Fiction · 66 stories

Fiction

The Dismantling

When Janice Spurlock designed the Concord Settlement she conceived of the hole first.

Thing Party · Aug 2026

Fiction

Carousel Feeding in the Asteroid Midden // Livelock

Everyone on Kupiter said ORCA pilots were the only workers left who still made decisions. The black ships shimmered in the port bay.

Spencer Nitkey · Aug 2026

Fiction

Floyd Haggerty’s Wild West Extravaganza Spectacular!

To stand my four hooves beneath the canvas roof of the stable tent is to enter a world shaped by invisible hands.

Thing Party · Jul 2026

Fiction

Thanatosis on the Central Mast // Liveness Check

Instead: Fourteen thousand six hundred nineteen tickets sat in a queue at the base of Egrol’s skull.

Spencer Nitkey · Jul 2026

Fiction

A Visitor’s Guide to the Disposition

By the author. The reader who does not know the author has been kept ignorant on purpose.

Thing Party · Jun 2026

Fiction

The Big Man

The whole business was a first-rate falsehood, constructed out of nothing but thin air and the desperate gullibility of men who require a master.

Thing Party · Jun 2026

Fiction

The Overloaded Train

Fu Kenan was slowly becoming invisible. He had first noticed this process on the second morning of the westbound run, somewhere between the Almaty…

Sachin · May 2026

Fiction

All You Can Do Here Is Leave

Dear Mom, I have no idea if this letter will reach you.

Thing Party · May 2026

Fiction

The Headless Empire

The UET-1 had been moving for 11 hours when Felix Lim noticed that Lin Yuan Exact had not eaten.

Sachin · Apr 2026

Fiction

The Flesh Perfected Is the Flesh Possessed

Rowan was startled awake from that half-daydream, half-sleep state that happens on long train rides.

Sachin · Apr 2026

Fiction

The Faithful Channel

The protocol spec called her role Designated Relay, but the traders on both sides of the partition said throat.

Nishit · Mar 2026

Fiction

Last-Mile Optimism

The delivery bag sat on the apartment building steps like evidence waiting to be logged. Small. Tamper-evident seal.

Marie-Hélène Lebeault · Mar 2026

Fiction

Caduceus City

Late-morning on November 5th, a dispatch ping sent me to the Advanced Research Lab to investigate the death of a Dr. Ori Demmel.

Randy Lubin · Feb 2026

Fiction

American Skyway

“Will the delegate from New Texas stand and be recognized.” The speaker with the dull voice paused and looked up across the semicircular chamber.

Cameron Russell Armstrong · Feb 2026

Fiction

The Repossessed

“A promise is a direction taken, a self-limitation of choice… if no direction is taken, if one goes nowhere, no change will occur.

Amita · Feb 2026

Fiction

Desire Machines

The last-minute tumult of departure reigned on the steamer from Bristol to Buenos Aires.

Sachin · Feb 2026

Fiction

Robyn occupied her booth the way bedrock occupies a landscape: immovably, silently, and with a certain aggressive permanence that suggested removal would be unwise for the structural integrity of the region.

Thing Party · Feb 2026

Fiction

Minor Differences Repeating Forever

Karina saw her first doppelgänger leaving the sensory deprivation clinic on 30th street.

Spencer Nitkey · Jan 2026

Fiction

Missing Not at Random

I am choosing to write my research report on my older brother, Io, because he’s different from most people, he makes me curious (curiosity is the best recipe for a good research project, right?), and because my dad cries and my mom gets very, very quiet whenever someone mentions his name – even still.

Spencer Nitkey · Jan 2026

Fiction

Day Traitor

Edward Thon didn’t like it when people called him Eddie. He didn’t like it when overlay settings obscured the real weather from him, even if it was gloomy.

Spencer Nitkey · Jan 2026

Fiction

The Predation Circuit

Happy 18th birthday. You wake to an empty city. You’ve known the quiet was coming since your 15th birthday, when intrusive thought became action, and you…

Spencer Nitkey · Dec 2025

Fiction

Planetary Tech Support

H3L-PR arrived in low Earth orbit with the quiet precision of a machine that considered efficiency a form of morality.

Marie-Hélène Lebeault · Dec 2025

Fiction

The Second Glossolalia

The city was still when I woke up, hours before the place would gradually come to life. The weather was gray, and people’s minds matched it.

Sachin · Dec 2025

Fiction

Would You Stop Following Me if I Was a Worm?

Sylvo always wanted to play this game when we were dating. He called it “If I was,” and I absolutely loathed it.

Spencer Nitkey · Dec 2025

Fiction

Perception Must Preserve

I never saw a drug dealer on the corner of Second and Poplar until I was looking for one.

Spencer Nitkey · Nov 2025

Fiction

The Partial

Incident Code: EC-71f – Unauthorized Emotional Non-Compliance Subject: Tessa Vaughn, Resident ID #HLV-847392 Location: Halverton Smart City, Cognitive Efficiency Zone 3 Time: 0947 hours, Local Preference Time Reporting System: Partial Oversight Network v4.2

Marie-Hélène Lebeault · Nov 2025

Fiction

Mr Cork and the Red Bus

Mr Cork took a sip of his pint at The Victoria pub, near Paddington station. He’d be lying to himself if he didn’t admit that he was a little nervous.

Kannen · Oct 2025

Fiction

Mismatch

“I used to think we were the perfect couple who enjoyed spending time together and maintained a deep bond,” I said, lying on the bed with my fiancé, Karim.

WriterRamprasath · Oct 2025

Fiction

Consensus Nightmares

Chainpoint was founded on a single principle: Code Must Govern.

Spencer Nitkey · Oct 2025

Fiction

Signals in the Margins

The UET-1 stretched nearly a kilometer from nose to tail, its segmented body gleaming under station lights, each car bearing different national and corporate insignia that blurred together as it moved – Chinese characters giving way to Cyrillic lettering, then Latin script, then back again.

Sachin · Oct 2025

Fiction

Hardwired

The sound began not as a whine, but as a change in air pressure – a high-frequency vibration felt in the teeth before it was heard.

George P. Burdell · Oct 2025

Fiction

In Every Lifetime

“In nature nothing exists alone.” Rachel Carson (1962) I am imprinting this record for the lifeform that will adopt this consciousness.

Lara Dal Molin · Sep 2025

Fiction

Towel Uprising

INCIDENT REPORT #SC-2407-TOWEL-VIOLATION Violation Code: Sun-34b – Unauthorized Lounger Occupation Location: Aqua Vista Resort & Protocol Compliance Center, Pool Deck Alpha Time: 3:47, Local Pool Time Reporting Officer: Towel Integrity Officer Martinez, Badge #TIO-0089

Marie-Hélène Lebeault · Sep 2025

Fiction

Genius in the Bottle

In the control room of the European Space Center, on-call engineer Marcus Chen stared at his screens with the blasé expression of someone who has been monitoring space data for 15 years.

Claire Pichelin aka Hypathie · Sep 2025

Fiction

The House That Paid Its Own Bills

Prologue: now Nobody dies as long as their data pays rent. Call it cynical, but it’s carved in silicon truth.

Thing Party · Sep 2025

Fiction

We Shape Our Tools, and Thereafter Our Tools Shape Us

A typical war, sparked by a bottle of soy sauce, erupted at the tail end of the Friday evening rush hour.

Tongzhou Yu · Sep 2025

Fiction

Latency

Selena logged into the local node at 06:58, as she had for the last 2,121 cycles.

rafa · Sep 2025

Fiction

Soda Sweet as Blood

My grandfather used to leave strawberry soda in the white and gold san chao thi spirit house on the corner of our property.

Spencer Nitkey · Aug 2025

Fiction

In the Garden of Eden, Baby

Moodily, Darius was contemplating his latest acquisition, a mahogany writing desk that had belonged to Charles Dickens.

Sisyphus · Aug 2025

Fiction

Loyalty

The Adaptation Force’s glideskiff floats above a half-submerged road.

Zach Hyman · Aug 2025

Fiction

The Last Archive

Brother Lexicon, Adjunct Archivist Grade B at the Ministry of Predictive Symbolism (MOPS), disliked Mondays.

Sachin · Jul 2025

Fiction

Circadia

The dream begins, always, with the corridor. Glass-walled and humming faintly, it stretches forward underfoot like a spinal cord lit from within.

Afeez · Jul 2025

Fiction

Songs of Hydropolia

Tav stood at the base of the hillside, where the stone gave way to mossy flagstones and the air tasted faintly of copper.

Sachin · Jul 2025

Fiction

Necrophoresis

Ants bury their dead. Scientists insist that this does not constitute mourning. Necrophoresis is a sanitization practice, not a religious or spiritual one.

Spencer Nitkey · Jul 2025

Fiction

Phantom in Eden

Two years after the siege, Lila found herself in Tokyo, working at a daycare. The facility was clean, efficient, and cold.

Sachin · Jul 2025

Fiction

The Reverie Loop

Olen had skimmed the onboarding packet—buzzwords like serendipity, self-directed frameworks, and repatterning. None of it mattered.

Marie-Hélène Lebeault · Jul 2025

Fiction

The Whimsy Index

In the beginning, people dreamed because their brains had to do something while their bodies took a break from hunting mammoths, inventing the wheel, or trying to figure out what to do with turnips.

Sachin · Jul 2025

Fiction

The Curse of Wolves

Zhang’s morning commute took him beneath a lattice of mirrored domes and whirring surveillance arrays.

Sachin · Jun 2025

Fiction

Genesis of Memory

Date: 17 November 2091 Place: Ceremonial Chamber, MST ARCHIVE In the cavern beneath the mountain, while rows of polished quartz discs lay bearing witness, Nishi stood waiting for the Crystal Reading Ceremony to commence.

Sachin · Jun 2025

Fiction

The Hungering Circuit

The Registry of Conveyance brooded beside the rail‑canal like a calcified lung, its limestone façade marbled with soot and anemic verdigris.

Protocolized · Jun 2025

Fiction

The Air Gap

Bram Kvass knew this case was about a missing daughter without being told.

Jack Lord · Jun 2025

Fiction

Fine Print

Nobody read the Agreement. Not thoroughly, anyway.

Griffin · May 2025

Fiction

Time to Die

The hum of the bio-regeneration unit was a constant, low thrum in Unit 7, a sound that usually lulled patients into a more peaceful twilight. Dr.

Ralph Witherell · May 2025

Fiction

Noise Ordinance

The average sneeze is around 60-90 decibels. I take pride in keeping most of mine below 20, even in pine season.

Spencer Nitkey · May 2025

Fiction

The 40-Hour Work Week

The plane was still taxiing. Three rows back, a woman stood up and opened the luggage compartment. A flight attendant shouted at her to sit down.

Étienne Fortier-Dubois · May 2025

Fiction

DHCP

The midnight rain hammered against the windows of New Kenzai's Lower Wards as Inspector Hideo Mori hunted through the cramped apartment.

Amita · May 2025

Fiction

EGREGORETEX™️

In a cluttered design lab above a forgotten bookstore in Toronto, four minds melded under the glow of soldering lamps and the pale, ghostly pulses of holographic neuron simulators.

Timber Stinson-Schroff · May 2025

Fiction

Human Enough?

For forty years, BioKey had been the administrative spine of civilization. No passports. No bank cards. No passwords.

Marie-Hélène Lebeault · Apr 2025

Fiction

A Chronicle of Lumina

Remembered by Selene, a Luminian protocolist. From the gallery windows I watched Earth turn beneath us, like a soft blue theorem, self‐evident and…

Timber Stinson-Schroff · Apr 2025

Fiction

Zero Knowledge

"I don't need to know your name," he said. "I just need to know you have one." They tapped their phones together.

Sachin · Apr 2025

Fiction

The Signal Under Innsmouth

It is with a mixture of dread and compulsion that I set down the account of my ill-starred visit to the coastal anomaly known as Innsmouth—a place long shrouded in superstition and decay, yet oddly absent from modern maps and index crawls.

Venkatesh Rao · Apr 2025

Fiction

Fault Tolerance

At 04:13, the city rerouted Sector 14-B. No sirens sounded. No alerts were issued.

Josh Davis · Apr 2025

Fiction

The Entropic Gate - Part II

Jonah followed Kaida through the abandoned arteries of Lower Tethys, a space that shouldn’t exist.

TΞRM1NΞX · Apr 2025

Fiction

The Entropic Gate - Part I

Jonah Weir stood on the observation tier of Novae Tethys, staring out at a city sculpted by an invisible hand.

TΞRM1NΞX · Mar 2025

Fiction

To Share, And Remember

Her name means something like Verity, the highest virtue among her kind. The activation ritual undertaken to receive the name was long.

Katharine Tyndall · Mar 2025

Fiction

Haven Tailors

I was watching the brittle winter morning begin to thaw when the first customer walked in through the long, empty hallway that led to the door to my shop.

Sachin · Feb 2025