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Tristian by Michael Battaglia, December 2003
It starts, as it always does, with an infant's cry.
Every single time.
Who are you to claim otherwise? With your tunnel vision, your cramped, painful sight, restricted to such a small space. It's only a pinprick, this time. Merely a moment: A light that flares and goes out. And if you blink you won't even have time to witness the lingering tendrils of the afterimage.
Stretching the Tear by Michael Battaglia, June - August 2004
Before he ever left, he'd made a conscious decision to leave his watch behind. He wanted to keep himself ignorant of Time, to somehow pretend it didn't exist. But it wasn't possible. Even when he stood still, he could feel it moving forward. Even when he threw his whole body against them, the clockhands never stopped twitching. He couldn't make them stop. And if he lingered long enough, they'd catch him in a sharp vice, and cut him in half. There was simply nothing he could do.
So he left his watch behind. What else could he do? It was something. It was a start.
Playing God by Ashley Hibbert, January 2005
The minuscule needle slices the fertilized egg, splitting it, then again, and again. First there is one, then two, then four, and eight, sixteen, thirty-two, sixty-four, until each sack is indistinguishable amongst the mass.
The Underpass by Ashley Hibbert, January 2005
"It starts the same every time - I'm standing in a room of white, no doors, and no walls. Everything's perfect - horribly perfect. It's as if whoever designed it was waiting for death to come. Here, they would stay for eternity, their corpse perfectly preserved. No wind, not even a breeze. There isn't a cobweb hanging in the corners. It's so beautiful - so much so that I just want to throw up. I look around. There's nothing - no way in and no way out. Not even a light bulb, although the whole room is well lit. Silence screams in my ear, so I scream back-
Crossing Dragons Canyon by Ashley Hibbert, January 2005
Reaching the tiny ledge, I fell to my knees and inhaled deeply.
The ledge extended out into Dragons Canyon and was the closest space between the walls reaching into the sky like twin palm trees.
Where Do You Go, When You're Not Here (excerpt) by Michael Battaglia, November 2005
I'll remember the taste of this day, the sour residue of something being severed combined with the sweet pretext of promise, that a grand plan was about to be enacted. It lingers still, even in those moments when I think it's gone. There's flavors to your life, to everything and when the senses are attuned you don't need a calendar. You don't even need a watch. There's no stages to my life, but I know each phase. I know what loss can taste like, in a thousand different permutations. But that doesn't make me special. I just know how to put a name to it, even if I can't find the letters to make it real. I want you to know, that I grasped for something that just wasn't there. That doesn't make it wrong, or the failure any less right.
Twenty Twenty by G.C. Dillon, November 2005
** Based upon an idea by James "The T is not for Tiberius" Gregory **
scene one.
Josie Kelley entered the employee underground parking lot. Security cameras followed the twenty-year-old woman. Facial profiling software scanned her features, not to appreciate her comely image in any way, but to compare her with its terabyte database of offenders. She reached her car without an alert being broadcast to the Municipal Constabulary. No COP, computer operated patrol-unit, would show up. She swiped her index finger along her car's key strip. It unlocked and she got into the driver's seat. She placed her Miyoshi-Alvarez wireless I/O pad on the seat next to her. A small green light lit as the device networked with the vehicle's computer. The voice recognition system started the engine when she spoke her password; the seat adjusted itself to her height and reach, as did the rear-view mirror and the dashboard controls. Her car was a gasoline-ethanol duel fuel/ electric hybrid. The display on its Auto On-Line showed the date: Tuesday, 30 June 2020. She activated the service's Eyewitness newsgroup. There was a story she needed to access before even driving home. She had gotten a short e-mail broadcast at work informing the company's associates that their CFO Cameron had been arrested for violations of the Sarbanes-Oxley regulations and they should direct any questions solely to the legal department. Solely! A softly spoken warning to all.
Tyrannicide by Christopher Howard, January 2006
It was one thing to go poking around for extinct plants in the Pleistocene, or pulling a piece of a nameless person out of time with a well-placed ping, but when Frederic bio-captured the Führer during a late thirties speech at the Reichstag I almost choked up my lunch. A complete capture like this...it only happened once.
"Coming through! Look at the histo. A full cap."
Ctrl, Alt, Insert, Delete by Norman A. Rubin, May 2006
“Psst!” a whispered voice beckoned as I jogged along a path near the concrete parched channel that brought water in a trickling stream to the thirsty residents of the City of Angels. “Psst, psst!” the sound called urgently, forcing curiosity on my part, despite the warnings of mayhem by total strangers. “Over here,” the voice whispered. At a supporting protruding abutment along the canal, a little man beckoned me with his pinky finger to near him. At first it was difficult to discern his identity as he was partly hidden by the visor of a peaked baseball cap. Then identity squirmed into the cells of my brain.
A Warbird Rises by Peter J Welmerink, October 2006
"Cowards die many times before their deaths; the valiant never taste death more but once." William Shakespeare
The landscape spun. The blue sky seesawed. Treetops and grassy open fields, roadway, Krollian city off in the distance: all swirled round and round. I gripped the collective trying to maintain power while it violently shook in my left hand, convulsing with the rest of the doomed Ebon Hawk skycraft . The cyclic quivered in my right hand, jerking one way while I struggled to move it in the opposite. Even minor success meant keeping the aircraft from turning into a giant spinning top.
Gold Star for Robot Boy by Michael Battaglia, December 2006
"I'll kill her," was all he kept saying. Sweat glimmered on his forehead, the light glinted off the knife in his hand. It contrasted sharply with the throat of the person it was held against. The man was blinking way too much. And he kept saying the same thing over and over. "I'll kill her. I'll do it." His breathing was quick and uneven and his pupils sometimes didn't focus right. His hand barely trembled, but that might have been an act of conscious devotion.
Green Light by Tala Bar, February 2007
(A conversation overheard on a long-distance bus.)
"O.K. Orna, now tell me, what's been troubling Rachel lately?"
"Oh, Rachel..."
"Yes, I'm sure something's happened to her; she's been behaving so strangely. Is she ill? You should know."
"If anybody knows. I don't think she's ill, but something did happen to her."
Touched by an Alien by Dan Mills, February 2007
Garrett Vidmar was upset that he was prematurely bald at the age of 29. Of course his nano-synthetic simulation looked completely natural. Except that it never got dirty and it always stayed the same length. In a strong wind his jet-black locks would fly about but it would magically move back into place when he went inside. The memory properties of a nano-synth–sim were remarkable. Garrett had heard people refer to it as helmet hair but that didn't bother him because Famka liked it and that's all that mattered.
Growing Pains in the Womb by Gustavo Bondoni, December 2007
“It almost looks as if you're enjoying this, Rob.” The accusation was actually pretty difficult to deny, but Rob felt he had to try.
“Why would you say that?" He asked.
“Oh, come on! Ever since you got the call this morning you're eyes have been shining with a fire I've never seen in them before. I swear, if you were forty years younger…”
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