In All Probability

The next swing of his pickaxe uncovered the shimmering light of a 1-nugget. Even after years working in the Probability Mines, the rarity of this find staggered Yuri. Most minerals were low grade, 0.2-nuggets at best, and could only affect the chances of trivial outcomes.

He could hand it in and get a bonus - but the cost of medicine for their sick daughter was crippling; the money wouldn’t go far. Or . . . he could steal it. Use it to cure Natalya, before they locked him away.

Yuri pocketed the gleaming rock. Everything would be alright - he was certain of it.

A Moon With a View

"The stars . . ." he croaks. "I've never seen them."

The fever has him bad and he doesn't have long. Despite being born in this hellhole penitentiary moon, few care and none can help the boy now. A guard owes me, though, and I call in the favour – surface access, briefly. Even my old ass can drag a sick child up there.

I look out at the glorious spectacle. I'd almost forgotten it and the reminder hurts. I turn to the boy, but the eyes are just glass orbs in a mannequin.

I wonder – did he see the stars before he died?

State Imposition

The unheralded entrance brings fresh hope. Words, speaker unseen, grind it into despair at point of recognition. Accusations lash the heart, strip the soul. Denial is torn away to leave no hiding place.

Torrential confession: a river of regret. Voice soothes until until the flow is dammed with acceptance. Quiet pleading tails off into silence, forgiveness ungiven, and only the ragged breath echoes. Weary, spent; defiance swallowed by the drain in the stained concrete floor.

A future, once blessed by uncertainty, now stone-bound; utterly known. The addition of one to ranks of statistics harvested with efficient indifference.

For the people.

Craze

"It isn't right, you know," bemoaned Father, as he stumped angrily around their habitat's main chamber. "It's inconceivable that any rational being would ever do this - let alone as a fashion statement."

He paused briefly in his tirade. "Inconceivable!"

"But he's young," soothed Mother. "It's his way of being different. Asserting his individuality." She immediately winced at her choice of words.

"Different?" stormed Father. "Individual? Deliberately replacing his limbs with prosthetics? Brain-damaged, I'd say."

Mother sighed. "No harm done, though. It is a reversible process after all."

"But we're androids!" exclaimed Father. "Grafting on these organic parts is simply . . . disgusting!"

A Fresh Start

Becky relaxed in the one of the sumptuous leather couches in the lounge of the luxury space-yacht Distant Horizons. She could finally leave it all behind. Her past. The squalor and deprivation and addiction; all that pain and misery. She had scraped together every credit she could and bought passage on the first starship with a destination she’d never heard of. Should be far enough away.

Becky glanced over at those passengers whose bodies lay sprawled by the doorway. She would airlock them and the remaining corpses later.

Yes - today was the first day of the rest of her life.

Farewell

The gentle lapping of the loch against the wooden hull had become a lament to him.

It was difficult to tell where the faded brown of the crinkled-soft envelopes ended and the man's hands began. The perfume, though faint from the years, lingered even yet on the cherished, worn pages. There was a quiet splash as the string-tied bundle was given to the depths; the ripples died swiftly.

*       *       *

The sun is low, and its rosy light fractures into brilliance on the dancing water with a distant, still figure in a boat the only silhouette. The hours pass unmeasured into night.

Another Fine Mess

Revenge is a dish best served cold. How very apt, thought Imperial Ambassador Ennodius as he watched his diplomatic rival, Harrington, finish the gazpacho soup across the banquet table. Last year's humiliation would be repaid at last.

He had gauged the dose of the medical-grade laxative perfectly, mused Ennodius - for as Harrington stood to deliver his inter-course speech, a look of consternation crossed the man's face. The results promised to be . . . explosive.

Ennodius regarded the brash sepia decor, and sat back with a beatific smile. The chamber's unofficial designation of 'the Brown Room' was about to go down in infamy.

Covenant

Angelina massaged her aching eyes with trembling hands as she considered the lab reports again. She couldn't sleep, anyway. Over a third of the colony was infected, and still the virus, codenamed Isaac, defied their quarantine efforts. Vector unknown; almost 100% mortality.

Just one had survived - a child. So, the only vaccine Angelina could make had to come from him. But to have any chance of saving the remaining thousands, she would need all of his blood.

Angelina's tears fell freely on to the small, sleeping form that stirred before her.

"Hush, my son," she whispered. "Everything will be alright."

Trouble on the Horizon

The tortured hull shrieked as their opponent's laser drilled it again.

"Where are those calculations?" shouted Alderson.

Miller's hands shook as he tried feverishly to determine the correct destination coordinates. With the navcomputer a smoking wreck, his mathematical abilities were the crew's only hope.

"Problem solved!" he cried, entering the numbers.

The hyperspace tunnel that wrapped the ship in its safe cocoon had never looked so glorious - but joy turned to dismay upon exiting. They stared, disbelieving, at the nightmare maw of a black hole.

A death sentence.

Alderson peered at Miller's scribblings. "Is that a plus or a minus?"

Extroversion

"There’s nothing but earth below," they say, but I'll see for myself. That’s why I'm still descending through the endless tunnels I'd discovered earlier, trembling with fatigue.

The torch's firelight illuminates dirty but otherwise smooth metal walls - they’re obviously from pre-Catastrophe times. In this claustrophobic darkness I long to see the surface again, curving up and around into blue-white haze; a giant bowl around the sun.

The shaft ends in a window beneath my feet. It reveals a pure black speckled with thousands of brilliant points of light. A huge cave, surely? I decide to break through the glass.

Onwards!

The Room

The closed door looked innocuous enough, but Wouters knew the truth. Young Lambert had been in there for two days, and it had been unusually quiet for most of that time. Everyone came out changed.

Everyone.

It was interesting, he thought, how just one experience could so profoundly alter the core of someone's self-identity. Many had been broken entirely in that room.

The door opened and Lambert emerged. Unsteady, ashen, the eyes different now, but - walking. Perhaps he'd been more resilient than Wouters had given him credit for.

"Congratulations!" exclaimed Wouters. "You've completed the EU Administration and Bureaucracy Exam!"

Orchestra

"They sing, you see."

Dana gestured at the immense spectacle before them.

"Every star vibrates with a primary frequency - a musical note - with natural harmonics superimposed. And each is different."

"I . . ." whispered Jared.

"To have gathered so many suns, to have arranged them perfectly . . ." Dana sighed. "I wish we knew who they were."

The music filled Jared utterly; a sanctuary for his soul. He stood now in timeless peace, one of a billion enraptured faces held in thrall. Dana would tend to his living needs - and those of the others in her care.

But, sometimes, she wished she could hear.

Exit Strategy

Shooting me is - at the very least - impolite of him. I can understand why he is doing it, though. Some guards are very protective of their banks.

“Have a nice day!” I bid him cheerfully, as I Select the closest probability-line in which he’ll miss (a beautiful sepia colour, like nostalgia). The bullet drills harmlessly into the wall as I stride out the doors. Straight into her.

“Going somewhere, darling?” she asks, with that infuriating smile.

The p-lines converge into a single strand as she Blocks my options; someone racks a gun to my left. Cassandra has caught me.

Again.

Choices

Every time I manage to pull back from the edge, I leave a small part of me inescapably there. That is the cost of it; the admission paid for each visit. I can keep doing this, I know, for some time yet - but there will come a point where more of me remains than returns.

And yet - it’s such a small loss. Like the barest scrape rubbing off an atomic layer. No one will notice; I can barely feel it myself. So what price is it really, in the end?

*      *      *

The boy watches sadly as the hollow man drifts past.

The Light of Other Days

Jace really missed the blue skies of home. She’d thought she’d never tire of the sight of the void dotted with a million tiny jewels of distant suns, but the monochromatic lightyears had taken their toll.

She gazed through her spacecraft’s shattered hull at the purple-azure dawn. Sunlight glinted on shards of exposed bone, and the cold air numbed her tattered flesh. The toxic atmosphere and her injuries raced to be the first to claim her.

Jace’s final sigh wavered between pain and contentment. The sky’s hues didn’t quite look like those of her childhood, but they were good enough.

Golden Rule

Drexel studied the tiny form intently. Creepy-crawlies had fascinated and repelled him in equal measure since childhood, and the years had not diminished these feelings.

With a deft movement of his tweezers, he plucked another limb off. Just two left! He loved this gradual imposition of stillness on the frantically wriggling chaos held between his fingers. The exercise of power, however petty, felt good.

A horribly loud clicking noise made him look up. Two huge, bristling...Insectoids...confronted him, clearly agitated. They moved fast, binding him tight.

Even before the aliens’ mandibles closed around his legs, Drexel began to scream.

Homo Machinus

Grabbing sticks and stones, they set about the prisoner with acceptable savagery. After a while they paused, puzzled by the strange noise bubbling from the bloodied form before them.

The round metal room echoed with the organic sound. Contained within layered concentric shells, cogs within cogs, the wheels of law turned. Justice as a concept long forgotten, this was purely a legal machine now for systematically enacting that particular inhumanity. Each a part of the process and its execution; not accountable.

And still the laughter came through shattered lungs.

"Your Honour," monotoned a guard. "You remain in contempt of court."

Whodunnit?

Only five of us made it to the escape pod. We peered through the viewports at the cataclysmic destruction of our spacecraft as we spun away into the Deep Black. It had been a deliberate, traitorous act - some mole undetected amongst the crew - and we knew that the saboteur had to be on board. We exchanged suspicious glances.

I studied the others closely. The second technician was looking particularly nervous - fidgeting and sweat-soaked. The navigator didn't meet anyone’s eyes for long.

I sat back, thinking hard. Which one of them would be the first to guess it had been me?

Fertile Land

"Gotta be careful with technology," warned Jameson. “Let me tell you about Tuonela."

The old pilot sipped his whiskey, then continued.

"They used these nanobots nicknamed 'undertakers'. The wee buggers disassembled decaying organic matter, then buried it in the ground. For farming, right? Except . . . something went wrong with their programming - they stopped distinguishing between living and dead. Most people didn’t make it off the planet. I swear I could hear the screaming from orbit."

I gaped in horror. "You serious?"

Jameson stared mournfully into his glass.

"Why do you think it’s famous for being the greenest world in the system?"

Sacrifice

Treyghin held the bright-edged knife with a clenched fist as he looked upon the offering. Its face was pale, lips tight, breath rasping quickly. Clearly scared, but trying to hide it.

"Rejoice!" cried Treyghin, "For your life's essence is truly a divine gift for the Goddess."

The man's throat was stretched taut; Treyghin could see the arteries pulsing fast and strong as blood hammered through them. He slashed deeply with the blade, opening the neck. The figure instantly disappeared behind a crimson curtain.

Treyghin was surprised at just how much blood was washing over the mirror. The Goddess . . . would . . . reward . . .

A Welcome Visit

The soft sodium light that edged its way through the half-open blinds was a perfect metaphor for his life, thought Nigel. It was mercilessly unchanging, day after mind-numbing day.

The background susurration outside, unnoticed till now, became loud enough to get him out of bed. Huge bristling shapes ringed with lights were descending from the sky. Dazzling streaks lanced down on the cityscape, shattering buildings. A cacophony of sirens and human suffering began wailing into the night.

Nigel stared, electrified. It was a Goddamned. Alien. Invasion.

The hardest part about this apocalypse, he figured, would be pretending he wasn't excited.

The Last Drop

I activate the holopad and cherish the minute forms of my family one more time. The roar of the plasma cannons is fading. If they have done their work, much of the population of the planet below has been obliterated. This will make our job easier - but still not without danger.

If I survive this mission, I go home. The Great Expansion can continue without me; I just want to hold my children again.

A jolt signals the release of the clamps holding my dropship. Sol-3, soon to be bereft of its strange bipedal primary species, grows majestically beneath me.