A little robot travels thousands of miles underwater trying to return information to her creator, whose project seems to have lost the funding to return to the site she and her “sisters” were studying.
Analog
98 free-to-read stories from Analog
Benji was an ordinary terrier until his master decided to have him sentientized.
"The first thing she knew was that smells didn’t have the same shapes or colors anymore. Not wrong, exactly, but different. Even her own scents—rawhide and dirty paws and bits of grass that had brushed her belly—were changed, not just undercut with the...
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.
"Jacqueline theorized how to build a private video connection for the three of us from broken baby monitors, trashed cell phones, and digital displays; I collected her shopping list from Dad’s junkyard, and Selena took Jacqueline’s scribbled plans,...
Exchange of pathogens has largely replaced traditional sex, but the archipelago has run out of new diseases, so four friends go to the mainland in search of new plagues.
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?
After a disaster in the Oort Cloud left her family penniless, young Holly works on a farm on Earth to pay for her college education while waiting for her uncles to raise funds to put the family back in business.
Content warnings 2
deathillness-and-pandemic
"Everyone was on the operations deck while Gare was on the conference call with the Ministry back home. Retii Major had just set below the mountain range opposite, but half of Retii Minor was still above the peaks in the slowly reddening sky. It cast long...
"The point of Mars,” Serafina said over the radio as her rover crunched over the fine lacustrine surface of the Argyre Planitia, “is that it’s the opposite of a safe place. Why else would we be here, except to challenge ourselves, to challenge humanity?”...
"The reading of Ma’s will marks the first time I’ve seen my mother in fifteen years. She looks frailer than I’d remembered, almost childlike, her limbs like disposable chopsticks under her gown. Her hospital room is decorated entirely with inoffensive...
After watching a make eat her mother, Malatina isn’t sure she wants one anywhere near her web, but she’s lonely, and so she responds to a very unusual arachnipede who seems to be lonely too.
Astronomers spot what appears to be a new cluster of stars, except that it’s growing hour by hour.
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.
Jerry’s got enough problems with donors pressing him to make his project show results, so it really doesn’t help that some of his staff seem to be freaking about something in Lab B-15.
In which we look closely at the plot of an alien-inspired SF thriller and discover something lurking in the hilarious plot holes.
"On the morning of June 3rd, 2307, Galactic Standard, Mo cycled through her hundreds of sensors, checking that everything on the Eris Express was well. Her processors whirred as she calculated trajectories for the ship, which she always found calming. She...
"Loire Valley, 1520 Estienne’s shadow fell over me, and I could not, of a sudden, recall the stitch I was making. He had invited himself onto the ladies’ porch without announcement. Odette’s voice faltered. “Take—” She was reading from the Queen of...
"A few hours before the ceasefire was scheduled to start, Captain Jarrell Dresdin and I dropped from low orbit on Aine’s night side, tasked with the final double-check. An armored dropsuit wasn’t enough to quell the terror of atmospheric entry, with only a...
"On the day of the fitting, hope flits in Ava’s chest, a frightened sparrow she might stifle or set free. The day unravels languidly from dawn until midmorning, then hurtles toward noon so quickly that Ava must run to catch the subway or risk being late....
"The Taghrib Colony had existed for almost two hundred years, and all that time it had been waiting to die. Then one night Rustem, tinker of Biskra, discovered a nova in the sky. The beautiful, deadly sun had just gone down, and the twilit air was...
"A worker of the Megachile pluto tribe—insecta, hymenoptera, leaf-cutter, resin bee— rumbled heavily through the air. Biome morning: light stretched thin as a veil of citreous bio-skin on the stone of Aconie’s cliffside cave. The M. pluto, large as...
"It didn’t really matter how he had come to be abandoned. A guardian had been at his side; was there no more. Locke was the only human on the world, so far as he knew. Many other lives were here. Survival was simple enough. Along the broad roofless...
"Tethered to the main cluster, placidly I float in the lazy currents. Softly, gently, a colony-mate brushes against me. Our membranes touch briefly and fuse. Electricity. Instinctively, I extend a single pseudopod toward my neighbor. The texture I feel is...
"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...
A woman protects an illegal AI from a government team that’s trying to erase it.
Aki has fond memories of the robot who cared for her in the orphanage, so she decides to do something when she learns they’re all being scrapped.
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.
Original humans killed off all the people on Karalang 15,000 years ago, but the captain of Karalang’s last surviving warship just woke from cryosleep to get his revenge. But there’s an intruder on the ship.
Technology has made Alan healthy and active for an 84-year-old, but it’s also made him unemployable. After his wife leaves him, he and some other seniors decide to start a biker gang.
"The wind sings in the petal wires. Alma hangs by one arm from the hull of the lily. With the other she works furiously at the tether brake. Each time the lily is lifted by a wave the tether zips down into the big dark. The third time the water breaks over...
"Licensed psychologists follow a set of ethical standards enforceable by law. Don’t fuck your patients, commit no felonies, refer out if you don’t know what to do, stuff like that. Then there are aspirational principles. More like ideals, inspiring better...
"The command center was silent but for the singing of the computers. No human voice dared speak as we passed into Saturn’s shadow. It was ridiculous and illogical, but superstition is a hard thing to train out of people who exist upon the knife’s edge of...
"The plaque on the living room wall was dark cherry with a brass-plated steel rectangle at its center, lacquered. The engraving stated IN APPRECIATION OF HAROLD MOSS. On another line: 45 YEARS OF DEDICATED SERVICE. Then at the bottom: WILSON TECHNOLOGIES,...
"A micro alarm sounded, and Chuck Grimshaw double-checked the suit integrity readings. He was losing air. Slow, but sure. Inside the pressure suit, he was actually surprisingly warm and comfortable. The AJ19 was an older suit model, and this particular one...
"Dirtsiders mostly do not understand orbital mechanics. They say stupid things like, “Space travel is a racket. My cousin emigrated to Mars last year and her trip only took three months. Now they’re saying I have to pay for seven months transit. Spacers...
"I was shipped to Barsaylus like freight. The ship was unmanned or, more accurately, uncrewed. Unlit, even. The aliens had given us technical specifications to build a kind of pod for my own survival, and it had taken NASA about a year working around the...
"2090 It’s true, my young friends. I was there as, one by one, the first stars began winking out. And again, the horrible night when one of the brightest of them all blazed brighter still—before disappearing forever. Serious? Yes, I’m serious. Moreover, if...
"Roy Harris perched on a stool in front of his new shop door, very carefully filling in the letters that Martha had sketched out on the window. She had a steady eye for that sort of thing. He could stay within the lines, but don’t ask him to put the lines...
"Folake Adeyemi was slowly digging her index finger into the base of her afro and staring at the row of remote subsurface exploration monitoring screens when she heard the explosion. She’d let her mind wander for a few moments, subconsciously clenching her...
"Reza Saintsbury used tweezers to place each seed smack in the middle of the sterile aeroponic pads. Each pad went into the vertical germination chamber, where it was spaced precisely two inches apart, one on top the other, for the first five days of...
"The creature was not the last of its kind, but it had been a very long time since he had seen another like himself. Loneliness had been Deviltree’s unrelenting companion, driving him to the edge of the cliff once more to look out onto the valley below....
"I heard this story from my late friend Shelby Weinberg. Like myself, Shel was a science fiction writer. If his byline doesn’t ring any bells, though, don’t feel ignorant; not many SF fans knew him by that name. Even the pseudonym he used, Hamilton Yale,...
"The toy robot danced wildly to the music being played. It flailed its limbs and spun around as sound poured from the ceiling, motions programmed by the laughing boy watching the dancing toy. His older brother, Carlos, flung the door open to the small room...
"Snow was falling in dithering flurries, spilling from the clouds like a shower of white confetti. The accumulation on the ground was already deep, and the horses pulling the sleigh were struggling, their hooves sinking into the drifts as if wading through...
"My name is Alfred Kramer, known for the better part of my life as “Lefty.” I was born April 13, 1920, in Owatonna, Minnesota. Today is my birthday in 2020, meaning that I’ve reached the unlikely age of one century. I currently live in a geriatric facility...
"There are times I wish I had a brain—just one organ surrounded by layers of bone or flesh that kept everything straight. You put your chit in one pocket and then you watch that pocket , right? It’s the whole reason helmets exist. Instead, my mind is...
"Taffy’s bedroom was a bit too warm, but I sensed that the chamber itself was cold. Couldn’t feel it of course. It was just a projection from Geneva. And it was probable that none of the people I faced were really at ARM’s Geneva facility at all. The...
"The mood in the control room was tense. When everything depends on the next hour or so, people grow quiet and focused. In a little less than an hour, the DART spacecraft would arrive at the asteroid Didymos, and all their effort would go out in a final...
"Dominic Vadas hadn’t set out to break records. Hadn’t intended to become the furthest outpost of humanity in existence, or famous in any way. He’d simply wanted to slip away from the rest of humanity unnoticed. One billion miles from Earth, 2.5 hours of...
"The funeral began when the temple clock tolled at sunset, crimson and lavender and gold clouds against a violet sky. Or an artificial version of nightfall—day changing to night on the video screens tiling the walls and ceiling of the giant cavern that...
"Rath van Dorn groaned and rubbed at eyes that were sore and red, his long brown fingers prying grit from the dry corners. ... How the hell did they expect him to concentrate on reports when his wife was missing? Had been missing for weeks. He tried to...
"I repeat a chatbot to customers who “want to talk to a human.” Here’s how it works: someone, somewhere presses “talk to a human” on one of our client-company websites, and my phone lights up. The call script prints out for me to read. “Hello, JewelSky...
"Watch it, trash!” a young chemical engineer snapped as he bumped another student. “I’m sorry.” Awi Trashpusher Nonumber had a blind spot behind him. Though an adult, only four of the six eyes on his pale, skinny, cylindrical body had developed. The...
"The technician swallowed. “She’s in pieces. I was uploading her and I don’t know what happened, but it didn’t work.” Her face flushed. “I broke her.” ... “Okay, first thing is calm down. I got this. What’s the patient’s name?” “Angela Spelling.” His head...
On a struggling colony in the Trojan Asteroids, young Alaya’s family needs more water than their ration allows, and her grandmother has a plan to get more.
Against all odds, the little Mars rover keeps exploring and collecting data, even it has been many years since anyone on Earth responded. Then it detects a radio beacon not far away on the surface.
The discovery of an attempted audio recording from Elizabethan times causes an uproar.
Hortensia works in the Venerean atmosphere, building a floating city, when a puncture in the aerostat threatens the whole project unless someone can patch it before a sulfuric acid rainstorm begins.
In a world where the dinosaurs never died out, Rekek and his adopted son accept a commission to lead a paleontologist to fossil-rich sites in the black hills of what’s South Dakota in our world.
A human astronomer decides to investigate why some stars seem to be disappearing.
The hard-boiled narrator runs investigations in cyberspace and reality. This time they’ve got a murder to solve, and it’s proving a challenge—even though they saw it happen.
In the wake of her husband’s death, Anke leaves the Oort cloud for a job on Callisto, bringing her kids with her. A planned side-trip to Triton goes awry, and they made a hard decision.
On planet Skale, the seasons are three years long, and as winter ends, Jadey finds that spring brings real challenges to the ranch she works on.
Teenage Marisol wants a Razzibot so she can stream her life online in ways that always make her look good.
"Poland, 1979 Warm sun filtered through the leaves and dappled the sidewalk as Helena walked back from the farmers’ market. In May, the linden trees bloomed all over the city, the same cheerful green fringed with white as the year before, as if nothing had...
"Police detective Hector Kovack couldn’t take the bullet back. He lay in the gray, predawn ooze of a hungover Martian Tuesday morning, twisting the thought with all his might. Or trying. Drunk, hungover or sober, the truth wouldn’t twist. No matter how...
"Grace had just tucked herself next to John on the wooden bench with her morning tea when she noticed a puff of dust rising from the access road. She stood and placed a hand on her husband’s arm. “John—someone is coming. Down by the bottom of the road.”...
"Instead of indulging in the festivities, I spent the evening evading Lamprecht, while Herschel evaded me. I had come to Bath not just to soak my body in healing waters, but to bathe my mind in new thoughts, to browse with the great William Herschel at the...
"The first time Gabriel Halstead tried to kill me, everyone thought it was an accident. So did I, truth be told. That kind of thing gets a couple people a year, even here. The number of EVAs we all do, you don’t even need a failbuddy to cause it....
"Under normal circumstances, the blank canvas of a freshly painted wall—like the one I faced on Third Street next to the interstate—would invoke both anticipation and a little dread. But tonight, I hadn’t come to share my art, only a small but important...
"Maestro Sezan Mistro was sweating, despite the temperature in the hall, as he stepped onto the podium for the sound check. There was a lot riding on this concert. Armandi Tylo, in uneasy partnership with the Federated Governments of Earth, had spent a...
"Susan Rose stands alone, save for me and a photographer, on the currently sun-facing side of Mars. She has a paintbrush in her right hand and a heated, vacuum-sealed bag of water in her left. The 60x90cm canvas in front of her is tied down to an aluminum...
"April 1970 olded newspapers marched like soldiers in military precision across the conference table in Deke Slayton’s corner office. Headlines blared, “PARALYZED APOLLO 13 SPLASHES DOWN,” “INJURED ASTRONAUT HOSPITALIZED,” and “APOLLO IN RETROGRADE.”
"Zeke came home to find wires dangling from the ceiling over the dining table. His light-fixture repair, abandoned mid-process. It hadn’t seemed important earlier, but now he couldn’t bear it. It was like the heart was ripped out of the duplex. Theory of...
"He had been on the run for a long time. At first, he drove himself ever forward, going deeper into the forest, aware of nothing but the need to keep moving. Much later, he realized that he had somehow circled back, returning to the places that he had...
"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...
"Servos whining, K3RA crouches behind the brambles and examines the farmyard. The burnt remains of a house, not unusual post-Devastation. A handpump next to a rotting well cover, scattered trash, and, jutting above some flowering bushes, a small auxiliary...
"It begins with a half-cyborg girl dangling her legs over the edge of the Grand Canyon at midnight. Below her are hundreds of millions of years of geological history, sliced open by a knife of water. Billions of years of stellar evolution shine down on her...
"Teodorq sunna Nagarajan the Ironhand sat astride his horse at the head of his regiment and studied the situation before him. His regiment, the Roy’s Own Savage Archers, was arrayed on the extreme left of the Royal and Imperial Army of Cuffland,...
"No program-layer could predict what a human might do, but Surveillance Hub could see everything that mattered. Their bird-drones spread across the city, scattered on cables and rooftops and broadcast towers. Every camera hunted for Krina Viy, independent...
"That was true. The Field supported many Stones like us but also carried considerably more unthinking rocks that obscured our far view. Stones occupied a narrow band within the Field; the ones too close to or too far from the Sun could not maintain the...
"They could have conquered Earth without breaking a sweat (if they’d sweated, which they didn’t). Instead, they were happy to trade. It hardly seemed fair to Dave, not that he was inclined to grumble. Everything people got from the Brot taught them new...
"You wished to see me, Minister?" A lone figure stood in the center of the auditorium, an amphitheatre with sloping sides and row after row of indentations that at the moment were occupied by only a few senior officials. "Yes, Nurse. Thank you for coming...
"Above the ship’s clearalloy cupola loomed Io, a pimpled canvas of desert camo so close Katy imagined she could smell its sulfurous plumes. Ahead, ocher bands slashed the sunlit limb of Jupiter like mud on a bloody scythe. Against this backdrop, gleaming...
"Madam Zieliński, we’d really appreciate it if you could embark for the Guyana Elevator at your earliest convenience. A helicopter has been sent to offer you passage.” You can tell I’m an old, respected engineer because when they give me orders, they’re...
"On this fine November day in 1967, Natalya Orlova took the oath to become a citizen of the United States, thereby clearing her last hurdle for acceptance into the astronaut training program. After nearly three years of giving her all to NASA, today should...
"As the vehicle tumbled past him, Bashim saw the passenger’s grinning white teeth in a face masked by desert dust and violet Worldshapers. The tailpipes coughed fire, so close Bashim could feel their alcohol heat. The sheared-off wheel bounced past, a...
"Lottie wanted to break something. Because she hadn’t! She’d shaped the cafeteria tray perfectly, with an ergonomic curve to support her elbow. She hadn’t had access to screws or nails, so she cut tabs into the workbench and slots into the tray, but the...
Bob, one of the bat-like Zoeys on New Horizons, helped architect the peace treaty that ended the war with the humans, but some Zoeys who don’t want peace plan to use his son against him.
An alien hive mind encounters something strange and tries to understand it. The human colonists are even more clueless, even though they’re caught in the middle of a pending war.
Michael has done so much recreational time travel that he’s jaded. He’s resentful of the tourists who don’t try hard enough to blend in, and he wants to take his new girlfriend someplace special and authentic.
After the asteroid destroys the Earth, Aleja escapes in a life pod good for one month, but surviving long enough to find a real colony isn’t going to be easy.
Emily is spending her last year alive visiting natural wonders of the Earth, but she’s intrigued to learn that an alien will be joining her tour group visiting the Monarch Butterfly sanctuary in Mexico.
On a planet where different body parts live separately unless they have reason to cooperate, the arrival of human beings causes alarm and confusion.
"As much as Flash Kennedy loved to lose himself in code, he also loved the energy and buzz that came from being around people. So of course they made him the face of user testing. It only made sense, and he loved it besides. They’d already set the space...