Meena Chaudhary noticed the smell first.

It wasn’t the antiseptic, the minty polish, or even the faint chemical sweetness that lingered in most dental offices. This smelled older, almost ancient: damp plaster and something like burnt sugar. She swallowed as it coated the back of her throat. Then, bending over the clipboard, she signed her name without looking. Twenty years of contracts had made it automatic: read, assess, commit. She rarely second-guessed herself once she’d decided.

“Ms Chaudhary?”

She looked up. The receptionist, a small, grey-haired woman, smiled. But it wasn’t her voice she heard. The door to the surgery stood open. The receptionist bobbed her eyebrows towards the door, slightly wrinkling the pancake makeup on her forehead. Again, the smile, but her eyes looked sad.

“Through here,” the dentist said.

Part 1: Yasuk

At the edge of the village, the abandoned gallows stood silent, their ropes stirring in the desert breeze. The creaking wooden frame had bleached and cracked, its knots swollen with age. Doctor Muhammad Hosseini watched the ropes sway and wondered if anyone would use them again.

Since the world beyond the village had vanished, crime had dwindled to something barely perceptible. Greed and anger were never gone, but muted, like a low insect hum fading into the heat. In its wake, fear remained. Not panic, but something graver.

In the first days after the silence, men kept to the shadows while women drew their veils tighter and children slipped between houses without playing. Their laughter, once spilling through the streets had drained away, leaving the village muted and watchful. Even now, the air felt tense, as if it were waiting for something to happen.

After the lynching of the local platoon of Faith Guards, most crimes no longer seemed to matter. People increasingly forgot central authority, as it had collapsed into memory and, like the world beyond the hills, fewer people spoke of it each day. Now they spoke of it only in hushed tones, afraid it might return, and perhaps even more afraid it wouldn’t.

Part I of V

At the edge of the village, the gallows stood abandoned, ropes idling in the desert breeze like tired sentinels. The air smelled of dust and rust, as if even the memory of their past depredations had dried and cracked. Doctor Muhammad Hosseini watched the ropes and pondered whether they would ever be used again. Since the rest of the world had vanished, crime had faded into a mere background hum—still present, but far less noticeable—an edge of unresolved fear replacing it with an implacable weight. 

He remembered the fear in the first few days, men hiding in the shadows like whipped dogs, women pulling their veils tighter, as if to protect themselves from djinn, children quietly moving from house to house without play, or the regular raucous laughter that used to characterise the ambience of what was a happy village. The laughter was all gone, and even now the atmosphere lay heavy like a blanket of unrealised expectation, a terror ready to pounce.

The spiders descended upon Earth with an enticing proposition for humanity: “Make us your rulers, and we will transform your world. Enjoy free energy, end wars, and join a galaxy-wide trading community that grants you access to the finest technology, food, and materials in the universe, including advanced sex bots. We will extend your lifespan to a thousand years, enhance your intelligence, and elevate global educational standards.”

“What’s the catch?” asked humanity.

“We get to eat one of your children every day,” replied the spiders. “They are yummy.”

“Any particular age group?” humanity asked, appalled yet curious.

“We prefer them innocent. Pure in thought. It gives the meat an electric resonance.”

“Is there any other deal we can have?” asked humanity.

“We could just eat you,” replied the spiders.

“Ah,” said humanity. “Are there any more catches?”

by Martyn

This is an expanded version of a story I wrote for Further Adventures in SciFi & F. I’m considering using this longer version for my current course.

Things to consider:

1. Is there sufficient emotional content
2. Is the dialogue realistic
3. Are the descriptions adequate
4. Is there too much telling
5. Is the story engaging?

The tall, black-clad figure of Zinnai Savita Ké coalesced into corporeality with a sigh of expanding vapour and a shower of portal radiation overspill. The air, carrying a faint scent of ozone, rippled as her mass displaced it. Zac, her e-familiar—a sleek, obsidian drone —hummed into existence beside her, hovering resolutely near her shoulders. Its sensors rotated, making a swift threat level assessment, which, finding none, released it from its station to hover near the ceiling.

“Are you doing menacing?” she asked, a wry smile trying to break free as she looked up at Zac.

“It’s my go-to pose, boss,” Zac replied. “It goes nicely with the multi-terajoule directed energy array I’m wearing.”

Ké favoured making solitude a stranger, at least since the Insight Agency claimed her from the orphanage in which she grew up, but her hit-and-miss relations with other humans meant she never travelled without the irascible but likeable drone. The upside of this is drones never forget anything. This is also the downside, but Ké liked the constraints of always being on her mettle, especially when her witness was a combat-enabled drone with no firmware interdiction of human casualties.

by Martyn Winters

Part 1

Landing Town looks shabbier than usual today: worn name-hoardings over the shops, and a wash of baked soil across the walkboards, which kicks up into dust with each footfall as I amble up Main Street, thinking to myself I need a good steak and a beer to rid me of the taste of the farm. And that, for the time being, is my plan.

“Heya, Ianto,” calls a shrill voice. Tom O’Malley waves from a tub of muddy water sitting in his yard. His hair, a riot of ginger, is the only real colour to be found here, unless you count brown.

“Hey Tom,” I call back. “Goin’ down the square. Wanna come?”

“Nah. I’m going to keep cool here,” he says, splashing the brown water.

This is the most sensible thing someone of Tom’s colouring could do right after Spring-End Downpour. The next few weeks will be hot, as Visram’s star bakes the ground hard again. It’s too hot to work, but soon, as the summer rays fade behind the high clouds and fresh winds gust in from the ocean, I will be back in the fields, digging the ditches washed away by the rains. Old man McMichael will then haul out his planting machine and sow the crop of Steak-plant, which we harvest just as the rains start again. Then we’ll load up his old truck and haul the protein pods to the market.

The tall, black-clad figure of Zinnai Savita Ké glinted into shape with a sigh of expanding air and a shower of portal radiation overspill, her e-familiar, Zac, following in close attendance. She never travelled on her own these days, not since being recruited by Insight anyway. Being in a world of conspiracy, unexplained tech, and poly-cortical chimeras did that to a person.

She found herself in a narrow, musky-scented corridor, with a flight of wooden steps at one end and a large stained-glass window at the other. Next to the window was a door; which was big, solid, and made of oiled oak; with an unwieldy iron handle and matching black studs decorating its surface.

“Very medieval,” she commented to Zac, raising an eyebrow. “I guess we go through there.”

The drone bobbed twice in agreement, “You want to go together, or should I take point?”

Part II – Futuristic version – SciFi.

Special Marine Hua Jin rides through the lanes, the ancient Harley she stole from the Autarch Voss, straining against the tug of Voss’s traction beam, and the noise of the gathering ion storm, her left arm trailing behind her like a rag in her slipstream, a pattern of needle points in her rapidly deadening shoulder, where the darts from the Dzarb caught as she cut through their line. Her black uniform flaps noisily in the wind, as fronds from the roadside vegetation slap against her thighs. Tucked in her breast pocket below the gold and red dragon insignia of her unit, nestles the thumb drive containing the data Voss needs to set the planet-breaker device in motion.

A Dzarb soldier drone rushes from a hedge, its grasping tentacles and slavering bi-fold maw full of intent. Jin drives straight over it with her engine thundering.

With a crooked grin on her face, she yells, “Hell yeah, no-one messes with the corps.”  

“Defeat, when it came, was like a pall of smoke hanging over our heads, lowering our horizons,” Yeltsin said, sitting back in his chair, one boot on the boxwood table in the centre of the otherwise empty room. He lit a cigarette and took a deep draught, the livid scar near his mouth pinching into a white line as he inhaled. “That’s why we did the things we did. You would too. Anyone would.”