The small fern glistened as light started to fill the sky. It was covered with a thick reddish frost. Palesa removed a glove and dusted some of it off with her fingers, before quickly putting the glove back on. The green of the half-unfurled frond was now visible. She called her companion.

“Before you go into that room I have to tell you something!”

“You’re… me? How did…?”

“No time: I time travelled back five years to–”

“Yeah sure.”

How often do you travel back in time to give yourself the single most important piece of advice ever…

Dear Victor, I’m leaving you.

I’ve been unhappy for years. With your ghastly obsessions with electricity and body parts. With your paranoia about being followed — frankly, formerly dear husband, it’s disquieting you maintain a belief in monsters. Believing you can create them!? You are not God! The eccentricities I found…

–It’s just a routine procedure for going on the mission.

–And it means that I get full sight?

–Yes, you will get your vision back.

–No.

–No?

–Not back. I was born blind, didn’t ‘lose’ my sight. I never had it.

The anesthetic flooded his system. His last thoughts were “I wish routine examinations didn’t need all this drama”. His eyes closed.

When he opened them, he was in a different room. More airy and open, brighter, though his head was groggy. More serene than the little examination room he was in. “I hope my insurance can pay…

The signal had travelled 26 light years. Four notes, over five seconds. Beatriz heard it first.

They listened back to it. It was faint, but she found it familiar. The pattern changed. The four notes repeated once, then the key changed and that repeated before disappearing. They both listened a few times, baffled.

The first days after the Parliament bombing were intense. The leader had to learn everything from the clinic: the source of the threat — anti-clone activists again — and the various ways the culprits were to be caught. She had to help everyone come to terms with this blow to the idea of a peaceful and democratic nation.

Nisa had been coding this thing forever. She couldn’t remember the last time she did anything else, but it was finally done — the first proper reality simulation she’d made. Dynamic weather and landscapes, NPCs making their own decisions on a micro and macro level, a whole evolving interactive history, the works.

I believe they will come back to me again. Out here, in the woods, late one night. My friends don’t believe I met them; they say it’s because I did too many shrooms that night, but I know what happened. I’ve had good experiences and bad experiences on shrooms before, but this wasn’t like anything I ever experienced before. It was truly transcendent

The wind from the star drove shards of the crumbled planet everywhere. Nothing remained that its former inhabitants could have recognized. Some fell toward oblivion in the star, more became an orbiting belt. One massive chunk became the moon of another planet.