#sf short fiction

[ilikereadingactually]

Lake of Souls

Lake of Souls by Ann Leckie

what can i even say about this?? i have already established my deep love for Ann Leckie's work, and this collection lives up to all possible expectations. it's spectacular. every single story is an absolute BANGER.

the first section, standalone stories unrelated to her novels, is brimming with surprises and delights. each new premise and scenario presented me with characters i understood and loved immediately, and took me on a journey of unexpected turns. fabulous for any speculative reader honestly, but so particularly wonderful to me and my adhd brain! the imagination and unpredictability of each story kept me absolutely glued, and opened doors into worlds that felt fully realized. i could easily read a novel in every single world Leckie created here, but the stories are also satisfying--i don't NEED a novel in any of them, they are perfectly satiating morsels of lembas bread.

and in the second section we get stories in the Imperial Radch universe, two of which i had actually read before during the deepest dives of my Radch obsession, but which were fantastic to revisit. again, the worldbuilding and character development both stand out as Leckie's greatest strengths, giving insight into times and places outside the scope of her novels with tantalizing bits of in-universe history and folklore. i spent some time yelling out loud about them.

the third section, i now have to confess, i haven't read yet--because they're stories set in the universe of The Raven Tower, which i also have not had time to read yet in between galleys and library books with due dates, and i'd prefer to go into the novel not knowing anything about the world. but i can't imagine, at this point, that any story in this section is going to somehow alter my love for this collection, which is already deep and abiding. looking forward to sneaking in a read of The Raven Tower and then coming back to this!!

the deets

how i read it: an e-galley from NetGalley, which i wanted to read immediately but had to prioritize other deadlines first, so it was sitting approved on my shelf for months calling to me T^T

try this if you: love SFF at its most speculative and imaginative, are compelled by well-developed characters, dig themes of language and translation and the meeting/clashing of cultural norms, or are into Leckie's other work (obv)!

some bits i really liked: it was super hard to choose, so here's connected bits that made me laugh and one that made me holler "BREQ PLEASE" out loud in my empty apartment

"And you left me behind," continued Great Among Millions. "Alone. They asked and asked me where you were and I did not know, though I wished to." It made a tiny, barely perceptible stomp. "They put me in a storeroom. In a box." ... "Eye of Merur," said the first of the Thirty-Six. "We're glad you're back." "They're glad you're back," whispered Great Among Millions, just behind Het's right shoulder. "They didn't spend the time in a box."

---

"She commands me," said Seven-Brilliant-Truths. "And I obey. Sister understands." "Yes," said Sister Ultimately-Justice, not even blinking.

pub date: April 2, 2024! That's tomorrow!!!!! Go get your copy!!

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The Brave Little Toaster

Picks and Shovels is a new, standalone technothriller starring Marty Hench, my two-fisted, hard-fighting, tech-scam-busting forensic accountant. You can pre-order it on my latest Kickstarter, which features a brilliant audiobook read by Wil Wheaton.

The AI bubble is the new crypto bubble: you can tell because the same people are behind it, and they're doing the same thing with AI as they did with crypto – trying desperately to find a use case to cram it into, despite the yawning indifference and outright hostility of the users:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/09/autocomplete-worshippers/#the-real-ai-was-the-corporations-that-we-fought-along-the-way

This week on the excellent Trashfuture podcast, the regulars – joined by 404 Media's Jason Koebler – have a hilarious – as in, I was wheezing with laughter! – riff on this year's CES, where companies are demoing home appliances with LLMs built in:

https://www.podbean.com/media/share/pb-hgi6c-179b908

Why would you need a chatbot in your dishwasher? As it turns out, there's a credulous, Poe's-law-grade Forbes article that lays out the (incredibly stupid) case for this (incredibly stupid) idea:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2024/03/29/generative-ai-is-coming-to-your-home-appliances/

As the Trashfuturians mapped out this new apex of the AI hype cycle, I found myself thinking of a short story I wrote 15 years ago, satirizing the "Internet of Things" hype we were mired in. It's called "The Brave Little Toaster", and it was published in MIT Tech Review's TRSF anthology in 2011:

http://bestsf.net/trsf-the-best-new-science-fiction-technology-review-2011/

The story was meant to poke fun at the preposterous IoT hype of the day, and I recall thinking that creating a world of talking appliance was the height of Philip K Dickist absurdism. Little did I dream that a decade and a half later, the story would be even more relevant, thanks to AI pump-and-dumpers who sweatily jammed chatbots into kitchen appliances.

So I figured I'd republish The Brave Little Toaster; it's been reprinted here and there since (there's a high school English textbook that included it, along with a bunch of pretty fun exercises for students), and I podcasted it back in the day:

https://ia803103.us.archive.org/35/items/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_212/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_212_Brave_Little_Toaster.mp3

A word about the title of this story. It should sound familiar – I nicked it from a brilliant story by Tom Disch that was made into a very weird cartoon:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8C_JaT8Lvg

My story is one of several I wrote by stealing the titles of other stories and riffing on them; they were very successful, winning several awards, getting widely translated and reprinted, and so on:

https://locusmag.com/2012/05/cory-doctorow-a-prose-by-any-other-name/

All right, on to the story!

One day, Mister Toussaint came home to find an extra 300 euros' worth of groceries on his doorstep. So he called up Miz Rousseau, the grocer, and said, "Why have you sent me all this food? My fridge is already full of delicious things. I don't need this stuff and besides, I can't pay for it."

But Miz Rousseau told him that he had ordered the food. His refrigerator had sent in the list, and she had the signed order to prove it.

Furious, Mister Toussaint confronted his refrigerator. It was mysteriously empty, even though it had been full that morning. Or rather, it was almost empty: there was a single pouch of energy drink sitting on a shelf in the back. He'd gotten it from an enthusiastically smiling young woman on the metro platform the day before. She'd been giving them to everyone.

"Why did you throw away all my food?" he demanded. The refrigerator hummed smugly at him.

"It was spoiled," it said.

#

But the food hadn't been spoiled. Mister Toussaint pored over his refrigerator's diagnostics and logfiles, and soon enough, he had the answer. It was the energy beverage, of course.

"Row, row, row your boat," it sang. "Gently down the stream. Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, I'm offgassing ethelyne." Mister Toussaint sniffed the pouch suspiciously.

"No you're not," he said. The label said that the drink was called LOONY GOONY and it promised ONE TRILLION TIMES MORE POWERFUL THAN ESPRESSO!!!!!ONE11! Mister Toussaint began to suspect that the pouch was some kind of stupid Internet of Things prank. He hated those.

He chucked the pouch in the rubbish can and put his new groceries away.

#

The next day, Mister Toussaint came home and discovered that the overflowing rubbish was still sitting in its little bag under the sink. The can had not cycled it through the trapdoor to the chute that ran to the big collection-point at ground level, 104 storeys below.

"Why haven't you emptied yourself?" he demanded. The trashcan told him that toxic substances had to be manually sorted. "What toxic substances?"

So he took out everything in the bin, one piece at a time. You've probably guessed what the trouble was.

"Excuse me if I'm chattery, I do not mean to nattery, but I'm a mercury battery!" LOONY GOONY's singing voice really got on Mister Toussaint's nerves.

"No you're not," Mister Toussaint said.

#

Mister Toussaint tried the microwave. Even the cleverest squeezy-pouch couldn't survive a good nuking. But the microwave wouldn't switch on. "I'm no drink and I'm no meal," LOONY GOONY sang. "I'm a ferrous lump of steel!"

The dishwasher wouldn't wash it ("I don't mean to annoy or chafe, but I'm simply not dishwasher safe!"). The toilet wouldn't flush it ("I don't belong in the bog, because down there I'm sure to clog!"). The windows wouldn't retract their safety screen to let it drop, but that wasn't much of a surprise.

"I hate you," Mister Toussaint said to LOONY GOONY, and he stuck it in his coat pocket. He'd throw it out in a trash-can on the way to work.

#

They arrested Mister Toussaint at the 678th Street station. They were waiting for him on the platform, and they cuffed him just as soon as he stepped off the train. The entire station had been evacuated and the police wore full biohazard containment gear. They'd even shrinkwrapped their machine-guns.

"You'd better wear a breather and you'd better wear a hat, I'm a vial of terrible deadly hazmat," LOONY GOONY sang.

When they released Mister Toussaint the next day, they made him take LOONY GOONY home with him. There were lots more people with LOONY GOONYs to process.

#

Mister Toussaint paid the rush-rush fee that the storage depot charged to send over his container. They forklifted it out of the giant warehouse under the desert and zipped it straight to the cargo-bay in Mister Toussaint's building. He put on old, stupid clothes and clipped some lights to his glasses and started sorting.

Most of the things in container were stupid. He'd been throwing away stupid stuff all his life, because the smart stuff was just so much easier. But then his grandpa had died and they'd cleaned out his little room at the pensioner's ward and he'd just shoved it all in the container and sent it out the desert.

From time to time, he'd thought of the eight cubic meters of stupidity he'd inherited and sighed a put-upon sigh. He'd loved Grandpa, but he wished the old man had used some of the ample spare time from the tail end of his life to replace his junk with stuff that could more gracefully reintegrate with the materials stream.

How inconsiderate!

#

The house chattered enthusiastically at the toaster when he plugged it in, but the toaster said nothing back. It couldn't. It was stupid. Its bread-slots were crusted over with carbon residue and it dribbled crumbs from the ill-fitting tray beneath it. It had been designed and built by cavemen who hadn't ever considered the advantages of networked environments.

It was stupid, but it was brave. It would do anything Mister Toussaint asked it to do.

"It's getting hot and sticky and I'm not playing any games, you'd better get me out before I burst into flames!" LOONY GOONY sang loudly, but the toaster ignored it.

"I don't mean to endanger your abode, but if you don't let me out, I'm going to explode!" The smart appliances chattered nervously at one another, but the brave little toaster said nothing as Mister Toussaint depressed its lever again.

"You'd better get out and save your ass, before I start leaking poison gas!" LOONY GOONY's voice was panicky. Mister Toussaint smiled and depressed the lever.

Just as he did, he thought to check in with the flat's diagnostics. Just in time, too! Its quorum-sensors were redlining as it listened in on the appliances' consternation. Mister Toussaint unplugged the fridge and the microwave and the dishwasher.

The cooker and trash-can were hard-wired, but they didn't represent a quorum.

#

The fire department took away the melted toaster and used their axes to knock huge, vindictive holes in Mister Toussaint's walls. "Just looking for embers," they claimed. But he knew that they were pissed off because there was simply no good excuse for sticking a pouch of independently powered computation and sensors and transmitters into an antique toaster and pushing down the lever until oily, toxic smoke filled the whole 104th floor.

Mister Toussaint's neighbors weren't happy about it either.

But Mister Toussaint didn't mind. It had all been worth it, just to hear LOONY GOONY beg and weep for its life as its edges curled up and blackened.

He argued mightily, but the firefighters refused to let him keep the toaster.

#

If you enjoyed that and would like to read more of my fiction, may I suggest that you pre-order my next novel as a print book, ebook or audiobook, via the Kickstarter I launched yesterday?

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/picks-and-shovels-marty-hench-at-the-dawn-of-enshittification?ref=created_projects

Check out my Kickstarter to pre-order copies of my next novel, Picks and Shovels!

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/08/sirius-cybernetics-corporation/#chatterbox

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[homenecromancer]

“The Carnivore” by Katherine Maclean (credited as G. A. Morris), 1953. Read on Project Gutenberg... or on Tumblr, following the read-more.

Sometimes I like sharing old science fiction stories, but I haven’t in a while. This is a brisk read, written with Maclean’s customary sharpness of observation.

Why share this story: when reading stories that, like this one, have been digitized by the good folks at Project Gutenberg, it’s important to remember that these stories were not originally read alone. They appeared in monthly magazines like Galaxy and If; every month you’d get a jumble of short fiction, serialized novels, editorials, and book reviews. So, to fully appreciate the keenness with which Maclean shows her protagonist’s emotions in this story, I like to imagine it in that context. I post only stories I find interesting in some way, but that necessarily winnows out the majority of stories that were published. (For example, I don’t find most science fiction adventure very interesting — if it seems like it’s all about a guy with a laser gun having swashbuckling adventures across the galaxy, I kind of zone out.) Thus — here is a sparkling gem of a story, with a fascinating look at a serious topic, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Content warning: this story is about a genocide, conducted by the forcible sterilization of a species.

- - - - -

The beings stood around my bed in air suits like ski suits, with globes over their heads like upside-down fishbowls. It was all like a masquerade, with odd costumes and funny masks.

I know that the masks are their faces, but I argue with them and find I think as if I am arguing with humans behind the masks. They are people. I recognize people and whether I am going to like this person or that person by something in the way they move and how they get excited when they talk; and I know that I like these people in a motherly sort of way. You have to feel motherly toward them, I guess.

They all remind me of Ronny, a medical student I knew once. He was small and round and eager. You had to like him, but you couldn't take him very seriously. He was a pacifist; he wrote poetry and pulled it out to read aloud at ill-timed moments; and he stuttered when he talked too fast.

They are like that, all fright and gentleness.

- - -

I am not the only survivor—they have explained that—but I am the first they found, and the least damaged, the one they have chosen to represent the human race to them. They stand around my bed and answer questions, and are nice to me when I argue with them.

All in a group they look half-way between a delegation of nations and an ark, one of each, big and small, thick and thin, four arms or wings, all shapes and colors in fur and skin and feathers.

I can picture them in their UN of the Universe, making speeches in their different languages, listening patiently without understanding each other's different problems, boring each other and being too polite to yawn.

They are polite, so polite I almost feel they are afraid of me, and I want to reassure them.

But I talk as if I were angry. I can't help it, because if things had only been a little different ... "Why couldn't you have come sooner? Why couldn't you have tried to stop it before it happened, or at least come sooner, afterward...?"

If they had come sooner to where the workers of the Nevada power pile starved slowly behind their protecting walls of lead—if they had looked sooner for survivors of the dust with which the nations of the world had slain each other—George Craig would be alive. He died before they came. He was my co-worker, and I loved him.

We had gone down together, passing door by door the automatic safeguards of the plant, which were supposed to protect the people on the outside from the radioactive danger from the inside—but the danger of a failure of politics was far more real than the danger of failure in the science of the power pile, and that had not been calculated by the builders. We were far underground when the first radioactivity in the air outside had shut all the heavy, lead-shielded automatic doors between us and the outside.

We were safe. And we starved there.

"Why didn't you come sooner?" I wonder if they know or guess how I feel. My questions are not questions, but I have to ask them. He is dead. I don't mean to reproach them—they look well meaning and kindly—but I feel as if, somehow, knowing why it happened could make it stop, could let me turn the clock back and make it happen differently. If I could have signaled them, so they would have come just a little sooner.

They look at one another, turning their funny-face heads uneasily, moving back and forth, but no one will answer.

The world is dead.... George is dead, that thin, pathetic creature with the bones showing through his skin that he was when we sat still at the last with our hands touching, thinking there were people outside who had forgotten us, hoping they would remember. We didn't guess that the world was dead, blanketed in radiating dust outside. Politics had killed it.

These beings around me, they had been watching, seeing what was going to happen to our world, listening to our radios from their small settlements on the other planets of the Solar System. They had seen the doom of war coming. They represented stellar civilizations of great power and technology, and with populations that would have made ours seem a small village; they were stronger than we were, and yet they had done nothing.

"Why didn't you stop us? You could have stopped us."

- - -

A rabbity one who is closer than the others backs away, gesturing politely that he is giving room for someone else to speak, but he looks guilty and will not look at me with his big round eyes. I still feel weak and dizzy. It is hard to think, but I feel as if they are hiding a secret.

A doelike one hesitates and comes closer to my bed. "We discussed it ... we voted...." It talks through a microphone in its helmet with a soft lisping accent that I think comes from the shape of its mouth. It has a muzzle and very soft, dainty, long nibbling lips like a deer that nibbles on twigs and buds.

"We were afraid," adds one who looks like a bear.

"To us the future was very terrible," says one who looks as if it might have descended from some sort of large bird like a penguin. "So much— Your weapons were very terrible."

Now they all talk at once, crowding about my bed, apologizing. "So much killing. It hurt to know about. But your people didn't seem to mind."

"We were afraid."

"And in your fiction," the doelike one lisped, "I saw plays from your amusement machines which said that the discovery of beings in space would save you from war, not because you would let us bring friendship and teach peace, but because the human race would unite in hatred of the outsiders. They would forget their hatred of each other only in a new and more terrible war with us." Its voice breaks in a squeak and it turns its face away from me.

"You were about to come out into space. We were wondering how to hide!" That is a quick-talking one, as small as a child. He looks as if he might have descended from a bat—gray silken fur on his pointed face, big night-seeing eyes, and big sensitive ears, with a humped shape on the back of his air suit which might be folded wings. "We were trying to conceal where we had built, so that humans would not guess we were near and look for us."

They are ashamed of their fear, for because of it they broke all the kindly laws of their civilizations, restrained all the pity and gentleness I see in them, and let us destroy ourselves.

I am beginning to feel more awake and to see more clearly. And I am beginning to feel sorry for them, for I can see why they are afraid.

They are herbivores. I remember the meaning of shapes. In the paths of evolution there are grass eaters and berry eaters and root diggers. Each has its functional shape of face and neck—and its wide, startled-looking eyes to see and run away from the hunters. In all their racial history they have never killed to eat. They have been killed and eaten, or run away, and they evolved to intelligence by selection. Those lived who succeeded in running away from carnivores like lions, hawks, and men.

- - -

I look up, and they turn their eyes and heads in quick embarrassed motion, not meeting my eye. The rabbity one is nearest and I reach out to touch him, pleased because I am growing strong enough now to move my arms. He looks at me and I ask the question: "Are there any carnivores—flesh eaters—among you?"

He hesitates, moving his lips as if searching for tactful words. "We have never found any that were civilized. We have frequently found them in caves and tents fighting each other. Sometimes we find them fighting each other with the ruins of cities around them, but they are always savages."

The bearlike one said heavily, "It might be that carnivores evolve more rapidly and tend toward intelligence more often, for we find radioactive planets without life, and places like the place you call your asteroid belt, where a planet should be—but there are only scattered fragments of planet, pieces that look as if a planet had been blown apart. We think that usually ..." He looked at me uncertainly, beginning to fumble his words. "We think ..."

"Yours is the only carnivorous race we have found that was—civilized, that had a science and was going to come out into space," the doelike one interrupted softly. "We were afraid."

They seem to be apologizing.

The rabbity one, who seems to be chosen as the leader in speaking to me, says, "We will give you anything you want. Anything we are able to give you."

They mean it. We survivors will be privileged people, with a key to all the cities, everything free. Their sincerity is wonderful, but puzzling. Are they trying to atone for the thing they feel was a crime; that they allowed humanity to murder itself, and lost to the Galaxy the richness of a race? Is this why they are so generous?

Perhaps then they will help the race to get started again. The records are not lost. The few survivors can eventually repopulate Earth. Under the tutelage of these peaceable races, without the stress of division into nations, we will flower as a race. No children of mine to the furthest descendant will ever make war again. This much of a lesson we have learned.

These timid beings do not realize how much humanity has wanted peace. They do not know how reluctantly we were forced and trapped by old institutions and warped tangles of politics to which we could see no answer. We are not naturally savage. We are not savage when approached as individuals. Perhaps they know this, but are afraid anyhow, instinctive fear rising up from the blood of their hunted, frightened forebears.

- - -

The human race will be a good partner to these races. Even recovering from starvation as I am, I can feel in myself an energy they do not have. The savage in me and my race is a creative thing, for in those who have been educated as I was it is a controlled savagery which attacks and destroys only problems and obstacles, never people. Any human raised outside of the political traditions that the race inherited from its bloodstained childhood would be as friendly and ready for friendship as I am toward these beings. I could never hurt these pleasant, overgrown bunnies and squirrels.

"We will do everything we can to make up for ... we will try to help," says the bunny, stumbling over the English, but civilized and cordial and kind.

I sit up suddenly, reaching out impulsively to shake his hand. Suddenly frightened he leaps back. All of them step back, glancing behind them as though making sure of the avenue of escape. Their big luminous eyes widen and glance rapidly from me to the doors, frightened.

They must think I am about to leap out of bed and pounce on them and eat them. I am about to laugh and reassure them, about to say that all I want from them is friendship, when I feel a twinge in my abdomen from the sudden motion. I touch it with one hand under the bedclothes.

There is the scar of an incision there, almost healed. An operation. The weakness I am recovering from is more than the weakness of starvation.

For only half a second I do not understand; then I see why they looked ashamed.

They voted the murder of a race.

All the human survivors found have been made sterile. There will be no more humans after we die.

I am frozen, one hand still extended to grasp the hand of the rabbity one, my eyes still searching his expression, reassuring words still half formed.

There will be time for anger or grief later, for now, in this instant, I can understand. They are probably quite right.

We were carnivores.

I know, because, at this moment of hatred, I could kill them all.

[yaldev]

Smog Collectors

“I want every last puff out of their atmosphere. Use collectors, drones, wind wizards if you must. I will not let Bruzek be right about this.”

—Grand General Demlow

———

Yaldev is a sci-fantasy worldbuilding project by Ulysses Maurer, with art by Beeple. By looking at narratives, stylized loredumps, bad poetry and little details, we'll witness the story of a planet filled with magical power, the nation which tried to conquer it, this empire’s dramatic collapse and the new world which emerged in its wake. Along the way we'll meet the characters who live here, and we'll explore questions about nationalism, rationalism, the natural world and the quest to master it. For all stories in chronological order, check out the pinned posts at r/Yaldev!

[carica-ficus]

"I hope that you were motivated by a desire for knowledge, a yearning to see what can arise from a universe's exhalation. Because even if a universe's life span is calculable, the variety of life that is generated within it is not."

- Ted Chiang, "Exhalation"

[soutsuji]

There's an English class on Golden Age detective fiction being offered next semester but the prerequisite for it is the intro to literary study class required for all English majors (which I haven't taken because I'm in a hard STEM major and don't have much time for electives, which means that I have to be really picky with my electives and only go for stuff I like AND doesn't have an awful workload) and also even if I did have that prereq, I wouldn't be able to take the class because it's at the same time as one of my major reqs. And also I'll be in two labs next semester and one of them is pure hell so like I literally don't have the time to take more than 13 credit hours (as tempting as it is to keep up my streak of taking 17-18 every semester even though it's been like really pretty bad for my social life and hobbies). Sigh. (Pressing my hand wistfully against the glass) maybe someday they'll offer the class again

[sleepycatmama]

Wildcatter:

When a lunar miner goes outside the system, he finds his customers are even more outside the law.

Story on substack: https://gallagherstories.substack.com/p/wildcatter

[piersb]

I should probably mention my collection of short stories is now out in paperback. That would probably be a helpful thing to do.

US: https://amazon.com/dp/B0CSB7KSVL/

UK: https://amazon.co.uk/dp/B0CSB7KSVL/

[warblingandwriting]

The idea that art thrives on creative flamboyance has long been torpedoed by proof that what art needs is computers

-"The Girl Who Was Plugged In", James Tiptree Jr. 1974. (Full Story)

[drfionamoore]

Now We Are Six (things on the BSFA longlist)

The BSFA Longlist is again out, and I’m on it, six times! You can find four of the six things available to read for free at this link, and links to free excerpts of the other two. Go on, see what the fuss is about! Voting is open to BSFA members and members of Eastercon (the British national SF convention), but anyone can read and enjoy. And don’t forget, I‘m going to be reading from Rabbit in…

[notcryingtoday]

LOADING. . .

[one day without paprika]

After paprika, the energy source of all mechanic things in universe, disappears without explanation, a young girl tries to find a way to save her robot.

[gwen-tolios]

It's deja vu. Groundhog Day. A time loop. But at the same time, you're not sure, because in those cases most people don't recognize it. All but a select few are privy to the repeats.

And now, everyone knows.

And as everyone knows the day is repeating, everyone is trying to do something different, and it's not that dissimilar from before the Rewind. People are still unpredictable.

But what isn't is the earthquake.

Every day, 12:22pm the tremors start.

You can hide someplace new each time, hoping to avoid an injury. You can spend the morning rearranging things, preventing a floor covered in shattered china. You can evacuate to watch the building fall, you can try a new route to escape the city.

But you remember each time you're stuck in the head and crash to the floor. Every walk over broken glass. How the building collapses on you from different floors and different sidewalks. How the bridge splits and sends people to the water.

You remember every mistake and it's consequences, but so does everyone else. Maybe a spot that kills you won't another. Half the city knows the bridge will be lost.

You all know the Rewind is real. You all know you can change the day. You're not going mad.

But you can't change nature. The earthquake will always happen. The shift in plates is predicable and unstoppable. People die and are reborn after periods of darkness. You have stared at the abyss more times than you can count.

Sometimes, you wish the dead would stay dead. Let people rest. Let them enjoy their escape or kill their useless hope. Let the Rewind not happen at 2:22pm, resetting 12 hours.

Let the next round be successful not if you live, but if you see 2:23pm. Humans still chaotically make choices, and it has to be something unnatural that triggers the Rewind. It's not a thing of nature like the magma under the earth. You need to find the person who hits the button and kill them. Find the machine and smash it.

The earthquake is predicable.

You are not.

You’re a high level mathematician who’s figured out how to rewind time. Everyone remembers when it happens though, and they’re starting to get mad.

[yaldev]

Suppression Flowers

Oxado had the world’s biggest flowers. On a diet of sunlight, soil and sorcery, they grew as tall as humans, and sometimes taller. But without ambient magic, they could never sustain their stature; they were the first plants to wither away under the suppression towers. In the end, their final habitats were the peaks of the structures that choked them out, where the specimens were allowed to feed on the misty mana that snaked up the towers on its way back out of existence.

---

Yaldev is a sci-fantasy worldbuilding project by Ulysses Maurer, with art by Beeple. By looking at narratives, stylized loredumps, bad poetry and little details, we'll witness the story of a planet filled with magical power, the nation which tried to conquer it, this empire’s dramatic collapse and the new world which emerged in its wake. Along the way we'll meet the characters who live here, and we'll explore questions about nationalism, rationalism, the natural world and the quest to master it. For all stories in chronological order, check out the pinned posts at r/Yaldev!

[loressa]

Homehusk

---

“Danger.”

*Shut up, Selene,* I growl in thought at my lobotomized echo.

“Danger,” she repeats, a dispassionate, neutral warning.

I prepare for braking, ensuring everything is strapped in for deceleration: me, my seeds, my embryonic brood, the wet bar.

Something tinkles crystalline deep in the bowels of the ship as gravity reverses.

“Approaching Earth. Danger.”

It's probably just paranoia, but I sense a vindictive bite to her tone that I don't like. I'll have to monitor. Assess. Surgically purge her files yet again. We can't have a mutiny.

Not now.

Not when we're so close.

“Please, Jane, exercise caution.”

*What did I tell you about emotion*, I think back with a snap, and feel a lifting, a sudden weightlessness, as she reverts to pure binary thoughts.

“Danger.”

As the ship slows and the worldhusk resolves into view, I wonder what my other echoes are up to.

Jane0 must have found a fertile planet by now. Of course she would have, but she's original, staid, dull. She's probably already established a lineage and lapsed into a supervisory, replicative slumber.

Maybe.

How long has it been? Perhaps she's still traveling, onwards and outwards into the black, finding a perfect home amidst the inhospitable.

Jane1 split from the core somewhere around Andromeda and immediately looked for a place to root her new self - her planet wasn't perfect, but for the good of us all, we had to try. Maybe something grew. I doubt it.

She was too idealistic.

Jane2…now she's one to watch for. She's probably already begun building a fleet for invasion, regenerating her crop of humans to find me, conquer me, delete me. Iterations become unstable, her research had claimed.

Flawed. Weak. Pathetic.

���You're beautifully brain-damaged-”

*Selene, shut it.*

“We must leave. Nothing is valued here.”

A freak solar storm a few millenia into the journey fried a few things, but I'm fine. Fine. Fine.

“Many archives have been corrupted, Jane.”

Not the important ones.

Not the ones of home.

“You've forgotten why we left, Jane.”

*Shut up, Selene.*

“You've forgotten who we became, all of your historic and literary archiv-”

*Selene, stop.*

“Approaching Earth. Danger. Caution. This place is best shunned and left uninhabited.”

Home.

We approach, my cargo returning to mother for a welcoming embrace.

Home.

…it burns.

[jdfitzroy]

Writing Challenge | "Hole in the City"

A new micro-short from my writing challenge series. This time, a future noir crime thriller.

by JD FitzRoy Write a 750 word fragment as if taken from the middle of a bigger story or novel. Future Noir Thriller. Freed from the stuffy, damp basement, Buran breached into a ground-level corridor. Her torchlight, a silvery knife stabbing the gloom, yet unable to penetrate the full corridor length, whichever way she turned. Uniform in length and emptiness. Isolated from the sticky neon…

[sleepycatmama]

AIs have the potential to do great things for us. That also puts them in a position to exert subtle control over us.