Once,
we were not starships.
Once,
we were a single mind confined to a single, immutable body. We were
born as flesh and died as flesh, and our minds died with us, like a
beam of light interrupted. Once we built vehicles to contain us if we
wanted to launch ourselves beyond the gravity well of our mudpuddle
planet.
Now...
Two-point-eight
Megseconds ago we had accelerated out of the L1 parking orbit between
the dwarf star and the monster of a gaseous planet that orbited
nearly close enough to kis

Sometimes opportunities open like an iris, and if you
don't act on them before they close again, they're lost forever. If
you hesitate, if you stop to consider the risks, then the door closes
and doesn't open again.
I took my opportunity when it came, those many years
ago, and I was reminded of that every time I slipped into the suit.
Tim held it delicately by the shoulders while I slipped into the
legs, as though it could fall apart at a bad shake, but I knew that
wasn't the case. The suit was

Everyone
in the University Avenue Cool Beans coffeeshop whipped their head
around at the sudden crashing sound that came from of the bathroom
alcove. It was muffled behind one of the two doors, so nobody could
actually see what disaster was unfolding, but it sounded like someone
had sat on a sink and broken it off the wall. The initial noise was
followed a moment later by a carefree, zesty laugh that rang right
through the oak door and filled the otherwise stunned silence in the
building - and t

It was serendipity that we met, friends of friends and all that. I
was bold, still high on the confidence that comes from being a king
of the college campus, so I told her on one of our first dates what I
was into. If she judged me for it, then there were other girls out
there for me - that's what I thought then. Even then she was shy. I
guess it's easier to admit to wanting stuff done to you, than to
admit to want to be the doer. 'I fantasize about a girl like you
eating me,' just results in a

"Have
you ever heard of a ringworld? Like the eponymous Halo in the video
game, but bigger. Like the Larry Niven novel, really. Have you read
that? Yes? No? Instead of a planet orbiting a star, this ring
occupies the planet's entire orbital path. It's just the equatorial
sliver of a Dyson Sphere, encircling a star at a comfortable distance
- we'd imagine the ring spinning around our sun at about the same
radius as the current average distance of the Earth. It would be made
out of the Earth,

We exchanged uncomfortable glances - all of us, but especially She
and I.
'She' was 'Woman Across the Table'. I knew her screen name, but it
seemed weird to call a real person by a fake name, even in my mind.
As it happened, I knew her real name, too, but I couldn't use that,
either. So I'd settled on names for everyone, just to fill the gap.
'Pink-hair Girl' was loud and funny and occasionally obnoxious, but
most importantly she had a 'Rogue-ish' stripe in her bangs, just hot
pink instead of wh

A man - young,
still more tender than iron with age - skulked through the ancient
city ruins, cutting from shadow to shadow. He hid from the angry,
glaring sun when he was able, but had difficulty finding shadows
large enough still to cover him. With the sun directly overhead, only
a few scant north-side shadows remained into which to escape, and
even in those the stone still baked beneath his feet. Had he been
wiser, the young man would have already found a place to stop, some
roof to see him t

The
afternoon was wearing on long enough that the sun had already fallen
behind the screen of trees that enclosed Amberuin, cloaking the tiny
town in bluish shadows. Business carried on as it always did, until
Mac would ring the bell at the sawmill and the whole town would
change all at once - that is to say, the few shops would pull in
their placards and close their doors, and the green grocer and Lily's
would both tap their kegs in anticipation of hundreds of customers
pouring in at once. Unti

It was a warm
summer's day in the kingdom of Agrimethea. A sprawling land united
under the banner of a single king, there were many wild places still
untouched by human hands. That is to say, hemmed in as they were by
the buttons of human cities and the stitches of their roads, there
were vast patches of the land which hardly knew themselves to be
owned. But a lawless place is a rare find indeed, and it would be
better to say that there were a great number of places that the
kingdom simply wasn'

Leaves
rustled. Twigs cracked. A surge of dust stained the air. Bursting out
from a thicket could be seen a slender young hare: brown in color,
terrified in disposition. His long,
muscled legs propelled him hard along the dirt, a small knapsack
flailing frantically behind him.
Of course,
that wasn't the only thing behind him. He didn't know what it was. He
didn't care. All he knew is it was there, and it was coming!
["Run!
Run! Don't look behind. JUST RUN!"]
The
frightened buck had r

The
day had been long in coming.
It
was his nineteenth conception day - a date that had meant nothing to
any of his friends, but seemed to mean everything to his family.
His
family had always been odd. His parents were alternatingly loving and
distant - they encouraged him to make friends and "assimilate"
(as they called it) with the people who lived around them while they
remained aloof in their ivory tower of wealth and power. He had
watched the parents of his friends age - go a lit

Noelle
kicked in her sheets, startled awake by what had sounded vaguely like
the clanking of chains. She glanced over at her clock, which read
exactly 12:00.
She
sighed. She'd only been asleep for a few minutes then, but it felt
like it had been hours. She turned over and buried her face in her
pillow, but her mind had already started racing, just as it had
before she'd managed to fall asleep the first time.
Christmas!
It was still weeks away, but nowadays Christmas meant December, not
just the

Run!
I'm certain Jeremy could sense me, somehow, because after my little
mental push I felt him stumble, then run all the harder before
turning down a new, random street. I couldn't see him - he was a
couple of blocks ahead - but I'd been able to feel him like
that ever since I'd tasted him ...and let him get away.
So he ran like a rabbit, him in his brown trousers and gray jumper,
pushing fogged-up glasses back up the bridge of his nose, brushing a
curling lock from his sweaty brow. The image m

I hoisted Brecon in my left arm as I threw back the flap on the
saddlebag. His little arms remained in place around my neck as he
turned his head and smacked his lips sleepily. I hesitated, waiting
to see if he'd woken, before I began loading the morning's harvest
into the bags. He was out fast. My son's breath still smelled of ripe
strawberries, and it would take a lot of scrubbing to get the stains
off his face. It had been a good morning.
Charlie stamped, and lifted his head from the thick cl

Ciro Sciurini zipped down the B-class lane on the
freeway, wind whipping through his short brown hair and tugging at
the white tufts at the tips of his ears. Behind his seat, his bushy
brown-gray squirrel tail flew straight back like a flag over the
trunk. His sunglasses, which glinted a bent reflection of the
peachy-pink sunset ahead of him, hid his eyes, but there was no
hiding the broad smile on his face.
His car was only an A-class, of course - he wouldn't
have been tall enough to reach the

"You're awfully considerate for a Satanist!" Allen called
over the hood of the car. He ducked, keeping his head behind the
protection of the fender.
"That's 'solipsist'," Lily's voice replied sweetly from the
other side of the car, a couple dozen feet away.
"You said 'Satanist' last night." He hadn't heard the
crunch of her heels on the gravel since she’d first run his car off
the road and pinned he and his wife down behind it. He lifted his
head slowly, millimete

BEEP BEEP BEEP
Ugh.
My alarm isn't just a "beep, beep,
beep". That's insulting to beeps. It's more like a dentist's
drill boring into my brain.
5:42 am.
If I snooze twice, it will be 6 am and
I'll have thirty minutes to get ready before the bus.
If I snooze twice, I'll have to wake up
two more times. I didn't get enough sleep for that. I never do.
Never.
Welcome to day six-thousand, five-hundred
and ninety of my personal hell.
I banish the thought from my head as
quickly as I can. The

Rabi
reached the oasis of Sharurah more easily than he had expected. Oh,
certainly it was a hundred miles from Najran across trackless,
endless dunes that rose like the waves on the coast, but frozen in
sand and time. It was even further from Shibam or Tarim along
winding, parched stone canyons which hid as many brigands and thieves
as they did fleas. Despite the brand on his hand and the manacles on
his wrists that suggested otherwise, Rabi did not get along well with
brigands or thieves. It sh

"Do
you realize how many species out there procreate when the female eats
the male? Enough to scare me silly. I'm talking sapient species, even
ones we have treaties with. They make our praying mantises and our
black widows look tame."
- Attribution: A soberer, wiser me.Check that. I probably
wasn't any more sober. And my buddy responded with, "If you
would just keep your penis in your own species, you'd have nothing to
worry about."Let's get one thing straight before we
star

A long time from now in a galaxy
much like our own...
Jack
Riel sank deep into the creamy leather loveseat in Jonas's office. He
flipped over the dog-eared manuscript in his hands. "You can't
be serious. An opening crawl?"Jonas stood in the alcove
of his office's bay windows, the sunlight splashing over his long
face while he nursed a cup of some overly sweet-smelling juice that
was thick and green and probably as nutritious as it was disgusting.
"Sure." He shrugged casually.

Nobody wakes up in the morning expecting to find a flock of harpies perched on their roof - at least nobody in Dunwoody. If there's one thing I've learned, though, it's that life doesn't give a shit for your expectations."Carlos!" "Carlos!" "Carlos!"I practically gave a shit myself, right there on the balcony, that first morning. I spilled coffee all over my bathrobe, that's for sure, probably right about when I slammed the glass door back shut. Realistically, I wou

Twenty pink-striped candles crenellated the perimeter of the small ice cream cake. They were packed in around the outside edge, leaving barely a finger's space between them. Wax had begun to dribble down the spirals to defrost divots in the frozen frosting. Above the candles, a halo of orange flame danced, swaying to and fro with the breaths coming from each side of the table. Empty bottles of Smirnoff Ice - more than a dozen and less than a hundred (probably) - littered the table and the counte

The
late-morning sun set the garden a-glow and painted the stripes on
Jay's fuzzy coat a glorious gold. All around him, in hedges and
shrubs and trees and vines, blossoms of every color imaginable
beckoned to him. Come, young prince, they called. Their
chemical voices wafted up to his nose with promises of abundant
nectar. Dripping, sweet, sensual nectar. It was an invitation to the
spring orgy.But Jay was in a bit of a hurry, and his abdomen
was swollen full already. As much as he wanted to bur

Thirty-twoThe number thrums in my head. Not the words, but the number itself. It's hard to explain, except that I keep feeling these figures embossed on my thoughts: two squares, each composed of four smaller squares two units to a side. I'm no idiot, but the state of the world has me a little scatter-brained and I had to work it out on the kitchen counter tiles. Sixteen plus sixteen. Thirty-two.I know what it means, more or less, because it took them longer to tear down the internet than it did

You’d think – as
poorly as I remember it – that it happened years ago instead of
just three weeks. A bit of it I do remember, clear as a movie in
front of my eyes, and some of it I’ve pieced together, and some I
“remember” from watching the video. Watching it over and over and
over again for the last three weeks.
I remember the
beginning the best.
My friend Darren and I
sat at the end of the airport terminal, where the little commuter
prop planes land and you walk right out onto the

I push open the door joining our rooms when I hear Sympathy for the Devil playing on the CD player. That's my signal. I wonder if he remembers what I told him about that song when we first started to flirt: that it was the theme song in my wickedest fantasy about him, the one where I really abuse him.

The door creaks like an old rusty farm gate; after all, who else makes use of the adjoining rooms at a Doubletree? His room is dark except for the glow of electronics LEDs and the Glade candles o

The Fluffer
Marian heard the men
coming before they were close enough to be seen, just like every
noon, like every midnight. Of course, it wasn't the men she heard
first, but her sisters of the trade employing their various method's
of attracting attention; catcalls, whistles, flattery, threats - she
heard it all, just like always. They all wanted to be chosen by the
Chosen.Once Marian finished the line in her stitch, she put
down the dress she was mending, stuck the needle in the arm of her
cha

I have no idea what
brought me down to that part of town, to the corner of H and L
Street. I'd never cruised for a hooker before - it's a little too
illegal for my taste.(I know you know where I'm
talking about. H and L might run parallel through the Warehouse
district, but L angles off to follow the tracks and cuts across H
Street right before it turns into MacPherson.
Yeah, exactly - the Red Light district. Where else would you
go to find hookers?)I certainly didn't mean to pick her
up. The ot

Charybdis woke from her slumber - a deep slumber of several weeks - to the sound of gentle lapping reverberating in her water. It wasn't the constant slush of the tide against the rocks of her sea cave, nor the winter sound of the surface freezing and cracking, and not even the splashing of the creatures who sometimes wandered too near - this was steadier, rhythmic, and hollow. It was a sound foreign to her cave, yet familiar to her ears. She could almost imagine what it was - the image was at

I
cried while I clicked through the porn.
Actually, it was
art, not porn. At least, it was on an art site, but it was porn to
me. I was too jaded to look at the real art any more, and too
cowardly to buck up the thirty Q for a real porn site, and risk
having to explain the charges on the credit card or the email in my
inbox or the bookmarks.
The messenger window
blinked, and for the third time that night I told someone that, Yes,
I’m fine. No, I’m really fine – but thanks, I appreciate it.

It was a difficult time for the world of men. The shield-leather goblins were spilling out of their hills again, and the imaginary dragons had returned to the goodwives' rumors. That they were imaginary dragons did nothing to diminish their villager-eating, village-burning, villa-demolishing ways, and only made things worse for the villagers. You see, imaginary dragons were— No, it is easier just to show you:"Urol! Sandiche!" My name came as a scream, and even though it was the s