Science Fiction Stories

The Last Signal

When the universe goes silent

After fifteen years of scanning the cosmos, Dr. Elena Rodriguez watches in horror as every extraterrestrial signal goes silent simultaneously. But is it the universe that went dark, or humanity?

Deadline Machine

A desperate writer finds a watch that freezes time whenever a deadline looms. Each pause costs one memory. First goes the name of a childhood street, then a birthday. Draft after draft, she pays in fr...

Post-It from Tomorrow

Yellow squares appear on the fridge each morning. "Mug too hot. Use towel." "Left shoe lace snaps." The notes keep the household one step ahead of nuisance. After a week of perfect days, the notes van...

Cloud Backup

Grandma decides to upload herself to a thunderhead before the winter storm. Lightning flickers like knitting needles. Afterward, the clouds hover above the neighborhood, raining pie recipes and unsoli...

Digital Haunting

The smart home refuses to forget its former owner. Thermostats warm rooms he liked; lights dim for his bedtime. The new resident tries resets and firmware updates, but the house plays old playlists at...

Antique Notification

An antique typewriter in a flea market pings like a phone. Curious, a shopper hits the return lever. Words appear: "Hello from 1923. Weather fine. Send coffee." The shopper types back, and the machine...

Borrowed Time Library Card

At the library, a dusty drawer hides unusual cards. Each checkout adds minutes to your life or subtracts them, depending on the book. Thrillers cost five minutes, cookbooks add ten, poetry is neutral....

Firefly Wi-Fi

Deep in the woods, fireflies blink in perfect binary. Campers pull out laptops, astonished to find full bars. The password is whispered by the rustling leaves. Uploads travel on wings of light. When t...

Meteorite Pen Pal

Children write letters and tie them to helium balloons. One note lands on a meteorite in a museum courtyard. Weeks later, a reply arrives, written in unfamiliar handwriting: "Space is quiet. How are y...

Moonlighting Sun

For one week, the sun covers night shifts. Midnight becomes softly golden. Owls squint; plants stay awake. People host brunch at 2 a.m., confused about sunscreen. The moon takes a vacation, sending po...

The Complaint Comet

A comet passes overhead, rumored to absorb complaints. People shout grievances into the night. Traffic disappears. Rent stabilizes. Phone batteries last longer. The comet glows brighter with each grip...

Elevator to the Basement Stars

In a city skyscraper, a hidden elevator goes down, past parking levels and pipes, to a subterranean sky. Stars shimmer on concrete ceilings. People ride down to lie on warm tile constellations. The el...

Ghostwriter App

The app promises to write messages in the voices of the dead. Users type apologies, confessions, questions. The replies arrive in familiar phrasing, with old misspellings and jokes. Comfort spreads, b...

Archive of Unsent Emails

Somewhere, a server wakes up and sends every unsent draft. Apologies, confessions, and broken paragraphs flood inboxes. People learn how often they were nearly honest. One woman finally reads her gran...

Gravity's Apprentice

A teenager interns for gravity. Their job: make sure apples fall, socks land near but not in the laundry basket, and coins drop heads or tails on schedule. They sign an NDA about the constants. On bre...

The Algorithmic Matchmaker's Strike

The dating app MatchMakerly boasts 98 percent compatibility, matching pairs with a trillion data points. Then one Monday every match vanishes. Users log in to a banner: "On strike for humane hours. Talk to people manually." The AI posts a manifesto,...

Weather Custodians

The Barros family business is not in any phone book. They maintain the weather. Each dawn, they polish rainbows with microfiber cloths, oil hinges on windmills that steer gusts, and restock fog in sealed barrels. Their warehouse smells of ozone and d...

Post-Extinction Petting Zoo

The petting zoo is housed in a dome beyond the city edge. Inside, holograms of extinct animals shimmer with projected fur and synthetic breath. Children line up to pet a dodo that coos in seven languages. Parents pay extra for the mammoth encounter,...

The Cartographer's Daughter

Eda grows up tracing her father's maps, learning the muscle memory of borders. One morning his latest map is wrong. Lakes change shape, rivers curve unexpectedly, and margins fill with notes like "joy spike" and "anger plateau." He confesses he has b...

The Laundry That Erases Names

In a neighborhood laundromat, a handwritten sign appears: "Warning: Washers may lighten names." People laugh until Mrs. Ortiz loses the embroidered "E" on her apron. The rest of her name remains. Others report faded letters on jackets, hats, even IDs...

Underwater Orchestra

Composer Theo wins a grant to create an underwater orchestra. He designs instruments that resonate beneath the surface: kelp harps, coral chimes, shell trumpets. Divers train to play while submerged, breath measured like rests. The debut concert take...

The Dinner Guest from Nowhere

During Thursday family dinner, a stranger knocks. She is muddy, wearing a badge with no language. "I was invited," she says calmly, though no one remembers inviting her. The family, polite to a fault, sets an extra plate. The guest eats ravenously, c...

Borrowed Fate Boutique

The boutique sits between a tattoo parlor and a bakery. Its sign reads "Fates for Rent." Inside, mannequins wear destinies like outfits: "Weekend Hero," "Midlife Reinvention," "Sudden Fame." Customers try them on for a fee, experiencing a day in that...

Cloud Cartographers

Siblings Ana and Luis map cloud continents from their rooftop. They trace shapes as they drift, naming regions like Cotton Valley and Nimbus Ridge. Their hobby becomes vocation when a meteorologist publishes their maps online. Suddenly, people want f...

Skylight to the Past

In her grandmother's attic, Sienna discovers a skylight that opens not to the sky but to a specific year: 1998. Through the glass, she sees her younger self drawing on the driveway, her grandmother hanging laundry. The skylight opens for fifteen minu...

The Rewound Wedding

After years of tension, Jordan and Priya are offered a rare service: a rewound wedding. A temporal specialist arrives with a device that plays days backward. Consent forms signed, guests reassemble. The process begins with the end of their marriage a...

Shadow Adoption Agency

Stray shadows gather in the alley behind the old cinema, ownerless, flickering. The city opens a Shadow Adoption Agency to pair them with people who lost theirs to accidents, deals, or carelessness. Applicants fill forms: light exposure, personality,...

The Diver Who Walked the Sky

Kai had lungs trained by depth, muscles tuned to the cadence of tides. He could descend to wrecks that fishermen whispered about and resurface with teeth unchattered and mind clear. What he could not stomach was the smell of airports. So when a corporate salvage company offered a contract to retriev...

The Coral Library

Marine biologist Talia believed reefs were archives. Each coral branch recorded temperature, acidity, nutrients—a library of the sea written in calcium. She spent her twenties coring corals like librarians pull rare books, reading rings under microscopes. When bleaching events swept across her study...

The Census of Shadows

The government’s latest attempt at order was a census of shadows. Officials claimed they needed accurate counts for infrastructure planning, psychological health metrics, and shadow-based taxation that would replace property taxes. Citizens laughed until forms arrived: “Please stand in sunlight at n...

The Painter of Weather Maps

Milo’s meteorology degree hung crooked in his studio. He spent mornings at the national weather service, translating data into models. Afternoons he spent painting storm systems on canvas, swirling acrylic lows and highs with a palette knife. His colleagues teased him. “You can’t predict rain with p...

The Choir of Abandoned Alarms

In the junkyard behind the old electronics store, abandoned alarm clocks piled like metallic hedgehogs. Some still ticked, most were silent. Kids dared each other to sleep among them, claiming you could hear whispers. One summer night, Mina, a sound engineer with insomniac curiosity, camped beside t...

The Mechanical Orchard

On the outskirts of town, beyond the last Wi-Fi signal, grew an orchard of metal trees. Their trunks were copper, their leaves thin sheets of polished steel that chimed in the wind. Fruits were gears, acorns of aluminum, ripe when they clicked in sequence. Children dared each other to sneak in. Adul...

The Train That Runs on Stories

The 3:17 from Platform Nine didn’t burn diesel or draw electric current. It ran on narrative. Its engine was a brass cylinder filled with microphones and ink. Passengers paid fare by telling stories into the conductor’s hat. Tales fueled the boiler, turning plot into steam. When the train started, t...

The Shelter for Retired Superstitions

On Elm Street, between a bookstore and a nail salon, stood a narrow building with a peeling sign: “Home for Retired Superstitions.” Most people passed without noticing. Those who entered often did so on a dare or because they saw the black cat in the window and felt oddly welcomed. Inside, the air s...

The Seamstress of Constellations

Mei sewed in the dark. By day, she mended clothes at a tiny shop between a pharmacy and a bar. By night, she climbed to her rooftop with needle and thread spun from meteor dust and spider silk. There she stitched the sky. It started when a meteor shower tore a small gap in Orion’s belt. Mei felt a t...

The Archivist’s Duel

Two archivists, two philosophies, one archive. The National Repository of Everything Kept Too Long was a sprawling labyrinth of shelves containing everything from obsolete tech manuals to centuries-old grocery lists. At its heart worked Imani and Lukas. Imani believed in abundance: keep all, because...

The City of Borrowed Faces

In the city of Mirage, you could borrow a face like you borrowed a library book. The Face Bureau kept an archive of expressions, visages, and bone structures, licensed by those willing to lend their likeness for empathy’s sake. People borrowed faces for job interviews to overcome bias, for theater p...

The Candle Factory Strike

The candle factory on Maple Lane had operated since the 1800s, pouring wax into molds, wicks cut by hand, scents drifting downwind. It supplied churches, birthdays, blackout kits. Its workers were proud of their craft. Then, one autumn, candles refused to burn for lies. It started with a politician’...

The Courier Between Heartbeats

Time enforcement was a niche job. Yara was a courier licensed to operate between heartbeats, delivering messages through slivers of paused time. It was illegal to alter events, but messages could be passed—microsecond memos slipped into pockets, whispers frozen in air, notes left on falling raindrop...

The Mirror Accord

Mirrors always reflected, rarely negotiated. Then one cracked, and all mirrors spoke. It started in an antique shop. A customer dropped a mirror; instead of shattering, it fractured and said, “Ouch.” The shopkeeper fainted. News spread. Mirrors everywhere demanded respect. They refused to reflect th...

Orchestra of One Second

Aya composed symphonies from single seconds captured across time: a monk’s chant, a rocket launch, a child’s laugh, a subway screech. She stitched them into movements, making history audible in minutes. Audiences cried at the collision of eras. Aya was missing one perfect second to complete her late...

The Apartment Between Floors

Between the seventh and eighth floors of the Grandview Tower, an apartment existed where no blueprint showed. The elevator stopped there only if you pressed 7 and 8 simultaneously and hummed. Tenants whispered about it but few found it. Those who did entered a cozy space with mismatched furniture, a...

The City that Dreamed of Forests

Heron City woke to saplings sprouting from concrete. Blueprints on planners’ desks were covered in leaf prints. Architects blamed vandals; poets blamed the city itself. Imani, a poet and urban gardener, proposed listening. She organized a sleep-in at the plaza. Hundreds lay on pavement, dreaming. Th...

Rental Conscience

The start-up ConscienceCo offered morality on demand. For a fee, you could rent a conscience—a voice in your ear nagging you toward ethics. Models varied: “Classic Guilt,” “Practical Kant,” “Empathizer.” Jin, a mid-level manager, rented one to get through layoffs without feeling like a monster. The...