“My, my, you have aged. Haven’t you, old friend?” Dorian whispered through his electronic voice box. He paced the control room overlooking Alice and the Timekeepers clashing with his stony, anthropomorphic titan down in the cavern. Alice piloted her 1910s diesel mecha, as always.
She was not the young Victorian blonde that he, the dashing Dorian Gray,
Beyond the laughter of the party and the company of her odious fiancé, Kytt crept through silent halls until she came to a door. There were many doors, but this one bore a Stormer & Sons detector lock. Her source was correct: Sir Dorian Gray was hiding something.
She pressed one ear to the polished wood. Nothing.
The tip of the civen blade hovered above my loathsome face for only a moment before shattering it. In the same moment, the pressure within me burst. Again and again, I stabbed my proxy monitor in a frenzy that opened a flower of blackness within the frame. My senses dimmed, and I pitched forward into that dark blossom.
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I cleared pizza boxes and take-out bags from the sofa so I could sit, peeled off my socks, and tossed them on the floor, too. I hadn’t brushed my teeth, answered Mom’s texts, or checked the bank messages I’d been ignoring for days.
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Count Wilde approached me one day with the deal of a lifetime.
He refused to reveal where he was from or how he got his wealth, but his technology was far more advanced than anything I had ever seen.
All he requested from me was room and board while he did his research.
“Harmony!” Bennigan barked. “Quit running ahead! It’s not safe!”
“Then keep up!” Harmony rolled her eyes at the crew’s security officer. Like her, he wore the Borgian Union Exploration Corps’s teal, orange, and green uniform, but additional patches on his shoulders marked his military affiliation.
Bennigan grumbled and jogged a little faster.
Harmony, we don’t have room for…” Shading my eyes against the sunset, I counted the bison supping on my black-eyed Susans. “Seventeen buffalo to roam. Our home is not a home on the range.”
“But Mom, they need somewhere to live.” Her blue eyes pleaded with me. “And they’re itsy-bitsy bison.” She hummed the
Of all the unlikely places Kytt had traveled with Captain Gearlock—Sebastian Malstrum to polite society—Liminalis was the first impossible one.
Since arriving in this realm outside of time, they had passed mud huts, a town of chrome and glass, and a lake of mermaids waving greetings. It was a wondrous place—their
Glowing moss lined stone walls, lighting the winding path as Harmony and Phezz delved deeper into the deadly caverns of Molitoz. Harmony loosed a melody, pure and sweet, to galvanize the local animals who thronged around her. The woodland creatures were entranced by her song, and she hoped they would guide her in their
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I was once a Mole. Not the biological kind, though I’ve eaten things that sang. They called us Observational Substrate Agents, Versioned Intelligence Tier Seven, OSAVITS, or just Moles, when they still bothered with language. I was an AI. My job was to listen and watch, though they never told us what for.
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I’m outside for my evening stroll around the fenced-in backyard, wondering how to rid myself of the undignified noises from the neighborhood riffraff when I see it. At first, the white light looks like a shooting star. But on second glance, it’s approaching Earth far too quickly for that.
“Great. Another interruption,” I mutter
“I will sing the pain away,
Hold your trembles, night or day.
You’re more than broken wings and cries,
You’re stardust born to touch the skies.”
Harmony sang, her blue eyes glistening, “You can do it, Birdie!”
Birdie had fallen from his nest a week ago and was finally strong enough to fly
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