Echo Beach
Daniel Marcus

It's always the last day of the world at Echo Beach. From fifteen miles up, the horizon is visibly bowed. The sun hangs swollen above an oily sea. The coastal range ripples up from the water's edge, bunching together in wattles like the neck of a lizard. Scintilla flash from the ruins of a port city half engulfed.

The lounge is quiet, but it will start filling up soon. At a table in the middle of the room, an old man plays chess with an automaton. Every now and then, he reaches across the table and slaps the thing on the side of its metal head.

Near one of the large windows, a lanky, barrel-chested man drinks alone. Coal black skin, melanin-enhanced, tangle of blonde dreads. Circa 22C, a mod from one of the Martian arcologies. Clearly pre-Plague. Close enough to home for me that I want to say something to him, warn him. But what could I say?

A couple sits at the bar leaning toward one another, their heads touching. It's difficult to say whether they are accelerated canines or regressed humans, but there is something very dog-like in their focused attention to one another. An aura of benign stupidity hangs about them like sweet incense.

The digital clock above the holo fireplace reads 4:22:00. As I watch, the numbers dissolve and re-form: 4:21:59.

Playing Dice
Ron Savage

Theorem #1. Special Relativity. As an object moves faster, time passes more slowly. The object’s length in the direction of the motion shrinks, and the object’s mass increases. At the velocity of light, time stands still, length in the direction of the motion reduces to zero, and mass becomes infinite.

The man is having the usual night sweats over a theory issue. He ponders his own infinite mass. What if my body becomes too heavy for me? Do I lie here forever? Is there an end to it?

His wife nudges him and says: “Stop mumbling to yourself, Albert. How am I supposed to sleep with you and the mumbling?”

Albert would like to give her infinite sleep.

Mileva has never been an attractive person. Her features are thick and boxy, her once black hair mostly gray. He married the woman for her intellect. Over the years, along with everything else, this also is beginning to sag.

Now the midnight chime of the mantel clock intensifies his horrible weighty feeling. Their dark bedroom smells of the broiled swordfish she cooked for supper. He is fifty today. He has graying hair like his wife. He has a thick waist and ankles like her, too. They deserve each other. Fifty, Albert thinks, and what have I accomplished? He is a clerk in a patent office, technical expert second class, a title held for the last twenty-three years. Earlier in his career he tried publishing a few scientific papers on relative velocity and acceleration. The journal editors felt a patent clerk wasn’t the person to discuss such matters. They sent him a polite, pre-written letter, saying his work simply did not suit their current editorial needs.

All of Me
Liz Holliday

I sure hope this thing is working. I can see the tape going round and round, but I don’t know for sure I pressed the right button. It would be a real shame if it don’t come out good, when you promised to type it all up for me. I surely couldn’t have writ it down myself.

Well anyways, I hope this is what you wanted to know about why I came here.

I clear the tables at the Aces High Restaurant. That’s down at the Eureka Gold Strike Casino. When someone leaves, I wipe the table, good and clean. I take the dishes back to the kitchen for Ray to stack the washer. When someone comes in, I get over there quick, and make sure they got their ice water and ask if they want coffee, and then I tell a waitperson to go write down their order.

That’s what I do. That’s my job. I like it.

I do. Or anyways, I did.

Wasn’t what I wanted though. I kind of remember that now. Seems strange to say it, but I remember when I was little, I wanted to do cartoons. Draw ‘em, I mean. Maybe write the words too, but mostly, I liked to draw. Always had a pencil in my hand then. Couldn’t see a piece of paper without marking it up.

But that was then and this is now, and you know what? It ain’t so bad.

Palaces of Force
Martin McGrath

Our journey to Paris and the Exposition Universelle de 1889 did not begin auspiciously. The trip required us to catch a train from Victoria Station, which is a terrible place. From Victoria Street the station appears to be nothing more than a shabby wooden shed, held together only by the many layers of paint that have been plastered on it over the years. The station’s exterior, however, offers barely a hint of the horrors within. The station's inadequate walls conceal the most chaotic, the most crowded and, assuredly, the dirtiest place I have ever seen.

And I am from Calcutta.

Everything was stained black by the smoke and clouded by billowing steam. I felt certain that, if I could but find a moment's pause to contemplate it, I should be able to feel the station's grime smearing itself across my face.

But there was no pause. The crowd heaved back and forth between the great hissing beasts of the engines. Men pushed and grunted, and women screeched and shoved, and the children scuttled like rats and bellowed like savages. In terms of both volume and shrillness the noise of the crowd was almost a match for the whistling, rumbling, rattling and hissing of the great steam engines that loomed over us all.

Foxwoman
Stephanie Burgis

She’s lurking outside my campfire again.

Räven. Foxwoman.

I can hear her breathing, quick and eager, through the crackling of the fire. Sparks fly into the darkness.

She’s too clever to let me see the glow of her green eyes.

I catch the smell of musk, sharp and sudden behind me. I spin around–

Too late. I’m not even granted a glimpse of her copper tail, shimmering behind long human legs.

It must be a sign of madness, to want a woman this badly.

Oxy
Will McIntosh

I held the shitty little chip of metal to her throat. Not much of a weapon, wasn’t even sharp, just a flat wad the shape of a toeless foot, but I was counting on her not fussing with details like that with cold steel pressed against her skin.

“Gimmee your oxy—oxy—oxy!” I grunted into her ear.

Squeeze those tits my lizard brain howled in my head. They’re right there, take one of those softies and give it a squeeze. I could have, they were right there, hanging out of a red rubber outfit her rich daddy probably got her. She probably never had an oxy-less moment in her life.

It’s a father complex, but not a wishy-washy father complex. My Drunken Monkey-mind chimed in. Oh, how I wanted to shut that bastard up with a little oxy. Soon, soon I’d have some blessed silence.

“Please don’t hurt me,” she panted.

“The tube! Now!” I pushed the metal hard against her throat. I could’ve sawed with that piece of shit for a month and not given her more than a slight abrasion.

Without another word she unlocked the supply-tube of her oxy tank and handed it to me. I attached it to my tank and thumbed the intake switch. That delicious wheeming sound started.

“Please, just leave me enough to get home,” the girl said. “I don’t want to sin.” A whisp of her yellow hair blew against my cheek.

“I don’t have no fun anymore. Ever!” I shouted at her. I was overexcited, too distracted to edit my Drunken Monkey thoughts. I bled her tank dry. Let her have a taste of life without oxy.

Thinking
Lawrence M. Schoen

So I’m sitting there, with the digital paper test sheet in front of me and my lucky Ticonderoga number two stylus in my hand waiting for the exam to begin. “You will have fifty minutes to complete part one,” said the proctor. “You may begin.”

The sheet darkened rapidly, faded to black and then back to purest white. Letters formed, a monospace serif typeface, like the kind those early typing machines had, about twelve point and all in caps, centered on the page:

WHAT AM I THINKING?

Okay, that was an easy one. I clicked my stylus into response mode and wrote you’re thinking of a number. I tapped the completion box that had appeared in the lower right corner. The sheet blanked again, then:

VERY GOOD, THAT IS CORRECT.

WHAT ONE THING CAN YOU TELL ME ABOUT THAT NUMBER?

Damn. Suddenly it got tricky. What could I tell it about the number? And just one thing? Was I supposed to write the actual number? It was seven, but so what? Should I mention that it was prime? That it was the number of students in the room taking the exam? The time I woke up this morning? The days in the week? The protons in Nitrogen? The number of times I’ve lusted after Suzie Birchmeyer since I saw her in second period today?