Fiction

Propagation by RJ Astruc and BV Czopyk

While RESYS is having this conversation in New Caledonia, she's also in Hong Kong having another conversation with a police tech. (The best thing about being an all powerful a-class AI is the ability to multitask effectively.) VINK2 is officially a national security threat, but the Hong Kong police force has been putting off asking RESYS for help until now.

The King of High Places by Peter Damien

I didn't know he was the king of anything yet. I just knew him as a guy from five blocks down who ahd a shopping cart fulla shit. He was kind of twitchy then, you know? Like someone was going to swoop down an' take the cart if he looked away.

Transitional Chords by Ada Hoffman

"Woah," I said. "What's the name on this?" It was a bad photocopy, and we were in a tiny concrete preactice room with a mediocre piano and ugly fluorescent lighting, and seventeen other sutdents were practicing with other instruments in the next rooms over, and the composer was jsut a smudge.

Covenant by Lavie Tidhar

As always when she had been gone too long without smoking, hallucinations started to occlude her vision;impossibly-tall creatures with a countenance of pure light seemed to walk around her, through her, passing with an inhuman grace through shining streets that had never existed, through broad avenues and past gigantic buildings that never were.

Incidental Light by Eliza Victoria

That Monday night, he wondered if he was finally having a psychotic break.

Hieronymus by Megan Arkenberg

The kephalopod in the broadsheet picture is monstrous. Photographed from above, its long, thick legs push against the roofless boxcar's walls, warping them like an overfull envelope. A milky eye juts above the car's waterline, as tall as the woman in the foreground.

Poetry

Once Upon a Timely Moment by Tom Sheehan
It came at her, the switt thought: our feet are caught in place: we are sucked into loam and hardpan and left for all of this rock; we are locked up tighter than the grip of stable Earth's seventeen-degree axis.

Wine by Alexandra Seidel 
the little girl with her red cap
wonders how the world come become like this

The Third Stranger by Kristine Ong Muslim 
She claimed to be 
the mother of oceans.