Science Fiction Short Stories

A Flicker in the Crystalline Wastes

By Leaf Richards

The wind howled, a banshee's shriek through the skeletal remains of what was once a downtown core. Ice, thick and glowing with an internal, unsettling blue, coated everything – concrete towers, skeletal lampposts, the twisted husks of vehicles. It was a cold that bit, a cold that seeped into bones and refused to leave, a perpetual winter since the Scourge had truly taken hold. Every breath was a puff of white, every sound a brittle echo in the crystalline wastes.

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Petalfall's Calculated Bloom

By Jamie F. Bell

The air shimmered, not with heat, but with a distortion no one spoke of, though everyone felt it. It was a spring morning, the kind where cherry petals, the colour of a child's flush, rained down on the cobbled square, catching in hair and clinging to damp boots. But the light felt wrong, too thin, as if stretched across a surface about to tear. A faint, almost subliminal hum vibrated through the ground, a frequency only young bones seemed to truly register, making teeth ache and the backs of eyes twitch.

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The Glass Apiary

By Jamie F. Bell

From her desk on the forty-seventh floor, Paula viewed the world as a series of cascading data streams. The city below was a distant, silent abstraction, but on her three monitors, it was a living, breathing organism of sentiment and opinion. Her job at Axiom was to nudge that organism, to gently guide the public conversation about their clients away from inconvenient topics and towards positive engagement. She was a narrative architect, and today, the architecture was behaving strangely.

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What the River Forgets

By Jamie F. Bell

The body had come in with the morning tide, tangled in a mess of fishing nets and dark green seaweed. Constable Philip trudged along the shingle beach, the air thick with the smell of low tide and diesel from the trawlers in the harbour. The victim wasn't local. That was the first problem. In a town like Port Blossom, where every family tree had roots deep in the rocky soil, a stranger was an anomaly. A dead stranger was a catalyst.

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The Hum of Burnt Wires

By Jamie F. Bell

The scavenged data-slate felt hot in Corey’s hands, a dangerous warmth that had nothing to do with its overworked processor. Below him, the Undermarket seethed with activity, a chaotic mess of noodle stalls, vapour lounges, and black-market component shops, all packed under the perpetually dripping underbelly of the city’s pristine upper levels. Every public console, every glowing advertisement, every citizen’s wrist-mounted interface was a node in the Stream, the curated flow of information that kept the city stable. And the file he possessed was a virus aimed at its heart.

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All Our Analogue Ghosts

By Jamie F. Bell

The cabin still held the faint, lingering scent of his father: pipe tobacco, damp earth, and something metallic like old circuitry. Philip sat before the settlement’s archive terminal, its thick glass screen humming with a soft green light. Outside, the perpetual drizzle of the Pacific Northwest coast pattered against the cedar shingles of the server house, a sound that was usually comforting. Tonight, it felt like a thousand tapping fingers, demanding an answer he didn’t have.

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The Cascading Signal

By Jamie F. Bell

The air in the town hall annexe was thick with the smell of damp wool coats and stale coffee. Paula checked the microphone for the third time, tapping its mesh head and listening to the flat, unhelpful thump from the speakers. Outside, the November rain wasn't stopping, and neither was the relentless pinging of her phone, each notification a fresh wave of public panic she was supposed to somehow contain with a single press conference and a few hundred hastily printed fact sheets.

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Static on the Ice

By Jamie F. Bell

Outside, the wind howls, a physical wall of white against the reinforced windows of Arctic Research Station Epsilon. Inside, the silence is broken only by the hum of the recycler and the quiet click of Cassie's keyboard as she runs diagnostics. She's been alone for three weeks.

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Where the Iron Snakes Sleep

By Jamie F. Bell

The last tram of the night rattles through the deserted streets of the old quarter. Inside, Ramon is the sole passenger, the flickering lights and the rhythmic clatter of the wheels against the track a familiar, lonely comfort. But tonight, the tracks gleam with a light that is not a reflection.

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The Ribcage of the Void

By Jamie F. Bell

The only sound is the hiss of the cutting torch and the rasp of Cassie's own breathing inside her helmet. Before her looms the hulk of the 'Star-Seeker', a freighter lost to a radiation surge two centuries ago, its metal skin pitted and scarred by micrometeoroids.

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