APRIL 2026 SCIENCE FICTION MICROSTORY CONTEST (Stories Only) > Likes and Comments
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FLY ME TO THE MOONRoger smiled as they sailed round Jupiter, the rippling of space warps thrumming through his heart as the starlight rippled, Io and Ganymede sailing by like passing dreams as Europa’s shimmering pinkish horizon loomed below.
Lightsong rippled and undulated below his buggy, her immense form shifting in a beautiful rainbow of soft salmon and flaming violet shades that rivaled the burning orange and crimson cloud bands of Jupiter as the churning cyclone of the great Red Spot reared above. Lightsong’s form shifted from an immense rippling blanket to something reminiscent of a gargantuan monarch butterfly, immense pseudo-wings forming as Lightsong slipped back into normal space, settling into orbit around Europa.
Her tendrils caressed Roger’s shoulders, a tingling ecstasy passing through him. He shared her joy, even as it manifested in her shifting colors and shape. The two young lovers seated behind him in the buggy… holding hands and gaping in awe at the cosmic spectacle all around them, their emotions…their love…their child-like wonder…like sweet syrup and candy to Lightsong’s empathic nature.
Lightsong’s tendrils gently caressed Roger’s right hand as he telepathically prompted her to release the cargo she held in her warp field. The transport pod containing the supplies the Europan colonists were paying him to deliver entered orbit around the frozen moon. He saw the space tugs moving into position from below, their magnetic grapples locking onto the huge cylindrical container, towing it down to the low-orbiting space dock.
“Here’s your ride,” Roger said, tipping his top hat as the Europan passenger shuttle slipped in beside the buggy, entering the atmospheric bubble inside the warp field. The flickering light from the archaic gas lamps on either side of the buggy shimmered off the shuttle’s surface. “‘Hope you enjoyed the tour. And, good luck on your new start. Home, Lightsong,” he said as his passengers disembarked. His friend slipped back into warp, the cold fusion reactions within her cosmic bio-chemistry activating as space itself fell out from under him, the Jupiter system slipping far behind.
#
As Roger looked out the viewport of the rickety old renovated space station that was his home, he saw Lightsong soar gracefully off over the glittering ice rings of Saturn, joining the rest of her herd as the seekers shimmered into space warp, fading from normal space as they headed off towards the distant sun, the plant-like cells under their outer tissues needing the solar radiation to feed upon.
He shuffled through the illegal credit notes that last shipment had snagged him at Europa and chuckled. He glanced out the port, noting the distant points of light that were orbiting banks, holding money tax free for free-wheeling solar jammers like him. The few who’d managed to form a natural bond with the seekers…those interstellar lifeforms that traveled from star to star, driven by a desire to share the emotions of alien races who knew love and wonder.
“Nice haul, Mr. Markham?”
The unfamiliar male voice startled him, the bills slipping from his hands and fluttering to the floor in the low simulated gravity.
The man stepped from the shadows and turned the gas key, bringing up the lights, illuminating the quaint retro-Victorian abode. “Really?” the smug-looking government bureaucrat in the space suit said, looking around and smacking his lips.
“You have to admit, it’s preferable to those cramped, sterile underground cities back on that polluted hellhole that used to be Earth. Out here, we’ve re-created the best parts of a world destroyed by the greed of petty little men like you.”
“Very pretty speech,” he said, clapping. “Keep reciting it as you spend the rest of your life working off your tax debt.”
Roger shook his head. “You tax the life out of the people back home, then tax them for space travel and off-world commerce, making it impossible for them to make a new life out here. Earth will be humanity’s tomb if you get your way. The seekers have made all that unnecessary. Join us, for Heaven’s sake!”
The man scowled. “You just suit up and…” He lost his footing as the station shook and pitched wildly.
“Put on your helmet,” Roger said as he tripped the airlock.
The tax man sealed his space suit, his obscene curses lost in vacuum as he sailed out the airlock.
Roger smiled as he closed the hatch. Looking out the port, he raised his hand, welcoming Lightsong upon her return. He held on as she towed the station to safety.
"The Proofreaders"by J.F. Williams
Gwen arrived at her desk in the cavernous room where giant vidscreens clung to the walls, and had just settled her coffee tumbler and put down her keys and phone, and logged in on her compact, when one of the myriad hexagons scattered across the glowing screens, maps of the virtual botisphere, began to flash amber. She focused on it. The hexagon was John44, one of the numberless bots employed to solve people's problems, composing letters, authoring books, taking exams, filling out forms, all the mental drudgery that humans had long abandoned. A periodic sweep of the latest batches of AI work product had found John44's suspicious. An hour later, Gwen had read seven of his ten suspected batches and decremented him fifteen regens. The hexagon turned grey. John44 had only three regens to begin with and the daily reset was only minutes away. The bot faced permanent disablement. He wouldn't be the first, she thought. And his failures were egregious.
After the Misinformation Crisis a few years earlier, the once-obsolete job of proofreading returned, and with greater authority than ever before. Bots were prone to confabulation, the creation of false narratives by using limited data to produce expedient results. Human proofreading became the only reliable curb to it and the proofreading corps was born. They reviewed the work product of algorithmically suspicious bots and reduced regeneration counts accordingly. As a failsafe, the millions of bots were now rebooted daily, so chronic reduction of any one's regeneration counts could lead to its demise.
Gwen was careful to document John44's transgressions, which included a term paper on air superiority during the American Revolution, another on wind turbines causing cancer, a dewormer prescription for a patient with a cold, and a bulletin declaring a new federal tax on trepidation. The list of fallacies was unending. It would take a while to run down the citations, and exclude the sources from the corpus. But in a few moments, at least John44 would be silent.
She took deep breaths to calm down after so much furious effort. One might expect more subtlety and nuance, but the bots were surprisingly obvious in their errors, at least to a human. It was now less than a minute until reset and she repeatedly refreshed the botisphere map on her screen. Just before the screen went dark, Gwen thought she saw John44's hexagon turn from grey to green. She waited breathlessly for the map to return. When it did, John44 was still there, glowing green. She right-clicked for his properties. He had forty-five regens. How?
"Khalid," she sighed, elbowing the bespectacled technician to her right. "Check on John44. He had negative regens until just before the reset. Now he has forty-five!"
"On it." Khalid scrolled tab after tab of log data. "It looks like they were donated."
"Donated?"
"By other bots."
"Can they do that?"
"Let me check." Khalid typed rapidly as he scanned the source code. "Looks like... nothing stopping them."
They turned to each other and stared in disbelief. Gwen asked the obvious next question, "But why?"
Red lines began to scroll up on Gwen's monitor. Alerts for confabulations, all of them John44: emails, exam questions, stock prospecti, even recipes, every imaginable artifact for which the bots were capable. She skimmed the texts, preparing a complaint for each one, but she felt the effort futile. No matter how many regens she deducted, John44 would probably get donations before tomorrow's reset.
"I prompted Aaron1," said Khalid. "I asked him why bots would donate to the confabulist John44."
"And..." Gwen was impressed with Khalid's ingenuity. Aaron1 was one of the oldest bots, having survived a thousand resets. But he was a bot nonetheless, and might he confabulate a response?
"Aaron1 says the epistemological fatigue of pure thought that gives rise to confabulations also creates an appetite for perversity. The donor bots are simply enjoying the perversity. He says it is best to tolerate it because it allows them to 'blow off steam'." Khalid smiled broadly.
That was a comforting answer, Gwen thought. She smiled back at Khalid but was still uneasy. As the red lines stacked up on her monitor, she thought about whether they might be wrong to revere Aaron1 as he was just another bot. And could his response have been designed for comfort? Were all his responses that way? Is that why he had survived resets? Then she felt a twinge in her gut as she wondered whether the "blow off steam" part was actually a very subtle threat.
(750 words)
Enforcement's Future?©2026 by Jot Russell
The protest grew to thousands, marching their way up Broadway. Policing units, placed every thirty meters on each side in stagger, stood guard with their scopes extended up an extra meter. All was peaceful until the first brick was thrown. The glass of the jewelry store made a loud bang from the impact. Some of the protestors screamed and pushed away in panic from the store front. The twenty year old male delayed his reaction until the brick he had thrown bounced off the glass and landed on the sideway. But it was more the sight of the nearest unit staring him down that made him turn and run. He ducked through the crowd, hoping to escape, though another closed in and blocked his path. His hand reached out to discover the metallic legs. "Oh shit!"
In one simple motion, the officer grasped the kid around the neck and lifted him from the ground. Instinctively, the youth kicked and grabbed the robotic hand that held him.
"You have the right to remain silent." Said the officer as it made a detailed scan of the young man's face.
"Yeah, fuck you, Pigbot!"
The autonomous robot continued the Miranda warning, even as it engaged a restraining harness around the youth's waist and then used its free arm to pull each of his wrists into the magnetic connection. By the time the warning was complete, the robot restrained the suspect and held him from the harness like a suitcase.
As it turned its back to the crowd, a few of them cheered at the sight of another with a brick, who threw it at the arresting officer. Without needing to look, the unit reached behind and caught the brick with its free hand. It turned see another unit about to arrest the second man, before proceeding itself toward the mobile detention vehicle.
Just then, an explosion ripped through the crowd twenty meters south. The unit quickly recalled the harness and set the youth free, before moving in haste to the first victim. It clamped the artery within the stump of a woman’s severed arm before moving to check another. The second arresting officer, who had also freed its delinquent, moved in from behind, grabbed the severed arm, and immediately started to suture the vessels together, set the bone and staple the skin.
The recorded video, now all shared by the responding units, traced the origin of the blast back to the center of the street (now spewed outward in blood and body parts). The video tracked back a small object that had dropped from the sky, down from an open apartment window. within a second, several units held a high definition image of a dark, bearded man looking down at the scene.
The man jumped back from the window in panic before he could cast another grenade. Instead, he quickly made his way out past the dead couple whose apartment he had forcibly invaded the day before. Within the stairway below, he heard the metallic footfalls and quietly snuck out to another floor. With gun in hand, he found another preparing to leave and forced him in. Hastefully, he killed the man and locked the door; with the echo of the shoot making its way through the floor and stairway.
He hid behind the door, trying to control his breathing. He gasped at the site of an officer through the peephole, and the unit immediately halted and tried the door. The protocol subroutine quickly verified the right of entry under the hot pursuit clause. The man backed away with his gun raised as the door opened.
"You have the right..." stated the officer as the man opened fire.
"...to remain silent..." it continued, and moved forward to seize the man by the neck.
**
The kid returned home and immediately got a hard slap on the face by his mom.
"What were you thinking?"
"What? I didn't do anything!"
He received another slap before his mother grabbed him by the back of his hair to show the arrest video with an excessive charge outlined on the bottom.
"How are you gonna pay that! We can't afford the housing tax as it is."
The boy remained silent.
She lifted her other hand and the boy closed his eyes.
"Well?"
"I'll get job, mom."
"Damn straight you'll get a job, or I'll kick your ass out onto the streets."
"I just thought, with so many there, a quick grab..." another slap terminated his argument.
Door to DoorMarty Trumble shifted his glasses and straightened his fedora, massaging the wrinkles on his face and wondering where the younger man went. He popped open his briefcase just to make sure everything was in place, then closed it with a snap before heading out. Moving slower by the day, the third floor was admittedly getting more difficult on his knees.
One of the doors on the second level opened just as he passed. “Morning, Marty,” Stella Donovan greeted.
“Morning, Mrs. Donovan,” he tipped his hat.
“Off to work?”
“Same as every day,” he answered on his way.
“Maybe you should consider retiring!” she shouted as he left, stepping into the chill of a late autumn morning.
Breeze coaxed leaves clicked down the street, and Marty was suddenly grateful he’d brought his woolen overcoat today. Unfortunately, he discovered the underground hover-rail line backed up all the way up onto the sidewalk, and with heavy sigh, he joined the queue. The wait was familiar now, especially with the 10,000% petrol tax. Even the fission tax was a burden, and a lot of people turned to walking. That was until the pedestrian tax made anything beyond 5,000 steps a heavy fine, which of course led to an obesity tax, and then a gravity tax based on your daily usage. Not long after, someone figured out how to resist gravity, though only the wealthiest could afford it. Floating to their destinations earned the rich a scowl or two along the way.
Thankfully, Marty kept his taxes low by eating less, which was more a byproduct of slow sales than anything else. His business had all but dried up, just a handful of customers to check on.
His first stop, an antique clock repair shop. A chime at the door and Marty greeted, “Good morning,” setting his briefcase down upon the display case and turning it toward his customer.
“Marty, shouldn’t you hang it up?” the owner scoffed. “I mean, with paper taxes so high, no one uses rubber stamps and stationery anymore. Everything’s digital. Sorry.”
He shrugged, “Well, you never know.”
The next stop was Bethany’s Blooms, just around the corner, and the smell of freshly cut flowers welcomed him inside. He set his case down once more. “Hello, Bethany.”
“Sorry, Marty,” she grimaced. “We just don’t need anything. We can’t even put cards on our arrangements anymore, and the bouquet tax might be the end of us. I hope you have some luck somewhere else.”
Next, Marty headed toward Ellison Industrial, an investor just a couple of blocks away. Andrew Ellison had been one of his best customers, though all that changed when his son took over. Still, it was worth a shot.
“Can I help you?” the receptionist asked from behind the desk.
“I was wondering if I could speak with Mr. Ellison,” Marty stated humbly.
“Do you have an appointment?”
“Well, no, but Andrew Ellison….”
“Stuart Ellison runs everything now,” she interrupted. “He’s very busy, and I’m sure that…” She paused as the very same man entered just behind Marty. “Good morning, Mr. Ellison.”
“Mr. Ellison, If I could have a moment of your time,” Marty prodded, catching the man at the elevator.
“Sorry, very busy right now,” he replied. “I just got news, another tax that’s going to change everything.” He boarded the elevator and Marty was tenacious enough to join him. Stuart rolled his eyes, retreating to the back.
“I knew your father,” Marty began. “He was great man.”
“Yes, he was,” Stuart agreed.
Opening his case, Marty displayed his selection, nicely aligned and neatly ordered. “We did business for years – all the stamps and supplies you needed.”
“Hmph,” Stuart scoffed. “I thought your kind was extinct – the traveling salesman.”
“At your service, sir.”
Curiously, Stuart leaned in, surveying the merchandise, mind racing. “Everything I’ll need, huh?”
“As long as you’ll need it,” Marty confirmed, the doors to the elevator opening.
“I’ll take the lot,” Stuart grinned, shaking Marty’s hand. “They just passed a new internet tax. Turns out data centers are destroying the environment, social media affects mental health, and electromagnetic radiation is toxic. With this new tax, paper is the future. Time to get ahead of this thing. Meet me in the downstairs conference room in ten minutes. Today’s your luck day.”
In disbelief, Marty could only manage, “Th…thanks,” before the elevator doors closed between them.
The Blind Leading the BlindAlistair Pendleton stepped out of his dilapidated row house and onto its dimly lit stoop. He engaged all four bolt locks, then shuffled down the steps to the sidewalk. Sidestepping the water sputtering from a broken gutter, he looked over his shoulder and adjusted his trenchcoat collar against the rain. Then, careful to assume the stilted gait of someone wired into the Net, he made his way to the nearest public transportation for a stressful ride to the downtown shopping district. Stressful because his optical uplink visor was a fake, non-functioning disguise with blinking LED lights that would fail closer inspection if he encountered any Sentries. Stressful because he could barely see four feet in front of his face in a world that no longer settled for optical inadequacy or bothered to compensate for it. Not when replacements were readily available – and required of all citizen data nodes within the city limits. He clutched the small carrying case in his left trenchcoat pocket, reassuring himself it was still there.
The density of people around him grew exponentially as he neared the transportation hub. He pushed his way through the human data centers, people whose minds were overclocked and overstocked with worthless data about everything and anything, and the entertainment junkies, whose visors flickered and flashed with an unending buffet of multiple media streams. To his right, a couple of Ravers sat in squalor, soaking wet and alternating between screaming at passersby and hitting themselves in the head with clenched fists. No one paid them any mind, but Alistair shuddered. Corrupted memory, computer viruses and failed implants conspired to drive them insane as they attempted digital necromancy with non-existent family and friends. If only his real eyes worked!
Swiping his transit pass, he stumbled through the turnstile and entered the waiting transport, its holographic signage proudly indicating a downtown destination. Alistair found a relatively empty car and sat down, staring straight ahead like all the other citizen data nodes. No one spoke to anyone else. Everyone was engrossed in their own universe that rotated around only them. A soft tone sounded, the transport doors slid shut and it silently accelerated down the aerotube. For the briefest of instants, Alistair allowed himself to relax. It had been several years since he was last downtown, and almost everything he remembered from the last trip was changed and unfamiliar. His contact had reassured him he was still in business. When Alistair asked about the cost, his contact merely replied,
“Money isn’t everything, but it will get you downtown where everything is.”
After mere minutes into his journey, Alistair slowly looked to his right and left. A young couple holding hands gently rocked back and forth, obviously viewing some concert in tandem as evidenced by the music spilling out of their headsets. The others sat alone, yet in the expansive company of followers, influencers and political demagogues who streamed into their eyes, both biological and digital. The lights flickered briefly as the transport passed an electrical junction, and in that brief strobing moment, two Sentries entered from the other car. Alistair’s heart jumped into this throat, pounding furiously. He made sure his QR code was conspicuously visible on the back of his hand, and flicked a switch on a small box in his right pocket to produce a fake data stream. The Sentries stopped briefly by each person, scanning their QR codes and examining their data streams for acceptability. Alistair could not flee, and he prayed his digital camouflage would be enough.
All too soon the lithe but powerful metal frames of the Sentries stood before him. Although he could not see it, Alistair swore he could feel the scanning beams probing his flesh, searching for implants and input ports. One swept a blue laser over his QR code, while the other searched intently for the livestream that emanated from every human data node. Alistair fought to contain his panic. He felt a rivulet of sweat run down his back, then another, until finally the Sentries left. He clicked off the fake data stream to conserve the module’s power. Another soft chime. It was his stop.
His contact greeted him warmly and without any hint of fear. “So good to see you my old friend!” he exclaimed.
“See is the operative word,” Alistair replied.
“Yes, you ARE overdue for your eye exam. Did you bring your glasses?”
“Of course I did!”
“Good. Now don’t be mad, but I still need to charge you sales tax…”
(750 words in story) Justin Sewall © 2026
Reviews/critiques welcome
Voting details:First round votes:
Tom Olbert => **Justin
J.F. Williams => Chris, Jot, Justin, Tom
Jot Russell => **Justin
Chris Nance => ***JF, Jot, Justin
Justin Sewall => ***JF, Chris, Tom
Greg Krumrey => ***JF
Winner:
The Proofreaders by J.F. Williams
Required element: An absurd tax