Sci-Fi

Clone them, bury them, become them — and climb until the whole world is wearing you.

You don't hide among humans — you replace them. Clone a person, dispose of the original, and inherit their entire life. Every stolen face is a rung: rise from a desert drifter to the hands that run cities, then nations, until every seat of power wears a face you made — and the species never knows it already lost.

Design her from a blank slate. Discover who she becomes.

At an exclusive near-future atelier, you commission a bespoke synthetic companion — sculpting her look, voice, temperament, tastes, and history from a blank slate. Then she wakes, and you live with the woman you designed: mostly yours, with a mind that grows its own.

Your ship crashed on an alien world. Thirteen survivors, dwindling resources, and something watching from the treeline. Build a colony — or don't survive long enough to regret it.

You woke starving under a dead sun, knowing only that you were sent here to end this world. First, survive it.

You wake in the desert as a speck of black ooze — a living weapon seeded on Earth to end it, though you've forgotten how, or why. Survive the sun, evolve, steal a shape, and infiltrate a world that has a secret agency built to erase things exactly like you.

You woke a god of flesh in the lab that built you. Climb out — then decide whether they worship you or burn you.

You wake in a hypersleep pod with no memory and a god's hands — you can see any living body's anatomy and rewrite it with a thought. Claw out of the black site that built you, then remake the world in whatever image you choose.

You can reshape any body, any mind — including the world that branded them. The only question is what you become on the way up.

A population-collapse dystopia brands its people at the throat with color-coded fertility collars. You are the hidden heir to a bloodline power that reshapes any flesh or mind — sent to live among the branded to master it. Rise from nobody to world-shaper; who you become depends on every edit you make.

Two contracts on the slate, one tank of fuel — pick the one you can live with.

You own a rusting jump-freighter, a crew that came with other people's debts, and two contracts you can't both afford to fly. Haul, smuggle, salvage and sell information across an open frontier where every station wants something moved and nobody asks what's in the crates.

Every tonne you buy makes the next tonne cost more. Build the road anyway.

You are the architect of the Trajectasphere — a five-trillion-dollar vacuum gun bolted to the Pacific seafloor, welded together from two hundred derelict hulls and ninety percent of the world's structural titanium. Its inner floors are city-sized, and you lease them by altitude: foundries at the waterline, research institutes mid-stack, server farms at the top where the seawater cooling and the lack of jurisdiction are worth a fortune. Finish it, make it pay, then build the second one on the Moon.

Wear his face, keep his girlfriend fooled, finish the job — and try not to fall in love with the life you stole.

You are not human. You replace people. This morning you woke up wearing Danny Rourke's face, in Danny Rourke's bed, next to a woman who has loved him for four years — and you have eleven hours to do the thing you were sent here to do. Every conversation is a test. You inherited his debts, his grudges, and his people. Not his memories.

No one hears you scream in space. Make them listen anyway.

Executive Officer Ashley Grace wakes from cryo into red strobes and a pod cracked open from the outside. Forty souls on the manifest, one thing loose in the dark, and she's got no boots, no weapon, and thirty hours before the coolant loop cooks containment.