Browse interactive stories
- sci-fi◐ Teen
Quorum of Salt
I've been scraping salt off the lettuce beds on Shift 749. Same task for nineteen years. My hands are white with it. Today I'm half asleep when the wall-screen flickers behind me. MOTION 4,114: TERMINATE THE SLEEPER IN BAY 9. A vote counter appears. 200. 201. 202. It climbs fast. I freeze. The ship doesn't have a Bay 9.
6 writers - sci-fi◐ Mature
Ash Vector
Dr. Mara Okafor hadn't slept in forty hours. On the quarantine moon Cessil-9, eleven mine workers had each spoken one strange word into the comms log, then gone quiet. When they woke, they answered to other names and wept for cities nobody had ever heard of. Their blood was clean. Whatever this was, it wasn't in the blood. It was in the voice. The comms log blinked on her screen, waiting to be played.
5 writers - sci-fiEveryone
Brushfire on Europa
Two drone pods sat on the ice like fat beetles, one orange, one green, both drilling toward the same lucky vein. Inside the orange shack, Priya watched her bore-counter tick eleven meters ahead of Theo's. Then both screens flickered turquoise. Far below the crust, something deep in the ocean was glowing back at the drills.
5 writers - sci-fiEveryone
The Gardener of Slow Light
Mira pressed her hand to the cold greenhouse glass and watched her breath fog it up. Outside, the station turned slowly around Veil, a dying red star whose weak light always arrived late and faint. But her bean vines weren't reaching for that tired star. Every leaf and curling tendril had turned the other way, toward the empty dark. Mira frowned. Plants follow light. So what light were they following?
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