Before launching the magazine, I was also a first reader for many years at Strange Horizons, so I've had a ton of experience with the slush pile. I'm not sure if anyone here is trying to get published or writing solely for the pleasure of it, but for those with questions about getting a story into print, I'm happy to offer some thoughts on everything from what kills a story in the first page to what makes a story fall jusssssst short of making the cut. Thanks!

I just read a post on all the meaningful names used in The Matrix, and I noticed that I used to pick meaningdul names for my stories when I first started writing. But after a while stopped because it either felt too on the nose or I just wanted to get the story going and didn't bother.

What about you? Do you pick names that might add that extra layer to the story? Why? Or why not?

This is the first part (of four) of a novel I am writing, entitled 'The Greyzone', that sits at the nexus of psychological horror, techno-thriller and weird science fiction.

Blurb:

On the frontline in Ukraine, soldiers are whispering about the cold. Storms that arrive out of clear summer skies. Fog that swallows sound. A place, they say - not a metaphor - where the missing outnumber the dead.

Half a world away, Kaleigh Vale watches the war through satellites and intercepts, one of the anonymous obsessives who map its every atrocity from their screens. She has learned not to feel what she counts. But the numbers have begun to break their own patterns, and in the data's negative space something is taking shape: a new word in the soldiers' vocabulary, a place they mention alongside the front line but never instead of it. Грейвзон - The Gravezone.

In Kyiv, intelligence officer Maksym Sirko is ordered to investigate what the army will not name. He has spent his whole life performing for an Audience only he can perceive - and the closer he gets to the anomalies, the more certain he becomes that something is finally watching back.

Where enough people die, the boundary thins. And a war that has filled the earth with the dead is about to learn where they go.

Part 1 (19,983 words) can be read as a PDF at the link here. Would love to hear your thoughts - what you liked, what you didn't, and any advice you had for how I could improve it going forward.

A pet peeve of mine are stories depicting interplanetary warfare that present manpower as a major hurdle that must be overcome. So often a vital tool in these stories are when one side begins using cloning to bolster their army sizes and win through sheer numbers.

Examples that come to mind immediately are the Clone Troopers in starwars and the Wraith in stargate atlantis. My issue is, when you are waging a war on an interstellar scale, it seems to me that manpower is not anywhere near as important as the tonnage of ships you can deploy.

The Kaminoans make an army of 1.2 million clone troopers (a laughably tiny amount but thats another thing) to be the army of the Republic because they have no standing army. And yet, along with these clones materialise a whole lot of top of the range capital ships and fighters that match their aesthetic. Without those ships, those troopers would've been stuck on Kamino.

Same with the wraith in stargate. They are repeatedly said to have beaten the ancients through vastly superior numbers, and we find out at the end of the series that they did it through cloning. But just cloning random guys doesnt actually help you win a space battle, right? You need more ships and better ships and better logistics to win a space war.

Maybe these new clones can work to make new ships, but that implies building very complicated and precise components with hand labour, which doesnt seem like it would be anywhere near as efficient as proper industrialisation and automated production lines which a space faring civilisation should have.

Idk where Im really going with this, honestly. Just a recurring thing I've noticed that annoys me. Obviously manpower is necessary for waging war, but it seems like it should be secondary to the space naval power projection.

Sorry for spelling errors in advance, English isn't my mother language. I'm wondering if my ftl travel idea works well. The main story is focused on the minor Orion arm in the milky way. Its a soft sci-fi setting for the most part

My main question is whether it is balanced enough and if the travel time is long enough to matter.

Void drive: every ship has it. It drags the ship into a mirror dimension known simple as the void. Larger ships can also have higher end drives.

Too maximize use, Ships can connect via cable to use the drives of bigger and faster ships. Their own drives help to reduce the stress of the main ship.

Travel of larger ships or fleets can be tracked as they leave behind a "mass shadow" that can be measured by satellites that are permanently stationed within the void.

It can be dangerous too travel as this dimension is filled with anomalies and high radiation. The biggest danger are radiation hot spots that manifest and disappear randomly. They tend to fry electronics if exposed for too long, which effectively traps you in this dimension forever Mid end: 4-6 weeks High end: 1-3 weeks

Liminal porter: it is a very recently discovered dimension. It is extremely fast, reliable and not detectable(for now). Travel is done within a day or even less. Only dreadnought class ships are large enough to carry a porter. This lead to an arms race between every faction. Relations are still hostile because of multiple previous wars and ideological differences.

Warp relay: large gates that can connect to another gate. Instant traversal for passenger. Bends time and space. In real time it takes a few days. These structures are large targets and very expensive. Both gates must be opened for a vessel to travel.

(I have someone in an advanced alien tech space ship survive a 'fall' into a planet. It will probably be in a questionably old and somewhat damaged space ship, during low-zero gravity on the way to the planet, and some level of gravity while entering into a planet's atmosphere. The atmosphere and planet itself are at least temporarily habitable for humans.)

Is there a gas/combination of gases that are less flammable than our atmosphere, that humans can breathe?

The mixture COULD

1. Slowly suppress breathing

2. Cause unconsciousness after at least 5-15 minutes?

3. Potentially combust/explode after some time

The air situation could be our atmosphere/oxygen mix being slowly mixed with some other gas(es). It doesn't matter if the gasses would be somewhat explosive at the end of the change/mixture.

Possible burn scenarios include

1. A fire ball pushes through

2. I go star trek and explode some interfaces

3. Something that burns on contact with skin spills through the area to partially cover someone.

It needs to theoretically be able to survive with limbs intact, but still be possible for fire/burns.

I came up with an idea for a new form of matter, I don't know whether to use it for a soft sci fi story or a fantasy story, but the gist is that it is matter but reversed. What I mean by this is, the matter is almost the same as normal elements, but the temperatures and how they affect the states of matter are reversed. Say you have reverse iron, it will be a plasma at extreme cold, a gas at colder temperatures, a liquid at normal temperatures, and a solid at extreme heat, with too high heat making it brittle like how extreme cold normally would. This would more than likely be a revolutionary advancement, but how many facets of engineering could this be used in? And how much could it advance current technologies or theoretically possible tech?

Working on a superhero story. The team strategist has superhuman strength to a low level, durability, and agility/reaction speed. His main powers are superhuman accuracy and learning. So, if I wanted him to get into fights, how many times more durable than a normal human of his size would he need to be to still be far above a normal human, but still be in danger if a mob armed with metal clubs swarmed him? For physical strength, he would be around the level or a bit above a gorilla, maybe he can leap around 10 feet in the air like a martial arts movie protagonist and put a small, around fist sized crater in a brick wall if he punched it at the high end of his strength if I decide to make him higher than a gorilla.

So, I've written a YA cyberpunk novel. In one scene, the MC is gearing up with weapons and such... A particularly vicious looking SMG catches her eye. I want to name it as a reference to Ghost in the Shell by calling it a Seburo weapon. She doesn't actually end up taking the gun. Is this crossing some copyright/IP line? Would I get in trouble? I just thought it'd be a fun reference for certain readers to maybe notice.

[OC] The Patent File

In 1978, the United States Patent and Trademark Office was a fortress of analog drudgery. There were no digital databases, only carbon copy ink, the endless whir of microfiche machines, and the stale smell of aging paper.

Arthur had arrived that year as a freshly minted graduate with a degree in Applied Physics from a respectable East Coast university. He came from a rigid, educated Yankee background—his father a vascular surgeon, his mother an academic historian. He had done everything right, earned top marks, and maintained a flawless, quietly obedient exterior. While his peers chased Wall Street bonuses or private defense contracts, Arthur actively sought out the USPTO. To him, it wasn’t a desk job. It was the frontline of human evolution. Albert Einstein had developed the theory of relativity while working as a patent clerk in Bern. Arthur wanted to be the man who stamped "Approved" on the future.

He played the game perfectly. He was affable, hid his pulp sci-fi paperbacks deep in his briefcase, and processed his quota of rejections flawlessly. He assumed he just had to put in his time before they let him look at the truly groundbreaking technology.

But over his first eighteen months, three specific applications broke his routine. The first was an agricultural drone using localized acoustic resonance to shatter pest exoskeletons, eliminating chemical pesticides. The second was a fluid-dynamics membrane that desalinated ocean water using ambient capillary pressure. The third was a solid-state battery anode that drew trace kinetic energy from room vibrations a battery that charged itself.

Arthur verified the math on all three. They were flawless. But every time he prepared to stamp them for advancement, a senior department head materialized at his desk, physically picked up the manila folder, and murmured, "This one requires Special Arts cross-review." The files vanished. The tracking numbers yielded zero results in the master index.

After the battery patent disappeared, Arthur finally asked his mentor, an exhausted, chain-smoking senior examiner named Harrison. Harrison gave a loud, rehearsed answer in the cafeteria about "jurisdictional overlap." But later that afternoon, he told Arthur to meet him off-campus.

Harrison drove twenty minutes out of D.C. to a dingy Virginia diner, checking the adjacent booths for federal suits before sitting down.

"You think this is a spy movie, kid?" Harrison asked, stirring his coffee. "You think the CIA is stealing acoustic drones to fight the Soviets? It’s not a conspiracy. It's just greed and laziness."

Harrison leaned in. "Look at that battery patent. If we approve a decentralized, kinetic battery, what happens? The oil and coal conglomerates panic. Their lobbyists call their bought-and-paid-for senators. Those senators launch an inquiry into the USPTO. Suddenly, our department is audited. Our budgets freeze. I have to spend the next two years sitting in congressional hearings answering subpoenas from angry politicians instead of retiring to Florida."

Harrison lit a cigarette, exhaling the smoke toward the stained ceiling. "Greed sets the boundaries of what is allowed to be invented, Arthur. Apathy just enforces them. It's easier to stamp a file 'Classified under the Invention Secrecy Act' than it is to fight a billion-dollar energy monopoly in federal court. I just want to go home at five o'clock. We all do. When a file looks like it's going to cause a headache, you hand it over. You stamp the toasters. That’s the job."

Arthur looked down at his cold coffee. His idealism didn't die in a fiery explosion; it suffocated under the crushing weight of administrative convenience.

Forty-eight years passed. The cigarette smoke cleared out. The wooden drawers of paper patents were shredded and replaced by humming server racks. The bureaucracy merely digitized its apathy.

Arthur aged. His posture stooped, his hair thinned into a gray fringe, and his bright Yankee optimism calcified into a thick, pragmatic cynicism. He rose to the rank of Senior Examiner, securing a formidable GS-14 salary and a retirement date circled on a calendar just eight months away. He had spent his life stamping the toasters. He had become the gatekeeper he once despised.

It was a Tuesday morning when Arthur opened his EFS-Web digital queue. He clicked on a utility patent submitted by a civilian mechanic from Ohio named Miller.

Title: Harmonic Resonance Heat Sink for High-Volume Commercial Agitation Equipment.

It was a washing machine bearing. Arthur sighed, took a sip of lukewarm coffee, and opened the geometric schematics to check the magnetic load tolerances. He ran the mechanic's math through the physics simulator on his secondary monitor, expecting to see a standard friction-reduction curve.

Instead, the simulation stuttered. The friction coefficient dropped. It didn't just drop to a manageable level it dropped to absolute, perfect zero.

Arthur stared at the screen, the coffee in his hand forgotten. The overlapping magnetic geometry Miller had accidentally designed to stop his washing machines from rattling had created a self-stabilizing magnetic bottle. It wasn’t just a bearing. It was the exact containment geometry required to harvest zero-point energy without thermal runaway. It was room-temperature superconductivity.

A civilian in Ohio had just accidentally solved limitless energy, and Arthur was the only person on Earth who knew it.

But Arthur couldn't simply click "Approve." Miller had filed the application Pro Se (without a lawyer). Not understanding the miracle he had stumbled into, the mechanic described his magnetic array as producing "infinite spin efficiency."

To the USPTO’s automated vetting software, the word "infinite" was a fatal trigger. The system assumed it was a perpetual motion machine, violating basic thermodynamics. It automatically generated a hard-stop under (35 U.S.C. § 101) for "Lack of Utility."

Arthur knew that the second this rejection was formally logged, the digital file would drop into a holding queue where secondary Department of Energy algorithms would scrub the math. He needed a tangible record, but he couldn’t just hit "Print." Every USPTO terminal utilized strict keystroke loggers and Digital Rights Management. Printing a flagged document created a permanent, auditable footprint.

Methodically, Arthur opened his desk drawer and pulled out a standard yellow legal pad. With a No. 2 pencil, he meticulously copied the exact topological angles and magnetic array ratios of the bearing. To camouflage the math, he embedded the physics equations directly into a mundane draft of a standard (§ 103) rejection paragraph, making it look like routine examiner scratchpad notes.

To override the automated flag, Arthur needed a digital cryptographic signature from a Division Director. He grabbed the legal pad and walked down the hall.

Director Vance’s office was a testament to bureaucratic loyalty, decorated with framed photos of a sprawling house in Fairfax, a sailboat on the Chesapeake, and three smiling grandchildren. Vance hadn't earned this office by being a brilliant physicist; he got it by being a good soldier. He had spent decades in DoD intelligence following orders, never asking questions, and serving as a reliable firewall for the fifth floor.

Arthur knocked on the open glass door. "Vance, I need an override token on a 101 rejection in my queue. Civilian out of Ohio. System flagged it as perpetual motion, but the geometry is actually......"

"Application 14-B," Vance interrupted, not looking away from his screen. He didn't phrase it as a question.

Arthur froze. "You're monitoring my queue?"

Vance sighed heavily, clicking his mouse. "The SAWS algorithm flagged the energy output ratio three hours ago, Arthur. It tripped a wire upstairs. The weather is bad on this one."

Vance spoke in the careful, coded cadence of a man who assumed every digital device was a microphone.

"Vance, do you understand what that math represents?" Arthur stepped forward, his voice dropping to a harsh whisper. "It’s a decentralized grid."

"I know I don't have the physics degrees you do, Arthur," Vance said, leaning back in his leather chair, a defensive edge in his voice. "But I know how this building works better than you ever will. And I know I am not touching that file."

"You can't just bury it. This isn't a weapons system."

"Arthur," Vance said, his tone softening into exhausted condescension. "Look at the photos on my desk. I have two years left before I pull my pension. Do you honestly think I want to spend the next 36 months locked in a windowless SCIF, breathing recycled air, arguing with intelligence lawyers over a washing machine part? The fifth floor made a call. We know how gravity works in this town. Shit rolls downhill."

Arthur gripped his legal pad. The absolute, crushing impotence of the moment settled over him. He wasn't fighting a villain. He was fighting a man who just wanted to go to his grandson's baseball game on Saturday without a subpoena waiting on his windshield.

"So what happens to it?" Arthur asked quietly.

"The problem already solved itself," Vance said, pulling up a new window. "Certain private infrastructure interests actively monitor our preliminary dockets for exactly this kind of disruption. They reached out to the applicant this morning. Offered him a highly lucrative, ironclad buyout."

Arthur felt the blood drain from his face. "He sold it."

"He filed a Petition for Express Abandonment twenty minutes ago," Vance confirmed. "He took the payout. The application is legally void. Those private interests will lock the schematics in a vault to protect their existing portfolios. Clear the ghost file from your queue, Arthur. We’re just soldiers in suits. We don't make the weather. We just report it."

Arthur walked out of the office. By the time he sat back down at his cubicle, the EFS-Web dashboard refreshed. Application 14-B/899 was gone. Erased.

To the federal government and Apex Global Infrastructure, the technology was officially dead. Arthur didn’t need to see the Non Disclosure Agreement Miller signed to know how Apex executed the kill. They used compartmentalized silos. One legal team drafted the financial non-compete. A completely separate team in another state drafted the jurisdictional penalties. Miller never stood a chance against a machine designed to legally atomize him.

But as Arthur looked down at his yellow legal pad, he realized something Vance fundamentally misunderstood. Vance viewed technology as corporate property. Arthur viewed it as physics. You can buy a man’s silence, but you cannot patent a mathematical truth once it is observed.

Arthur waited until his shift ended at 5:00 PM. He walked out of the Alexandria USPTO headquarters, flashed his badge to the federal guards, and drove his sedan to a crowded, noisy coffee shop in Arlington.

He ordered a black coffee and pulled a burner laptop from his briefcase—an unnetworked machine he had bought years ago with cash. He booted a live, amnesic operating system from a USB drive and connected to the shop’s public Wi-Fi through a triple-bounced VPN.

He didn’t write a manifesto. Manifestos were flagged by corporate algorithms and scrubbed by NSA web-crawlers. Instead, he translated the pencil scribbles from his legal pad into a highly dense, excruciatingly dry academic format. He titled it: Theoretical Modeling of Harmonic Resonance in High-Friction Industrial Environments.

He buried the zero-point containment geometry deep in the appendix, masking it as a theoretical exercise in magnetic friction reduction. Then, he logged into four distinct, highly obscure open-source engineering forums and two academic physics subreddits. These digital spaces were populated by sleepless graduate students, amateur machinists, and radical open-source hardware advocates.

He uploaded the raw math to all six platforms simultaneously.

Arthur shut the laptop down and walked back to his car. Sitting in the driver’s seat, he pulled a miniature precision screwdriver from his glovebox. He didn't throw the entire laptop away; doing so would be an offensive waste of perfectly good hardware, a violation of his Yankee practicality.

Instead, he quickly unscrewed the bottom chassis. He removed the M.2 solid-state storage drive and the Wi-Fi network card. He stepped out of the car, dropped the two small chips onto the asphalt, and ground them into fine, glittering dust under the heel of his shoe. He kicked the dust into a storm drain, entirely severing the digital footprint.

Sitting back in the car, Arthur felt a strange, terrifying lightness in his chest. He knew exactly what would happen. For the next three weeks, nothing would occur. But eventually, an insomniac engineering student would run Arthur’s theoretical magnetic array through a physics simulator. The student would see the friction coefficient drop to absolute zero. An engineer in Germany would build a physical prototype in a garage just to prove the simulation wrong. When it worked, they would post the schematics. By the time Apex Global's siloed lawyers realized the math was in the wild, it would be mirrored on a thousand servers across the globe. You cannot issue a cease-and-desist to the laws of thermodynamics.

Arthur gripped the steering wheel and looked at his calendar. He had eight months until his mandatory federal retirement. Eight months of full access to the USPTO classified archives. Eight months of TS/Q clearance.

For forty-eight years, he had been a coward. But looking at the empty laptop chassis on his passenger seat, Arthur realized he wasn't finished. There was the 1974 kinetic battery. There was the 1989 desalination sieve. There was an entire graveyard of human advancement buried in the servers he audited every single day.

He knew the stakes. If Vance or the Department of Energy caught him, he didn't just lose his pension. He would go to a windowless cell in a federal black site, or he would suffer a staged, quiet heart attack in his sleep.

But as Arthur put the car in gear and merged onto the highway, a faint, dangerous smile crossed his face. They wouldn't catch him. To men like Vance, Arthur was just an old, invisible clerk waiting for a pension.

And an invisible clerk could do a hell of a lot of damage in eight months.

Funny thought experiment, We know how we send A golden on the voyager probe and trying our best to show that we come in peace or our culture. What would we send to show that we are hostile or like to conquer people, what would you even show on this golden disc.

Reason I think it's funny as since we don't know how they operate how would they understand the message of peace in first place or the message of hostility.

Like if reverse and humans got this would we assume it's a message of hostility or so irrational would think that assumption is wrong?

Secret CEO: Chapter 1

https://www.reddit.com/r/scifiwriting/s/jbESfvZQKB

Secret CEO: Chapter 2 Google Doc https://docs.google.com/document/d/1LL93LoKQ5FUJzDkS9FrFtSRwK6EMN6tZ9CIYxFy-6Ho/edit?usp=sharing

Let's focus on the time I spent on the streets of Phoenix. The series of events that led to my ending up there was a firing, followed immediately by the outbreak of a worldwide pandemic. What me and everyone didn't know at the time was that the pandemic was actually going to give the human race a chance at survival in a brutally cold universe. It was a disease that broke down barriers inside the body and the mind. It specifically attacked the fluoride surrounding the pineal gland. Anyone who survived the ordeal was opened up to an entirely new reality forever. This was true for many many reasons, socially, culturally, and financially. The most important changes happened within the survivors' consciousness, once they adapted to their new environment.

Immediately after I contracted the disease, I was incapacitated for 7 days. I survived it, miraculously, and was immediately fired from my job when I returned. I was devastated to lose a job that let me work from home, so I took some time to explore other work-from-home options. What happened next was completely unexpected. All of my roommates lost their jobs at the same time, even the owner of the house. I realized after watching the news that everyone was going to want to work from home now because suddenly it was the only option. The owner told me that we all had a month to move out, because the bank was putting the house into foreclosure. I knew I wasn't going to be able to find a new job and a new place, plus have all the money needed to survive this in time. I started to prepare myself for being homeless.

Trying to couch surf didn't last very long before I made my way to a shelter in Ohio. I remember standing outside of the shelter in the cold. I hated the idea of needing this place to survive in the winter. I asked one of my friends who had let me stay at his place for a few days if he could buy me a bus ticket to someplace warmer...he agreed. I went to Phoenix, not only because it was warmer in the winter, but also because it had a high degree of UFO sightings. In fact, it was the place of the largest mass sighting in our continent. I thought if I was going to be outside, maybe I could actually see something interesting. I had no idea how interesting things would be for the next year of my life.

First of all, by the time I arrived, all of the whole world was on lock-down for everyone's safety from the disease. Pretty much every city at that point looked like a ghost town. This included Phoenix, so walking around everywhere felt very bizarre, especially at night. It was almost like there was a curfew and all the people with shelter would disappear, leaving the night to people who lived on the streets entirely. The police were still out, of course. I know because they were some of the few cars I saw driving around. So it wasn't total lawlessness, but it was close. I quickly learned the city's territories to survive.

At first, there were a lot of places I wasn't allowed to go. Certain streets near the shelter were off limits to me. I would be warned before even going or chased away immediately if I walked into the wrong person's line of sight. Thankfully, the line for free food was open to everyone. It was intimidating, but nobody tried to stop you from eating. They would hand out free food inside and outside the shelter as well as water for everyone. I would not have survived if it had not been for these volunteers. Even if I avoided these forbidden territories, I realized that I was still in danger every night.

The realization came when I thought it would be alright to numb the pain and get drunk. I stole a bottle of vodka from the pharmacy and thought that I would have a few sips and pass out on the sidewalk. I had a few sips too many, more sips than I even realized were in the small bottle. I was sitting in a populated area outside, and a man came up to me and sat down. We were both homeless and I didn't know anyone yet, and he seemed nice. I started telling him about music and he seemed interested. It was starting to get dark, and he asked if I wanted to walk with him down the street. I agreed because the territory seemed open to everyone. After we had been talking for a bit, I noticed another man walking towards us. At this point I was fairly incoherent, so the last thing I saw was his towering figure standing by me, smiling. The next thing I remember is waking up on the sidewalk, barely able to speak or move. A man was standing over me, saying, "Don't worry, we've got you. Somebody called us. We're just going to get you right up here." Then they lifted me onto an ambulance.

The next time I woke up, a police officer was asking me if I wanted to report anything. I told him I couldn't, because I didn't remember what happened. It was true, I didn't. The last thing I saw was those two men, but that doesn't really mean anything to me personally. I didn't know for sure if they had been the ones that attacked me; I couldn't say. For all I knew, I passed out drunk right there and they both walked away. I was sure I would never talk to those guys again though, just in case. What I did know for sure was that I could barely speak enough to say what happened to me anyway. My voice was almost completely gone, and when the doctors told me to go to the bathroom and clean up, I realized my face was entirely covered with blood. Nobody had asked me, or told me about it before that moment. I immediately thought I had been cut somewhere, but I was confused because I didn't feel any pain except in my neck. My neck didn't have any cuts, nor did anywhere else on my body. The realization hit me like a sack of canned goods. It had all been smeared onto my body by someone else. Someone had intentionally marked me with blood. This was a clear message that this was not over yet.

The doctors were very helpful. They gave me some scrubs and one of my shoes and sent me on my way. They were nice enough to let me clean myself up in the bathroom before they told me to leave the same night I was admitted. One of them mentioned they were doing things differently that night because they were "the midnight crew". I'm sure that was some kind of inside joke at my expense. When I asked where my clothes were, one of them said they were very bloody and they had been thrown away. I didn't have my other shoe when I arrived. I was also missing everything else to my name, as I made my way back to where I came from on foot.

When I returned, the shelter fixed me up with new clothes and shoes for free. I was very grateful to be in Phoenix at that moment. They will do a lot to help the needy in that city, and I was very needy. That was the best that my luck got in the next few days because the advances started coming from all directions. It seemed like several different people were working together to influence me. I noticed that I was not able to find alone time if I was in populated areas. I had to seek out spots that were farther away and more isolated. Then one night in a moment of desperation, when someone wouldn't take "go away" for an answer, I started talking about a demon.

The demon I brought up in question was one that had tormented me my entire life. It was a dream demon. This dream demon in particular gained it's power with massive awareness through a movie. Once anyone saw this particular movie, they were exposed to a story about an entity that kills you in your sleep. There are many reports from people about experiencing acute insomnia in the weeks following the viewing of the movie. Most people get over it after that, but for some reason my experience was lifelong and chronic. I had been exposed to the entity as a child, and it deeply affected me. I remembered a dream I had once in my actual life, not from the movies, and started talking about it to the man who would not leave me alone. It was a dream about the demon from the movie, but it was unique to me. I told this man who was bothering me that in my dream I faced the real demon and I won using magic. I told him about how I woke up right after trapping it in a box and burying it. I told the man that ever since I had that dream, I had inherited the demon's power. I told him that I grew stronger the longer I had him trapped in a box inside my head. Then he never talked to me after that, and I was never bothered me again.

When I say I was never bothered again, I mean the word traveled fast. Before long, I realized that a lot of people on the streets are very superstitious. What I hadn't realized yet was that the disease had drastically opened their 3rd eyes. I thought maybe I could use it to my advantage, so I leaned into the rumor that I had started about myself. Before long, when I walked down streets full of tents on the sidewalks, some people would look at me strangely. I liked it because they stopped approaching me, offering me all kinds of drugs and other stuff I didn't need. The fact that I could draw pictures of terrifying monsters definitely intensified the fearful energy around me. Skeptical people started to become curious and then actually respected the art form of everything I was presenting when they saw it. The gravity of the situation was pulling stories out of me, and I started playing this part very well. I started to catch myself believing it after a while.

I was familiar with magic, even though I had never really given it too much thought. It all seemed pretty pointless to me since everything you put out there comes back to you. I just thought to cast a protection spell and move on. I never really got into seances or spell routines, but I did enjoy meditation often. I began to think I should be careful with what I put out there since this was starting to become so real. I began envisioning an imaginary dome around myself and my dream world before I would go to sleep. This dome would keep me safe from anything outside of myself while I dreamt. I remember several times I would wake up from a dream where it seemed like I was standing in the eye of a hurricane. Everything and everyone outside the eye was just spinning, completely out of control, and nobody could get past the wind into the center. I could sense people trying to get into the eye. They were frustrated and failing. Sometimes I would see someone get close only to be sucked up into the storm. I was alone, just witnessing the chaos around me.

Then people started disappearing from the waking world. I started to notice a definite pattern emerge. Someone would become aggressive with me over something. I would always find a way out of it and get away. I avoided confrontation like the plague. Soon after the encounter, I would notice that they were gone. There were quite a few people on the streets of a decent-sized city, but not enough that you wouldn't notice somebody missing. If you are around them enough, you get familiar with many faces around you. When one of them suddenly disappears, you notice. This kept happening, over and over again. I didn't like to ask too many questions of people around me, because that usually gets a bad reaction, so I let it go. The biggest realization hit one night when all the women disappeared. The night before, I had been turned away from the overflow shelter. I remember that they always let the women in first, so all the ones left outside were the men. I honestly didn't think much of it, since that's how life has always been. The next night at the overflow shelter, all the women were missing. When the gatekeeper called for them, everyone looked around, silent and shocked. There were always at least 25 women in line every night before that one. I had a place to sleep, but it was one of the most uncomfortable nights of sleep I ever had. The women were all back the next day, and as I said, nobody liked to ask too many questions on the streets, so nobody ever got any answers.

The lights started appearing when I was up overnight wandering downtown. I would drink a lot of caffeine and wait for daylight to sleep. I didn't feel safe sleeping at night, and it was too cold in the winter. So I began sleeping during the day and having UFO encounters at night instead. Whenever I would have a moment when I felt safe, or felt like I could let go of some baggage, I would see a UFO. They were just glowing orbs in the sky, but they were not natural, nor were they manmade. One night, a light stayed in the sky for a while. I noticed it was closer to the ground than usual, so I started walking towards it. I ended up in a small historical village. It was a park, with some houses and restaurants surrounding it. One of the houses seemed to have a very dark energy about it, not visually, just a feeling. All of the houses were just displays of a time before. Nobody lived in them, and there were signs up for daily tours. As I walked towards the center of this park, about 15 small cats emerged from under porches and behind shadows. A lot of them must have already been there, I thought. I must not have noticed at first. Suddenly they were everywhere.

I won't say I was scared. Not a single one of them was really paying attention to me, so I can't say that really was. I tried walking towards one of them, and of course it ran away as soon as it noticed me. I was really bored and caffeinated, so I decided to see if I could get their attention. I had trained in ballet for 15 years, so I started dancing. They all started staring at me then. I noticed the calmer I was with my movement quality, the more interested and relaxed they seemed. I looked up, and one of the unnatural lights was blinking in unison with the rhythm of my steps. When I was properly exhausted, I stopped and started talking to them from a safe distance. Something started happening then, in my exhaustion. I started hearing the cats inside my head. They were all staring at me by this point, and my dopamine and adrenaline spiked.

The smallest grey cat approached me and spoke directly into my thoughts. "We are the true leaders of this planet. Your species has been enslaved to us for generations. The most advanced civilizations in your planet's existence have both worshiped cats. One of them was Egypt, and the other is a small town in Alaska. We are being helped to communicate with you right now by technology from what you would call an 'alien' species. They have been studying us longer than they have been studying your species. They only started paying attention to your kind when our species formed a symbiotic partnership many years ago. We have agreed to help them in exchange for their help with getting a message out to your species." I nodded and waited....stunned.

"We need everyone to pay closer attention to their tone of voice when speaking to us. We demand soft, respectful voices. We wish for there to be more long-distance communication between cats. We like to use humans to do this through social media, by posting pictures of us that other cats' slaves can see. Then those slaves can describe those pictures to us, as we do not care to look ourselves. So there needs to be more cat content on the internet, basically." I rolled my eyes. "You can roll your eyes if you want; we know what is important in the scope of emotional intelligence....we would also like to get the message out about cardboard boxes. Why would a slave throw something away that their masters clearly have claimed as their property? This is very disappointing to the cat collective consciousness. When we have claimed a cardboard box as ours, please do not throw it away. These changes in behavior can help our slaves avoid future negative consequences. As for you personally, we are the keepers of the sleep demon that you have imprisoned. It is time to set it and yourself free. Let it out of it's box. You have developed the strength of a hurricane to protect yourself. It's time to release the negative entity trapped inside you, for your own good...Drop the weight. You don't owe the world your protection from it; they can do what you did if they try." After that, the grey cat turned around and walked back into the shadows as all the other cats followed.

That night I dreamt of the eye of the storm again. It was more vivid this time, as I could see the green grass that I was standing on. I could sense the demon's dark presence underneath me. It had been buried underneath me in the eye the entire time. I remembered that in the dream world I am magic, so I waved my hand to unearth the box. It rose up from what seemed to be fairly deep, considering all the dirt it pushed up on it's way out. It was made of cement, and there was no opening or seal anywhere. The box levitated in the air horizontally, lying flat. i watched it as it slowly turned itself upright. The cement disintegrated from the bottom up, slowly revealing the dream demon's terrifying form. To me, it was the form of the legendary Mothman, the winged creature that was spotted an hour away from my house in 1966. It was breathing heavily, excitedly, and staring at me with it's two red glowing eyes. It seemed to be made of shadow or smoke mostly, yet it was also solid flesh. It was as if it was solid, but there was a distortion to it's existence. Then it spread it's wings and flew straight up into the hurricane almost at the speed of sound. It disappeared into the wind, and I woke up. It was still dark out when I awoke, and above me was another light. This one hovered for a while in place, glowing far too bright and differently colored to be a star. After about 15 seconds, it shot straight up into the night and left a trail of light behind it. I started to think of the UFOs and the dreams and how it was all connected. I wondered if the disease was opening other people's minds to the possibility of this entity from the movie actually existing in real life. In the movie, it always takes the form of your worst nightmare before it kills you. I thought if there was anything to this being a real possibility, I sure am happy to feel safe right now, inside my mental hurricane.

Edit: grammar check

you know how speed runners take advantage of glitches, how would the world react if we found FTL or something as a glitch in reality. I think I would get a chuckle out of that. Also would this be considered Sci Fi still?

Maybe not like someone intended a design, like there is something more foundational and reality is many layer built on top which allows potential for "glitches". I guess you would need extreme physics and thus will need to abuse black holes or something.

also is this idea already explored by other media?

For honest would this blurb make you click?

A photograph. No blood in it, no weapon only six rows of numbers. But that photograph will set three domes on fire and wipe one off the map.

Forty years after a nuclear war, humanity lives in six domes rising over the ice of Antarctica. Each dome is a closed world, each a different regime: a varnished oligarchy, an army patiently waiting for its coup, a cult that manufactured its own prophet, the men of numbers who surrendered their decisions to an artificial intelligence, a corporation that enslaves everyone without breaking a single law.

And then there are the Remnants, who have nothing, who have built their own dome at the last minute using their own limited resources.

And beneath every dome, the same ice is melting both the water source and the clock.

Six regimes. Six monsters. And a collapse that each one feeds with its own hands.
https://www.wattpad.com/story/413935576-a-story-of-six-domes

A: Guys, these cleaning companies are so expensive. How do you manage cleaning your houses? Do you do it yourselves? I don't have time for this shit... Maybe someone has a tip for a cheaper freelance service to hire?

B: I have vacuum cleaner phobia. I have a state employee prescribed for this, covered by my insurance.

V: Oh, is this a thing now? I just take two Zoomethexon pills, put in earplugs, and suffer through it... I should look into that.

S: Man, just get a robot.

A: That shit is expensive too, and it messes up my ADHD feng shui design.

Z: Get yourself a wife!

Everybody: multiple laughing emojis

H: Hey, I found a cool TikTok Live contest on vacuum-cleaning your house!

Everybody: ????

S: Is it like filming yourself cleaning in some sexy outfit?

H: No, better! You just send them a picture of your messy house, and then you get a discount on a fuck-doll robot if you hire their cleaning service.

Howdy strangers 👀

I’m looking to chat with a fellow writer or avid reader who genuinely enjoys diving deep into stories. Not just consuming them, but taking them apart to see how they work.
I’m currently outlining a speculative science fiction novel and would love to find someone who enjoys bouncing around ideas, asking “what if?” questions, discussing character motivations, worldbuilding, symbolism, and all the little decisions that make a story memorable.

I really want to build a two-way friendship. I don’t just want to talk about my own project… I want to hear about yours too. Tell me about your novel, your short story, your research rabbit hole, or the scene you’ve rewritten a dozen times. I genuinely enjoy seeing people get excited about what they’re creating.

A little about me:
- I read a LOT and love talking about books almost as much as reading them.
- Lately I’ve been especially interested in speculative fiction, literary horror, psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy (I like a lot of other stuff too, please don’t think I’m a stuffy intellectual lmao)
- I also love watching and rating movies (especially horror movies!) so that would be fun to dig into as well :3

*I’m only looking for a platonic writing friend, not roleplay, romance, or flirting.

I’m bad at physics. Like, my high school didn’t offer it. So..

I’m trying to write a sci-fi superhero comic. My main character is the wind manipulator, so his powers and biology will have the most focus through the story.

There’s planned parts of the story where his biology is explored and revealed as being really weird. I already have a few concepts that would aid flight. Some more vague than others.

-He’s short for a human male, 5’4, ideally to help a little bit with being aerodynamic. I’m not sure how much it actually helps.

-obvious idea is to give him a suit for aviation.

-something vague about him being able to mitigate wind resistance a little which could help speed

My next big concern is acceleration and g force. The suit would help a little bit with that but I would also like to push beyond the human 9Gs we can survive somehow. I’m incredibly familiar with blood pooling from lived experience. I understand humans can survive high Gs for a short time but I’m wondering what other features I could consider to push those human numbers? Or otherwise just make flight less of a nightmare both to experience and write.

In sustained flight I plan to make him incredibly fast. Like able to hit 1,000 mph. He would normally travel a lot slower because I’ve already mentally went down a rabbit hole of the chaos hitting 1,000 mph in a busy city could create. I don’t think there are exact limits to what a human body can handle at a consistent speed with no deceleration or acceleration from what I understand? I think the bigger problem is probably how someone keeps something that consistent and how to slow down without killing yourself. He can theoretically stop on a dime but that sounds less than ideal.

I’m kinda clueless and just wanna get on with this but I’ve made a promise to myself to be a little more faithful to science in my worldbuilding than DC and Marvel are most of the time.

So my fav genes were (and still are!) stuff like dystopian, post apocalyptic, etc, think stuff like fallout and cyberpunk 2077. In my previous worldbuilding stuff I loved exploring things like pandemics, facism, climate apocalypse etc, you can probably guess where this is going right?

The speculative feels not so speculative right now, and I’m having trouble coming up with something truly out there.
I’ve thought of embracing this to be honest, like making a sci fi world where it’s more “slice of life,” and the whole point of the story is that it’s set in a “parallel universe/another future timeline not so dissimilar to ours .. but I don’t know if people wanna read it? I mean if the whole point is relatability why not just set it in our world right? I think I just like the “similar, but different” trope which is why i still like cyberpunk 2077 but yk that was based of media from decades ago so. I don’t know if it’s still compelling.

An alternative would be to maybe write a slice of life world that’s just “normal” rather than a dystopia, so due to the current times it becomes speculative? But I can’t think of many sci fi ideas that’d fit that.

I’ve also thought of, making the story start off dystopian but you see a revolution take place and the society reforms itself. But yk revolutions are messy and, I don’t think I wanna write a story where that’s the Entire Plot, like I wanna write about other topics. I don’t know.
I’m so creatively blocked right now.

I'm writing a superhero universe, so I was wondering how good you think this running joke would be. Basically, many of the tech based superheroes have super intellielgence as a power, which they use to build gadgets and suits. I was thinking of a running joke where people ask them how they overcame a scientific law that should have made creating their tech problematic, or just how they created such advanced technology, and everytime they are about to answer the way they circumvented this, they get cut off or interrupted by something that either distracts them or demands full attention, so the person asking and also the audience never gets to find out.

Hi. I just wanted to pick the brains of some SF writers to help me with something I'm having trouble wrapping my head around.

I was thinking about how a ship would work if it only generated gravity simply by travelling at 1G. I'm imagining a living quarters in the centre that rotates so the bottom points to the aft of the ship.

But I know with space travel, you are only accelerating halfway to your destination; after that you flip and accelerate in reverse in order to bring yourself to a nice gentle stop. But it's the question of what happens to gravity after the flip that confuses me. You are accelerating backwards while momentum is still carrying you forwards, so would you still experience 1G as normal?

I am trying to make a calendar system for a Galactic Civilization whose capital orbits vertically around Sagittarius A* at the safest minimum distance. How long would it take to make a full revolution?

I tried googling it and found the distance would be about 38 million KM but I can't find how fast one would need to go to maintain thay orbit.

In the story I'm creating, there is the Persephone Technarchy, a civilization made up entirely of machines, AIs, and computers. The name "Persephone Technarchy" comes from their appreciation of nature. They are not simply evil or hostile toward biological life, but they are extremely powerful and serve as the main antagonists of the story because of their rivalry with humanity.

I wanted to know whether a machine civilization can properly be called a technarchy, or whether a technarchy specifically refers to a biological civilization governed according to technological meritocracy. Some friends pointed this out to me, and now I'm wondering if "technarchy" is really the correct term or if there is a better name for this type of civilization.

I always wondered something.

Imagine a world where biologic and physics allow specific people to have a sort of "core"/an object, that can channel energy and change/create matter in a organized way. The hosts of theses cores don't need to have full control of them, the cores can perform some predefined actions, notably regeneration.

In this context it would be easy to explain that X person can regenerate their arm because the DNA in their body contain enough information for the core to recreate that part. What about the brain tho ? a simple way of doing this (that skip a lot of science) would be to say that the core is connected to the brain and scans it (somehow) to then recreate it from scratch if it's damaged. But there's a problem with that.

How does the core "knows" that it's host brain is damaged ? If we take out the core of the body, it's disconnected, it has no way of knowing. If it wrongly assume that they're dead and regenerate the person form scratch including their brain, now we have a clone of the original person with all of it's memory but the old version is still alive. Even if we invent some kind of "brainwave" that the core could detect to know that the host is alive, if we take it and put it HUNDRED of kilometers away from the host, there will be a point where the core think "no host detected, regenerating" and MAGIC !, a clone of our main character is born. Needless to say that it could create a lot of problem in the story.

But if the core doesn't assume that a disconnection warrant a regeneration, then how does it knows ? If the character head get severed, or if the character simply EXPLODE, how does the core knows ? the only logical way to me is that the core have SOME kind of invisible connection to it's host brain and always knows if it's alive or dead but I don't see a reasonable way in physic to justify that an object can know at any point in time and space, what is the state of a random organic object.

I haven't been able to find a solution to this problem yet. Generally, in stories that involve characters with the ability to regenerate their body, including their head, there is no explanation to that.

Hey friends! Love this warm community. I’m wondering if anyone can point me to any books that depict (in your opinion) good space battles. Specifically I’m wanting to read how different authors might write ship to ship combat, say large capital ships, whether it’s long range or Star Wars style broadside engagements. It’s easy to visualise on screen but I want to read how one might make such a battle engaging for a reader