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Latest Stories

July 08, 2025
General Stories Michael Barlett

Dance Of Death

CHAPTER ONE 1940 Chief Inspector Kenneth Langford offered the Commissioner a crisp salute, and then walked back through the labyrinth of passageways to his own small office. Langford was a member of the London Metropolitan Police, commonly referred to as…
July 08, 2025
Poetry Markus J

The Winter Blues

the winter blues has a grip on me, all so tight Its icy tentacles wrap around me and squeezes freezing my fingers and toes with its nasty frostbite staving off the cold is a battle, an endless fight it brings forth an assortment of nasty diseases The winter…
July 08, 2025
Horror Stories Sushma R Doshi

Deliverer Of Messages

A loner in my childhood, my scrawny and weak figure prone to being bullied by sturdy and robust boys, I tended to wander around places frequented by few. Those curvy roads which fell into darkness after evening without street lights, the area near the pond…
July 08, 2025
General Stories L Christopher Hennessy

With A Side-Eye I Cherish

for Brittany ma amour Up to my neck in sadness for something just out of reach and she came along and fired up my life with kisses and the physical. The moment I looked into her eyes I didn't want to share her with anyone else and keep her all to myself. In…
July 03, 2025
Poetry Markus J

The Days Of Future Dreams

the days of future dreams the flames once rose high thinking our lives would end up supreme thinking our future seemed a far of dream but in the end nothing is what it seems many times the winds of changed has blown this way one minute we`re lapping the cream…
July 03, 2025
General Stories L Christopher Hennessy

Bad Girl

Part 1I lost the entire manuscript when I assassinated my laptop with sauvignon blanc as I rubbed the lower back of a woman who dozed drunk on my bed, sweating. She was crazed, somewhere between screaming and lying about the orgasm. Bree was a miracle to me,…
July 03, 2025
Horror Stories Nelly Shulman

Black Is Our Colour

“I swear she could have been you. Look! This girl is your long-lost twin.” Fi nudged me, and I smiled. “Never had or wanted one.” I stood up. “Let’s go, or the bargain hunters will clear the shelves before us.” We dived into the vintage emporium across the…
July 03, 2025
Poetry Markus J

The Transformation

"I need a brake" words that twisted my heart- shattering the dream that we would never part. I asked myself 'what ever did I do wrong? sad, gloominess could`ve easily been my song. I wouldn't let the anger and misery grow or cultivate- uprising feelings I…
July 03, 2025
Flash Fiction Benoit

Jae

It was Jae’s birthday today. She turned eight. What a beautiful sunny girl! Hyo planned a surprise or two; Li, his wife, did too. Birthday cake, a puppy and … Don’t forget, they grinned just before he drove off. Traffic was intense. A long call came from…
July 03, 2025
General Stories Matias Travieso-Diaz

Fear

Leandro stood outside the Kroger, leaning forward as he shivered in the early March dawn. He hated this moment: the cold, the fatigue, the feeling of helplessness, the anticipation of another day ahead at his degrading job picking collard leaves under the…
July 03, 2025
Horror Stories Mihko Askiweno

Found You

Panic gripped her as she staggered up the steep, rocky incline, breath coming in jagged, shallow gasps. Sweat streamed down her face in torrents, her hair clinging to her forehead and cheeks in disheveled clumps. Her legs trembled with exhaustion, molten fire…
July 03, 2025
Poetry Markus J

Lost On The Path

But alas; sometimes I think we've lost our way- too many strayed opinions...one too many a survey. Walking on the road ahead, just following the herd of sheep- with a hypnotised mind, wide awake yet very fast asleep. While yelling...join the team of the…

Who knew? - Editor

The Fleet of the Moon's Library

by Joshua Kemp

It was 2023 before we, Humanity, set up a sustainable base on the surface of the moon. When I think of all that we learned from the libraries, it seems insane that it took so long. Once we got up there, once we started roaming around, beyond a few hop skips and jumps, that’s when we found it; The Library.

Whoever built it, if they were still watching, must have figured this seed planet a pretty miserable failure. Here we are more than six thousand years into our race's one big shot for the title, and we’re too busy killing each other to get the big picture. Three years after Moon Base Selene I was established, a walker probing for ice found the first entrance to the library. Within a month of active searching beginning we found a dozen more portals to the library, and the world shattered.

I mean, it was chaos, insanity. The Pope killed himself! I was alive, I read about it the day it happened! It may not seem like much, since you’ve probably never thought about a pope outside of history class, but believe me, that just didn’t happen, but nothing like the library had ever happened or will ever happen again. The first thing we learned, beyond a shadow of a doubt, was we are not alone. There beneath the dilating doors that swirled open at our approach were machines thousands of years beyond human technology; Rows and rows of black obelisks, their surfaces laced with tiny vein-like tubes through which a faintly luminescent green liquid flowed, Massive star craft bristling with long barreled turrets and missiles with tiny cockpits perched ludicrously atop massive engines and power plants. These and ten thousand other wonders we discovered up there soon became commonplace.

They were easy to backwards engineer, surprisingly so. I don’t think whoever left it there was really giving us the best of their arsenal, or all their top of the line technology. They were probably leaving all the things that they knew a bunch of backwards primitives just starting to colonize the moon would find the most helpful. So what did we start with first? The weapons, of course! In any case, armed with its new cache of toys America won the game. Seen as something of a fading star at that point in history as it wallowed in an on again, off again economic recession that had been more on than off for the past thirty years, America suddenly had everything that nobody else did. Better weapons, faster computers, better medicine, better everything. When everyone around you is using jet propulsion aircraft and you can, from orbit, select six precision targets per second anywhere within the hemisphere that happens to be facing you and burn them down with high powered lasers, another technology the rest of the world hasn’t weaponized yet… Well, I repeat, America won the game. That is how we came to have the United World States. Here’s to the White, Blue and Green, eh?

After we got the weapons down, we started our best and brightest working on the computers. This took a while; simply put we didn’t know how to interface with them. We tried everything we could think of, and who knows how much or what information we lost. We’re fairly certain that everything we destroyed while trying to figure the computers out was backed up in different vaults of the Library, but when it comes to the library, who can really say? All we know is that what we got all fit together, and explained basically every question we had, scientifically speaking. Oh, and this is where we discovered there is no God, evil exists and the end of the world really is coming. We even have a date linked to it. The world is going to end in the year two thousand five hundred, give or take a hundred years or so.

We don’t call it “Satan” or “Evil” anymore; there is no more talk about original sin. Nobody runs around saying mankind is the source of all wickedness. Now all we have is the fleet. You see, whoever created the vaults on the moon wasn’t some sort of benign benefactor helping us achieve our destiny in the stars. No, they were a people at war and we, well, we’re a weapon. The human race is a God damn biological weapon.

They set us up from the beginning, first things first they removed the developing life (goodbye dinosaurs) and then they seeded our planet with a number of pre-engineered, hyper-violent species likely to develop into intelligent life. We came out on top. The next step of their plan was simple, and elegant, give us just enough weaponry to make us a threat and force us to fight for our survival.

The Creators, as we call them now, made us just dangerous enough that their enemies, chasing only a few millennia behind them, couldn’t ignore us. So here we sit, watching the sleek black ships of the Moon’s Fleet as they grow imperceptibly closer each day. Now every year is filled with a frantic interplanetary effort preparing our defenses, hoping against hope that we will somehow be able to defend ourselves, save ourselves. Knowing we cannot. Welcome to the real human Race.

©2010

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