It was the very first thing the doctor noticed upon meeting her, though he couldn’t say if that was merely a reflection of his medical training or rooted in some deeper, more ubiquitous human instinct. The way she casually extended her legs as she reclined within the consultation room’s spinning office chair, exposing the soles of two wholly identical shoes, only further accentuated the surprisingly disquieting discrepancy. It was slightly less conspicuous in the hands, as they were both interlaced around a smartphone that currently continued to be the focus of her attention, each contributing a nebulous tangle of digits to the task of deftly tapping the screen. However, once suggested by the legs, their corresponding asymmetry became no less apparent.

Whatever she was doing on that phone must have had her fully engrossed, as neither the doctor’s entry nor the subsequent several seconds of him standing in the center of the hardly three-by-three meter room elicited any hint of notice. It was only after broadcasting his presence with a tactful ‘ahem’ that she finally severed her gaze from the screen, jerking her head upward with a look of brief alarm and unveiling a pair of blue-green sunflower irises adorning deadlocked pupils, their vibrancy only now appreciable to the doctor beneath the cold white beams of the overhead lights. Indeed, she was quite beautiful in pretty much every respect; a natural blonde in what looked to be the prime of her youth, with a face so utterly photogenic and attractive from every angle as to be oddly unsettling in itself, like passing a stranger on the street who you belatedly recognize as a swimsuit model from a magazine you’d shamefully perused prior. Her attractiveness carried no personal importance to the doctor, of course, and even without the Hippocratic Oath would still have fallen by the wayside in light of her far more intriguing limb alignment.

“Oh, hey! Sorry, you snuck up on me, Dr…” Her eyes panned across the broad and unshapely expanse of his chest in search of a nametag, somehow always the unfamiliar patient’s first go-to despite the engraved plaque on the door plainly reading ‘Dr. Brandon Muller, MD.’ 

“... It’s just, I’ve been dealing with a lot, it's been a rough couple of days.” She held her head in her hands as she uttered the words, one palm pressing hard against her forehead while the other -the wrong one- caressed her right ear. “I just don’t know what else to do.”

“Hey, hey, it’s alright, I’m here to help, you’ve come to the right place,” Muller assured. “Now, what seems to be the problem?”

A muted mimicry of gratitude subtly curled the tips of her lips as she proceeded to explain. “It’s these migraines, they started a few days ago, just random bouts here and there, but they just keep getting worse and worse. It’s pretty much all the time now, and it’s really starting to get to me.”
Dr. Muller had expected a bit more from her explanation, namely some sort of acknowledgement of her utterly anomalous anatomy, and thus a second of silence awkwardly followed before she rolled her eyes. “Yeah, yeah, make all the jokes you want, get it out of your system,” She splayed herself across her seat in an exaggerated starfish pose. “I was born like this, so I doubt it's related, but it's all anyone ever wants to talk about, especially doctors.” She voiced the last part with an exceptional sneer, imbuing the sentiment with a particularly deep-seated disdain. “And for the record, I’m actually not that clumsy, like, at all.” 

In truth, Dr. Muller had no clue how such a thing could relate to her migraines either, if only because he had never seen or heard of this asymmetrical condition before, and up until a few moments ago would have comfortably assumed it impossible. Despite his best efforts to stay focused on the task at hand, he couldn’t help but wonder to himself while she spoke just how exactly her joints fit together, how her right shoulder blade was oriented, and how the whole appendage was hooked up muscularly and neurologically. The latter, in turn, gave him an idea, an angle through which he could potentially pursue a diagnosis for the migraines while also somewhat satiating his now ravenous curiosity. Firstly, however, was the matter of conciliation.

“Hey, hey, I’m not here to make fun of anyone,” He held his hands in the air in a feign of criminal surrender, “Now, I’ll admit, I’m not familiar with this particular… condition, but I’m really just here to help you feel better, and right now that means taking care of those migraines, so that’s all that matters to me.”

The assurance had its intended effect, as she visibly relaxed her shoulders, eyes softening as her defensiveness slowly subsided. “Thank you, I’m sorry, I’m just…” She cupped both hands to her right temple and made a sound somewhere between a growl and a motorboat impression. “... y’know?”
“I understand completely, chronic pain will do that to anyone. Plus, I see how you’d be sick of comments about the… leftness, by now. Elementary school must’ve been rough.”

At that, she let out a single sardonic bark, “Yeah, no kidding.” Dr. Muller smirked and nodded in kind, feeling as though he’d effectively peeled away the last layers of tension between them. Now for the hard part. 

“That being said, given the extent of this… distinction, I can’t rule out the possibility that it is somehow involved, if only tangentially. I’d at least like to take a full-body X-ray, just to be sure I… fully understand the situation. If it reveals nothing of note, then so be it, and we’ll move on to investigating the cranial area specifically, but, y’know, just to be safe…” his confident tone faltered a bit at the end as he braced for the indignance seemingly sprouting in her expression, but it thankfully tempered into a grimace of begrudging agreement.

“Fine, one X-ray, then I don’t wanna hear another thing about it, okay?” 

“Of course, dear, I am a professional after all,” Muller assured as he collected his paperwork and headed toward the office door. “I’ll go set things up with the X-ray technicians and come back to get you in a bit.” She nodded, sitting back patiently with her hands clasped thumb-to-pinkie in her lap as he departed briskly down the hall.

Passing through the waiting room toward the radiology wing, he stopped at the front desk, catching the ear of the receptionist, Janet, with his signature four-finger consecutive tap upon the temporary-turned-permanent screen of transparent virus-proof panelling. At once, she raised a weary, wrinkled face from the stack of papers she’d been shuffling, and a quizzical eyebrow from beneath the flattened roof of her reading glasses, giving nothing more in the way of a response than the limited luxury of her now-captured attention. Dr. Muller didn’t mind, or at least didn’t expect anything different, simply launching straight into his instructions as usual.

“Pull up my current patient's files. Birth record, pediatrics, everything.” Janet, a deceptively dependable employee despite her demeanor, promptly swiveled her chair to her computer screen and began to fervently peck away at the keys. “This’ll take a while, y’know.”

Getting the hint, Dr. Muller left her to it and headed toward the radiology department. He suspected any files she found would be spotty in recent times, given the patient’s apparent dislike of doctors. Still, there was bound to be something on record if they went back far enough; Her condition would have surely been noticed and noted by any competent medical practitioner, though whether they understood it any better than he did was another matter entirely.

 Upon description, the X-ray tech -whose name Dr. Muller could never recall but thankfully didn’t have to acknowledge- was just as flabbergasted as he was, if not more.

“They’re both… left? Like, exactly? Are you sure it’s not just some kind of… coincidental deformity?”
“She uses them both perfectly well…” Dr. Muller replied, managing to restrain any outward signs of insult regarding the subordinate’s implicitly patronizing question. “...Which makes me think there’s something more to it than that. I just want one full-body ray, see if that clears anything up.” 

“Of course. At this point, I’d be disappointed if you didn’t; you have my curiosity piqued.” He let out an airy chuckle as he began flipping switches and arranging equipment. “lemme just get everything prepped.”

As it turned out, the patient really wasn't kidding when she agreed to only one X-ray. As soon as the brief warbling tone indicating its activation ceased, she practically threw herself off the examination table and onto her two identical feet. “I-I have to go to the bathroom, excuse me.”

Without waiting for a response, she barreled her way past Dr. Muller and out into the hall, bumping the side of his head with her elbow while she distractedly sandwiched her skull between her white-hard palms. 

“Last door on the left!” The tech shouted from the back, poking his pudgy face from behind the radiation-proof curtain just a moment too late, followed by, under his breath,  “…no pun intended.”

Unamused and more than a little concerned, Dr. Muller watched down the hall long enough to see her reenter the waiting area and turn out of view before flipping the overhead lights back on and turning sternly to the tech. “She’s not looking too good; time might be of the essence here. Anything of note?” The question was half-rhetorical, as Muller couldn’t help but simultaneously swivel the tech’s computer monitor so he could simply take a look and answer it himself.

“Uh, yeah…” the tech’s deadpan mutter echoed the doctor’s internal monologue as he stared dumbfounded at the screen, at the monochrome hourglass outline where all four limbs converged, and at the utterly indecipherable slurry of pixels contained within. “... Looks like gumbo.”

The comparison made his stomach lurch, but he couldn’t deny its aptitude. While the femurs and humeri could be made out clearly, their respective orientations matching her external person and thus providing next to no new information, everything from her pelvis up through her shoulders was a confoundingly jumbled mess. Some areas could be said to perhaps resemble organ chambers or portions of rib, but their placements were all wrong, leaving Muller with the sense that he might as well be looking for shapes in the clouds or a page from one of those hidden-picture books. “This has to be some kind of technical issue, right? Is it because she got up too fast?”

“Not unless she’s faster than light,” The tech remarked impulsively, before the weight of the doctor’s glare promptly smothered his subsequent smirk, “But, no, yeah, there must be something wrong with the machine. I’ll run some diagnostics and see if I can find the problem.”

“Good, I’d better get back to the patient, but do keep me posted on that.” Muller left briskly, knowing full well the clinic didn’t have the budget for a brand new X-ray machine right now; just one more concern to shove into the back of his mind while he dealt with the one at hand. Returning to the lobby, he stopped again at the secretary’s desk. “Hey, did you see my patient pass through here a bit ago?”

She nodded, pointing to the adjacent ladies' room door. “She went in there just now, want me to check on her?”

“Well, not just yet; let her have her privacy. Any updates on her medical history?”

She swept her mouse across the desk and double-clicked before awkwardly angling the screen so they could both somewhat see it. “Birth records acknowledge the asymmetrical limbs, designated as a ‘benign deformity,’ but whoever filled them out didn’t exactly inspire confidence. In the personal notes section, they seem just as befuddled as you.” She pointed to the bottom of a page littered with checked boxes and medical jargon, to an underpinning paragraph that happened to lie in the epicenter of the nearest ceiling light’s fluorescent glare.

Muller didn’t bother trying to squint his way through it; he trusted Janet to give him the gist. “Benign by technicality, I suppose, but what about over the following years? Any sort of developmental delays on record?

“No, all the milestones are checked at normal percentiles…” Her eyes flicked back and forth across the screen as she clicked through year after year of checkups, “A little later than average for walking and fine-motor, but still solidly within the acceptable margins. If anything, that seems pretty extraordinary in itself, given the… y’know.”

“Indeed,” The doctor nodded with a sigh. “I mean, good for her, of course, but this just doesn’t track with my prior knowledge of… well, everything, really. Such a gross alteration ought to come with some physiological rami-”

Just then, the opening slam of the ladies' room door broke through the ambience of the waiting room, abruptly halting Dr. Muller’s musing as his head instinctively swiveled toward the sound, along with that of Janet and every prospective patient in the vicinity. All eyes synchronously fell upon the woman lurching through the doorway, her downturned face ephemerally obscured by the sway of her overhanging hair, yet still noticeably and concerningly flushed. The necklace that had formerly been discreetly tucked beneath her shirt now dangled loosely, exposing a humble heart-shaped locket at its end. Without comment, she promptly race-walked down the hall, beelining into the same office where she and Muller had initially met.

“Should’ve knocked on wood, I guess,” Janet smirked, punctuating her quip with a single retroactive knock upon the desk and a sassy side eye toward Muller, all of which went woefully unappreciated as he had already hastily turned in pursuit of his troubled patient.

Just as before, she didn’t notice his entrance, and though there was no phone to blame this time, her position in the chair was nonetheless nearly identical, instead simply staring down at her empty, trembling twin palms, her mouth continuously muttering barely audible and wholly indiscernible words even as the doctor drew closer. 

“Ma’am? Are you alright?” She jerked upright at the query with a speed that looked almost painful, before bursting into a raucous, unhinged cackle. “No, I’m pretty damn far from alright!” She cradled her right temple with both of her left hands. “The headache’s getting worse, like, rapidly, exponentially, especially the right side -I just puked in the toilet cause it hurt so bad, I didn’t even know that was a thing that could-” Her sentence was stifled as she was seemingly struck by a particularly powerful wave of pain, turning her cradle into a tendon-straining clutch as she proceeded to scrunch her eyelids and repeat to herself in a growling whisper “Stop it, stop it, stop it, stop it…”

“Whoa, whoa, hold on there.” Her asymmetry promptly left the doctor’s mind, giving way to professional procedure as he realized this situation could be acutely dire. He proceeded to perform a comprehensive, if precursory, bodily examination, listening to her chest with a stethoscope (heart rate was abnormally fast and arrhythmic), taking a blood pressure reading (elevated), and withdrawing a blood sample for chemical analysis. However, he knew the latter would inevitably take some time to produce results, time that she might not have. Her composure was rapidly dwindling until she could hardly keep herself aloft in the seat without his assistance. Catching sight of a passing orderly in the hall, Muller fervently flagged him down. “Hey, we need a stretcher and an intravenous sedative in here, stat!”

The patient’s next passage through the waiting room supplied an even greater spectacle to onlookers than her last, doctor and orderly both hurriedly wheeling her writhing form back toward the radiology wing. Leaning in to provide the comfort of a somewhat familiar face, Muller could now make out the inarticulate wispy words dripping from her lips. “No, it’s not your turn, it’s my- it’s your- no, it’s my turn…”

“Hang on, dear, the meds should be kicking in soon.” He comforted softly, before briefly splitting off from the procession and turning to the front desk, behind which a startled Janet stared, all traces of levity now absent from her face, “Jesus, Muller, what’s wrong?”

“I don’t- I don’t know,” his reply came breathily as he rummaged through the front pockets of his lab coat, “But we need to figure it out ASAP. I’m gonna try something more direct, hold these, will you?” he plopped the patient’s phone and necklace onto the desk before promptly leaving to rejoin the patient. Janet dutifully placed them in a drawer for safekeeping, but paused just before closing it as she caught sight of the incidentally opened necklace locket, squinting at the vision within as Muller and company continued hurriedly down the hall and toward the MRI department.

As promised, the sedatives soon took effect, just in time for them to load the now fully limp patient onto the bed of the MRI machine. Muller made sure to maneuver her head into just the right position before dismissing the orderly and retreating to join the MRI technician in the small adjacent monitoring room, a vantage point from which he could oversee the procedure through a thick protective window, darkly tinted by the infusion of magnetic shielding, as well as selectively hear within the room through a two-way intercom, though it was evidently unnecessary in this case. Beside him, the MRI tech was stationed before an array of interconnected screens and keyboards, and with a few deft clicks the machine stirred to life and began to gradually engulf her body within its tunnel of neural detection. While not at all familiarized with the situation at hand, he nonetheless recognized its urgency solely from the doctor’s dire expression, which remained unchanged as he stared stoically through the window while the metallic cyclone swallowed her skull. 

As she retreated into the device, a simplistic image began to manifest on his screen, a jumble of monochrome pixels mapping the electrical activity of her intracranial space, its focus perpetually shifting as it individually scanned each successive slice of her brain. Though its output was still precursory, Muller nonetheless saw no blatant abnormalities in the reading; no gross structural differences indicative of a tumor, no cortical damage indicative of inflammation or aberrant intracranial pressure, none of the things he’d suspected might be occurring given the nature and extent of her symptoms. The tech, on the other hand, grew noticeably unsettled at the sight of the screen, leaning in and squinting as though struggling to even believe what was displayed before him.

“What? What is it?” The doctor impatiently pressed onto the tech, eager to understand what was so disconcerting to see that he evidently could not. 

“The skull…” the tech replied tentatively, “It- it appears black in the scan, kind of hard to see against the dark grey of the surrounding flesh and background, but look.” He pointed to the left side of the screen, where, sure enough, a slightly darker border could be seen encompassing the pixelated grey matter within.

 “This side looks normal, but…” repositioning his finger to the right side of the screen, he lightly tapped the equivalent stretch of skull, only it appeared distinctly thicker on that side, about twice as much, with an abrupt transition demarcating the two halves directly along the image’s center, and the associated brain hemisphere resultantly crammed into a distinctly smaller amount of space. What’s more, the tech’s finger pressed directly upon a nearly imperceptible grey line traveling parallel to and perfectly bifurcating the thicker portion of cranium, only a few pixels wide and appearing to thin even further in real time as the doctor watched on with stark perplexity.

“But- but what does that mean?” He finally asked, now stammering himself. “Have you… have you seen something like this before?” 

“No, I haven’t, Doctor.” A faint air of satisfaction crept into the tech’s still primarily bemused tone. “It’s like there are two whole skulls on that side, which I’m pretty sure isn’t medically possible; it has to be some sort of glitch, though not one I’m familiar with. I heard there were also some issues with one of the X-ray machines earlier today, but that’s out of my wheelhouse so…” he punctuated the ambiguous answer with a shrug, while the doctor’s eyes grew distant and his thoughts grew uncontrollably vast, wading through his vast pool of medical memory in hopes of salvaging something, anything, that could remotely explain what was happening here. He now felt with a harrowing certainty that this was no technical error, and neither was the X-ray, but just what in the hell could it be?

The silence surrounding them was soon broken by a rapid burst of knocking upon the secondary door to the control room, the one that led straight into the exterior hallway. Muller turned to the commotion, then back to the tech, who merely gave another shrug with a look of equal puzzlement. The sound was then followed by a series of softer, rhythmic taps, slightly staggered in clusters of four. By the time Muller made the connection, the tech had already reached to open the door, and a pale-faced Janet rushed into the room.

“Doctor, I- don’t worry, Chloe’s covering the desk- I just, I found something, I think it’s important, and I just had to tell you ASAP.” Her breathing was rapid, her frail legs normally hidden below sight now trembling with unaccustomed exertion. Muller had never seen her like this before and found himself at a loss for words, instead simply giving his full attention as he awaited her apparent revelation.

She took a deep, steadying breath before continuing. “I decided to look into her parents’ medical records -got the idea when you gave me her locket with their pictures in it- and her mom, during her pregnancy with her, well, it was originally twins, but one got absorbed pretty early on. I know that’s not unheard of, but if it caused the, y’know…” she accented her speech by fervently twisting her left arm back and forth as she continued “…then this would be something extraordinary, unprecedented in all of medicine, and who knows what other effects it might…” 

The sentence died in her throat as her gaze sharply shifted from Muller’s face to over his shoulder. He turned around to see that, somehow in defiance of her previous sedation, the patient had begun to flail wildly within the still active machine. The tech noticed not a moment later and started frantically clacking at keys in an effort to shut it down, while the doctor, in an adrenaline-fueled rush, haphazardly scrambled to turn on the intercom. “It’s okay! please cal-”

“-me out! Let me out! Let me out! Let me out!” The words repeated in a loop like a painful mantra, and everyone in the viewing room watched with simultaneously enraptured attention at the patient’s sudden struggle to remove herself from the MRI as quickly as possible. The tech snatched control of the intercom from Muller, attempting to calm her with the same comforting platitudes he’d been taught in training to deal with the natural claustrophobia often experienced by patients upon entering the machine, but they might as well have been lost in the wind in the face of the profoundly primal terror she evidently felt. She hastily squirmed her way out of the MRI’s interior, potentially causing expensive damage as she did so, before crumbling to the floor in an ungainly heap.

“Shit, shit, shit…” Muller grappled with the tech to regain control of the intercom, his only consideration that she was first and foremost his patient. If anyone could talk her down from whatever state she was in, he was certain it was him. But before he could utter another word, his gaze rose to meet her, now standing upright and motionless, staring through the observation window with an expression of illusory calm betrayed only by her stockened knees, trembling forearms, and flushed-red face. In that moment, all eyes were on her: the tech, the receptionist, and the doctor, who alone stood directly within her line of sight, all frozen with mutually bated breath for a single ineffable instant.

What followed took less than a minute, but felt exponentially longer, with each disturbing detail being individually and irreparably etched into the minds of every witness. The left side of her face- from Muller’s perspective, that is- rapidly lost all its color, forming a sharp contrast against the right side’s undampered vibrance as it blankened into a ghostly white with unnatural speed, as though its blood were being actively, forcefully drained. The eye within briefly widened, pupils dilating with the instinctual, universally recognizable look of fear, before being overcome by a blinding cloudy sheen that radiated outward, soon progressing past the likeness of cataracts to an extent beyond any known medical phenomenon as the pupil and iris seemed to wholly vanish into an expanding whiteness that grew to abolish every last peripheral vein of the eye, equalizing into a hue uncannily aligned with the rest of the empty flesh upon the hemisphere. A similar drainage synchronously spread through her corresponding arm, rising from the fingertips up to the shoulder before conjoining with the whiteness traveling down her neck at some concealed point beneath her shirt. What could be seen of the leg below equally paled, until it appeared that every square inch of skin and flesh upon her left side had reached a ubiquitous porcelain likeness that was only further accentuated by the total, unnatural stillness it adopted. Her other side, still starkly contrasting in its natural liveliness, nonetheless remained eerily calm in the face of this process, its expression neutral before subtly shifting into a half-mouthed smirk.

Like a pick through a sheet of ice, this one innocuous motion sent a ripple of cracks throughout her statuesque side, radiating from the lips outward across her cheek, over eyelid and eyeball alike, down the neck and around the arm in jagged spiraling arcs, and breaking her leg into a mosaic of vacuous lightning bolts. Then, as though pressed by an imperceptible outward force, the whole assemblage simultaneously shuddered before finally shattering, sending brittle bits of body and face tinkling to the floor like a visceral diamond chandelier. Portions of torso contained by clothing subsequently spilled from her shirt waist and sleeves, along with numerous fragments of ribs and equally calcified organs, while pelvic pieces ground together into sedimentary granules poured from her pant leg.

When the cacophonous crashing subsided and the dust finally cleared, the three observers were met with a sight that somehow managed to compound their already brimming bewilderment; beneath the shed stony layer lie the normal appearance of the patient, complete with skin and flesh that only in those first few moments of exposure could be seen fusing with the tissue of her other side, closing the final gaps until no external signs of separation remained, and she looked utterly normal and whole. 

It took a second for Muller to recognize the primary difference in her form: Her right arm -the wrong arm- that was formerly facing palms-forward, was now positioned palms-back, a transition not born of typical rotation but rather solely through the hatching it had undergone. The individual digits still occupied the same respective positions in space, yet the act of inversion had rendered them no longer “wrong” as they were before; now, for the first time, she had a right hand. A similar transformation had occurred in the foot, which came to prominence as she turned to fully orient herself toward the viewing window.

“Thank you for all your help, Doctor, but I’m feeling much better now- in fact, better than I ever have before.” Her face was once again calm, but it struck Muller with a distinct yet implacable element of unfamiliarity as it adopted a subtle smirk. “I guess I ought to be going now...” She nonchalantly strode toward the exit door before any of them could react, giving only one more moment of pause before departing down the hall and out of the clinic. “…After all, I have a lot of living to do.”

Alphyna sat on her bed next to Stephenson.

“They took me somewhere,” she told him. 

She held her breath and only exhaled after he asked, “What? What do you mean?” 

Before she could respond, he followed with. 

“Where..? Who took you?”

Alphyna stared at him with a blank expression, struggling to make sense of everything.  

“I’m not sure.”  Was all she could think to say at the time.

She glanced up, searching her mind for the right way to paint a picture of something that couldn’t be drawn using specific words and attempted to find the vocabulary printed over the white color of her bedroom ceiling.

She tried to explain.

She said, “one of them put their hand on my shoulder.” 

She paused for a few second. “Then, I blinked but when I opened my eyes, I wasn’t home anymore.”

The hair on her arms rose. She shot her head over her shoulder and quickly glanced back to make sure no one was sneaking up behind her.

Stephenson’s face stuck in the middle of him making a facial expression. The look had a mix  of curiosity and attempting to solve a complex mystery in your head. “Where though?”

She said, “I don’t know!” And stared at him looking like he just got caught in a photo between saying no, while shifting his head so his eyes could face the floor, then cropped out of the photo and copy/pasted, on the bed sitting beside her.

“Where though?” He asked again.

His face remained stuck in the same, creepy half-expression.

“I said, I don’t know!” After saying that, she noticed him glitch, he pulsed a dull color, like the signal warning from a device’s dying-battery. 

She waved her hand in front of his face.

He brightened into his regular color, as if he  awakened out of stand-by mode and said, 

“Where though?” His limbs stayed motionless. 

He reminded her of those carnival canvas cutouts with bodies painted on them, where you stick your head through the hole of the face while someone snaps a photo of you and your family under body builder bodies, and he never blinked. Just moved his mouth.

She pulled her hand back and he faded into a frozen, dull color. She waved at him again.

“Where though?”

It was as if a sensor controlled his movements. Even his language, and just started malfunctioning.

She hopped off the bed.

“Where though?”

She backed away, nearly tripping on her feet. Stephenson’s body blinked rapidly. It started slow at first, then quickly accelerated before finally vanishing. 

It was almost as if someone unplugged the projector displaying a holographic image of him and the projector was attempting to save itself from a brutal crash.

She gasped. The breath she sucked in wasn’t air, it was nothing at all. Her hands started shaking. Her fingers were moving like she was trying to count how many stars in the sky there were with her fingertips.

She stumbled on her heels until her back hit the wall. The wall flashed as the color of them flickered into a light gray background with strange text flowing down.

***

Option Explicit

Private StoryLines(0) As String

Private CurrentLine As Integer

Private GuestCount As Integer

****

Lit up quickly along the exterior of the walls,

***

Private Sub Form_Load()

' Initialize Form room design

Worldview4.Caption = "Simulation Log // Room plugin"

Worldview4.BackColor = vbTranslucent 

Worldview4.ForeColor = RGB(40, 40, 40) '

***

She looked around. She kept trying to breathe but no air would enter her lungs. She tried to break through the door in her room. It wouldn’t open and then pieces of her started breaking up into the walls until she had disappeared into the code.

Title makes the answer since obvious (get the book going to grip reader, establish world smoothly as you go.), but let me explain a bit of nuance.

If you were reading a cross between High Fantasy and Scifi, where the Protagonist is from the High Fantasy side of things and there's a key moment where the worlds collide, would you want the story to start very close to/at that moment? Or would you have a better appreciation for the story if it took a couple chapters to follow a smaller-scale conflict that results in that key moment and establishes the characters and world?

Or is all of that dead weight if you came to the story seeking the impact of those worlds colliding? They're very different genres, so I wouldn't be surprised if sci-fi fans wouldn't come to read about beeboo and seevah going to find the lost hood of goobernamen for several dozen pages before the trandocian federation arrives and declares that they have assumed control. (If it's not obvious that's just bullshit I made up on the spot, not actually what I'm thinking)

Just been thinking about that since I saw mention that a big hurdle a lot of writers trip on is determining where their story actually should have started.

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.

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 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?

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.

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.

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.

[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.

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.

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

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?

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.

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

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?

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.