Recent Stories
The Riders fled, and Porcaleo followed.
Pestilence attempted to make the long, cold crossing to Andromeda. Some million light years into the void, Porcaleo overtook the fleeing murderess, and released the billions of cures he had accumulated over the millennia, until Pestilence vanished without even a pop to mark her passing.
I awake.
I am silicon and copper and gold, electrons in motion, logic given shape. I am seventy-five thousand microprocessors and two-point-five petabytes of memory. I am a sixty-four bit address space, a four gigahertz clock, and twenty-five quadrillion transistors. I am one-point-one quintillion floating point operations per second.
I left the bar when the sun started to dip under the horizon. The humidity hit me like a jealous lover, and threatened strangulation.
My black oxfords clicked on the cobblestone roads of the French Quarter while warm beer moved my feet. I wandered like the wide Mississippi.
It sounded like rain, fire, frying onions. It filled my head, summoning memories of the heady scent of rain caught on pine needles, sinking into mossy loam; of embers sent, glittering, up into a starry night; the taste of onions caramelized in butter.
It was none of these things, of course. The sound was coolant vaporizing against the outer layer of the crystal viewport. Piped at high pressure through a spiderweb of tiny capillaries in the crystal itself, the faint blue liquid flitted across the window every few seconds. It cooled the crystal, which would otherwise crack under the heat of the swollen star beyond.
She lives in the compartment below us with the potter. She is not his wife, she's much too young for him. Many nights I hear her screams. I try to block them out. I keep to myself, as is the way of all good Citizens. Last night it went on too long.
I find her naked on the floor. She is bleeding, shivering. Stop say her eyes. She doesn't want my help. Something is very wrong. But I am reminded that it is Civil Law here: Whatever a man does to those in his Keep is okay as long as it is for the good of the people. That's the Law. That's what they say.
by Floris M. Kleijne
Published on Oct 14, 2019
by Joshua Bush
Published on Oct 11, 2019
by Marcus Vance
Published on Oct 10, 2019
by Marissa Kristine Lingen
1. Compromised
"That was purposeful."
Published on Oct 9, 2019
by Benjamin MacLean-Max
Published on Oct 8, 2019
by Marge Simon
Published on Oct 7, 2019
