A young man working on the moon during a construction boom keeps seeing two men doing crazy things in the middle of nowhere. Men who leave no trace and whom no one else can see.
Adam-Troy Castro
25 free-to-read stories indexed on Quasar
On the eve of her 20th birthday, Sacrid Henn’s parents send her to an AI prison for her failure to conform. It’s a pleasant prison, but prison nonetheless, and she’s determined to get out.
Content warnings 1
abuse
Draiken kidnaps a hired killer from a space station and spirits him away for a “demonstration.” But what sort of demonstration could possibly change the man’s mind?
Draiken and Thorne seek out a torturer they once knew in hopes he can lead them to surviving leaders of the organizations they once worked for but are now sworn to destroy.
In which we look closely at the plot of an alien-inspired SF thriller and discover something lurking in the hilarious plot holes.
"When they ordered me down off my pedestal, I had nowhere else to go. Life as a statue is easy. They make you ascend the pedestal, turn you to stone, remove your ability to move, and leave you to watch the turn of the seasons in a world you cannot touch or...
Content warnings 2
abuseviolence
"Before I bothered traveling for six months to see it for myself, Sunfire had been described to me in glowing terms as a palace in the sky. Phrases like that immediately trigger my alarms. I begin to suspect that someone’s trying to sell me something."
"The golden woman is a prisoner trapped in a straight-backed chair. She has been paralyzed by artificial means, reduced to a temporary quadriplegic by a device affixed to the back of her neck. She has been stripped to her undergarments and left only enough...
Two series meet in this crossover episode where ex-assassin Draiken’s search for justice is interrupted when he’s arrested by ace prosecutor Andrea Cort.
"If a robot stands alone in a field, staring into the forlorn distance as it obeys the last order it was given by a human, that order being, “Don’t move until we come back for you,” which it can remember uttered with a cruel sneer by a man who has taken a...
Content warnings 1
abuse
"This much was clear. At some point in my future, I would have access to a time machine. This was a ridiculous sentence and a tragically irrelevant concern while my wife Judi was on the floor and possibly dying, but there it was: nonsense, in the presence...
Content warnings 2
death-of-a-loved-onesuicide
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
"The buffet was infinite. It existed in a pocket dimension, via some sort of technological jiggering of the sort that you have heard about before and, unless you are totally anal, don’t want to hear about now. You could probably summon an explanation that...
Content warnings 3
cannibalismgoreviolence
"Posit a man. He could be any man. She could be a woman. They could be any human being anywhere on the spectrum. The story would play out the same. This is, however, entirely the creation of a writer who has written plenty of formidable women, and so he...
"The aftermath of the great war deposited me on a breathtaking port city called Aeskir, on a dazzling world called Aevii. This was about as fine a place to end up as I could have hoped. Many thousands of worlds across human space had been scoured of life...
"Ambassador Porleth Heng considered herself a blessed woman. Unlike most members of the Confederate Diplomatic Corps, who had indentured themselves to that service out of economic hardship or an ache to escape the terrible conditions on their respective...
"The Exhibit of You is the central attraction of an institution you could call a museum, in a population center you could call a city, beloved by creatures who you could call people. We know that this is annoying sentence structure. If you cannot penetrate...
Content warnings 2
deathsuicide
"I have experienced some tastes of my afterlife as a crustacean. In it, I am one of many, on a beach with purple sand abutting a sea that could be water but might be some other liquid entirely, beneath stars that seem larger and brighter than any I see in...
Content warnings 2
deathsuicide
Gorman travels the galaxy engaging in all the risky sports that only the very rich can do, but he’s haunted by an annoying robot that keeps trying to interrupt him with a birthday card.
The galactic government has decided to evict humanity from Earth, but we’ve got a choice of different species that are willing to accept us—provided we convert to their forms.
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
The city is dying and its immortal human inhabitants seem inclined to die with it. Except for Kayn.
Content warnings 3
body-horrordeathsexual-content
My wife sometimes asked what had gone wrong with us. She had always been our bank of compassion, the caretaker of our marriage, the one who diagnosed what was needed to keep us on track, and made sure that it was provided. I evaded the question. How could...
The creatures who shared your art with us had to explain many things to make it minimally comprehensible. This by itself made sense. You are who and what you are, and we are who and what we are, and the physical differences between us are profound. We...
Content warnings 1
suicide