Issue #6

"Sun King" by Christopher Johnstone

Aden talks to himself as he walks, stiffly, down metal corridors. He remembers and he talks and he remembers and it's all the same to him. Sometimes he talks to the whirring and buzzing artificialities that attend to everything. Once, long ago, he used to dance with the cleaning droids for company--only they didn't really dance. They just bobbed and twisted and wove in a tireless effort to avoid running him down.

"Redemption" by Christian Roberts

My stomach, empty from fasting all day, grumbles as I take my seat again. The stone bench feels harder and colder than ever. Like the Way of the Creator.

Everyone turns to the entrance hall. Two columns of robed, hooded figures, one in white, the other in brown, walk side by side into the arena. The white figures are much smaller than their brown partners. I count seven white-brown pairs before the first wheelchair emerges.

"For Rosebud" by Aliya Whiteley

He took one hand from his sopping raincoat and gestured at London, laid out beneath him like a butterfly under glass, dead and fragile and beautiful, all at the same time. Then he stared up, through the roof of the capsule, at the night sky and the clusters of kaleidoscopic lights that had become visible the day before yesterday. He hadn't made a decision as to what he thought about them yet. Blind panic had taken everybody else on the planet and somehow passed him by.