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Write a story where time functions differently to our world.

Posted in Science Fiction on Mar 22, 2024

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✍️ 41 stories

Seventeen Minutes

Submitted to Contest #243

Nineteen minutes. That’s all the time left before she had to leave for her eight hour shift at the clinic. Nineteen minutes. She knew she would come home exhausted after the late shift only to go to sleep, get up early, and do the early shift in the morning. What did her coworker call it? Clopen. The close, open. Her next bit of freedom would be the following evening. Damn. Eighteen minutes. She still had to get her dinner together and pack her bag.  She gazed at the TV, her laptop, her comfo...

28 likes 16 comments 16
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The Well and the Tower

Shortlisted for Contest #243 ⭐️

As my tongue slid over my cracked lips, a gnawing saltiness invaded my mouth. Yet, my lips remained dry. I took a sip from the bottle. I held it against my lips, but kept my mouth shut. After withdrawing the bottle, I circled reachable areas with my tongue several times. What I managed to gather, I swallowed. It was probably the last few drops of water within several tens of kilometers, so without hesitation, I hid the bottle. The well offered some relief from the heat. I was grateful for that much. I checked the ground—crumbled into tiny gr...

27 likes 18 comments 18
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The Button

Submitted to Contest #243

I was late.The quad of my high school campus - the central outdoor area of the New York Academy of Arts - was packed with protestors holding handmade signs that screamed TIME IS TIME and NO HURRY NO DELAY in red paint.I should have expected it; I'd heard on the news that a new and improved version of the Button was about to go on the market, and anytime there was news like that, there would be protests all over the city.NO HURRY NO DELAY. I shook my head. I did need to hurry. I had an appointment with Amelia Amour. She was a famous actress -...

26 likes 9 comments 9
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Thirty-Seven Seconds

Submitted to Contest #243

“Double espresso, soy milk?”, said Spencer, swiveling to receive the coffee.“Affirmative”, said Ken, plumping down at his own desk.“Good man”, said Spencer, turning back to his trading desk, where four screens of market prices were flashing away. His eyes flicked here and there.“Did I miss the action?” asked Ken, attentive to his own terminal, a mix of red and green.“We were waiting for you, and for the PMI data to be released. We figured we’d get through that hurdle, then give the new AI trade a spin,” said Spencer.They sat at the...

20 likes 14 comments 14
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Yesterday

Submitted to Contest #243

21st June 2000 The setting sun cast its last rays onto the orange, patternless curtains that shimmered and rustled like falling leaves on a dry autumn day. Izzy sat on the floor of her bedroom, drawing next to her sunshine-decorated bed. Her tongue stuck out as she wriggled to lie on her front on the grey carpet, swinging her legs, scribbling her future on a plain piece of paper. Her crayon flew over the blank slate, creating a wilderness of colours and patterns. Mumbling unintelligibly to herself as she worked, she stopped every few seconds...

18 likes 9 comments 9
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One Day Like This

Submitted to Contest #243

The back of the truck smelled of sweat, sharp with microbial sourness, not unlike the kimchi Max had been concocting in the cupboard under his kitchen sink. He got a fleeting, distant feeling that he might not enjoy any fermented foods for a long time after this.He counted everyone in the truck. Last time they had been summoned, ten years before, there were eight of them, Test Group Octagon. But this year, there were only six. Since the agreement they all signed at the start of the experiment stated the only viable reason to cease participat...

17 likes 3 comments 3
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Lost and Found

Submitted to Contest #243

I was trembling like a vibrating massage tool. It wasn't possible. I didn't want to look. My landlord's words haunted my memories. "Just don't, for any reason, go into the attic." At the time I had shrugged it off. The rent was affordable and the location convenient. Everything was perfect, so why worry about the attic?I let my eyes drift back to the attic access hatch in the ceiling and I realized my heart was pounding furiously. I could hear the blood coursing through my constricted, tense blood vessels. I watched, hardly breathing, as the...

16 likes 10 comments 10
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The Trial

Submitted to Contest #243

The prison guard was an angry man, never smiling and rarely talking. He had been there for as long as Lucas could remember. Resentful and bitter he walked the corridors, giving the impression that at some point, something absolutely terrible was to happen to him. Lucas did not share his enraged aura, but he sure had the same outlook on what was to come. Whatever awaited him outside of these prison walls, Lucas was certain that it was nothing good..The same room had been his home since childhood. The bare walls had a gray-greenish color, the ...

15 likes 5 comments 5
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On Retreat

Submitted to Contest #243

Sometimes, while he was watching his team work, Nikolai wondered what the world had been like before the Retreat; 9 to 5 jobs, long lunch breaks. He would wonder, while staring at the screen in his home that showed all of his employees dutifully typing away, how anyone could get anything done in 8 hours. Right now his team was working in Real Time. In about 20 minutes an alarm would sound all around the office indicating it was time to go On Retreat. When that happened, each one of his employees would pull out the small device that...

14 likes 8 comments 8
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Time After Time

Submitted to Contest #243

MondayI love to watch you sleep on a while each morning. When you finally awake, you stretch like a god cat, before wiping the sleep from your eye. This is my favourite part of the day. A moment of peace before we rise and join the others on the hunt. Through our tent door, the last cool of the night slinks away, and the warm of Ra’s beauty knocks loud, insistently calling us both to the service of our Pharaoh, Ramses.This has been our happy life these last seventeen years. Years that I wouldn’t change for all the gold in the great pyramid. ...

9 likes 4 comments 4
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Einstein's Nightmare

Submitted to Contest #243

A family takes a trip to a park on the first day of spring: dirt trails, a candy-colored play area, the laughter of children, high sun peeking through tall oak trees. The mother had visited this park before, many years ago, but had forgotten. As she watches her children climb the yellow jungle gym, scale the wooden mockup pirate ship, giggle as they swing on the swing set, she is reminded of that earlier trip, and that memory pulls her into the past. Now this mother watches other children playing on that very same pirate ship decades before....

9 likes 3 comments 3
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Deceptions' Dance

Submitted to Contest #243

The smell of an earthy dark roast coffee permeates through the air, enlightening my sense of smell with pure bliss as I take the last sip. The clock strikes six forty five and I feel the sun rays creating the first beam of light through the coffee shop windows, warming the skin of my face. Just as I am in the midst of daydreaming about my future, A bolt of energy jerks me back into reality, as the sudden chatter of twenty year old’s flood through the doors. I should become a coffee shop owner, they seem to do just fine with business, and I a...

8 likes 3 comments 3
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STATIC (Save A Smile for the Firing Squad)

Submitted to Contest #243

I: Lateral Movement I’ve known how I’ll die for most of my life. It’s not a parlour trick, that’s just how it works now. Ever since we picked up the transmission and made the mistake of listening intently, everyone else knows when I'll die, and I know when they’ll die and how, just from looking at them. But they already know that. It’s not just death, though that does preoccupy a lot of people's thoughts. The transmission changed the way we experience time completely. Now, we sort of see our lives as one continuous moment, birth, death and...

8 likes 4 comments 4
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A Lull

Submitted to Contest #243

Living on Mars wasn’t so bad. Wearing an oxygen tank and a mask every time you stepped outside was a chore, but you got used to it. Most of the day-to-day stuff stayed the same as Earth, you get up, you go to work, come home, visit with family and friends, fool around with hobbies, watch TV—of course, the family was a long way away and there were no TV stations on the planet, yet, but we had a huge collection of movies on our hard-drives and we could get the nightly news from Earth, just a little later. The only really tough t...

8 likes 2 comments 2
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Dark Matters

Submitted to Contest #243

Time-Slips. Magnetic Temporal Quantum Vortices. Hellacious, thieving abysses. Last I heard, there are 358 known natural occurrences of them on Earth.Time-Slips are microcosms of extreme gravitational force with hyperactive time dilation, minus the spaghettification. Whatever that all means. They don’t know what causes them. Something about dark matter, and the speed of light. And collisions. All anyone really know for sure, is that inside a Time-Slip, time slows down, so that life around you can speed up. If you want to fast-forward through ...

8 likes 12 comments 12
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