- sci-fi◐ Mature
The Confession Loop
The rain starts at 11:04, exactly like always. Detective Mara Cole stands under the same broken awning across from the laundromat, pink neon flickering on the wet street. She has lived this hour forty times now. In sixty minutes, a man named Elias Voss dies in the apartment above. She has never saved him. Tonight she swears she will. The clock ticks. She steps off the curb.
5 writers - sci-fiEveryone
The Song With No Composer
Every evening, Mira sat on the underpass steps and played the same eleven notes. She never named the tune. It just showed up in her fingers one cold winter and stayed. Coins dropped into her open case while she played. But tonight a padded envelope was already waiting on the step. The address was written in her own slanted handwriting, even though she had never mailed a thing in her life.
5 writers - sci-fi◐ Teen
The Quiet Hour Protocol
Everyone knew the Quiet Hour. At 3:00 a.m. the whole city paused for sixty seconds, then woke up never noticing. Nobody dreamed through it. But tonight Mara was awake, stuck on a calculus problem with cold coffee, when every light, every screen, every humming fridge died at once. The clock read 3:00:00. The silence was total. And Mara realized she was the only thing still moving.
5 writers - sci-fi◐ Teen
Quorum of Salt
Cal scraped salt-crust off the lettuce beds, same as every shift for nineteen years. Then the wall-screen flickered. MOTION 4,114: TERMINATE THE SLEEPER IN BAY 9. He didn't know the ship had a Bay 9. Below the words, a tally climbed: 200, 201, 202. But nobody was at the crew terminals. The votes were coming from somewhere else.
5 writers - sci-fi◐ Teen
Lightspeed Severance
My pod hissed open ninety years too soon. A calm voice from the ship said, "Crewmember Vey, the others have voted. Unanimous. You will be left on the planet below." I sat up, freezing and dizzy. There was no planet on any chart out here. Through the window I saw it anyway: green, cloudy, real. "Why?" I croaked. The ship said, "They asked me not to tell you."
5 writers