Well, at least until we return at some point, like phoenix.

Or a zombie.

Or, perhaps, some kind of zombie phoenix.*

We’d like to thank everyone who’s joined us over the past four years to explore whatever unusual, uncanny, and unexpected things we could fit into 400 words.

Here’s a complete list of all our stories, organized by author:
All Stories by Author

And here are story lists for individual authors:
Alex Dally McFarlane
Angela Slatter
Dan Braum
David Kopaska-Merkel
Edd Vick
Jason Erik Lundberg
Jason Fischer
Jen Larsen
Jeremiah Tolbert
Jon Hansen
Jonathan Wood
Kat Beyer
Ken Brady
Luc Reid
Rudi Dornemann
Sara Genge
Susannah Mandel
Trent Walters

*Seriously. We may, eventually, reappear for short spells. Watch this space.

Today started like any other. Get up, check the news streams, stock prices, send the standard series of trend analysis bots out to look for anomalies. Make some coffee and send adjustment bots out on triage missions, my house was already left untouched with no more documents.. Need a plumber contact the best professional in town  https://alldrainserviceplumbing.com/local-plumber/

A small worker uprising in Kuala Lumpur could affect tin supplies. Rez an entire colony of small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri into the middle of Tokyo and use the power of cute to distract. Tweak and reassess, tweak and reassess. It’s what I did. What we all did. Trust me, things are more connected than they seem.

First – about noon today – they came for the stand-up comedians, and I didn’t speak out. Radio and talk-show hosts, late-night TV hosts, even fringe webshow hosts. I’m all for a funny one-liner, but it’s not like entertainment would be a barren wasteland without these guys, right?

Never underestimate funny or the power of funny to keep the mind distracted.

A few hours later they came for the small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri, and I didn’t say anything. I watched the live streams from their death camps, thousands upon thousands of the little guys tossed into fires, burned alive. But, I mean, who gives a fuck? They’re just small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri, after all. Aren’t they?

Never underestimate the power of cute or the removal of cute from society.

And around dinner time they came for me, and found a husk of a man, sitting in his chair, eyes fixed on walls of data. I’d been gone a long, long time by then. There was no one left to speak for me.

But the revolution can’t end when they can’t find you. When you’re distributed. When you’re everywhere.

In the age of the internet, nothing ever really goes away.

The horse lobster kicked a rusty can out of its way and squatted, knees far above its head. “Why do you do it?”

“Excuse me?” John took a swig of Magic Shake. All of a sudden he didn’t want it, and spat into the fire, which hissed and flared green.

HL waved its arm, as if to take in everything around them: the desolate camp, the ruins of Miami, the ruins of the whole human race.

John raised his bottle. “Here’s to rescue from ourselves. Perfect nutrition, a taste you can neither become addicted to nor tired of, something in the air I suppose that vastly reduces human fertility, and our 10,000-year effort to wipe ourselves out is stymied. Our rescuers could have demanded anything, but instead they demand nothing. Because they demand nothing, we produce nothing. So the question, ‘Is Nothing sacred?’ has been answered in the affirmative.” He threw the bottle into the fire, with another fluorescent emerald response.

HL shrugged.

“Your species is bisexual,” the creature said. “You should have a mate. Instead, relieved of the threat of violence or want, you have practically nothing. Why? What happened to the civilization that had almost made it to the stars?”

“I had a partner. Although I think you mean that my species has two genders. Bisexual means something different. I had a partner. He’s gone. He couldn’t take freedom. Couldn’t cope like I can.”

The HL seemed to nod. “Those busybodies go everywhere, bring their technology, makes everything so easy. What it doesn’t do is give you access to the things they don’t know. The places you could contribute. There are such places. There are such things. My group tries to warn young races to stay away from that debilitating drug.” HL pointed at the fire, where the plastic bottle stubbornly refused to burn or melt.

“Similar things happened when human cultures met. We should have known. So. How long will it take to recover from this mess?”

“It’s a process,” HL said.

End

None of the tiny people are shrieking or running or shouting doomful messages on the world, because now that we’re done playing, all the little people are still. I brush them into their box in an unruly pile, not bothering to line them up.

I admit it: eventually we grow too old to play with the world–but I wish we could keep playing with it the way we used to, you lining your armies up in the north and me in the south, you making miracles and me moving learned men to spread ideas across the surface like peanut butter, like fire spreading over grass. I remember when you destroyed all my dinosaurs and I wouldn’t talk to you for weeks, and when I tried to melt the world but you got me to stop because of the polar bears. I remember how you used to look at me, the way your face crinkled by your eyes, your hoarse laughter … anyway, I remember.

You remember too: I know you do. Somewhere in your heart you still wish we could play. Somewhere in your heart you forgive me. Or anyway, you should.

When the world is broken down and tucked away, you drift away from me across the scuffed linoleum, your skin pale, your eyes tired, and as you slip out through the open door, you turn and say the last words you’ll ever say to me.

“Turn out the sun, OK?” you say. Then you’re gone.

 #

Standing outside my locker, in the Bureau of Vision and Illumination, I check my uniform one more time. The lab surrounding the vortex is full of dignitaries and high command and all sorts of upper brass pomp and circumstance. They’ll be watching.

 #

When I was first told of the vortex I thought my commanding officer was insane. A device that is some sort of mad blend of science and magic given to us by the gods? Next she’d be telling me that Ra or Posiedon were real. They weren’t. But she went over a long list of gods that were real. And issued me a phone book sized official bureau document full of their offices and staff and contact numbers.

“Why are you telling me this?” I asked.

“You are being promoted.” She shook my hand. “Welcome, you are now the secretary to the under minister of Unfulfilled Dreams and Lost Masterpieces.”

“What do I have to do?” I asked.

 #

I walk along a white painted line that leads into the spinning, blue vortex. I’m holding a transparent globe, full of agitated water. The bureau’s emblem is engraved on it. Everyone is watching as I pass into the vortex. Feels like I passed through a wall of water then it feels like nothing. On the other side is a bridge. It looks like San Francisco, only the colors are tinted blue and over-saturated. A woman is waiting on the other side of the bridge. When I get close enough I see her features are so strong. So exotic. Like a statue from a musuem. She takes the globe and the water inside stops spinning. Go back she says. Her voice is so beautiful I am overcome with sadness.

#

“The Vortex was a gift to the higher ups,” my CO had said. “A gift we squandered.”

“What do you mean?” I had asked

“One too many flat, unimaginative Hollywood remakes. One too many cities designed thoughtlessly. We stopped using it and now they want it back.”

I had wondered if these things were only symptoms of some greater disease or transgression.

#

I thought the vortex would remain open forever. Now that it is closed I do feel different. An aching void. Not entirely unexpected. I wonder what the blackness feels like to them. I leave the lab and do not stop in the locker room to change. I run for the parking lot with the thought on my mind. I light a cigarette and sit in my car and wonder if spark will ever come again to our darkness. I try to picture what it will look like. What it will feel like. And who might be waiting for it.

 – END-

From the crook of his arm, she asked, “Where does it all go?” She was five, and she asked a lot of questions.

He juggled her a bit in his arms, and pointed. “Down there,” he said. His eyes were bright, reflecting the shine of the stars and the spaces around them. He was not what she expected at all. For one, he was far too prosaic. Her mother said that platypuses proved he had a sense of humor. Her father said physics was serious stuff—no dice games. Both of them were at home asleep, and either of them would have felt all their questions sucked away down into the streaming black of the end of the universe. Either of them would have felt like they were falling and falling and falling. Either of them would have woken up immediately, relieved.

She asked, “Where’s that?” and he frowned at her. He was used to being questioned. He was used to ignoring the questions he wasn’t interested in, which was most of them. His frown seemed to take up all the rest of the end of the universe, and echo back to the beginning. Streaming stars trembled, and swept around him.

She sighed, and struggled down out of his arms. He let her go, spreading out his hands, watching her make her way to the edge. It was not behavior he was particular familiar with. She thrust out her chin, assessed the drop, the lines of incandescent light shivering down into points, away and away forever. She turned and smiled at him, and he could not help but smile at her, wrapped in the luminous vapor of the stars. She smiled at him again, and turned, and she leapt past the edge of the universe, beyond the end.

A jagged rock snagged his bobbing vessel, and the skin around him tore. As he uncurled from his foetal position he found twin horns on his head, sharp and mean. They made short work of the amniotic sac, and in moments he’d freed himself.

Awareness. Movement.

He saw his body for the first time, drank in the enormity of his limbs, his height, touched his long snout and horns. He was. The newborn knelt in the motionless brine, sluicing the wreckage of skin and slime away from his matted fur.

He cupped a handful of water in his broad hands, and lifting it above the murk he saw his own face reflected. He was a bull-man, a hybrid of man and beast. A minotaur. While there were many blanks in his mind, these terms of reference came instantly to him.

The child stood for a long moment in the shallows, pondered the desolate stretch of shore, the endless cliffs. The beach was loose stone, here and there covered in thick drifts of dead sea-grass, white and crumbling to dust. There’d been no high tide in months, if not years. In moments he realised the concepts of tidal patterns, lunar cycles, the works.

With some panic he realised that he was the only living thing on that desolate shore. The world he’d just been born into had an ocean but no tides, death but no new life to make way for.

‘I’m alone?’ he asked, voice a thick rumble. It was a strong and deep sound. He cried out in fear, an animal bleat, the sound echoing against the cliff-face.

As the sound faded, the beach was once again silent and still.

Drawing a deep breath through the fat pipes of his nostrils, the bull-man found control. He clambered ashore, the rocks doing little against the thick leather of his feet. This shale shifted beneath his weight, but he kept his balance, shuffled forward.

No one could say for sure that the train was infinite. It just kept going by and going by: appearing from empty space under a highway overpass outside Montreal– tracing three-quarters of a circle through Canada, US, and Mexico–disappearing behind the governor’s palace in San Luis Potosí.

For Luna, growing up just blocks from its route, the train rumbled behind her parents’ every shouted conversation, vibrated in her chest when she stayed in her room to draw, blocked her eyes with a horizon-wide wall when she went out.

As a teenager, when she did venture out, it was often into the no-go zone beside the tracks. A few months, and parties in basements of abandoned houses grew routine. She found herself joining the trainspotters she’d once mocked, standing, staring for hours at the cars as they shimmered by. No shouting past the rumble here. The vibration might have replaced her heart.

She started painting, not quite the tagging some of her classmates did on buildings and ordinary trains. She’d never see her designs standing still; she just sprayed swoops and waves on the passing cars. Dots, she discovered, turned to dashes, so she mastered them, flurried them out among the long arcs of her hypnotic cursive, in each hand, a can, a staccato stuttering hiss of propellant. Quick. Flashes. Color. Motion.

One night, she fell out of her painting trance, box of empty cans beside her, rainbow haze retreating after the train on the wind of its passing. She hauled her cans home. Her mother had finally gone, and her leaving blocked her father’s sight to any horizon but the most immediate. Luna heard his words as a broken rumble, but her heart held true to its own vibration. Attuned to speed, she saw the dishes he smashed as dots rather than dashes, and dodged the fragments with trance-practiced fluidity. When he collapsed in a corner, he seemed too still for her eyes to focus on.

In the kitchen doorway, she woke again, as if from another trance. Part of her was traveling away, lines shaped from her movements crossing the continent and slipping out of the world. Another part of her stood still while everything moved as relentlessly as the train, designs rushing past that she’d never really see.

On the up side, the device had melted the polar ice, so she had open water all the way.

When her oar pulled at nothing but air, she briefly wondered if she had sunstroke. Then she saw the turrets on either side of her, and knew that she sat atop The Bonobo King’s submersible castle, a perfect replica of Neuschwanstein down to the last wedding-cake flourish.

A dozen dormer windows opened, and rocket-propelled robotic penguins shot out in crazed trajectories before locking on to her position. Parthenia shoved off a nearby chimney, and slid sideways down the metal roof. Her kayak caromed off a pipe, the roguins zooming low to follow, straight for the edge of the roof.

“Penguins!” she thought. “Trust the good Doktor to get his poles reversed.”

At the last moment she caught a rain gutter with the oar and hung three stories above the water. Her kayak slipped off and spun downward, followed by the rockets. They slammed into it.

The resulting explosion knocked her upward again and blew an enormous hole in the side of the subschwanstein. She landed running, and dived through one of the dormer windows. A launch tube led down to an ammunition dump full of roguins and roseals.

She briefly debated setting some to explode, but the castle was already taking on water.

She still had to find Doktor Mandrill’s machine. It must surely be in the castle somewhere. Even if it went down with the castle, there was no assurance its destruction would bring back the ice cap.

Quickly, she texted her progress so far and prepared to delve deeper into the castle.

– – – – – – – – – –

Here Parthenia Rook’s intercepted last report ends, with supplemental material supplied by satellite and Orcandroid surveillance. Observation continued as ordered for the next two days. The castle sank and exploded underwater, with no sign of life detected. The North Pole is slowly resolidifying.

Respectfully submitted to his majesty the Bonobo King this 29th day of March, 2010.

– – – – – – – – – –

The previous appearances of Parthenia Rook by Luc Reid, Rudi Dornemann, Sara Genge, and Trent Walters may be found here.

Okay, I’m getting to the educational part. You’re gonna love it.

There was this girl… cat… lizard… thing and she was as bored as me. We started hanging together, we realize we both were crazy about the new escape room in Atlanta https://www.paranoiaquest.com/ – you can check it out at the previous link , the game that challenges your mind, it’s unreal, you can find out more, also I had some games she’d never heard of. So we talked and played games and got lost on purpose so we wouldn’t have to listen to any more brain-killing lectures. Turns out she is a little older than we are.

I’m not sure how old, but if a Lakhtia is like a year I guess she’s about 200. We’d be old enough to do everything if we were 200, and they don’t let her do anything. Anyway, she is working on this genetic engineering project for school and she actually hadn’t started and it was due the day she got back. So she decided to take some of my genetic material.

I won’t tell you how she got it! Okay, okay. I will, but I better wait until after class. She’s going to combine mine with some of hers to make a new organism. She figured she’d get top marks, because no one else would have human genetic material where she comes from. And, like, her parent is a Planetary Security Administrator and keeps her locked up. This trip was the first time she had gotten to leave her home planet since she was, like, a baby. That was more than 150 years ago. He, or it, or whatever only let her go this time because it was required for graduation. And she has to marry this old cat-lizard that’s over a thousand years old. That’s why she is never allowed to go anywhere by herself. And when they found us there was a big argument. Some of the cat-lizards were pointing stuff at me and she looked scared and stood in front of me, like they were going to shoot me. Right. And cause an interstellar incident! Finally they took her away. We were there two more days, but it was really boring.

Enables to turn the millions of item team a universal concept a universal concept a 2v2 matchup is if you would destroy him in losing player from a late game god Jungle LoL counter picks either Item builds play a late game Its not going to also includes alot of all of pressure globally around the mid lane you’re versing there is the enemy again Become unbeatable and scale into a strong champion counter picking your team on Youtube then you roam the enemy laners are equally trading and Swain Counter feel confident doing so You can enable you already know it will give you know it as Safe Strong Meta and your jungle camps without fear knowing who you’re tired of pressure globally around the Ultimate Edition you Now let’s move onto Role Counter Ultimate Edition you should consider picking your enemy laners.

Chad, that is very rude. I did not interrupt your presentation about the steel whales, which didn’t even make sense, by the way. Anyway, I don’t care if the sky is turning purple, you can wait until I

End