Excerpt From "Strings", by Richard Larson

This story stood out to me because it is set in a futuristic, dystopian version of Africa, which is something I had never encoutered before.  It's also a murder mystery, a genre that holds a special place in my heart, from my first Agatha Christie novel to Fred Vargas' quirky, Paris whodunnits.  Please enjoy.

“So you are not the killer.” The investigator rolls the Coke can across his baked black forehead.

             Nuru’s fingers drum on the table. “No,” he says.

The investigator crooks his head and a fat policeman shuffles forward, thumps an old solar laptop down between them. The investigator tracks his finger across the dirty screen and Nuru watches the murder play out in pixels.

              “Here is you, here is your hands on his neck. Your hairs—everywhere.”

              “Yes, yes, you know this means nothing.” Nuru’s fingers drum harder, angry.

              The investigator flicks his tongue against the cold can like a lizard. “So why is your boss dead, you puppet son-of-a-whore?”

              “I think it has to do with Kataryna,” Nuru says, and his organs feel suddenly damp and heavy in his gut. The investigator whirls away, showing off his exasperation. He curses in French, too fast to follow, but Nuru hears the word for Christian and recognizes guignol as well. He spins the laptop around and clacks something in.

             “The white bitch?” he demands. “The European?”

The laptop faces Nuru again, showing a headshot. Her skin is bleached ghostly. The exposure was not meant for white skin, but the camera-man didn’t know better.

              “Yes,” Nuru says, and his fingers die one by one on the plastic. “Her.”

Excerpt From "If Not the Moon, Then the Exquisite Sun", by Carl Roloff

Today's excerpt.  My name for it is poetic sci-fi.  It has real beauty, as well as the end of the world.

All the flowers open at once, and suddenly we're surrounded by the scents of a thousand blossoms that won't live out sunrise. We had called them the Dawn Callers, by their strange quirk of opening about an hour before the sun began to swell. Shimmering dark purple, the kind only a full moon can really bring out.

“You need to make up your mind soon,” she says, her head pillowed on my stomach and me spread-eagle on the ground like one awaiting crucifixion. “We could still go together, save ourselves.”

It was the end of all things. Our sun was to betray us, but we had found an escape of sorts. We had discovered that everyone's dreams, everyone's hopes, hates and loves could be distilled, reduced down by some arcane process into a lattice of purest crystal. We would abstract ourselves into gauzy glimmering structures, lazy cobwebs of colour that refract the light into mad patterns and sudden pits of darkness. A human, translated into a chip of eternity. Then, the flight from our doomed planet: convoys of carnelian, emerald and garnet sailing out into the deepest reaches of space. We would go with the hope that being an unthinking piece of beauty was better than being a cinder.

Excerpt From "Children of the Device", by Camille Alexa

Today's excerpt is classic sci-fi, from a very cool story.  Read, and be hooked.

1:1  According to the ship's chronometers, it's a brand new year, and in some archaic tradition carried from Earth by our forebearers along with the tablets, we are urged to make a resolution.  I'm not entirely sure what this entails, but have resolved to begin keeping this diary, this weekly log of thoughts, observations--maybe even jokes if I can think of any not too unfunny even to record them in this digijournal, where they'll never be seen or read or even suspected by anyone else ever.  We'll see.  It's the first Saturday of a new year, and I, Hannah, of the fifth generation of the first and last of Earth's colony ships, The Elkanah, resolve to keep as true and faithful an account of myself as I can.

*

1:2  Is it possible a whole week flew past?  Unbelievable.  Between one Saturday and the next seems a long endless trek from one quadrant of this hulking ship to another and back again and back.  The Elk escaped collapsing Earth with its colonist complement numbering in the thousands.  It's not always easy to decipher our earliest recordings, but shipboard outbreaks of various plagues have a way of making everything else--captain's logs, medical records--seem less important.  Even we fifth-gens have had our share of outbreaks, viral strains like the one that killed my parents mutating in unanticipated ways under the intense radiations of deep space.  Guess those who shot us into the void as the last bombs wiped out Earth anticipated a lot of things, but not that.  No matter how long they'd had to prepare, they might not have been able to safeguard against that first plague, or the subsequent mutations, or the sterilizing effect on the majority of the survivors.  And they certainly couldn't have known how few survivors there would be.

But some few hundred of us are still hanging on, along with the thirty thousand embryos in cold stasis.  Wish I were one of the lucky ones, like Penny, who can have children. Children to love her, talk to her, help her with her portions of the lichen field harvest and the repairs to the urine stills in our quadrant of the ship.  Children to carry on, find another world and get right all the shit we pitiful humans messed up on the last planet.

Yes, Penny's one of the lucky ones.

Excerpt From "Sterrennacht", by Cat McDonald

Continuing with excerpts from issue 7.  This one involves a woman with a very special ability many have dreamed they could have.  Only for her, this time, it's more of a nightmare.

Dana changed her mind as soon as the canvas they’d wheeled into her office stood revealed to the buzzing fluorescent lights.

“Get someone else.”

The Starry Night. Van Gogh’s view from his sanitarium window after he’d been committed.

Michael sat on her desk, his spine rounded forward, his sunken eyes staring at her floor. He didn’t say anything, just stared at the old gray-blue carpet, looking up to trade serious glances with the guard who’d come, in uniform, from the Museum of Modern Art with the painting.

“Dan,” Michael began. So he’d chosen to start this with first names. He felt sentimental, apparently, if a little behind the times.

“Dana.”

“You’re the only diver I can find.”

“Mitch.”

“Vacation.” Finally, he turned his head to look at her, his face worn and sullen. Not a good day to force him to issue an actual order; something had got to him.

The painting’s central swirl of white sneered at her somehow behind that brush-streaked cypress silhouette, blackly luminous in Van Gogh’s world of brilliant light and color. She could see, even from outside the painting, the twisted knots of oil paint that made up that blue landscape.

“I don’t do post-impressionism.”

Michael’s eyebrows didn’t drop, so she had some time before Captain Michael Czerniak straightened his back and informed her that she would, in fact, do post-impressionism. Maybe time to find another diver in the area, someone who could fearlessly slide between the brushstrokes and navigate the maze of colors that looked, from the top, like a night-time landscape.

Excerpt From "Private Transit", by Amy Bright

 The launch is in a week.  An excerpt a day until then.  Enjoy!


  The first time I saw him, he had a black eye.
  “What a shiner.”
  He looked around, the old, hey, you talking to me, but who else would I be talking to through the smoke cloud. I disarmed him with my finger guns, one of them pointed right in line with his bruised melon. His swollen socket.
  He put his free hand up to his face. The other hand was holding a guitar case, slick and new.
  “I don’t even remember it happening,” he said.
  “That,” I said, “is not the end of the world.”
  I pulled down my sweater and showed him the bruise on my arm. I wore it proudly, tank tops, shoulders bare. Doesn’t everyone want to show that they are loved so hard that there is someone out there who will not let them go, not even for a second?
  “You got his fingerprints on there?” the guy asked me.
  I pinched my skin and revolved it around my arm, taking a closer look.
  “They are there,” I told him. “In case a crime is committed.”
  He raised his eyebrows and I lowered my sleeve and we went back to not talking. If I am alone outside of the bar, I hold my breath very tightly in my chest and count out easy numbers in my head. My specialty is reaching thirty exactly every single time. When I am finished counting, I open the door and go back inside.
  Tonight I am breathing. In, out, in, out. It’s heavy humid, Florida-style. We rode the roller coaster at Disney World, me and my sister, when we were family-vacationing on a high school Spring Break. Our hair was wet where it touched our scalps and the ends went curly like it never happens anywhere else in the world. We fell out of the sky and dropped very quickly, safe inside our safety harness, our extra-strength plastic seatbelts.
  “I’m Tom,” he said, offering that spare hand. “Tommy.”
  Woah there, buddy, I wanted to tell him, hang onto your name. Don’t you read fantasy books.