“On the bright side,” said Zara, poking at his glasses a week before, “this means you get new eyes.” But I don’t want new eyes, he thought. The surgery isn’t bad, as surgeries go. The one he had when he busted his knee ten years ago, as a teen, was much worse. Or maybe it […]
Kaityn Falk loves the dark phase of the moon. It’s quiet. Soothing. Insulated in their spacesuit, comm dimmed, Kaityn sits in the rover and watches the sky. Here on Io 7, a newly discovered satellite in retrograde orbit around a dwarf planet the size of Pluto, they are the only living human in several thousand lightyears. […]
Okay, this rogue robot recovery gig is getting old and I’m saying this as the tech geek of the team. So that should tell you something about our situation. I mean, it’s not like the hacker is trying to steal different robots every time—it’s always a Commando 237X, which also happens to be like one […]
I gotta tell you, as a puppet life sucks. I mean, cartoon characters got it easy. They don’t have to deal with five-fingered monsters crawling all over them or being nailed to the floor. Or dying. I was talking with old Scoobster the other day. Once you get past the doggy speak, he’s pretty clear. […]
Once upon a time, long, long, long, long, long, long, ago, there were three raptor sisters, hatched beneath a lucky star. They lived in a wood together, they stole sheep and cattle together, and all in all, there was no tighter-knit hunting pride of matriarchal dromaeosauridae between the mountains and the sea. The oldest was […]
“So you’re a chef,” the huntress said, after she’d saved the day, “and you’re out here to hunt and cook a dragon?” “Yes?” Kee picked leaves off her muddied pants, a futile gesture. The huntress stared at her with a slight frown. She was compact, shaved hairless, brown-skinned, and wore Easterner boiled leather armour, dotted […]
The precinct’s interrogation room had the same atmosphere as all such rooms: stale coffee mixed with flop sweat and the tang of blood. There were no windows, and the cliched one-way mirror was replaced by hologram cameras that transmitted an exact 3D replica of proceedings into a room of detectives and lawyers. But the single […]
The Miller Diaries Author(s): Donna K. Gibson Source: Journal of Anthropological Research, Vol. 123, No. 4 (Winter, 2069), pp. 223-242 Published by: University of New Mexico The following are excerpts from the diary of Elias J. Miller, a previously unknown member of the ill-fated Donner Party. Donated to the National Historical Society earlier this year, […]
October. Our animals, they know. Way before we do. Ever since we entered the Zone of Exclusion, she’s been uneasy. For me, it’s paradise. No people. Stores full of stuff. Apartment doors standing open, radios still on. One morning months ago a caravan of trucks showed up, ordering everybody out of a two-hundred-kilometer circle of […]
The year is 2069. Rumors of monsters haunt three abandoned islands in the Pacific Ocean. Surrounded by dangerous waters from which visitors are warned away, few have dared visit and fewer still have returned to tell the tale. The three islands, linked via now-decrepit tunnels and bridges, were intended to create and experiment on DINOSAURS. […]