Zan’s supervisor tossed the glass square onto their rusting desk. A glass-rendered construct of a silver ticket hovered in the air, text shimmering. Zan held their breath as they re-read it until they were sure their credentials were correct.| Lightspeed Magazine
Defense Attorney John Yurasov: Earlier you referred to this trial as a circus. Can you explain what you meant? Defendant Michaela Xiao: I don’t mean it was corrupt. Though that’s very possible. I just mean that the conclusion was always foregone.| Lightspeed Magazine
The buffet was infinite. It existed in a pocket dimension, via some sort of technological jiggering of the sort that you have heard about before and, unless you are totally anal, don’t want to hear about now.| Lightspeed Magazine
Dispatch #1. [INAUDIBLE] . . . but hopefully I’ve got the recorder working now. This is Dr. Nathaniel Letheford, Director, Alliance for Military Neutralization and Eradication of Sensitive Incidents and Atrocities. I have been inserted into conflict zone W-924/B for sample collection.| Lightspeed Magazine
We all know, by now, how common time loops are. In less than a decade, they’ve moved from the realm of SF movies into the slightly less-realistic realm of self-help books---most famously, Moving On: How to Keep Going When Time Literally Stops.| Lightspeed MagazineRSS - Lightspeed Magazine
Once upon a time, on a spaceship traveling through the divide between galaxies, a married couple was bickering about whose job it was to clean the mouse shit that’d accumulated in the reactor tubes.| Lightspeed MagazineRSS - Lightspeed Magazine
Mom lives in a little place off the old meat-packing district, the streets full of cobblestones peeking through asphalt as hipsters turn the bones of slaughterhouses into bespoke gin bars. It’s expensive.| Lightspeed MagazineRSS - Lightspeed Magazine
It had been a long day of convention. All I wanted was a quiet drink in the hotel bar and quality time in my room with a romance novel. The utter cad from Planetary Industries was an unanticipated bubble in the fuel line.| Lightspeed MagazineRSS - Lightspeed Magazine
See now the misfortune of the thinking tenax. It is alone. The other tenaces have been chased away. Their gore stains the thinking tenax’s mandibles, and its roar drives them further back. Their flickering eyes peer out from behind feldspathic spires.| Lightspeed MagazineRSS - Lightspeed Magazine
We lost so many souls today. Reports stream in across five continents; icons bloom on the map like blood spatters. Broken filters, zero latency, bandwidth that somehow blew through the roof when no one was looking. The hardware plays catch-up as best it can.| Lightspeed MagazineRSS - Lightspeed Magazine
The grow pods clung to a red, humped ridge about a twenty-minute hike west from the habitats. Inside one of their plastic domes, a farmer named Oliver Judd nestled potato starts in the ground with nimble hands. It was tricky work in a forty-pound outside suit.| Lightspeed Magazine