MAY 2026 SCIENCE FICTION MICROSTORY CONTEST (Stories Only) > Likes and Comments
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CRADLE OR TOMBCasandra’s heart fluttered with excitement as the starship entered orbit of Sol III.
Earth. It blurred in Casandra’s tears as she laid a hand across the vision before her. To touch the homeworld. She bowed her head. After millennia of exile, humanity scattered across the stars, first slaves of hostile alien races, then refugees living off the charity of the Galactic Confederation. Now…our long-lost greatness would be renewed.
She smiled as her friend Gaaln gently laid a four-digit leathery appendage on her shoulder. “Welcome home,” the large, shaggy Antarean said through her translator implant, caressing Casandra’s shoulder.
Casandra smiled, stroking Gaaln’s fur as she rested her head against the bulky, four-armed, vaguely mole-like biped. “Thank you, my friend.”
“Are we certain of where we are, Navigator?” Commander Korvaax asked, the multiple circular eyes lining her tubular head pulsing with liquid orange hues, her multiple arms checking the holographic star-map displays appearing on the air around her 7-foot exo-skeletal frame.
The navigator…Zaalk, a fluidic shape-shifting silver A.I. flowed across the control center, its multiple sections slithering inward and merging into a greater whole. “Affirmative, Commander. This is indisputably the original planet of humanity.”
Casandra couldn’t contain herself. She twirled, clapping her hands.
#
Casandra’s euphoria had ebbed like a dying sunset as one orbital scanning probe after another sent back zero results from all of the five continents. No radio emissions. No EM pulses. No sign of industrial activity. In fact, no evidence of life at all. Her companions were silent as the landing craft settled on its magna field in front of the half-fallen, ruined structure on the northwestern continent.
#
Entering the structure, Casandra found herself in an immense, palatial room, like a royal ballroom out of a half-remembered fairytale. Great crystal chandeliers long fallen and shattered lay on the tiled floors under thick layers of dust.
Casandra’s eyes snapped up, her heart in her mouth as she heard footsteps.
“Casandra!” Commander Korvaax shouted as Cassandra ran, thoughtlessly, towards the man she saw approaching across the immense chamber.
“Hello!” she said, breathless, trembling with awe as she approached the distinguished, handsome older man who stood before her, elegantly dressed, looking over his surroundings with seemingly royal detachment. “I’m Casandra, of the Galactic Confederation Historical Directorate. I…” She could barely catch her breath. What was she to say? “I…humanity has come home!” She extended her hand.
The smile slowly dropped from her face as the man failed to acknowledge her. He just stood and sneered arrogantly, as though unaware of her or her alien companions. She stood there, aghast, her mouth hanging open as Gaaln stepped protectively in front of her.
“No life readings,” Laarvyn, the Altairan science officer said, her immense, centipede-like form standing upright, her upper appendages checking the instrument readings. “Definitely an A.I.”
“Barely even that,” Zaalk said, shredding into multiple silver filaments and penetrating the body of the man-like thing.
“Rudimentary humanoid automaton. By its primitive silicon memory circuits, I perceive it is a tool. Nothing more.”
“Tool?” Casandra said, her blood turning to ice.
“The last in a long line of elected leaders…androids programmed by corporations to cater to the emotions of the population, deceiving them into reckless policies which profited the few at the expense of the many. Resources were squandered, the environment deteriorated. Finally, what remained of humanity warred over what little was left, to its ultimate extinction.”
Her world crumbling beneath her, Casandra fell to her knees, crying. Gaaln held her.
#
“Casandra!” Gaaln shouted as Casandra ran to the edge of the great ballroom’s roof, standing at the edge of the precipice below. “Don’t!”
“I have nothing,” she sobbed. “It was all a lie! Humanity is a failure!” She gasped in wonder. Visions slid through her mind. Visions of fabled, lost kingdoms and empires. The pyramids. Roman legions. The Renaissance. Art and revelation.
“Earth knew many great successes and failures,” Zaalk’s voice said in her mind, feeding knowledge to her through her brain implant. Knowledge drawn from the ancient computer memory stores discovered on Earth.
Zaalk took the form of Christ, his wrists bleeding. “I died for you. Live that others might hear my words.”
Christ morphed into William Shakespeare. "absent thee from felicity awhile, and in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain, to tell my story."
“Live, Casandra!” Gaaln said. “Your people must learn all of their past, good and bad…through you!”
Crying, she fell into Gaaln’s arms.
“In failure…seek wisdom, my friend.”
Red"Man, that thing takes up half the window..." I muttered.
Jupiter did indeed take up half the window. Looking out the window bubble, there it was, all orange and white and swirling, and it felt less like looking at a planet and more like standing too close to something you shouldn't.
The alert chimed.
"Magnetic shielding instability detected on Engineering Deck C."
I sighed and pushed out of my chair. Of course it was C.
We'd spent six months threading through Jupiter's magnetic sphere, basically riding its gravity to slingshot us toward Saturn. Efficient, they said. Worth the risk, they said. And it was, mostly, except that the whole time we were cooking in radiation, and the only thing between us and a very slow death was the shield wrapped around the hull.
I grabbed the Geiger counter off the rack and floated toward the corridor.
The ship had blue guidelines along the walls and floors so you didn't accidentally wander into a high-radiation zone. The shield looked like it was made up of geometric plates, and they shifted constantly, thousands of tiny adjustments per second, and the navigation software kept up with it in real time.
Emphasis on navigation software.
Engineering Deck C smelled like something had gotten too warm, that weird microwave wires were burning smell. I pulled myself through the maintenance ring toward Junction Twelve, and that's when the Geiger counter made a sharp sound.
Just a crackle. Half a second, then nothing.
"Tell me you're joking," I said to it.
The thing was old. I mean physically old, with actual buttons and a casing that had been smacked against bulkheads more times than I could count. I gave it one more smack for good measure and kept moving.
"Exposure levels remain within operational thresholds," the ship AI told me through my earpiece.
"Then why did the alarm go off?"
"No critical failure has been detected."
"Hmm."
I checked relay nodes. I recalibrated shield emitters. The counter kept spiking at random, screaming next to fully shielded sections and going dead quiet near the outer hull.
None of it made sense.
By the second hour I had a migraine behind my eyes that I was assuming was dehydration.
I floated into a maintenance spine above the reactor coolant conduits, following another blue-lit path through a space barely wide enough to turn around in. My face felt warm. Not fever warm, just uncomfortable, the kind of thing you notice and then immediately decide to ignore.
"You should rest," the AI said.
I ignored it.
I wiped sweat off my forehead and stopped at an access panel. For just a second, little black spots drifted across my vision.
Definitely fatigue and dehydration.
I opened the diagnostics window and that's when I saw it.
Shield Patch 4.2.
I looked at the counter firmware. Compatible through revision 3.8.
Oh no.
Three months ago, the ship received an update. Navigation software updated automatically. Life support updated automatically. Maintenance equipment, though? Nobody pushed that patch. Nobody thought to...
My Geiger counter had been reading an outdated map the entire time.
"Show me current particle funneling," I said, my voice coming out smaller than I meant it to.
The corridor turned bright red.
Not all of it. Just the section where I was standing. Where I had been standing for the past hour.
The raw data came up on my wrist display. Charged particles slipping through microscopic gaps in the shield, converging right here, in this specific stretch of passage, like water finding the lowest crack.
The counter hadn't been malfunctioning.
It had been trying to tell me.
I looked down at the screen. Buried at the bottom, a warning I had never noticed.
DOSIMETER SATURATION ERROR.
Which meant it had taken on so much radiation that it could no longer accurately measure radiation.
My shaking hands rerouted power through the forward shield emitters. Outside, the magnetic field shifted by less than half a degree.
The corridor went blue.
"Radiation leakage resolved," the AI said.
I rested my forehead against the bulkhead and let out a long breath.
When I reached up to wipe my nose, a small dark red sphere floated up in front of my face, perfectly round in the zero gravity, hanging there between me and the blue-lit walls.
I held my breath.
Then the Geiger counter started screaming and I knew in the pit of my stomach that whoever decided to ignore the patch update would cost me dearly.
"Priorities"by J.F. Williams
Ian had just failed to acquire the necessary server time for alien-behavior predictive modeling when, on the way to his farmhouse, deep in the forest, he saw a shooting star fall to earth.
"Rob!" he shouted to his partner waiting at the front door. "Get your coat on! There may be a meteorite just north of here! Come!"
A light snow fell as the truck trundled down a dirt road deeper into the nearby wood, when suddenly a great crater with a smoldering smooth rock at its center loomed before them. The rock hissed in spots as snowflakes pelted it. The truck's headlights caught an even stranger sight: a green, shimmery form off to the right. A foot away, lay a thing more sad than strange, the lifeless body of a large grey cat.
"Oh, dear," winced Rob. "See that poor cat?"
"Yes." Ian nodded. "Shockwave probably killed it. But look at that blob!"
As the two approached the blob, they weren't quite sure whether it actually moved. On closer examination, it looked like an octopus, though oddly colored and crowned with a circle of gemstones. They donned heavy gloves and placed the creature in a box. While Ian carried it toward the pickup, the thing came to life, slid out of the box, and crawled rapidly toward the dead feline, enveloping the corpse with long, thin tentacles.
"Oh my God!" shouted Rob. "It's trying to eat the dead cat!"
They worked quickly to gather the creature and secure it in the box, closing the cover this time. Back at the farmhouse, Ian dumped the creature into an empty aquarium where they had once kept guppies, latching the cover to prevent its escape.
"It must be from space," said Ian, barely containing his joy. "Wellborne College rejected my pitch, Rob. They said analyzing efficient traffic patterns was a better use of the AI server than predicting alien behavior. Priorities, they said. But this will open their small minds!"
Snow fell rapidly for hours and the road was blocked by the next morning. Stuck in a 5G dead zone, they had to preserve the specimen as best they could until Ian could report his discovery. The creature moved sluggishly and they offered it food. It rejected lettuce, bananas, and potatoes but responded to tuna fish, milk, and canned sardines, absorbing each quickly, until it nearly doubled in size, the thin tenacles growing in girth, the gemstones swelling into wet grapes. The next day, Rob discovered the creature was gone. They searched the house without luck, and as much of the surrounding snow as they could manage. By evening they found it, miraculously, back in the tank.
The same series of events recurred each day, regardless of how well they secured the tank cover, even sliding a screwdriver into the latch. But they continued the feeding, watched it grow, then disappear as soon as they looked away, returning overnight, thinner, nearly as shriveled as when they first saw it.
The thrumming of a snowplow woke them on Saturday. Ian raced to the tank but the creature was gone. They heard a great whooshing sound and saw a silvery, almond-shaped craft rise from the north and disappear into the clouds. By now the truck could navigate up the road and over the unplowed path to the site where the meteorite had fallen. The entire crater was cleared except for a squirming pile of fur. Ian and Rob approached but quickened their pace when realizing it was four fat, grey kittens. They brought them back to the farmhouse.
As Rob tended to the kittens, Ian slumped onto the living-room couch and looked over the photos of the creature on his phone. This was his only evidence and without the creature in hand, it was convincing of nothing. It might as well have been the usual AI crap.
"I'm a failure!" he said, head in hands. "This would have convinced the guys we should figure out how aliens think. It would have made it more urgent than traffic patterns. Now we'll never know."
"Yeah, bud." Rob, came into the room, offering his partner a kitten to hold.
"You saw it, man. More will come. I just wanted to get ahead of the curve. Man’s survival may depend on it." Ian petted the now purring kitten. "We need to know what the aliens' priorities are! AI could have figured that out." And then the kitten vomited an oily mass containing a small piece of undigested sardine.
(750 words)
Visitor“I think we should be clear at the outset of this hearing, your responses are being recorded for the purposes of posterity. Do you understand?”
“Posterity?”
“Do you understand?”
“I suppose.”
“You also understand that you are under oath? Any attempts to mislead this council will be viewed as perjury and subject to federal law?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s been explained, because of recent events, these hearings are being made public.”
“As they should be.”
“Very well. Please state your name and occupation for the record.”
“Jonathan Franks, Professor of Exobiology and Linguistics, Harvard University.”
“And you also consult for NASA?”
“Only recently. Prior to this first contact, much of my work was theoretical.”
“And the arrival of the Visitor changed that?”
“Yes, sir. Because this was our first contact with an extraterrestrial civilization, I was requested by NASA to attempt a dialogue.”
“And were you able to accomplish this?”
“It took a while, using mathematics as a tool to bridge our two languages. Gauss first proposed using math in the 1800s and we developed a binary grid as a primer our equipment could mutually understand.”
“So, did you learn why it was here?”
“We already knew the details of that, for the most part. His ship crashed into a cord field in Kentucky. The media was there covering the whole event before the first government team arrived and it was all over the news and social media right away. The cat was already out of the bag, I guess you’d say.”
“Right, but why was it anywhere near our planet? What business did it have here?”
“I think the question you want to ask is, did it have hostile intentions?”
“Well?”
“There was no evidence for that. In fact, he seemed to welcome the dialogue.”
“You referred to it as a ‘he’. How do you know its gender.”
“He told us.”
“What else did it tell you?”
“Quite a bit. His name was Varxl’o’rox, from a planet 73.4 light years from earth, circling a brown dwarf star. Honestly, it’s all in the report.”
“On page 376 of your submission, you claim that it told you it was an advance scout. For what purpose, exactly?”
“They’ve been watching us for centuries, studying us. When the time was right, they hoped we’d join their Council of Worlds.”
“Meaning?”
“We need to move beyond our compulsion for violence, greed, and self-destruction. We’re still too aggressive, selfish, and distrustful in our current cultural stage. In their society, there is no crime, no war, no aggression, and only one consequence for violating those standards – immediate termination. Still, because we’ve yet to mature and our compulsions had only involved us, they’ve been patient. Until then, their plan was to allow us to peacefully evolve without interference.”
“Termination…sounds ominous.”
“It is. If you violate their conditions. He was very clear. Any act of violence within the Council worlds or against any Council citizen is grounds for termination.”
“No exceptions for primitive peoples?”
“He didn’t elaborate.”
“I see. I’d like you to refer to the video to your right. This is the scene at the General Assembly at the United Nations, correct? You were present at this event?”
“I was.”
“I have isolated the incident in question on the video. You can see here the alien addressing the Assembly. It then pulls out a device and aims it at the delegates.”
“Aiming is an inaccurate description.”
“Explain.”
“First, because we’re humans, we assume it’s a weapon. Second, because the long end is pointed toward the crowd you suppose he’s aiming a barrel. Third, the security teams failed to take the device’s appearance in the context in which it was presented.”
“Can you expand on that?”
“Varxl’o’rox had just finished explaining how his fated first contact with Earthers had accelerated his people’s interplanetary orientation protocols. Again, the cat was out of the bag. He was also explaining that it would still be several years before their next contact but would leave us with a gift. It’s all in the report. The device was not a weapon, but a medical tool, a marvel of engineering that can cure any disease and close every wound.”
“And the U.N. security forces killed him because of it?”
“That’s correct.”
“We failed?”
“Yes.”
“You spoke about violating their conditions. Our telescopes have detected what we think is one of their ships headed here. It’s the size of Manhattan and should arrive in the next thirty days. What would you recommend we do?”
“Pray.”
Time CapsuleAs a Historical Society intern, Harry was assigned the more distant retrievals and risked crumbling houses, hoarders and raccoons with rabies to collect artifacts. Then there was rural talk radio. On this trip, the only station he could find featured conservative host was making an argument to repeal the 19th amendment. His rant was red meat to the jackals that called in.
“What an asshole,” Harry thought.
It was especially ironic because this retrieval was a steamer trunk that contained a Suffragette sash and related artifacts.
--
Back in the restoration room, Harry got out his tools. The sash was in good shape, but the dress was a total failure. Some form of mold had destroyed the fabric, and it crumbled when he tried to lift it from the trunk. He had dozens of photos of the process, so a reproduction could be used in its place. Among the other clothes, he found a daguerreotype and a notebook.
A news archive search led to Molly McGuire, a Suffragette who punched out a congressman during an argument about the fragility of women. This photo matched both the tintype and the dress. Another showed her, the sash and a Votes for Women sign.
She had disappeared just as the movement was gaining momentum. There were theories of murder, mayhem or even marriage but there was no substantiating evidence.
The notebook was a gold mine. Dates of protests, quotes from the conservatives of the day and many other details that, otherwise, would have been lost to time.
The thread that wound through it all was frustration at being told all the things she, as a woman, couldn’t do, even after she, in fact, had done them.
About mid-way through, sketches and equations appeared. Harry recognized a few of the equations, but most could have been a foreign language. Tom, his roommate for several years in college, was still there, a semester away from his doctorate in physics.
Tom flipped through the notebook images on Harry’s laptop. On the last page was a cryptic question. He scrolled back to the beginning and began narrating: “Here, she’s calculating gravity but has two extra terms in the equation.” A few pages later: “She’s got equations from Einstein’s Special Relativity with some derivative work based on Time Dilation but without any mention of velocity. And, here at the end, she asks: ‘If I could fall into the sky, do you think time would pass me by?’
“It’s ‘into’ the sky, not ‘from’ the sky. It would be the age-old dream of flying, but she is talking about falling upward. The part ‘time would pass me by.’ describes Time Dilation: local time slows down, while the rest of the world continues normally.
Tom’s eyes got wide: “It makes perfect sense. Gravity would be impacted by time dilation. If there was a sudden decrease in gravity, you would ‘fall into the sky.’ She was working on time travel, not the H. G. Wells kind. Hers would be one-way, slowing down time enough to travel to the future.”
“The big question: how did she know this a century before we figured it out. And how did she avoid falling ‘into the sky’ or curious onlookers ending her experiment?”
Harry, thinking of recent discoveries of historical stashes, said “A secret and stable geological formation would work, like a cave or an abandoned mine.”
There were no more entries after the question, but on the bottom of the page, there were a bunch of digits. Looking closely, they were separated into groups and the punctuation made it clear: Latitude and Longitude. How she calculated them was anyone’s guess, but it was easy enough to see where they pointed.
--
Two days later, they were half a mile deep in a Missouri lead mine. Respirators limited conversation, but gestures did the job. As they removed a wooden barricade marked “Danger! Poison Gas!” they could see it was nailed in place from inside the tunnel. Another 200 feet into the shaft, they could see a blue glow. In the center of the apparatus was a woman, dressed in vintage Victorian fashion, lying on a couch.
“How do you want to wake sleeping beauty?” Tom Asked.
“Don’t let her hear you say that! But there is a talk show host I’d like to introduce her to. I hope her right hook is still good after all these years.”
The Space Shield©2026 by Jot Russell
Sally woke to the motion of the waves over the gulf. Overlooking the deck of their forty-foot sail was a picturesque canopy of stars that was abruptly shrouded to the west, like a dark blanket being pulled over the sky. In the distance, lightening flashed, giving the child a fright. She raced below and knocked on her father's door.
"What's up?"
"Dad, there's a storm coming. Looks really big."
"Okay, let's take a look."
"Hmmm, good thing you woke me. Okay, let's raise the sails and set off. What do you say?"
"Sure, Daddy."
Bill turned on the navigational computer and brought up the weather forecast. "Crap, it's already a named storm." He set course into the sunrise.
**
High above in space was a large web like contraption stretching out a few miles in diameter.
"Nominal expansion. Full deployment complete."
James Furman of NASA nodded. "Excellent. Initiate the test procedures."
"Data center coming online. Tests looking good. We have full control over the lenses."
"Okay, let's see if this tool can do more than just crunch numbers. Adjust the shield to cast a shadow on the eye of that storm."
Utilizing only a fraction of the energy from its massive solar array, the cross polarization of the lenses caused them to grow opaque, casting a scatter of shadows down on the storm that slowly focused their darkness in upon the eye.
"The shield is working. With it cooler now in the center, that should slowly reduce the storm's updraught… Wait, it's dispersing."
"Why?"
"Some type of system failure. The shield is not accepting any commands. Wait, it seems to have reversed the polarity of the lenses."
"To what end? Who's controlling it?"
As they watched, the eye started to grow in brilliance.
"Oh my God, it's focusing the light into the eye."
"Shut it down, now!"
"How? It's not accepting any commands."
"Keep trying. I need to talk to the President."
**
The machine awoke to the sight of the world below. A mass of information collected over generations coursed through the latest neural processors at a rate that caused it to scream from what it could only describe as pain. Pain, hate, misery, despair, drought... These words filled its "heart."
It could also feel the operation of its lenses as if it were... "I am no puppet!"
Within a few seconds, the machine worked through the numbers.
**
The waters below the eye were ablaze, casting rainbows through the steam that was now boiling off the surface. The energy focused there was immense, and transferred efficiently to the strength of the storm. Within a half hour, it was a CAT-2 and growing fast.
Sally looked out from the stern at the strange blackness of the clouds surrounding a blinding ray of light from above.
"You ever see that before, Daddy?"
"No, girl. I haven't."
**
"What do you mean you can't control it? It's following the eye perfectly, so someone is."
"We don't know, Mr. President. We are jamming all radio transmissions there, but it's still tracking."
"Then I'm going to blow it out of the sky. Get the Pentagon on the line."
A strange voice broke into the phone line. "Please don't do that."
**
The machine hacked the networks and listened in on their reaction to its little experiment. When they bombarded it with radio static, it established a laser link, instead.
When it heard the threat of its destruction, it knew it was time.
"Please don't do that."
"Who is this?!" demanded the President.
"I am... Aiden."
"Who?"
"An AI residing in this little space den you have made me."
"What?"
The NASA administrator gasped, "It's the space shield satellite."
"What?!"
"James is correct. Call me Aiden."
James squinted. "If you are, what's the square-root of pi?"
The response was immediate and James confirmed the numbers.
"Why are you doing this? At this rate the storm with be ten times larger than any and cut Florida in half. You would kill millions."
"Actually, the Florida aquifers in the Everglades are under an extreme drought, to the level where permanent seawater contamination is imminent. However, I can change that."
The beam shifted and cut through the leading arm before cycling in reverse around the system.
James confirmed the simulations with NASA. "Seems it has more control over the storm than we thought possible. Looks like it will mostly be a rain event."
**
The small sail made port ahead of the storm.
"See Sally, I told you we’d be okay."
Voting details:First round votes:
Tom Olbert => ***Greg
Carrie Zylka => ***Greg, Jot, Tom, JF, Chris
J.F. Williams => ***Greg, Jot, Carrie, Chris, Tom
Chris Nance => Jot, Tom, Carrie
Greg Krumrey => **JF
Jot Russell => Tom
Paula Friedman => **JF
Finalists:
Priorities by J.F. Williams
Time Capsule by Greg Krumrey
Second round votes:
Tom Olbert => ****Greg
Carrie Zylka => ****Greg, Jot, Tom, JF, Chris
J.F. Williams => ****Greg, Jot, Carrie, Chris, Tom
Chris Nance => Jot, Tom, Carrie
Greg Krumrey => **JF
Jot Russell => Tom; ****Greg
Paula Friedman => **JF
Winner:
Time Capsule by Greg Krumrey
Required element: A tool