New Stories posted in the last 30 days

You've been dying since before you could read. You just don't remember most of it. Home alone and bored, a kid spots a dusty box with a crayon smiley face on the highest shelf, and nothing is going to keep him from it, not even the furniture tower it takes to get at it. A short, funny, strangely tender twist on the origin story for a young internal superhero.

A planet seems to be losing oxygen much quicker than one Dr. Phillip Almera can explain. He must find the source of what's using the oxygen and reveal it to the public.

A story of artificial intelligence operating within—and sometimes beyond—the systems humanity built.
Before Robert Johnson untangled global AI conspiracies in The Silent Directive, he learned his hardest lesson in a Long Beach warehouse. The Missing Shipments is the prequel where three 'independent' systems agree on a lie—and a gate guard's paper notebook holds the truth. Discover the case that forged the rule: three witnesses aren't corroboration if they're all listening to the same liar.

A marine biologist studying a rare coral colony that recovers from damage faster than it should is injured during a dive. The wound is shallow, almost trivial. What follows is quiet, clinical, and increasingly wrong. The injury closes. Then it closes again. A surface, he keeps reminding himself, is only a surface.