Short Stories from the keyboard of Michael Siciliano

• Seeding Day, Kzine, May 2013: Once each year, on the Summer Solstice, terrifying alien spacecrafts skim across the surface of the Earth seeding the land. Jack and Travis, two brothers on a Nebraskan farm, fight to save their families and their land. But something is different this year, something unstoppable.
• Another Life, The Colored Lens, June 2013: Bobby MacDonald, senior at Robert Murrow High School, has a horrifying dream of nuclear disaster, and wakes to find he has all the memories and experiences of someone else. Someone from the future. He thinks he's gone insane until, one by one, his new memories come true. Now, it's up to Bobby to save the world from a nuclear apocalypse.
• A Dose of Treachery, The Colored Lens, December 2013: Lazio, an orphan, lives with his adoptive mother at a temple in a rural farming community. But his simple life is thrown into turmoil when Paltos Xerax-Thal, a King's councilor, and his apprentice Lanna show up. They are on a mission to find a terrible weapon of destruction to use against an enemy of the King, referred to only as The Usurper. Lazio is drawn into Xerax-Thal's quest, but things are not as they seem.
• Inalienable Right, Bewildering Stories, March 2014: Naresh Somayaji, the engineering chief on the ILP starship Tarstad, is confronted with a moral dilemma when the ship's Autopsych program claims sentience. Is Amanda a soldier-slave or a sophisticated AI mimicking human emotions? Naresh must choose, and his decision will rock the very foundation of the Interstellar League of Planets.
• The Lunatic Queen, Roane Publishing's Portals Anthology, July 2014: Vazya, the Night Queen, has stolen the sun and plunged the land of Mershinka into perpetual night. Animals and crops die. Vicious creatures, half-man and half-wolf, prowl an unnatural fog. Mershinka's populace succumbs to the Night Queen's rule. But two teenagers, Pavel and Tamara, invent a plan to end her terrible reign, and set out against impossible odds.
• Unintended Consequences, Martinus Publishing's The Temporal Element II Anthology, September 2015: FBI Special Agent Cooper interviews an unassuming, twitchy man claiming to have knowledge of an upcoming terrorist attack. His story sounds like the usual crackpot fantasy of an unbalanced mind, but when Jonathan Banks provides proof that Stanley can't debunk, he begins to worry that it might actually be true.
• Evolution, Envision Future Fiction anthology by Kathy Steinemann, November 2015: Walter and his family have suffered a loss: the death of a long time butler named Gavin. But this was no ordinary death. Gavin was a sophisticated android. Their maid, Molly, yet another android, is devastated by the loss. Devastated? Androids don't have feelings, or if they do they're just clever programming made to look like feelings. Right? Walter must confront his own conscience when he starts seeing Molly in a new light.