Hugh J. O'Donnell

The ambassador surveyed the ballroom. She had to admit that Humans knew how to throw a party, but their obsession with history baffled her.
In the Hive, cultural standards were dictated by the current Queen, and she didn’t build statues to her ancestors. There was little room for living in the past, only the drumming wingbeat of the present.
But humans were always trying to recreate historical fashion, foods, and even entertainment. They were nostalgic for eras in which they hadn’t even lived.
Still, she was having a good time. And this corset was doing amazing things for her thorax.

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The night after the dust storm, I walk out into the desert. I spot the light on the horizon, a distant red dot like a fading star.
After a night and day of walking, I reach the source: a gigantic face nearly buried in the sand, fallen with only a single glowing eye visible. The last god-kings made it from metal they pulled from the stars to be an oracle that remembered them forever.
I bow before the half-sunken face and beg it to teach me of the old world. It replies in a language that no living person understands.

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The dinosaur cloning program was a huge success while it lasted. The feathered ancients were wildly popular, but the costs to clone and then to house and feed the animals was too great.
The closure left the animals in limbo. The animals couldn’t be destroyed, but there was no space for them in even the most advanced zoos.
Finally, they found spots to release them into the wild.
Critics claimed that reintroducing megafauna after millions of years would destroy the ecosystem, but things quickly stabilized. The mammals weren’t about to concede their place at the top of the food chain.

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He found the backpack abandoned on the street. It was empty, without any markings or a tag to say who it belonged to. It was a nice bag, though. So he took it home and washed it.Then he hung it in his closet with the other bags and promptly forgot about it. The backpack stayed there for years before he found it again and donated it to a secondhand shop.The backpack waited in the stockroom and then the shop floor, but nobody tried it on.But that was alright. The mimic was hungry, but it could be patient.

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The spacecraft touched down in the overgrown field, and a trio of figures climbed out, wearing full atmospheric suits.
The farmhouse was just a rotting shell, but the transmitter installed on the sagging roof still worked, even as the building succumbed to time and the elements. It had sent a signal out into the dark, a thin stream of data, and they managed to follow the thread to its source.
One of the figures nodded and released the seal on her helmet, shaking out her hair and breathing deeply. They finally returned home centuries after Earth was abandoned and lost.

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Every sunset he would climb to the viewing platform and look at the broken, blasted landscape.
In the long shadows, the damage didn’t seem so bad. He could imagine that he was observing the old world: a sea of trees or a cityscape.
In those moments, he was able to renew his faith. He could believe that restoring the environment was possible. They were wasted moments but important ones. They gave him the strength to carry on and lead the survivors through all the others.
They allowed him to cling to the illusion that he had not destroyed the world.

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His office was a gray cube in a gray building in a gray city on a gray planet. Every day, for twelve hours, he processed data and crunched numbers. He was just a cog in the Imperial Machine.
But he could see the data for what it was: Troop movements, supply allocations, and resource management. It all came down to money.
And it was easy to transpose a column here or misspell a shipping manifest there. He made a thousand little cuts.
He was never going to be a hero. But with each small gesture, he fought his own rebellion.

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The enemy’s doomsday weapons were inbound, and there was nothing more that he could do to stop them. The knight had failed the kingdom. But he could still save the princess.
He scooped her up from her hospital bed and carried her to the palace’s hot spring. As the bombs fell, he plunged them both into the boiling water.
A blue-white flash seared the sky, and then everything went eerily calm. She kicked against him, and he brought them back to the surface, coughing.
“Where?” The princess spluttered, then stopped. She looked around in horror at her kingdom, frozen solid.

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The alien robots hid themselves on Earth for decades, disguised as terrestrial machines and vehicles. They fought an endless shadow war over whether they would conquer or protect the developing planet.
Their leader of the protectors was a veteran of the conflict. The olive-green paint on his boxy chassis was a sign of experience. When he was captured, the rest of the team raced to the rescue.
But it wasn’t an enemy, but a human teenager who carjacked him while he was sleeping. They demanded to know how the boy had done it.
“Saw a video on TikTok,” he replied.

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Every year the town burned a scarecrow, and she hated the tradition. A local artist constructed one each spring, and it stood for months near the town’s welcome sign, only to be cruelly burned at the end of the year.
But when she was selected to build that year’s scarecrow, she couldn’t say ‘no.’ She tried to explain why the tradition horrified her but couldn’t find the words.
Instead, she filled her scarecrow with cunningly hidden wildflower seeds. Her creation burst with life all through the spring and summer. When autumn came, they didn’t have the heart to burn her.

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