Genres: Apocalyptic, Queer, Romance, Space, War
SECURE PRIORITY COMMUNIQUE
distribution SOLITAIRE, keyword MASQUERADE, source PENTACLE
FROM: TRIPLE INTENT
TO: ASPHODEL
BEGIN CONTENT
Even if you’re my enemy, I’m glad to hear from you. (Continue Reading…)
Joey Straphos, Papa Joe, told me once that Chandra’s Game is a bitch of a city, fickle but generous when the mood strikes her. But Papa Joe was a romantic.
Chandra’s Game roots in the side of a barren asteroid moon like a tick. Over the years we’ve burrowed deeper into rock and ice until poor Chandra is mostly Game. We loop the twin wormholes, Gehenna and Tartarus, roundabout in a figure eight, ready to catch the freighters as they escape from hell’s dark maw. We strip them of goods and drink their heat, load them up and send them into another hell. It’s a profitable game, Chandra’s.
My mother smuggled me into Chandra’s Game without patronage and compounded her error by dying without permission; I was Terra-born unless she was lying, which was likely enough. I joined the other unregistereds down in the Warrens: ferals that lived off the Mayor’s Dole and by odd-jobs when that wasn’t enough. Papa Joe fed us, and sometimes the tunnels were glorious with the smell of meat, and if you were smart or hungry enough you didn’t ask from what. Where there’s humanity there are rats, and Joey wasn’t a rich man, not then. But food is food, and he’d bunk you if he could, and if all he asked in return for the latest Warren scuttlebutt or a few sticks of ephedrine off a freighter’s load, what of it? Saints are few and far between in Chandra’s Game.
Genres: Medical, Queer, Romance, Technology
Feb. 17, 3:40 AM. Audio notebook for new project: revival of a clinically dead patient, 36 year old male, died of hypothermia and shock.
The technician at the morgue hesitated when releasing him to me. I’m not surprised, with the tone that took hold of my voice as I corrected her Mr. to Dr. as she took down my details. When I gave her my name, her pen stalled over the paper—a giveaway that his parents had called before I arrived. I should be grateful that she released him to me anyway, honoring my legal right to the body. I should be grateful for so much, I suppose, even if it doesn’t feel like it, to have this opportunity to—to not let his story end in tragedy. (Continue Reading…)
Genres: Artificial Intelligence, Queer, Romance, Space, Technology, YA
“Hey Marty,” Mom asks, “got a moment?”
I cringe whenever Mom’s voice has that tone to it. I don’t know what she’s going to say; but if I’ve learned anything in my thirteen years on this desolate, oxygen-deprived rock, it’s that she’s going to find a way to say the most mortifying thing possible. It would be impressive, the way that every sentence excavates my stomach—if it weren’t my stomach she was mining!
Okay, that’s unfair. Maybe this time it won’t be so bad?
“That girl who just walked past us. Why didn’t you ask her out?”
Or not. (Continue Reading…)
Rupert Weard leapt into the drawing room, escaping a hallway dense with impossibly angled, tentacular horrors trying to sell him insurance.
“Ye gods, it’s bedlam out there,” he said. “Just look at this, Boswell.” He hurled his folded newspaper at me like a frisbee.
I occupied my usual spot on the rug by the fireplace. I’d been happily finishing off the remains of a cauliflower when the unwanted periodical came streaking across the room, forcing me to hop into frantic evasive action.
“Oi!” I said, coughing up half-chewed bits of Brassica oleracea. “Do you mind? That was my breakfast.”
“It’s eleven o’clock, you idle rabbit.” Rupert slammed the door firmly shut on a particularly determined sales rep attempting to squeeze its incompatible geometry into the room. (Continue Reading…)
Genres: Robot, Technology
(…Continued from Part 1)
Jenna gave herself a few moments to seethe in silence before she spoke, to make sure her voice was calm. “I can’t move.”
“Did you hear that?” Daron took a swig of his water, then bit into his sandwich. He looked around the table at the others. Not even a glance at Jenna. “She can’t move.”
“It’s a problem,” Skye admitted.
“Definitely is,” Irelyn agreed.
“Most unfortunate.” This from Khalil.
There was a pause as they waited for Uruk, but he was staring at his computer screen. He jumped up when Irelyn’s elbow poked his ribcage. “We’re still good. No delays. I’m keeping track.”
“We’re talking about the newbie, Uruk,” Irelyn said. “She can’t move.” (Continue Reading…)
Genres: Robot, Technology
Damn, the exoskeleton was hot. Two minutes strapped into the smart harness with its thick exospine and the oversized, carbon-fiber limbs that grew from it, and sweat pooled between Jenna’s shoulder blades, over her own spinal column. The whole thing hummed with electronics and throbbed with support motors. Nothing like the black top, mini skirt, and sneakers she’d worn on her previous job, waiting tables and tending bar at Lazy Dog’s.
But the pay was three times what she made in tips, and she had the evenings to herself.
She was moving up in the world. (Continue Reading…)
Genres: Apocalyptic, Dystopia, Humor, Technology
“This place is trash, garbágio, blechalicious,” Rocky Cornelius said appreciatively. “All we gotta do is, as they say, sublevel the vibe.”
“Really? You think so?” The greengrocer, Franklyn, wrung his hands—still caked with black soil from showing her the beet rows in aisle five—a sure sign that Rocky’s negging, one of the most reliable techniques in her consultant toolbox, was working.
They stood in the canned goods section of Primal, soon to be Westwood’s newest and hippest boutique bodega slash survival goods retailer. The paper labels on the tins had been artfully patinated by some design school dropout, ripped and torn to leave just a slash of Roma tomato picture here, a glimpse of fava bean logo there. The shelves looked half-caved in, but were in fact quite secure, welded into place at zig-zag angles. Simulated California sun streamed, dappled, through an ivy-frosted, hole-in-the-roof-shaped skylight.
The idea of this ‘concept shoppe’ was to make shoppers feel like they were looting an abandoned store in a post-apocalyptic, collapseporn paradise. Rocky quite liked the idea. No one wanted to be a “consumer” these days. People—especially Californians, who had lately been through so much—wanted to think of themselves as “survivors,” disaster-hardened protagonists in a return-to-their-roots story of rebuilding and social rejuvenation. It’s just that, if they could afford one of the new quake-proof condos springing up in Westwood, they wanted to do so without having to worry about tetanus, botulism, scurvy, or gluten. (Continue Reading…)
Genres: Space, Technology
I’d always known Calam would run.
He had all the signs. A taut restlessness, body brittle as an overstretched lute string, when we stayed too long in one place. A gloom in his eyes, as we drifted through stretches of dead space. A sullen crease between the brows, whenever I tried to ask how he’d landed in that dead-end Martian workshop at seventeen.
But after ten years, why now?
Genres: Artificial Intelligence, Dystopia, Robot, Superhero, Technology
Stacey reads a comic book. It’s about a robot lady, but not like her. This robot lady has exposed gears and metal rods in her arms and wears a metallic bikini as she solves crimes. The colors are otherworldly. Sometimes the red ink bleeds sideways or the blue shifts toward the bottom of the page. Stacey loves the feeling that every image is made of transparent layers. She imagines soft films of yellow, red, and blue gently wafting down onto the black and white.
Stacey isn’t supposed to be reading the comic book. Her existence is devoted to the proper display and peddling of women’s casual separates for the upscale consumer. When she isn’t in the window posing, she is assisting customers or straightening stock–which means undoing the chaos the customers do to the shop. They do a lot. The comic book itself had been left by a customer, on a pedestal displaying the new winter sweaters, with a half-drunk coffee and some cheese doodles. (Continue Reading…)