“Who’s there?” the voice asked, rough and unpleasant. Robert and Lydia glanced at each other.

“The Paranormalists, Mr. Scrooge. You called us a couple of hours ago,” Robert said.

“Took you long enough,” the voice said. The door clicked as Scrooge unlocked several locks, and finally it slid open a couple of centimeters. Scrooge peered out, the heavy chain still on the door. Jenny flipped the night vision off her camera to get a clear view of him in the foyer’s dim light. He was much smaller than his voice implied, a diminutive man who was probably a bear in the conference room, but a pussycat when in thin pajamas and a robe.

Well, not a pussycat. Something more like a weasel.

Rated PG. Contains ghostly visitations. Film at 11.

First appeared in Asimov’s, December 2002.

“They’re uploads, Jennifer.” When I first met Mel, I thought the sleepy voice was sexy. “How can they move in with us when they’re not anywhere?”

“They bought a puppet to live in,” I say. “Life-sized, nuskin, real speak – top of the line. It’s supposed to be my Christmas present. Bring the family back together for the holidays and live unhappily ever after.”

“A puppet.” A puzzlement glyph pops up at the bottom of my screen. “As in one puppet?”

“It’s a timeshare – you know. They live it serially. Ten hours of him, fourteen of her.”

“Not fifty-fifty?”

“He’s giving her the difference so he can take extra time off for his bass tournament in June.”

Rated PG. Contains family drama and way too much sugar.

Sponsored by SleepPhones - Pajamas For Your Ears

From beneath the camouflage of kindling on her back came Grandma Thinkbox’s quiet voice. “You should have something hot to drink, child. Do not make yourself sick.”

“Yes, nainai. As soon as I check on Pig.”

After Comrade Liu had been evacuated with the last of the support troops, Xiaoying had rearranged the personality of her assistant battlefield AI into something that suited her better. If she were going to spend months carrying it around, she wasn’t going to listen to it drone on like a party chief. The way it talked now reminded her of her grandmother. The missiles had overlays for their small brains, too, and she’d decorated them with personalities as well. Boredom was a more immediate enemy than Japan.

Rated PG. Contains violence and political complexity.

Sponsored by SleepPhones - Pajamas For Your Ears

“I have done over fifteen hundred dives,” I said, and let that sink in. The number was astronomical for a guy my age, even for a professional. “I have done free diving down to eighty meters. I have worked as a commercial diver and in commercial salvage.”

They were listening and nodding, concentrating on me while recording the conversation. “Then you, of all people, should have known better,” said the little guy.

“I did know better!” They were acting like the shark was the victim, not me. “How many people in the whole fucking galaxy could have come up alive, huh? How many would have had the technology and experience and conditioning?”

“If you want our congratulations, you got ‘em,” said Odenny. “But we’re more interested in what you were doing.”

First appeared in Interzone, October 2008.

Before the concert, we steal the Master’s head. The Necropolis is a dark forest of concrete mushrooms in the blue Antarctic night. We huddle inside the utility fog level attached to the steep southern wall of the ice valley. The cat washes itself with a pink tongue. It reeks of infinite confidence.

“Get ready,” I tell it. “We don’t have all night.”

It gives me a moderately offended look, and dons its armor.

Referenced Sites:
PodDisc.com

Narrated by Sarah Tolbert, Kate Baker, Nate Periat, and Steve Eley

The story first appeared in Fast Ships, Black Sails edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer.

You could feel their heat. Not a metaphor, I don’t mean that, I mean literally the room grew warmer when they were in it. They were both so powerful. Whenever Anne and Jack (they weren’t named that then, but that’s who they were) strolled into the room you got contact highs from their lust. People who would never make out would find excuses to go to the bathroom together and come back with monster hickies. Everyone always wanted to sit near them because of their heat, and because they always said the thing you wish you’d said but only thought to say a billion blinks later.

When I first joined the Freebooter tech collective Anne and Jack were happy to have another girl in the group, but otherwise they ignored me. I could stare and stare at them all day long, hiding behind my black-rimmed glasses. But then one day Anne looked at me, and then Jack looked too, and we all just sort of fell toward each other. Like gravity. Like magic. Like there was a God.

Rated ARRRRR.

This story originally appeared in Aeon #14.

The diner stood off the highway outside a small town optimistically called Hope. Hope was being stuck in the middle of the Northwest and wishing you were someplace, anyplace else. And Hope was also the name on the tag pinned to the dead woman in waitress uniforms that was currently lying against the wall inside the Barbie-Q Roadhouse. I had to stop myself from worrying at the connection: looking for patterns when sometimes there are none at all.

I wasn’t worried about Hope (the waitress, not the town). I didn’t get called down here for a murder: shit, murder is an honest-to-God American pastime. Just look at the statistics. No, I got called in because of the Marilyn.

The Marilyn was also dead. All in all, there were five dead people in the Barbie-Q: two waitresses; a balding man who – from his bag full of cheaply-printed catalogues – was some sort of a general salesman; the diner’s manageress; and Marilyn. They had been shot by a machine gun, probably an Uzi. Marilyn’s head left a red smear against the glass of the booth she sat in. She was there alone.

What the hell was a Marilyn doing out here?

Rated R for violence and language.

Editor’s note:  this is a sequel to EP007.  Listen to it here.

Flies buzzed around the edges of the huge stone block, gathering at the rivulets of blood that ran down to the floor. A bit of what looked like it might be intestine hung off one corner, drawing special attention. It was a testament to the force of the collision that fragments of bone and tissue were scattered all the way down the passage, some even wedged in the carvings in the stone walls. Two men surveyed the scene with dismay.

The other man, younger but not precisely young, hauled himself up on top of the block and examined the mechanism. “This bar’s been sliced right through.” He looked back down at his client. “You say this was a poltergeist?”

Rated PG for some violence and language.

Order now from PodDisc.com

No polos or coffee mugs yet. Maybe next time. Thanks very much for all your continued patience and support, from all of us at Escape Artists!

The trouble with knowing everything there is to know, Stephanie Dowling decided instantly, because that’s how clever she was, was that when there was something unknown out there, she had nobody to consult.

And there was something unknown out there, nibbling away at the edge of the economy, and screwing with the Cottrell-Cockshot tatonnements sufficiently that there’d be problems. Shortages of essentials: power cells and answer boxes. Ridiculous surpluses of nonsense like chrome and diamonds. She could tell because the bride was coughing between her lines and the donkey she rode on suddenly looked ill. It would be just like … wossname … that old thing. Capitalism. Till she fixed it anyway.

Wossname?

Rated R.

They were the usual motley collection of freelance vampire hunters. Two men, wearing combinations of jungle camouflage and leather. Two women, one almost indistinguishable from the men though with a little more style in her leather armour accessories, and the other looking like she was about to assault the south face of a serious mountain. Only her mouth was visible, a small oval of flesh not covered by balaclava, mirror shades, climbing helmet and hood.

They had the usual weapons: four or five short wooden stakes in belt loops; snap-holstered handguns of various calibers, all doubtless chambered with Wood-N-Death® low-velocity timber-tipped rounds; big silver-edged bowie or other hunting knife, worn on the hip or strapped to a boot; and crystal vials of holy water hung like small grenades on pocket loops.

Protection, likewise, tick the usual boxes. Leather neck and wrist guards; leather and woven-wire reinforced chaps and shoulder pauldrons over the camo; leather gloves with metal knuckle plates; Army or climbing helmets.

Recently appeared in By Blood We Live.

Rated R for violence and very different vampires.

Practically the first thing she did when she took in the alien was to give him a new name. He looked at her outstretched hand long enough to annoy her, and then grasped it with his four opposable fingers and hung on limply until she wrenched her hand out of his moist and over-jointed grip.

She said, “I’m Sarah,” and he said his name, or what she assumed was his name, in return, rolling the syllables around in his mouth like so many rough pebbles. His name was too long, something like Shperidth with extra grunting noises in the middle, like a car backfiring very far away. She tried to repeat it and couldn’t, while he stood on her doorstep sweating and folding his fingers around each other. She frowned at him.

“I can’t say that,” she said.

Rated PG-13 for some adult situations and coarse language.

“Damned social engineers,” said Boothby, frowning his freckled face. He looked at me, as if expecting an objection to the profanity, and seemed disappointed that I didn’t rise to the bait.

“As you said earlier,” I replied calmly, “it doesn’t make any practical difference.”

He tried to get me again: “Damn straight. Whether Jody and I just live together or are legally married shouldn’t matter one whit to anyone but us.”

I wasn’t going to give him the pleasure of telling him it mattered to God; I just let him go on. “Anyway,” he said, spreading hands that were also freckled, “since we have to be married before the Company will give us a license to have a baby, Jody’s decided she wants the whole shebang: the cake, the fancy reception, the big service.”

Rated PG.

originally appeared in The Infinite Matrix

The plan must have come to Rog fully formed that first morning, as he stepped off the elevator into the lobby of Szilliken Sharpenwright and saw the old soldier newly stationed there in his omnichair between the potted silk ferns and the coffee tables.

“Oh. My. God. I am in love.”

Megan, her arms loaded with Rog-House props and paraphernalia she hadn’t had time to ditch yet, said, “You say that an awful lot for someone who styles himself completely asexual. Not to mention atheistic.”

Rated R for adult situations, a smattering of violence, and overly friendly chairs.

No one hears when I ease the heavy steel door shut behind me. All the ears in the darkened workshop, all those hundreds and hundreds of ears, but still no one hears a thing. And I stand there for a while, as unmoving as they, not exactly frightened and not exactly uncertain if I should see this through — I think I stand there in reverence. I be-lieve that’s the word that people use for what I feel in that moment, standing there alone, alone with that assembled crowd.

Rated X for violence and strong sexual situations.  As Steve says in the intro, this one isn’t for the kids.

When morning finally dawns, Rochester isn’t there anymore.

Jenny stands beside Eric, gazing south from the rising ground that yesterday was a fallow field. Maybe the whole city hasn’t vanished. Certainly the tall buildings are gone, Xerox Square and Lincoln Tower and the few others that just last night poked above the horizon, touched by the red fire of the setting September sun. But, unlike Denver or Tokyo or Seattle, Rochester, New York sits – sat – on flat ground and there’s no point from which the whole city could be seen at once. And it was such a small city.

“Maybe they only took downtown,” Jenny says to Eric, “and Penfield is still there or Gates or Brighton…”

Rated R for sexual situations and alien-caused genocide.

Violet snapped three photos of herself from various angles, sent them, and waited for her boyfriend’s response. He rang her up—a slow vibrating purr, unlike the staccato door-knocking of her mother’s ringvibe—and said: “Me likey. Now take it off.”

Violet frowned. “You were supposed to dig up the backstory on the dress.”

“Well, you can’t blame me for getting a little distracted. Besides, isn’t it bad luck for me to see?”

“That’s only for weddings, not prom.”

Rated R for language, teen-adult situations, and virtual steadies. Also, Norm’s sexy talk.

IT’S 2:02 A.M. ON A COLD SUMMER NIGHT.

I’m sitting in a book store next to a strip club.

Not that kind of book store. The inventory here is incredibly old and impossibly rare. And it has a secret—a secret that I might have just discovered.

I am alone in the store. And then, tap-tap, suddenly I’m not.

And now I’m pretty sure I’m about to snap my laptop shut, run screaming out the front door, and never return.

Rated G. May contain creepy imagery and disturbing data visualizations.

The meetup’s at 11 AM on Sunday, September 6 at the Gordon Biersch Brewpub at 848 Peachtree Street:

View Larger Map

Minx has an RSVP list for headcount purposes at:
http://twtvite.com/cz4lk4

The brewpub’s about a mile north of the con, which makes for a long walk; but it’s an easy taxi ride, and we’re talking about bringing some people to carpool together as well. Drop me a line at sfeley@gmail.com with your cell number or post in the forum thread if you need to coordinate transportation.

We look forward to seeing many of you there!

Each morning is a decision. Should I put on the brown mask or the blue? Should I be a tradesman or an assassin today?

Whatever the queen demands, of course, I am. But so often she ignores me, and I am left to figure out for myself who to be.

Dozens upon dozens of faces to choose from.

1. Marigold is for murder.

Rated R for sex, masks, and violence.

Papa and Uncle Fomba told me if I didn’t join the army, they’d kill me. They didn’t. They cut off my hands.

This was after U.S. forces marched on Syria, but before we invaded Lebanon. On every city block, posters of Uncle Sam entreated every Tom, Duc, and Haroun to get blown up in the name of freedom. Papa and Fomba gave me two weeks to enlist. I ran for Canada instead. They caught me.

Rated R for amputation fads.

When I met Skinhorse, my first thought was old. Which was weird. Nobody gets old these days. We all die young, some of us after living a long time, if we’re lucky.

He was in Piet’s Number Seven, a bar-cum-caravanserai in an illegal orbit trailing far enough behind Vesta to be ignorable. Piet’s had been instantiated in an old volatiles bladder that had done the Jovian run a few too many times before falling into the surplus circuit. You could store entire cities in Piet’s cubage, which made for a somewhat attenuated bar experience. Plus the place had one of those gravity cans — yes, those gravity cans — which meant your drink stayed stuck down long as you were near a Higgs carpet.

So there I was annoying myself with three perfectly disrespectable rock jocks, each of us out to fleece the others, when this cadaver starts to stand over me. We’re all forever young or forever dead, but this armstrong looked like he’d shaved about half a cent too deep across his whole body, then restored his dermis with spray-on thermal insulation.

Rated R for strong language, strong violence, and world-spanning tumors.

Read by Kate Baker

Story originally appeared in Federations.

Wren Hex-Yemenni woke early. They had to teach her everything from scratch, and there wasn’t time for her to learn anything new before she hit fifty and had to be expired.

“Watch it,” the other techs told me when I was starting out. “You don’t want a Hex on your hands.”

By then we were monitoring Wren Hepta-Yemenni. She fell into bed with Dorado ambassador 214, though I don’t know what he did to deserve it and she didn’t even seem sad when he expired. When they torched him she went over with the rest of the delegates, and they bowed or closed their eyes or pressed their tentacles to the floors of their glass cases, and afterwards they toasted him with champagne or liquid nitrogen.

Before we expired Hepta, later that year, she smiled at me. “Make sure Octa’s not ugly, okay? Just in case—for 215.”

Wren Octa-Yemenni hates him, so it’s not like it matters.

Rated PG for political machinations and waiting…

Narrated by MarBelle

This story originally appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction (February 2006).

“Since we have so many new faces,” I said to the half-dozen volunteers, “I’ll start with a tools talk. Safety points for the spade — the most important is that when you’re digging, you push with the ball of your foot.”

I picked up a spade from the pile, and demonstrated by digging up a bluebell growing by the hedge. From the large bells all round the stem, I knew it was a Spanish bluebell, a garden escape that if left unchecked would hybridise with the natives. Too late now, though. You can tell the British bluebell because the flowers are smaller, deeper blue, and they’re usually on one side of the stem, so the plant droops under their weight as if bowing down before its foreign conqueror. There’s hardly a wood left in England where you’ll see only native bluebells.

“Or you can use your heel on the spade.” I heaved the invader out of the earth and tossed it aside, knowing it would safely rot. “But you should never press down with the middle of your foot. The bones in the arch are delicate, and you can injure yourself.”

Rated PG for plants with many uses.

read by Norm Sherman

Closing song by Andrew Richardson

We’ve got robotic arms to put the eyeballs in. Metal clamps to pulldown the eyelids. Tony, on Four, keeps the grease vats filled. Oil squirts nineteen times a minute to keep the eye sockets from squeaking. Tiny slick needles stitch on the lashes, while millions of different irises get stamped in magenta and yellow and cyan, so no two will ever be alike, just like us.

All that, and they can’t engineer anything—or anyone—to take over my job. People in Organs go home coated with grease and vinegar; people in Bones have lost fingers to the machines, and still nobody wants the job where a hundred half-live cyborgs line up in rows, twitching when your back is turned. Waiting for someone to talk to them, feel for them. Transcend them to life.

There are safety signs around the factory. “Scrub Up.” “Know Thyself.” “Don’t Blink.” That last is the best piece of advice, here on the eyeball floor.

Rated PG for for angry awakening sentience and some swearing.

Read by Sarah Tolbert

Previously appeared in Asimov’s.

In January, there will be an annular solar eclipse, with the path of annularity moving through the Indian Ocean and into Sumatra and Borneo. Two days later, aliens will invade Earth.

No spaceships will loom large in blue skies, nor hover over our cities. At night, though, when we see blinking dots of light near the horizon, as small and pale as any star, we’ll think they’re planes or satellites of human origin. They won’t be. These are alien ships, come for conquest.

That is all we can see. What we hear is just as faint and difficult to resolve: we hear rumors. Or rather, one persistent rumor: “the aliens want volunteers.”

Naturally, I and my junior faculty friends need to drink quantities of beer to discuss this in detail. I expound that it’s a hoax.

Rated PG-13 for adult concepts and alien recruiters.

Appeared originally in From the Trenches

We set down in Pekoi as part of the organics inquisition team, still stinking of the last city. We’re all muscle. Not brains. The brains are out eating at the foreigners’ push downtown, and they don’t care if we whore around the tourist dregs half the night so long as somebody’s sober enough to haul them out come morning. When the brains aren’t eating, they’re pretending to give us directions in the field, telling us where to sniff out organics. They’re writing reports about how dangerous Pekoi is to the civilized world.

We’re swapping off some boy in a backwater push the locals cleared out for us. We’re sitting around a low table. I pass off another card to Kep. Luce swaps out a suit. She has to sit on one leg to lean over the table. It’s hot in the low room, so humid that moths clutter aroundour feet, too heavy to fly.

The boy’s making little mewling sounds again. Somebody should shut him up, but not me. This is my hand. I’m ahead.

Rated R for violence and sexual situations.

Special Thanks To:
Paul Fischer (of The Balticon Podcast) for instigating and organizing
Nobilis Reed (of Nobilis Erotica) for engineering

First appeared in Live Without a Net, ed. Lou Anders
Now available in Wireless, by Charles Stross

“Buggerit, I don’t have time for this,” Joe muttered. The stable waiting for the small herd of cloned spidercows cluttering up the north paddock was still knee-deep in manure, and the tractor seat wasn’t getting any warmer while he shivered out here waiting for Maddie to come and sort this thing out. It wasn’t a big herd, but it was as big as his land and his labour could manage – the big biofabricator in the shed could assemble mammalian livestock faster than he could feed them up and sell them with an honest HAND-RAISED NOT VAT-GROWN label.

“What do you want with us?” he yelled up at the gently buzzing farm.

“Brains, fresh brains for baby Jesus,” crooned the farm in a warm contralto, startling Joe half out of his skin. “Buy my brains!” Half a dozen disturbing cauliflower shapes poked suggestively out of the farms’ back then retracted again, coyly.

“Don’t want no brains around here,” Joe said stubbornly, his fingers whitening on the stock of the shotgun. “Don’t want your kind round here, neither. Go away.”

Rated PG for strong language, chemical violence, and drug-abusing dogs.

I was polishing a brandy snifter when the Unmarried Mother came in. I noted the time—10:17 P. M. zone five, or eastern time, November 7th, 1970. Temporal agents always notice time and date; we must.

The Unmarried Mother was a man twenty–five years old, no taller than I am, childish features and a touchy temper. I didn’t like his looks—I never had—but he was a lad I was here to recruit, he was my boy. I gave him my best barkeep’s smile.

Maybe I’m too critical. He wasn’t swish; his nickname came from what he always said when some nosy type asked him his line: “I’m an unmarried mother.” If he felt less than murderous he would add: “at four cents a word. I write confession stories.”

If he felt nasty, he would wait for somebody to make something of it. He had a lethal style of infighting, like a female cop—reason I wanted him. Not the only one.

He had a load on, and his face showed that he despised people more than usual. Silently I poured a double shot of Old Underwear and left the bottle. He drank it, poured another.

Read by Alasdair Stuart

Welcome to Worlds of Tomorrow, an occasional feature we’ll be running looking at some of the best in science fiction cinema. From acknowledged classics to forgotten gems we’ll be covering them all. Some of them you’ll have seen, some you won’t, some you’ll agree with me on and some you’ll wonder what I was drinking when I watched them but that’s half the fun. Spoilers abound so if you haven’t seen the movie and want to be surprised, go rent it now, we’ll be here when you get back. Otherwise, prepare for a good night’s sleep and pay no attention to the nice men from Lacuna Corp…

First appeared in Hub #24. Kevin switched the audio over to the projector. The lecture hall was filled with outdoor noises. Wind hummed softly over the microphone, cattle lowed nearby, a truck accelerated in the distance.

A roan steer staggered around a concreted yard, its mute distress accompanied by clattering hooves and the fleshy slap of its thigh striking the ground when it fell. A new sound was introduced - incongruous, but familiar to Kevin’s audience.

Whale song.

Gradually, the cow’s shaking stilled, until it could stand securely. Its muscles continued to tremble, but not enough to upset its equilibrium while it listened.

Rated PG-13 for violence and mad cow disease.

First appeared in Interzone

Zhi 4’s scream pierces the Siberian night.

My spiked metal boots crunch through the snow as I race towards him, with Zhi 6 running at my side. The nanochip in my brainstem clicks on, and I reach out with my mind, but I can’t sense even a trace of Zhi 4. A few seconds earlier his form had been outlined by the dark turquoise glow of the force field.

We stop twenty feet short of the field’s perimeter. Beyond it, the hazy silhouette of the colossal Stalk looms, its millions of cilia undulating.

My bodysuit hums as it transmits data back to Xiang Xu Base, situated behind the Rusanov ice cap half a mile away.

My pulse flutters in anticipation and I take a deep breath to try to rein in my excitement. I — like all Zhis — have been designed with an insatiable curiosity about the Stalk’s origins and vulnerabilities. Knowing I’ve been bred to feel this way doesn’t make me feel it any less. Where did the Stalk come from? Why is it here? How can it thrive in these temperatures? I see the same questions reflected in Zhi 6’s expression.

Rated PG-13 for cloning and some adult themes.

One morning, Gordon Pointer received an e-message from the left-front Goodstone tire on his old Callisto sedan. (He had bought the car used over a decade ago and retrofitted it for the intelligent interstates of the Piedmont metrosprawl.) Gordon abhorred palmflips, infraspecs, logomaniacs, microserfs, lapcops, and digital Kleenex, but he lived at the computerminal in his Callisto, journeying between office foci to talk with other human fossils like himself. He did not quail before occasional sitreps from his lead tire.

Rated PG for a worryingly low miles per gallon

First appeared in Ideomancer

“You’re a disgrace to your calling and your species.” The Cardinal’s words were at odds with the verging-on-seductive voice of the translator embedded in the Anturean’s Chlor-tank. From beneath lowered lashes Ignatz O’Reilly, D.D. Inter-Species, watched his superior’s mouth-tendrils vibrate, a gesture he knew denoted extreme lust or mounting rage.

Lust was out of the question, he supposed.

“Falling-down drunk at Mass. Passing out in Confession. And don’t think your little black-market dealings go unnoticed.” The Cardinal’s posterior spines flushed blue. Ignatz averted his eyes even further, studying the faint brown lines crisscrossing each other on a slate floor the color of dried blood. The mutant squid bastard really was mad this time.

“If I might be permitted to explain, Your Eminence…” Ignatz’s tongue tasted like last night’s liquor. “I indulge for purely medicinal reasons…a slight asthmatic condition…any allegations that I would engage in illegal…”

Rated R for religious themes, carousing, and transubstantiaton of a different sort.

There are a number of good writers now breaking into the big leagues through podcasting. My friend J.C. Hutchins is one of them. I loved his 7th Son trilogy, and I jumped at the chance when he asked me to read an advance copy of his horror novel Personal Effects: Dark Art and record a reaction for him.

Here’s my initial reaction (Hutch liked it enough that he added the background music and bumper titling and such):

J.C. Hutchins’s “Personal Effects: Dark Art” - Expert Testimony from Stephen Eley on Vimeo.

And here’s the big group “vlurb” project that my piece was a part of:

J.C. Hutchins’s “Personal Effects: Dark Art” - SuperVlurb from Stephen Eley on Vimeo.

(The folks in that vlurb are all awesome and you should check out their sites: Philippa Ballantine, Scott Sigler, Seth Harwood, Mark Yoshimoto Nemcoff, Christiana Ellis, Matt Wallace, James Melzer, Mark Jeffrey, Mur Lafferty, Phil Rossi and Matt Selznick.)

I read the book in PDF form. And then I pre-ordered it on Amazon, because it’s just that good. (Also because the little goodies that come with the physical copy sound like fun.) This is an unusual horror novel: it brings in a lot of conventional settings and tropes, but the characters break from formula in some surprising ways. And it’s a smart horror novel. Silliness in hats aside, I highly recommend it.

Mr. Wayne was taking his daily exercise, walking Arthur around the lake in Nevley Park, when the sky darkened and a light snow began to fall. A few flakes fluttered against his cheeks. He could feel the cold through his heavy topcoat. He enjoyed the park when it was deserted, but at his age he couldn’t afford a chill. He thumbed the control in his pocket. Arthur turned left onto a bridge that would cut their return journey by a good half mile. Mr. Wayne followed.

Rated K9 for dogs at the cutting edge.

First appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.

Astronauts are people who ride rockets into space.  They must train for a very long time before they go.  Astronauts must be brave and smart.

Will you be an astronaut?

* * *

The biggest rocket ever was the Saturn V.  On the launch pad it was taller than a 30-story building.  Today’s rockets are smaller and lighter.  Today’s rockets can be launched more than once.  They have wings and can come back to earth and land like airplanes.

When a rocket launches, it’s like an earthquake. The ground is shaking! There is flame and smoke. It’s like an explosion!

Antonio is strapped into his seat.  He is about to ride to a space station.  Because there is no air in space, Antonio must wear a space suit.  In the suit, Antonio can breathe and talk over radio.  He wears a helmet with a special faceplate that protects him from the sun.  The fingers of his gloves have tiny claws that help him work with small objects.

What’s all that noise? It must be a rocket! Astronauts are traveling to space!

5-4-3-2-1!  Lift off!

Rated PG-13. Deceptively G…

Kegelman-Ballston Corporation is proud to announce the first public release of its new drug, Halitex, which cures Ulbarton’s Flu completely after one ten-pill course of treatment. Ulbarton’s Flu, as the public knows all too well, now afflicts upwards of thirty million Americans, with the number growing daily as the highly contagious flu spreads. Halitex “flu-proofs” the body by inserting genes tailored to confer immunity to this persistent and debilitating scourge, whose symptoms include coughing, muscle aches, and fatigue. Because the virus remains in the body even after symptoms disappear, Ulbarton’s Flu can recur in a given patient at any time. Halitex renders each recurrence ineffectual.

Rated PG after intensive clinical testing.

By John Kratman

Read by Norm Sherman

First appeared in Aeon Speculative Fiction.

“A construct is no Crow!” Tommy shouted, the ridiculous war bonnet he’d worn to my father’s funeral slipping off his head. He pushed it back with an angry swipe of his hand, glaring at the gathered members of the tribe, daring them to laugh.

“Harry can do everything a man can do,” I said. There were many people in the lodge that I recognized, but there were many more, ghosts of my past, who should have been there and were not. “He can hunt, write poetry, sing a song. He can think and he can feel. I taught him how to shoot and how to track, how to read and how to write. No matter that he sprang from my brain instead of my manhood. He is my son, the only one this old man will ever have. He is a Crow.”

“What can a machine know of tradition and honor?” Tommy asked, his lined face veiled in the shadows cast by the fire. He drew a pipe from his pocket and packed it with angry jabs of his age-spotted hand.

Rated R: contains violence, strong language, and counting coup.