Peterson5 years ago in Fiction
Memoir of a Teddy Bear
Her name was Amelia, and I loved her. I watched as the doctor disconnected her life support and wished I had been made with the ability to cry. Her arms still wrapped around me and holding me tight gradually grew colder as the warmth and last lingering traces of life left her, and it truly started to sink into my processors that my beloved owner was gone. That smile that always dazzled me, that laugh that had always warmed my circuits, it was all gone. She would never clutch me to her chest in bed at night, never whisper girlish secrets into my fuzzy ears, or sit me across from her as she held a tea party ever again. My entire reason for existing was gone.
By Valkyrie Ice McGill5 years ago in Fiction
Collar
Just kick her up the bum, I thought. One kick. Doesn’t even need to be hard. A nudge would be enough. Bruce rounded the corner. His scowl deepened like he knew what I was thinking. My brief moment of treason slipped away into the past. Just like all the other moments I’d spent in this house.
By Matt Holland5 years ago in Fiction
