“Spit Please.” Maggie launched the mix of paste and saliva into the sink which at the touch, washed it away. As her brush finished the tune I love your eye, (which currently charted no.1 on the Hot Galactic 1000) she gave one last stare into the mirror and sighed.

“Open.” The sliding door to the lavatory lifted as Maggie started towards her bedroom. Upon reaching the brightly painted pod, she felt her feet start to lift from the floor.
Rubbing her head where it made contact with the ceiling, she whined, “Dad! Amelia is playing with the anti-grav controls again!”

Sounds of giggles taunted her as Maggie’s six year old sister backstroked on by.

by Elliot Ryan

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

I woke at midnight on the day of my one hundredth birthday.

Some sound, perhaps some presence, had stirred my mind. I could see no one in the shadows of my bedroom, but that meant little. Perhaps it had been a dream. But no—I could feel into the corners of the room, into the closet, the hall, the space above the ceiling, and knew someone was near. Moreover, I knew it was someone familiar to me.

One hundred years of relative peace and quiet; now this. I couldn’t tell if the mystery visitor had eyes on me, just that someone was paying attention, the way you might apprehend someone reading over your shoulder.

I had a gun in my nightstand, a knife wedged under my mattress: I’ve had an interesting life filled mostly with whatever interests and challenges I chose to pursue, but every now and then, like the evolutionary theory of punctuated equilibrium, I met someone or something that hungered for that life.

This is not one of those times, Skyler, said a voice in my mind, familiar indeed.

“Hello, Mother.”

by ZorkFox

“So do you have a name, or do I get to call you God from now on?” quipped Dreanna.

“A name…” He replied almost absentmindedly. He had several names, countless names throughout the eons. So which one to choose?

Before he could fully process the request, an answer “Eric. Eric Bamber.” Interesting choice, he mused.

But it did fit the situation, didn’t it? Wasn’t that what this body was called when he was corporeal? Before his species evolved from beings not much different from Dreanna.

“Eric? What kind of name is ‘Eric Bamber’ for a god??” Dreanna started to blurt out, just catching herself in the nick of time. “Nice to meet you Eric” she replied instead.

“So what happened here?”

“Dunno” Eric replied cheerfully.

“What do you mean ‘dunno’ I thought you knew everything!”

“Interestingly enough, so did we.”

While it was the straight answer she’d been looking for, that was little consolation… it had definitely turned into an “oh shit” moment.

By KevMullins

She licked her lips and a million stars were born, burned, and died upon them. When she felt this way time became her favorite toy.

The beats to the songs of hundreds of cultures kept her entranced as she shifted through phases and wrote new creation stories for upcoming civilizations. Most of them would never know what really happened, that they’d been created from moss by the swing her her index finger and that they’d split atoms to destroy themselves by the swing of her thumb.

She shuddered and shook black holes from her skirt. They dropped forever into the ground and she laughed, brushing lakes of stars out of her hair and planets from her eyes.

It was a toy. The whole thing was just one big toy.

by Liz Spencer

He skipped across rails, sparks flying when he caught them almost too late. The glow of his boards grav plates lit the skylights of the office below and caused a draft that kicked up dust and loose leaves from the grey water collecting gardens beneath him. He pushed off a final rail with gusto, triple flipped in the air and landed right in the middle of the office worker’s roof cafe, startling them all and causing several unbreakable dishes to plummet, then bounce off the ergonomic floor coating.

A hatch opened near the cafe’s entrance and a security bot popped out, spread its spidery legs and shouted a warning.

Alexi just grabbed a nearby panini & took a chomp.

Then he leapt off the building’s edge.

1500 feet.

by Erik Chevalier