Here you can find all of the stories that have been published on the SPJ website.
“Sing, barren woman, you who never bore a child; burst into song, shout for joy, you who were never in labor; because more are the children of the desolate woman than of her who has a husband” Isaiah 54:1 The Daughter’s screaming still echoed through their house, even muffled by the outer walls. He could… Keep Reading
He had been drifting on the outskirts of oblivion for a long time. Left with only his own thoughts and his relentless search for a planet he could call home. Infinite desolateness, and after all these years in space, experience had brought an entire new meaning to the word. An adventurer by nature and an… Keep Reading
“I’m already locked inside a trillion cells. What difference does one more make?” He shouted this from his cage, the words slipping past receding guards to find more receptive ears in similar cages lining the corridor. It didn’t take long for his zen-like question to become a subtle but standing echo throughout the facility. Some… Keep Reading
I. No one will know that I’m leaving, just that I’m gone. I carry the final box from my office to my packed up car. I open the tarnished gold trunk, the small lamp inside the trunk had long burnt out and the bulb is a pain to find. I push aside the empty quarts… Keep Reading
The host returned to consciousness in a flutter of dark eyelashes and dilation of pupils. Were it not for the familiar sound of his own wheezing, Gabriel would have mistaken the too-bright room for his post-death destination, wherever that lay. The realization that he was still alive gave Gabriel no comfort; it simply surprised him.… Keep Reading
I know exactly what Socrates meant and he fucking meant it literally. It’s just that most people aren’t smart enough, or not smart in the right way, or not weird enough, basically not enough like Socrates, to realize what he was saying. But I am. OK, so the bit I mean – the thing about… Keep Reading
Commander Zuniga’s mouth hung open. “I’m sorry, could you repeat that?” “We do not believe in humans. It is an old superstition, easily disproven.” The android’s deep blue face was placid as any sea, though his body was, under his simple clothing, immensely fat. “But we’re standing right here, talking to you,” Zuniga said. “Three… Keep Reading
Unfriending and clicking on ‘block sender’ doesn’t work on journalists; Yolanda should have known that. I soon found out she’d run from Edinburgh and joined the Carford Unit for Advanced Cognitive Sciences, in England. And then the CUACS media day gave me a legitimate reason to go and see her. Lucky me, I’d thought. Always… Keep Reading
"No more coal for the boiler—it's all gone! No more oil for the burner—it's all gone! Dragons charged up in the sun—come get one! You'll get hiss hiss hisssss STEAM HEAT!" I'd waited so many years to turn on a television again. When there were hundreds of channels blaring day and night, I never watched. Now we have only one channel. You'd think people would get bored with it, but they watch just to see my commercial. To see the dragons dance. Who knew? But I gotta tell you, when they spread their wings and claws, it gives you a whole new appreciation of jazz hands. The first time I saw Laroux and the Leaping Lizards perform Cell Block Tango, I Keep Reading
“Houston, we have a problem.” A phrase so infamous, so ingrained in people’s minds, that it was practically impossible to utter anything else when something went wrong up in the unforgiving black. NASA hated it, for a number of reasons. First and foremost, obviously, because it meant something had gone wrong and they were about… Keep Reading
In the darkness, the Buddha is a light. Cast not a shadow, and align your soul with what is right. Such was the verse inscribed above the entrance to the Chamber of Light, hidden a mile within the Kitala Mountains. Alaria knew that those words were a fleck of eternity, cast upon the ever-changing canvas of the world. Yet the verse was not just a remote, noble truth, but a command. Although the gilded bronze in which it was written was like garish face-paint over the enduring stone, it helped train Alaria’s mind on her task as she followed the four monks into the chamber. The thin brown cloak over her naked body provided little warmth in the Keep Reading
root: The watch daemon detected anomalous and likely illegal activity within the first twelve milliseconds of the murder. In the next twenty milliseconds, the daemon forked itself twelve times across the local grid. The murder weapon was careless in the thirty-first millisecond and disrupted the nearest fourteen of the seventh-fork daemons before they came online. The nearest thirty-four daemons noticed the lack of response pings within the thirty-sixth millisecond, which activated their pursuit-fork mode. The ninety-six remaining daemons continued their unthinking forking to maximize initial growth. When Keep Reading
