The ship hadn’t activated Bot 9 in a long time—it’s an unstable model—but in a desperate situation it needs all its resources. And how much trouble can it get into hunting down a rat?
Content warnings 2
deathviolence
Suzanne Palmer
12 free-to-read stories indexed on Quasar
"I have been activated, therefore I have a purpose, Bot 9 thought. I have a purpose, therefore I serve. It recited the Mantra Upon Waking, to check that it was running at optimum physical efficiency, then the Mantra of Obedience, the Mantra of Not...
Content warnings 2
deathviolence
By treaty, people on Erax never talk to the Oceanics, so when an Oceanic turns up at a south polar base to deliver a few dead human bodies, it’s trouble for sure.
"Sunset is beginning, a sweep of red across the sky chasing the blue over the remains of the ship’s stern, dragging darkness behind it like a thick sheet over the day’s face and declaring it done. Stars, such as they are, will come on soon, one row at a...
The human terraformers didn’t realize there was native intelligence until it was too late to save them. Now it’s just a question of what to do with the time that remains.
Content warnings 2
deathviolence
"Okay, so you know those things they sell called ‘useless machines’?” the inventor says. He is smiling. Of course, the boy knows them; he’d briefly had one that had been plucked from his bedroom floor and relocated into the inventor’s basement workroom...
Content warnings 2
body-horrorviolence
"Thomas stood at the top of the weedy stone path that led down the gently sloping hill to where a ramshackle cottage sat sprawled out against the backdrop of a hostile, unforgiving sea. The lingering gray of the morning’s storm had not yet fully let go its...
"Did you know,” the Ijt Ambassador said, as she sipped gently at her soup with her long, blue, curling tongue, “that your predecessor, in an act of yofishi —” the translator choked on the word, but Station Commander Ennie Niagara knew that it meant...
Cassie takes her hallucinating uncle and a needy animatronic dinosaur head on a road trip through the suburbs of a decaying city.
Content warnings 1
death-of-a-loved-one
"I have been activated, therefore I have a purpose, Bot 9 thought. I have a purpose, therefore I serve. It had a lengthy list of Mantra subroutine sets to run after its usual initialization check, and it noted the addition of even more since its last...
Every time Joe get injured in battle, damaged parts of him get replaced with “smart” artificial organs. So smart that they have their own ideas about what’s good for Joe.
You find a lifepod with a near-dead young man in it, and you decide to find out where he came from and why.