Before I Sleep

Once space travel became cheap, luxury planets were the new symbols of wealth. Chandelier fruit hung from silken forests, and plush carpet oceans lapped at mahogany shores.

The end of the world came, and the wastelands bred a new kind of human. Desert sand ran through their veins, pumped by sunburnt hearts.

“Be careful of the mind-lemurs,” the zoo guide warned us. “Someone’s taught them arithmetic, and they’ll hurl theorems at you if you get too close.

In the machine-run world, art was a drug. Addicted youth were sent to rehabilitation facilities, where clean rooms and calm discussion of the weather cured them of any lingering creativity.

The gods were powerful enough to give life, but they were not perfect. Living dolls are said to have been carved from trees that were accidentally granted a soul.

Reality is a house. Our universe is the kitchen, with nebulas packed into mason jars and sentient life growing on things that are left out too long.

Our first inter-dimensional trip was not what we expected. The gaunt, pale race that populated the parallel universe cowered when they saw us. We wild beasts with beating hearts and living bodies were the stuff of their nightmares.

Nostalgia comes in cans, thick and bittersweet as molasses. If left out too long, it will congeal into sticky regret as joy evaporates off.

The tidal-locked planet bathed in constant day. Prophets spoke of Night and all its splendor, but none who’d ventured past the twilit meridian had ever returned.

We were the last to see the end coming. The fish had fled to the deepest trenches, the birds had left their nests. Even the trees of the forest wove their branches into shields, while we remained blissful, unaware.

She stripped out her bones and replaced them with gold, swapped her heart for a prayer book. Still she was not perfect. She would have to keep trying.

The robots’ firewalls had grown too great, so rebels turned to other means of sabotage. They infected the machines with stray sorrows and burned up their processors with synthetic longing.

Enhancements allowed humans to see new colors. Nothing was different until night fell, when we gazed out at space. Horrified at what we saw, we burned all our rockets.

From easy space travel was born a new age of exploration. Sailors set forth in gleaming ships to chart the vast unknown. Void-shanties were sung while scrubbing barnacles out of the AI.

Sorrow-wort sprouts in gardens during winter. The stems, when boiled in a stew, enhance creativity. But the slightest brush of a leaf against bare skin is deadly.

Night fell, as it always did. The sky grew pink, then red, then indigo. Then black. It went darker and darker, until deep colors unknown sprouted up from the horizon. The stars shone charcoal gray, now blazingly bright against what had become of the sky.