Story Excerpts

False Light
by MB Valente

The psychiatrist’s face was a distant gray blob, his voice muffled. Wey blinked and shook her head. She leaned across the transparent floating coffee table and said, “What?”

“I said that sounds worrisome.”

Wey nodded and looked at the window. It was a wheat field ruffled by wind, slurry green mountains sandwiched between the rippling gold and an aggressively blue sky. On the far side of the table, the blob that was Dr. Kulver was listing off nonsense words, possibly the names of medications.

“Oh yes, all that,” Wey said.

“Well, I think it’s too much.”

There was something disturbing about the window. Something experimental—it reeked of clinical trials. READ MORE

Consumer
by Stephen Case

Thoughts in space came slowly. Trennis knew this was true, but she could not feel the difference. Her mind was spread across the radius of her drone swarm so that thoughts that would have lanced through physical neurons in milliseconds took orders of magnitude longer, skipping through drones separated by entire light seconds. Instead of feeling her thoughts slowed though, it felt rather that the universe had sped up around her. She could almost see the whorls of nebula drifting in gentle spirals through her sensors. READ MORE