The Cavalry

by João F. Silva in Issue One, November 2021

“The admiral wants you in room L17F5,” Lau tells me. “They say it’s urgent.”

As if the buzzer wasn’t enough of a reminder, I give her a quick nod and finish putting on my scrubs in shades of medical blue and military green before grabbing the most important item in my arsenal—the trusty brown rope I’ve been using since I started this.

Lau buries her face in the tablet in front of her. I’m the only one in my team with a leg on both sides of the frontline, but the four of them are still treated like superstars—because of me.

A few years ago, I would have been modest... Continue →

Phosphor’s Circle

by Annika Barranti Klein in Issue One, November 2021

First published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, May/June 2021

They only gave me the job because I’d been in the school play. I was the narrator in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, which my school put on for the same reason they’d done The Sound of Music the year before and Cheaper By The Dozen the year before that—high schools are full of kids who want to be in the musical, and those plays are about families with a LOT of children. Jacob has twelve kids, which is entirely too many, and the eleventh kid is... Continue →

Leaving Earth

by Gabrielle Johansen in Issue One, November 2021

She was only two when the now defunct U.S. government launched Skylab. Now she was pushing seventy-four, just below the waitlist cutoff to be on one of the last Mother Board Transports leaving Earth. A global consortium of corporations had decided no one above the age of seventy-five would be allowed to board. That would be it. Sayonara, Terra.

A few choices if she was left behind. Slow painful death by radiation poisoning or a quick company-sanctioned suicide, delivered via obscenely cheerful, virulently pink pills.

Jeannie knew what she wanted, and she was afraid of having... Continue →