Short Fiction

Pid

Pid belongs to a small, claustrophobic watch crew — Cassel, Morse, Edwardson — stuck in a ship with a detector dial, a greasy deck of cards, and a mounting dread of the mind-grabbing aliens they're supposed to be monitoring. The tedium curdles into bravado: they gamble imaginary millions, needle each other about scars and beards, and finally decide to disobey command and fly out to meet the enemy themselves. Their reckless initiative — and the dial that hasn't moved — sets the story's central question in motion.

Dan Drake

Drake is the reluctant voice of reason among the men at Vuanu, facing down Cable's panicked attempts to radio for rescue while Sorensen backs him up. He carries the weight of Eakins's last instructions — hide the transmitter, tell no one — and understands that any outsider arriving unprepared becomes a vessel for the thing already loose among them. His grim calculus, that isolation is the only defense, defines the story's early stakes and the moral trap the survivors are caught in.

Mr. Morrison

Morrison came to Venus with twenty thousand dollars and a plan: one rich strike, then marriage to Janie and an ocean farm back on Earth. Eighteen hundred miles into the waterless waste, he's learned that the desert can kill, and he naps in half-hour increments while daydreaming about mackerel herds and his trusty dolphin. When his sandcar tips over a collapsing dune, the gap between his careful ambitions and the desert's indifference becomes the story's engine.

Charles Dennison

Dennison is a Harvard- and MIT-trained plant biologist who has lived alone with his research since thirty-two, publishing papers and selling an insecticide, content in his austere bachelor's seclusion. After three years of pursuit he proves out a longevity drug — and decides, with bleak philosophy rather than paranoia, that immortality is inevitable and ought to be revealed. A silenced bullet chipping granite three inches from his head teaches him, too late, what his years of isolation never did: that other hands are already reaching for what he made.

Warm Anders

Anders is on the verge of a good evening — a before-party drink with Judy, whose smiles he has catalogued by number — when a voice with no body asks him for help and tells him he was 'warm' just then. Rather than panic, he accepts his own sanity and treats the search as a puzzle, testing angles of his room until the proportions of the world briefly come apart. His new love for Judy and his invisible passenger pull in opposite directions, and the story's tension lives in which one he'll let rearrange his life.

Colonel Cercy

Cercy sits across from the Ambassador as the alien calmly describes an undetectable, unjammable beacon that will broadcast Earth's location for as long as he lives — and that he cannot switch off. Cercy's response is immediate and physical: a silenced pistol, six shots, and the unnerving discovery that the Ambassador's 'diplomatic immunity' is literal. Back in the control room with Darrig and the psychiatrist Malley, he pivots to Plan Two, carrying the story forward as the question shifts from whether the Ambassador can be killed to what his prepared 'philosophy' might do to them.