april-2026

After centuries of speculation on the matter, there was now a definitive answer regarding the fate of an individual’s consciousness after death.

The sentence: fifty trillion years of torture, followed by an eternity of happiness and bliss.

God—actually a super-intelligent alien from Alpha Centauri – had devised the sentence as a means of testing the effect of long term torture

on creatures of limited intelligence—Earthlings. He had felt guilty about this, and appended a blissful eternity as some sort of reward.

A man named Lemming sat dying in a hospital bed. He was the first dying person to know what his fate would be.

Lemming addressed the doctor who was tending to him.

“Suppose—after, say, several trillion years – something kills the omnipotent alien. I’m tortured for several trillion years, and then at the mercy of some other super-intelligent creature.”

“The alien is immortal,”the doctor said. “You have nothing to complain about. A more interesting torture experiment would involve the subject being tortured for fifty trillion years, given a minute of extreme happiness, tortured again for another fifty trillion years, and so on.”

He died and the torture began. Every individual which had ever existed was being tortured with him, though some—those which had died in the distant past—were closer to the eternal reward than others.

When the reward came it was no longer recognizable to him. It felt like torture.

The author has sold dozens of works to numerous publications. He resides in Saratoga Springs, NY.

Still got the same golden-butter hair, same as mine, her eyes a matching blue, but her mouth ain’t right. My mama smiles like summer, but this mama ain’t cracked even one since she come outta old Flander’s windmill.

Her hands on me feel salamander cold. She steers me towards the dusty dark what smells of dead things.

“See what’s inside, sweetie?” she says.

This mama’s voice is dull as rocks, not alive with laughter like it’s supposed to be.

“I ain’t going in there,” I tell this mama, but she won’t stop pushing.

This mama’s stronger, too.

Moira writes weird stories and pretends to be a rat on the internet. @moirariom.bsky.social www.ohmoira.com

The first sign there was something wrong was in the eyes. They were unblinking, vacant, hollow. Then came the violence.

Typically, when individuals are deep in the memospheres, they remain active and alert. Merely an augmented, augmented reality simulator existing entirely in the public domain.

No one had considered a virus embedded in the highest directory files of the Memory Library.

It began with historical data of popular files being ominously missing, seemingly deleted. But when they came back online, no one identified the corruption until it was too late.

We didn’t know it was possible to hack a human brain.

—Meghan Murphy

Sixteen was a year of translation. From strict Hungarian classrooms to an international school in Budapest, where Michael Jackson and Iron Maiden bootleg cassettes passed between friends and the city whispered of change. Statues came down, but on Friday nights we gathered beneath the glow of McDonald’s arches, pretending not to care as we pocketed the paper trays like contraband maps of America.

One night, in a park smelling of wet stone and cigarettes, a game turned toward me and Nevin, my Egyptian classmate. “Go into the trees,” someone said. “Don’t come back until you’ve kissed.”

We slipped behind the statue of a half-forgotten poet. The voices faded. She looked at me, dark eyes steady. I wanted to hold her hand, but my palms were damp.

Her breath was mint and tea. Her lips soft, the lightest touch of her tongue…then my body locked and I pulled away too soon.
“I’m sorry,” I blurted.

She smiled. “Why? It was nice.”

We walked back. Laughter greeted us, knowing, harmless. The game moved on. But the kiss stayed.

It was no romance, not yet. It was an initiation. A gate swung open. A new vocabulary: not memorization, not recitation, but the shock of being alive, being seen.

Years later, I still think of that night…statue darkened by rain, mint on her breath, the taste of permission. For the first time, the world felt like it was mine.

Zary Fekete grew up in Hungary and lives in Tokyo. Loves books and podcasts.

pushing up gen-mod daisies
taking a dirt nap on Mars
buying the moisture farm
sleeping with the fishes on Enceladus
wearing a wooden onesie on Weywot

Inspired in part by a list of Earthly death euphemisms listed in a press release from mariecurie.org.uk

Lisa Timpf’s writing has appeared in Star*Line, Polar Borealis, Scifaikuest and other venues.