IQE by Torn MacAlester 1 It was a strange sit­u­a­tion. I need­ed to be in three places at once. Of course, I was stuck on the Endeav­or eigh­teen years on its way on a forty-year jour­ney to Prox­i­ma. I also need­ed to be on the ship arriv­ing at Prox­i­ma that very month. And, if all wasn’t hard enough, I need­ed to attend the direc­tors’ meet­ings on Earth. Instant com­mu­ni­ca­tions made that pos­si­ble, the instant com­mu­ni­ca­tions of quan­tum entan­gle­ment, or IQE. The IQE allowed me to inhab­it a robot at the oth­er end of the com­mu­ni­ca­tions con­nec­tions. I saw through its […]

Morgan’s Road, a short sto­ry by Torn MacAlester Graph­ic by Shan­nan Albright Mak­ing a liv­ing on the Moon is not for every­one, but Nel­son Carmike actu­al­ly pre­ferred the air­less basalt plains over Earth’s windy prairies. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, three years of Moon prospect­ing left him pen­ni­less, and with­out funds for sup­plies he was doomed to face a […]

Writ­ten for: The Fic­tion Foun­tain 4 Aug 2019 Pho­to by Min An from Pex­els   Frank ‘Coot­er’ Ross looked at his books, try­ing to find infor­ma­tion about first con­tact. Where the hell is it? He thought. I know there is some infor­ma­tion here some­where. “What’s going on Frank?” said the female voice over the com­put­er line. […]

I head­ed along the beach. It had been at least ten hours since we had run aground. We had agreed that going into the inte­ri­or of the island was unlike­ly to be use­ful. The jun­gle would hide things too well for us to find. The beach, how­ev­er, would even­tu­al­ly reveal signs of civ­i­liza­tion some­where on the island. We could eas­i­ly see a dock, a boat, or even a set­tle­ment on the beach. Or if the island was unin­hab­it­ed, we’d meet each oth­er on the side of the island. Mac and I flipped a coin. He’d go north, and I would […]