dreamszilla

When a synthetic woman joins a lunar mining crew, the commander has mixed feelings. Image generated with OpenAI Delta 22 Lima never thought she could have feelings for anyone. She wasn't built that way - literally. As a humanoid mining engineer built for lunar service, she focused on efficiently performing her assigned tasks. Nothing else mattered - until it did. Before she arrived at the military hydrogen fuel production facility designated Lunar Forward Operating Base 29, the commander, Colonel Robert Davidson, had already decided the humanoid would not be a good fit for his unit but was undecided on a course of action to undo this blatant affront to his command. Major Jones, his executive officer, knocked twice on the bulkhead and gingerly entered the commander's office with mild trepidation, knowing how his boss felt about synthetics in the military. He came to attention and saluted. "Sir, the new humanoid engineer has just arrived on the resupply ship." "A...

A coroner joins a group of cops who have been led by an unrepentant murderer to the site of his victim, and decides to stand up to the town's corrupt sheriff. Image generated with OpenAI When the snow had melted, they found him. By the second week in March the weather had grown unseasonably warm and the snow and ice had flowed down from the mountains and drained into pits in the valley, exposing the ravaged grave to the searchers. The man had been missing four months and his remains were found on the slope of a mountain just five miles outside the town where he had lived all his life. From the head of the grave a person could watch the new Wal-Mart's parking lot as it filled up. It was a warm Sunday morning when they found him. What was left of him - what the bullets, fire and coyotes hadn't already taken as their own - they found between two aging pine trees on an incline a few hundred feet above the mountain's base. The earth was tan where the killer's spade hadn...

The Korlqar Empire's invasion of planet Earth does not go as planned when they make first contact with the world-weary manager of a fast food joint. Image generated with OpenAI The arrival of the Korlqar Empire's armed emissary went utterly unnoticed at McDuncan's, partly because it was three in the morning, partly because the staff were all quite used to weirdos, eccentrics, performance artists, influencers, aspiring comedians, and other dregs of society. Truth be told, the tall, bald, gray-skinned, male-presenting individual wearing a cloak and making a scene in the lobby didn't even stand out. "Take me to your leader!" he roared in an odd but not unusual accent, waving what looked to be a Dollar Store toy blaster - all streamlined and bright-red. "Yeah, sure, sir, whatever," sighed Latitia, the intrepid cashier and survivor of seven armed robberies. She spared one glance to the visitor's strange - not car, exactly, but some sort of flat vehic...