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?