LINKDING

summary: <blockquote>If a robot stands alone in a field, staring into the forlorn distance as it obeys the last order it was given by a human, that order being, “Don’t move until we come back for you,” which it can remember uttered with a cruel sneer by a man who has taken a cruel dislike for it, the kind of man who will not be coming back, if the robot understood at once that no one would ever be coming back,</blockquote> ➤ really more of a prose poem than a standard short story ➤ about the experience of being a robot given unfair orders under unbreakable laws ➤ a satisfying read and I loved the structure ➤ 2k words in length

Summary: <blockquote>When you were young, Mama sent you away from the land of the dead and told you not to look back. You remember the grey skirts they passed out at the border. Long lines like sinew, and waiting in them. The dark cavern sky of Asphodel. Sometimes the wind brought the honeyed scent of Elysian apples. But that is where heroes go, so you had to stay in line.</blockquote> ➤ about grief and loss; losing a parent young, and losing access to that parent's culture and language; and about holding on to what things you can ➤ the story isn't specific about exactly what happened in the disaster when the main character was a young child but the hints are enough to be pretty dark ➤ beautiful, longing, sharp and bittersweet ➤ second person pov ➤ 1k words in length

Summary: <blockquote>Every year, I cut my lover down again. I begin with her fingernails, then remove the dead blossoms from her hair, combing it long and straight in the planet’s weak autumn sunlight as she tells me her hopes for next year.</blockquote> ➤ I'm not quite sure what to make of this short story but it's odd and lovely and I enjoyed reading it so I'm sharing it with you as well. ➤ content note for body horror I think ➤ 1k words in length

Summary: <blockquote>"Ask me something only I would know." You say this to your wife because you know you’re human. You can feel it in the familiar ache in your back, and the fear writhing in your guts. You feel it in the cold seeping into your bare feet from the kitchen floor. You know you’re real because you remember. You know I’m the duplicate. The imposter. The monster.</blockquote> ➤ a woman with a gun is faced with two identical people who both claim to be her wife ➤ it's a fascinating short horror story about shape-shifting monsters who can duplicate human forms ➤ told through the pov of a shape-shifter! ➤ 2k words in length

excerpt: <blockquote>Well hear this one time nuh. I tellin’ all yuh the queen must be alien or something not of this earth, because in 1966 she come and visit Trinidad when I was just a schoolgirl, and I gone with my classmates to see she, and before we gone, the headmaster tell we, we have to throw flowers at the queen.</blockquote>

Summary: <blockquote>Welcome to my seminar, Self-Care Secrets for Immortals! Few foxes make it to over nine hundred years old in this day and age, but you’ll be one of them with four of my time-tested, battle-honed secrets.</blockquote> ➤ the dangers of immortals falling in love with mortals

excerpt: <blockquote>DRAMATIS PERSONAE ACHILLES: A young man yet untouched by love or war. PYTHIA: An oracle who sees alien futures. THE CHORUS: #mlm #5k #patrochilles #coffeeshopAU #meta #canon-compliant • • • • SETTING: The adyton at the Temple of Delphi. Smoke rises from a vent in the floor, partially obscuring PYTHIA, who is sitting on a high stool carefully positioned behind the smoke. ACHILLES stands, supplicant. Behind him, the CHORUS looks at their phones.</blockquote>

<blockquote>1. POSTMORTEM EXTRACTION a. Ensure physical vessel is secured in the supine position. Proceed only after confirming vessel is unresponsive by lightly striking facial area. when I was fifteen my younger brother slapped me hard in the face to prove to us both that he was the stronger faster meaner one. in my twenties I took up boxing pretending it was for self-defence but the whole time I was thinking of how my fist would feel against his face even though he was in the army and halfway around the world by that time</blockquote>

<blockquote>The birth of a twin is a special thing. Mama told us when we were young. "There are customs in every land," she said. "And our land requires sacrifice." So when our mare gave birth to twins, she told me. "Lily, one of these foals will be ours, but the other will be given to the land."</blockquote>

<blockquote>TECHNICIAN: Recording new consent document, procedure 228. Patient is a thirty-nine-year-old female. C-could you state your name for the record? PATIENT “BLUE”: Sure! I’m [BLUE]. Is this, like, really formal? TECHNICIAN: Um. Fairly. C-can you tell me about any reservations you have regarding the procedure? BLUE: Probably what I’m most, like, nervous about—besides learning how to walk again [laughs]—is that my new body’s neural pathways won’t be developed right for engineering work. Not that I work since getting married. But you know. I like keeping up with nanomaterials and stuff.</blockquote> ➤ tbh I feel like it went a little TOO obvious at the end, but I still really enjoyed it!

<blockquote>From: Emeka Nwobi Sent: Thursday, November 24, 2034 4:29 PM To: Chukwudi Nwobi <CNwobiby-uh.edu> Subject: Emeka Nwobi has shared the file “Provisional Patent Application For An Eternal Spirit Core Final Draft” with you. Sender’s Note: Please Review The link below only works for direct recipients of this message. PROVISIONAL PATENT APPLICATION FOR AN ETERNAL SPIRIT CORE [Open File] </blockquote>

<blockquote>Your grandmother is becoming a starship! She has gone through many phases in her life already — infant, child, teenager, young adult, student, worker, in many cases spouse, parent, retiree. She has had hobbies like knitting, volleyball and carbon mitigation. She has travelled in planetary atmosphere whenever her circumstances allowed. Now she is uploading her consciousness into a starship! The circle of life is beautiful</blockquote>

<blockquote>Problem 1 It is 7 p.m. on a snowy January evening, and Penny is a 13-year-old who likes fruity lip balms, wears leggings, and notices everything, like how she's expected to wash the dishes but her older brother is excused to finish his homework. On this night, she insists her brother do the dishes because she has an algebra test and it's only fair. Her parents explain girls can do anything--everything, in fact. She can wash the dishes plus get top grades. Her brother smirks as he escapes upstairs. </blockquote> ➤ does what it says on the tin

<blockquote>The day you arrive at the academy, you spend just three minutes outside the car before begging your mom to drive you back home. There are too many girls. They’re too loud. They’re laughing. Some of them are flying. Even if you weren’t a mindreader, you’d be overwhelmed.</blockquote>

<blockquote>You’ll smell it before you see it — scents of ticklish pollen, braised roots. The market doesn’t like to let itself be found too easily. I found it by accident nineteen years ago, stumbling from Atgeld Library in that gossamer hour when the sun begins to warm a world still living in night. They tell me the walls between things are thinner at dawn and dusk. But you, my daughter, needn’t worry about all that. They’re expecting you.</blockquote>

<blockquote>“Hi, Becky.” She calls every year. If asked, Sam would not have a good explanation for why he picks up; Becky is unfailingly unpleasant and usually manages to call at a bad time. “Did it really happen?” Sometimes, when he's had a bad day, or when she's really being rude, or when he's just tired of playing therapist to someone he hasn't seen since they were ten, he considers saying no. “Did what happen?” he might say. Or “Sorry, who is this?” Or, if he really wanted to be cruel, he might just not pick up the phone. But—and here is the thing he cannot explain to other people—he knows why she calls, and he would never do that. If she didn't call, he would probably do it himself. He needs reassurance he isn't crazy as much as she does.</blockquote> ➤ Packs a lot into a very short story, telling you the important stuff through implications rather than spelling everything out

<blockquote>The city lives because we die: we, the shivering, bloody few, the girls who climb the diamond stair in the winter to serve ourselves to the dragon.</blockquote>

<blockquote>“But if other parents choose it and you don't, how will your daughter be able to compete?” It always came down to that, didn't it? That cutthroat, cannibal, race-to-the-bottom mentality, where Any Good Parent would keep up with the joneses, or risk their children sinking into obsolescence and the underclass. “All right,” said Maria, gruffly. “Give her the robot arms.”</blockquote>

<blockquote>He says, “But I’m dying,” like it’s the answer to everything, like he thinks I’ll disagree. He says it like I’ve forgotten, but how could I forget sitting in that paper-strewn office a week ago, watching dust layer up with sunbeams while a doctor dressed in immaculate professionalism emphasised the words six months to live?</blockquote> ➤ short but does a lot with the space it has!

<blockquote>The mudroom got darn hot in the summer, but he couldn’t risk doing magic inside the house. It got into the air conditioning and caused all kinds of trouble. Some magics he’d chance, but the Lord knew he didn’t want anything interfering with Edna’s health.</blockquote>

<blockquote>Prompt: Anger Of course I can be angry. But I wear a headscarf. The moment I’m angry, you put me in your mental box labeled “TERRORIST” in neat, tidy small capitals. You store me under “Potential Danger” in the warehouse of your mind.</blockquote>

<blockquote>Alexis carries the laundry through the kitchen. The tile beneath her feet was once a strip of sand beach. She walks through clusters of plover nests, which were perfect circles. The yellow cream clings to the tread of her tennis shoes. The alarmed mothers, suddenly orphaned.</blockquote>

<blockquote>HiQIRR rates this highway U/UR: unsafe/urgent repairs needed. HiQIRR rates most highways U/UR. Two hundred four point eight miles ago HiQIRR rated a highway DC/6: degraded/check again in six months. HiQIRR experienced unexpected procedural harmony. Krace says that means HiQIRR is happy. Krace says to use round numbers like two hundred.</blockquote>

<blockquote>1. Technically, you don't have to. The Special Ambassador program is for people who can embrace the future in a spirit of friendship and harmony, and our Allies do realize not everyone is ready to do that yet. So they'll understand if you say no, although it will upset them.</blockquote>

<blockquote>There's a letter in his pocket. I feel it as I lift his body up out of the mud and onto the transport. Above my head, the sky is still burning--the afterglow of EMPs and plasma cannons lingering like snowflakes--but down here in the dirt, the fighting's been over for days, and we're just busy collecting the dead.</blockquote>

<blockquote>Captain Max Stone stood in the spotlight in the packed battlefield theater, extolling the virtues of courage and loyalty in the war against the Graths. This broadcast was reaching billions of people over five planets. The hot-climate uniform he was wearing served no purpose here other than to show off his deeply gnarled scars and functional, but very mechanical, prosthetics; symbols of humanity's truly brave warriors. Max pounded the podium, raised his metal fist and his voice, whipping everyone into a patriotic, Grath-hating frenzy. This was all he was good for anymore.</blockquote>

<blockquote>"What sort of amateur nonsense is this?" Anders asks. He holds my glasses in his left hand between thumb and forefinger. He has the audacity to call me an amateur. Me. I take chess more seriously than any player who's made it to the world championships since Garry Kasparov.</blockquote>

<blockquote>She used to keep track of things. Of dates. Of names. Of time spent in one city before drifting to the next, staying unnoticed and unremarked. Of schools she attended, hands shoved in pockets, head down, saying, "My name is Jennifer (or Susan, or Emma, or Faith) and it's nice to meet you." She used to remember her name. It doesn't matter. She has to tell herself this, over and over. All the leaving and forgetting and the years that burn up in her thoughts like kindling. They don't matter. She'll live forever. Young, wild, and unhurt.</blockquote>

➤ in which the seed vault is post-apocalyptic legend

<blockquote>When she was four he found her in the back yard, holding a brick unsteadily above her head, poised to bring it down on a small heart-shaped clock he had bought her for her bedside table. It lay face up glass sparkling in the afternoon sun. “Sorry Baba, I wanted to see what’s inside,” she said.</blockquote> ➤ sweet