Daily Scifi Shorts, Sketches, & Starts

#832498

October 27, 2014 at 10:26pm

The roar of American Airlines Flight 127 departing from Portland's Runway 28 woke Stony Reyynolds up, just as it had the seven other times he'd been here. He blinked and rose to a sitting position. His mouth was dry--it had been the other seven times too. It would be next time, he knew--if there was a next time. He swung himself out of bed, staggered over to the compact refrigerator, and retrieved the bottle of water that had been placed there for him. It had been there the other seve... [Read more]

#832453

October 27, 2014 at 2:26pm

The whole thing started with a running shower in the next room.      Kent and Mabel Kirkwood of 3431 Drosophila Road--only in a college town would you have a Drosophila Road--Middletown, Connecticut, had looked forward to a short getaway for their fourteenth wedding anniversary, but had to delay their plans when the architectural firm that Kent worked for as a materials engineer was rather unexpectedly awarded a contract to build an extension onto an existing structure downtown as part of a... [Read more]

#832354

October 26, 2014 at 5:02pm

The large auditorium was filling up with people--there were the the people you would expect at such an event, such the scientists and researchers who studied the Klepi professionally. There were the student enrolled in various courses for whom the lecture would be a formal assignment. But mostly, there were the curious: ordinary people who were interested in such things and wanted to get a look at one of them close up. They filled the large room, standing and chatting and milling about for the b... [Read more]

#832286

October 25, 2014 at 7:04pm

Sasha Vildmer sat in a plain little room at police headquarters and cursed his luck, cursed his friends, cursed the white-painted wooden table at which he sat. But most of all, he cursed the three men who had gotten him into his present untenable situation. The detective who had put him in this little room came back; unaccountably, he knocked before he cracked open the door. It must have been the beginning of a 'good cop, bad cop' routine the were setting up for him. "Mr. Vildm... [Read more]

#831925

October 21, 2014 at 11:10pm

"Haven't you guessed?" Norris asked. "I'm a time traveler." "Ah. Time traveler," Soren repeated, his derision restrained only with great effort. "You don't believe me." Soren spun the photo around and looked at it, then looked up at Norris. "There is no doubt that this photograph was taken in 1971. It appeared in the Sun on Thursday, October 21, 1971." He leaned over the table and thumped it. "This really is you, isn'... [Read more]

#831824

October 20, 2014 at 10:30pm

"The name I used in those days was Westerlake, Norris Westerlake,  middle initial T, born June 17th, 1901 in Cleveland. That's a small city in Ohio." He stopped abruptly and looked around nervously. "Are you getting all this?"      Soren's puzzlement at this strange little man was growing by the second. "Sure. Everybody knows where Cleveland is," he said.      Westerlake's expression changed to shock for a moment, then he recovered to ordinary amaze... [Read more]

#831683

October 19, 2014 at 8:47pm

As Bill and Soren approached the end of the short corridor, Bill pulled out his wallet and retrieved a plastic card. Then he unclipped his casino ID from the inside of his suit jacket. "You got your DL?" he asked, but Soren was already ahead of him. Bill placed his casino ID against a flat plate; there was a click, and he pushed a door open and held it for Soren. He closed it and they were in a featureless anteroom. Cameras at the high top corners of the room moved, and then a speaker ca... [Read more]

#831636

October 19, 2014 at 1:00pm

Soren knew the that particular set of photographs well. He'd studied them both professionally and personally. They were stills from the Associated Press coverage of the 1971 opening of the north wing of the Sands Hotel and Casino. This project was the first to feature modular plumbing and fixtures in the expanded-size guest rooms and inclusion of modern design elements in the casino to encourage the spending of money and discourage leaving: unified textile choices, continuously curving throu... [Read more]

#831612

October 19, 2014 at 12:41am

Assistant director of the Clark County Historical Society was a position that Soren Roshwald took pretty seriously. He was the senior member in terms of time served of a board of eleven; he'd been on the board since 1979. The director, a lawyer brought in by the mayor primarily as a fundraiser, didn't even live in Vegas, but as he was largely hands-off when it came to daily operations, he'd been tolerated by the board members and even embraced by some, Soren among them. "He's... [Read more]

#831569

October 18, 2014 at 12:02pm

Nestor sat on a bench intended for riders waiting on a bus--that much he knew--and wondered what to do now. Everything was going wrong on this trip. The last time he had been here had been 1952. Everyone was speaking German, as they were supposed to be, the gambling and drinking were in full swing, and he had intersected with his target, made the observation, and filed his report--just as he had practiced. Of course, the simulators weren't perfect. The calculators had to make certain a... [Read more]

#831408

October 16, 2014 at 9:36pm

Artois PT Americus was the largest ship ever put into space; eleven miles long, roughly cylindrical, with a diameter of nearly four miles. Spencer Vilkenon, captain, crewman, medical officer, and loadmaster for the 51 quadrillion liters of Saturnine atmosphere that constituted the effective payload, often wondered why such a technological wonder as the ship he commanded would be named after such a small town; he'd never been to Georgia, and in fact had never been to the United States at all,... [Read more]

#831184

October 14, 2014 at 9:59pm

Deep within the superstructure of Artois RT Portland , Renko Swarsski held his light in his mouth while he tried to find a comfortable position among the conduits and cables. Upstairs, Pamela Vickers was in the captain's chair half asleep; she'd been monitoring his progress, but like so much of deep space operations, there was little of interest between emergencies, and the readjusting of the Crater unit hardly counted as an emergency. The ship had three of them, the primary plus two re... [Read more]

#831081

October 13, 2014 at 9:57pm

A young man stood in black regulation swim trunks at the highest platform. He was a boy, really, with the sour, serious look of someone thrust into adult responsibility too early. The platform was fifty-four feet above the surface of the pool; the top of his head cleared the ceiling by less than two feet. Fifty-four feet was no accident--it was the precise distance from the deck of the fuel processor to the cold water below. The processors--they resembled nothing so much as the aircraft carriers... [Read more]

#830954

October 12, 2014 at 9:48pm

Although Arnold "Lefty" Swanson's head was under the communications panel, he heard the clacking of talons as they grasped the projections on the floor and knew it was the captain approaching. And if for some reason Lefty hadn't noticed it was the captain approaching, the soft gnashing of the captain's mouthparts, followed quickly by the computerized voice of the translator he wore around his neck--it wasn't actually his neck, but that's what the humans on board calle... [Read more]

#830865

October 12, 2014 at 1:17am

The sun rose in the Pennsylvanian epoch over a high plateau, a rolling landscape that would eventually become part of the state of Montana. Grass waved in the breeze, and reptiles and amphibians inhabited the shores of a stream that wound its way across the field and around the outcroppings of rock at its bottom. It was late in the spring; the precise date could--and would be--calculated as May 15, 314,407,741 BC, but of course, that number was devoid of context and therefore nonsense, merely a ... [Read more]

#830782

October 11, 2014 at 9:55am

Oscar brought the plastic bag to his mouth and tugged, spitting out the torn cover. Then he poured the contents into the barrel of the gun he held in his other hand. "Just hold still," he said to the eight-year-old girl who stood next to him. "It won't be interested in us if we don't move." "You're moving," the girl observed. "Yeah, but only a little," Oscar replies as he reached into his pocket, retrieved the weapon's operative pr... [Read more]

#830760

October 10, 2014 at 11:14pm

The huge cylindrical ship spun around its long axis in order to produce gravity for the inmates who occupied the water-filled interior; attached to one end, at a distance calculated to effect a single Earth gravity, the warden station clung as a fly might cling to the end of a can. The station contained housing and workspaces for the 21 human crewmembers consisting of eight maintainers, two engineers, nine guards, one linguist, and the warden, Sterling Richardson. Richardson sat in his office on... [Read more]