"Manhattan?" the man asks, pulling out the chair across from her before pausing, "May I?" as an apparent afterthought. He sits down without waiting for an answer and waves towards the waiter. "Two more of these", gesturing to her drink on the table between them.
Nadia's momentarily speechless. Her expected date had just stood her up via text message, and she was planning on drinking this one off on her own.
"You look a little down," he takes off his white woven fedora and flicks the brim absently before setting it on the chair beside him.
There was something about his expression that was captivating, his eyes alight, and she struggled to f
When I came to your world, when I stumbled into your city on the edge of the desert, you paid me no mind.
Your guards bullied me like any other vagabond in the streets, laughing as they tripped me, pounded their chests in fits of bravado.
Your peasants took pity on me, a weary traveler, fed me, gave me water. They knew what it was like to have nothing, and they happily shared what little they had.
When I showed them how to pull water from the ground, when I showed the artisans how to make steel that would never dull, how to fashion glass from the sand, you took notice.
When I talked to them about equality, and rights, and justice, they to
Sometimes, when we got bored, we'd turn off the artificial gravity and do mundane things in zero gee.
Sitting on either side of what passed for a mess room table over breakfast was a particular favourite pastime of mine. The slow motion ballet of sucking bubbles of liquid from the air, forcing a stream into the space between us and trying to catch every one before they coalesced on some surface.
You were always determined to win, while I remained focused on memorizing every line of your visage as you floated around the room, face creased in concentration, eyes crinkled into a determined smile.
Sometimes zero gee breakfasts devolved into ze
Memories, Light the Corners of our Minds by SRSmith, literature
Literature
Memories, Light the Corners of our Minds
Lucas Three sat in the coffee shop long after she left, long after the people that had watched the scene play out had moved on. He sat for hours after she'd calmly, mercilessly ended their three year relationship with a calculated precision of language that even he couldn't have delivered more succinctly.
"This has been fun, really, it's been fantastic, but you knew this was never going to last." She didn't touch her latte, which was never a good sign.
"You're never going to get old, and I'm going to age out and die. At some point you're going to leave me for someone younger, and by then I'll be too old to find anyone to love me and I'll si
The agent had been a train wreck. Until just a few hours ago he'd been laid open like a can of tinned meat from his ear to the bloody stump that had been his left foot. Blue, the mechanic, had stopped counting the number of liters of fluid that had been pumped through him, gathered in the catch basin beneath, filtered and pumped through him again.
Messy business, special ops.
Along the side of the makeshift medical center hummed a bank of printers assembling replacement parts one micro-thin layer at a time. Several days ago they had produced a femur, a nearly full complement of ribs and the better part of a jawbone. Prior to the agents arri
Jack withdrew the blade slowly, knowing with the sudden swell of blood from the wound that the blow was fatal.
"Nothing personal mate, it's a survival of the fittest thing and I'm simply better than you."
He felt the body beneath him go limp, the fierce tension of just moments ago slipping away limb by limb. Jack counted to twenty before dropping the blade as he rolled off the body. He dragged himself painfully to a nearby wall, propped himself up and surveyed the damage.
The man, for all his advanced years, had put up quite a fight, and Jack was perforated heavily from the short blade his opponent had employed. He took a deep breath and r
Gabriel pushed open the cockpit canopy of his shattered craft and watched as it broke free, tearing away at the hinge to fall to the earth below.
He wept.
Ahead of him, a tree many times as tall as his craft was long lay broken, it's roots exposed from the soil, it's trunk now battered horizontal to the ground. Gabriel felt the tightening in his chest, the warmth of tears course down his face. Heedless of the sharp, ragged edges of his vessel where it had been gored by the forest it had so ruthlessly torn through, Gabriel descended to the ground.
From the lower vantage point, he could more easily see the scorched tunnel through the woods b
The Captain stood just inside the doorway of the hut, regarding with amusement the figure sitting in the lotus position in the middle of the room.
"It's over Thomas, we've come to take you back." The Captain scuffed his boot on the unusual surface of the floor, glass-like but with a sandy grit embedded. "You must be ready to leave all this," he gestured at the bare walls of a similar smooth surface devoid of any window or adornment, "all this vacancy behind."
Thomas remained seated, legs crossed, palms upwards resting on his knees. He didn't open his eyes, and when he spoke the Captain had to strain to hear him. "It is over, it pleases me t
Dr. Darius from the Psychology lab walked along the line of students to Dr. Thorne's adjacent Bio lab, reaching the door just as it opened to emit a thin wiry girl with a pale face and electric blue irises. She paused only a second before stepping around him, offering a shy 'Excuse me sir', under her breath.
"Next." Thorne's voice was unmistakable from within the lab.
"Just a second," Darius held back the next student in line, evoking an irritated but acquiescent huff from the towering young man, "won't be a minute," Darius added as he entered the lab and closed the door.
"Release signed?" Thorne spoke without looking up. "Payment in order
"That suit's not safe on my dock," the voice boomed across the row of vacant lifter pads to the mezzanine, "who gave you clearance to come out here?" Horik's visor was up, the bulky exo-suit exaggerating his movements as he marched across the deck.
"You must be Horik," the taller of the three men stepped to the railing, gripped it in both hands and grinned, "just the man we wanted to see." Behind him, similarly clad in dark matte-fabric three piece affairs, the man's companions unbuttoned their jackets exposing large handled handguns tucked in their waistbands.
"Horik, my good man, we've come to improve your working conditions. We're bringi