Shelly was the Librarian, and she hated it.

The Library was what they called the storage complex for souls. Or at least, the transcoded neural nets of Marauder victims who had been copied and stored when their bodies had been processed into fuel. But “souls” was easier to say.

Every so often, the Aegis managed to “liberate” a Marauder stronghold, and the soul matrices were transferred to Aegis Prime. They had over 12,000 of them now. The problem was what to do with them.

Theoretically, Aegis could place the souls into more of its automechs, or even clone new bodies for them. But even if they had the funds to build them, the UN would never allow them to field 12,000 cars —and while the anti-cloning laws could be skirted in dire need, they couldn’t get away with making 12,000 of those, either.

And the souls were too valuable like this, anyway, Shelly thought bitterly. Because even if Aegis was too moral to make them, it could still use their knowledge and processor power exactly as the Marauders did.

by Chris Meadows

“Did you see the news today?” Jan asked me, with that look on her face that told me whatever it was, she didn’t like it.

“No, why?”

“They’ve just invented a robotic human brain, it’s the last organ to be cracked, so now you can build a whole human from robotic organs.”

“Wow, you’d never make a mistake, think how useful that’d be, bet it’s expensive.”

“It’s like all the other robotic organs, only the richest can get them. You know I read a piece in the paper the other day, it’s reckoned that 99.8% of the worlds wealth is in the hands of people who are between 85 to 97% robots. This new brain will push that number even higher, maybe up to 100% in some cases.”

“So they’ll be living longer and be less prone to mistakes.  Tony at work reckons they can communicate in way we don’t know about. I have to say that even though I always thought the world would get taken over by robots, I never really thought it’d be quite like this.”

by Russell Ruffino

She watched him lazily as they lay entwined on the bed. Her fingers traced along his jawline, back and forth before brushing them gently across his lips. The feathery touch elicited a ghost of a smile as his eyes closed.

She leaned forward and pressed a light kiss against those lips. “I love you like pancakes, Eric.” He chuckled softly.

“I love you like syrup. Now go to sleep you silly girl.”

Snuggling into his warmth with a contented sigh, she pulled the sheet over her cool skin and shut her eyes.

As they slept, a faint red light began to flash just behind her left ear. The pulse grew stronger until her eyes flew open. She sat up turned to stare at Eric who was still slumbering away. She had no memory of the whispered endearments only a few hours before. With a calculated, swift movement, she placed her hands on either side of his head and snapped his neck.

She rose gracefully from the bed and dressed quickly. She opened a hidden compartment in the wall and prepared to carry out the mission.

by Melia

They wanted his pinky finger at customs.

At first, he’d thought maybe they just wanted a print or a blood sample. But then, he’d seen what happened to the tentacle of the sapient in line ahead of him: It walked away with a fresh blue-weeping stump, the tip excised by the eye-blink swipe of a sterile blade.

He knew that that particular genotype could regenerate tentacle tips – but he doubted that the customs agents here knew or cared that pinkies didn’t grow back. At some passport inspection earlier, one of them must have made a mistake in classifying him and shuffled him into the wrong lane.

No one spoke English here – and why would they? He was the first human being ever to be processed by the gateway station. All he’d had going for him was the universally encoded information in his travel papers.

Alerted to the hold up in the queue as he balked at the tissue sampler, a hard-shelled uniformed agent trundled over. It squawked and helpfully directed his hand toward the machine.

by l. m. orchard