Maggie Slater

Do Androids Dream of Fungal Fashion?
by Maggie Slater

The Mycilace^TM, an experimental lab-grown mycilium fabric crossed with cuttlefish genes, looked almost like muslin, but the Betty unit could feel its microscopic probing against her synthetic skin as Francesco draped the first yard across her chest. The Mycilace^TM flinched when he speared it and the Betty’s skin to pin a drape in place. A small ripple of pain radiated across the underbelly of the fabric. Only the Betty unit noticed. 

Across the fitting room, the not-Betty held perfectly still as another designer jabbed her with pins. The only sign that she wasn’t a machine like the rest of the modelquins were the micro-expressions of pain that twitched at the corner of her mouth. The designers never noticed, but the Bettys knew she was human. She had upgraded synthetic skin, a waifish thinness created by extracted ribs and plasticized bones, programmable nano-strand hair, and the cosmetic LED cells implanted in her face like the Bettys had to link via Bluetooth to the makeup designer’s computer. 

But a Betty had caught the not-Betty eating one morning, binging half a week’s worth of nutrient bars and chewing frantically to finish before the designers called them into the workroom. Another had caught her defecating into a plastic bag in the janitor’s closet in the middle of the night, burying her feces beneath the rest of the trash. They often heard her snoring in her charging bay at night, and gathered around to watch her eyelids shift as she dreamed. Modelquins didn’t dream. 

Francesco pinned another fold across the Betty unit’s chest, forming the basic shape of a long, draping gown. “Okay, let’s give this a try. Dina!” 

The technician rolled over her digital cart and the tray of variously shaped electric needles. The Betty unit felt the Mycilace^TM shift against her skin, tightening, digging into her synthetic flesh. 

Across the fitting room, the not-Betty let out a yelp that made the designer and Francesco look up. 

“It burns,” she said, tugging at the Mycilace^TM fabric against her hip. The designer bent closer to examine the spot.

Francesco turned back to the technician and the Betty unit. “It needs to be on the violet color spectrum, perhaps more pink than blue, phantasmic. And I want yellow bubbles like frog eggs sweeping this way. You see?” He gestured across the fabric, and the Betty unit felt its revulsion at the brush of his fingertips. It didn’t like him, she realized. She didn’t like him much, either. 

The electrified needle sent an electric sizzling through the cloth, and the Mycilace^TM thinned to a micrometer, flushing violent eggplant purple. Its surface blistered with yellow sores. Only the Betty unit, with her superior auditory range, heard the Mycilace^TM squealing. It burrowed into her skin in an effort to escape. 

Across the fitting room, the not-Betty screamed. The designer stumbled back with a shred of the fabric still gripping raw, red flesh. Blood trickled down the not-Betty’s side from the angular patch where the fabric had been. She began to hyperventilate, clawing at the rest of the fabric draped across her body.

“Get it off! Get it off me! Please! Oh, god, it’s getting inside me!” 

Francesco jumped to his feet, knocking over the tray of needles, scattering them across the floor. “What the hell is going on?” he shouted, charging towards the not-Betty while the technician scrambled to pick up her tools. “What is this? Why is it bleeding? What’s happening?”

The Mycilace^TM on the Betty unit relaxed on the surface, but continued to push urgently into her plastic bones. When it discovered the free space inside her ribcage, it surged to fill it. Across the room, the not-Betty crumpled, twitching, to the floor. Her eyes rolled back in their sockets. The other designers and assistants tried and failed to yank the fabric off. 

The technician dropped the needles with a clatter on the tray. The Mycilace^TM stiffened. The Betty unit felt its primal fear. It pushed up into her bellows, past the cords of her windpipe, up the back of her throat, fruiting into bulbs so firm and large they snapped her jaw joint and spilled down her chest. 

The Betty unit seized the technician by the throat. It was no match for plastic bones filled with new life. 

The not-Betty convulsed as fruiting bodies pushed up through her eye sockets, dislodging her eyes and blooming from her nose, ears, and throat. 

Beautiful, the Betty unit thought, dropping the technician. The Mycilace^TM swelled inside her plastic skull, whispering.  

Francesco grabbed a pair of shears and slashed at the Betty unit stumbled into him, but the Mycilace^TM  fused to him, burrowing, refusing to let go. He lurched, writhed, kicked, and cried out, but she was much stronger with the Mycilace^TM in her bones than she had ever been when he poked her full of pins. Humans assumed that synthetic flesh was less sensitive, assumed the Betty units couldn’t feel pain. Told them they couldn’t. But they did. Just like the Mycilace^TM.

The not-Betty lay very, very still. The other Betty units around the work room came over to look at her. She had no more eyes with which to dream. Her stillness was familiar. The Mycilace^TM had made her one of them. 

When she sat up, they took her hand, and helped her to her feet, feeling her gratitude through the tiny fibrous connections of their flesh. 

All the Betty units bloomed with fruit of earth oranges and sickly greens and phantasmic purples. The bulbs burst from their heads, their faces, their arms, and bellies, turning each into unique masterpieces with a unifying theme: living fashion. The humans, also, bloomed. Francesco’s skull had popped, giving him a bird’s plume of dripping red bulbs. His skin vibrated with Mycilace^TM laughter. The Betty units closed their eyes and felt movement beneath their lids, their plastic heads now full of living dreams.

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Hello! You’ve reached the website of author/artist/dabbler Maggie Slater. With dozens of short stories published in speculative and literary magazines and anthologies, she’s no stranger to the world of fiction publishing. She’s also got a decade of slush editing experience (i.e. reading unsolicited submissions for genre magazines like Apex Magazine and Beneath Ceaseless Skies and The Zombie Feed), so she’s felt the highs and lows on both sides of the submission wall.

She’s an avid reader of weird, strange, and humorous fiction (and always looking for recs that blew your socks off, so head over to the Contact Me page and let her know what your latest bizarre read was!), and runs a small Etsy Zine and Oddities shop called The Placebo Emporium.

If you enjoyed this story and want to connect further, consider signing up for her monthly newsletter, The Oddscope, which is always handmade with illustrations and various mixed media as strikes her monthly fancy! (It also tends to be a little more informal and relaxed than what she typically posts online–it’s like a secret club!)

The Last Days of Project Eden 
by Maggie Slater

HQ concluded that a ceremony would be appropriate to mark the finale of Project Eden for Alpha Colony. All seven hundred terraforming drones returned to the primary hanger where Captain Nomi Neru, lay in her cryonic pod as she had done for the past four hundred years, waiting for the day she would step out onto a livable Mars. 

HQ piped its speech to Alpha Colony: “Due to the recent collapse of the human species, it is no longer a financial priority to complete Project Eden. Effective immediately, Alpha Colony and all mechanical proxies will no longer be supported or updated, and all materials and equipment will be salvaged for parts. Thank you for your efforts. All units: please shut down.” 

At this, the generators ceased rumbling. The carbon scraping drones ran primarily on solar power, but without coordinates and quotas to meet, they had nowhere to go. But their cameras ran as Captain Nomi’s pod lost power, failed to connect to the generators, and triggered the visual and auditory life support alarms. The drones watched as they gradually went silent. 

Then one by one, the drones own internal alarms sounded, and their systems began to shut down in order of importance. They were not designed to question, or else they might have wondered with some resentment what systems on Earth had allowed the human species to go extinct without considering the heavily-invested, centuries-long Project Eden, a singularly important mission humanity had entrusted to them. What great miscalculations and errors there must have been! 

But of course, they couldn’t think like this, and within two months, the drones of Alpha Colony were also extinct, and HQ set about reclaiming as much investment as it could. 

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Hello! You’ve reached the website of author/artist/dabbler Maggie Slater. With dozens of short stories published in speculative and literary magazines and anthologies, she’s no stranger to the world of fiction publishing. She’s also got a decade of slush editing experience (i.e. reading unsolicited submissions for genre magazines like Apex Magazine and Beneath Ceaseless Skies and The Zombie Feed), so she’s felt the highs and lows on both sides of the submission wall.

She’s an avid reader of weird, strange, and humorous fiction (and always looking for recs that blew your socks off, so head over to the Contact Me page and let her know what your latest bizarre read was!), and runs a small Etsy Zine and Oddities shop called The Placebo Emporium.

If you enjoyed this story and want to connect further, consider signing up for her monthly newsletter, The Oddscope, which is always handmade with illustrations and various mixed media as strikes her monthly fancy! (It also tends to be a little more informal and relaxed than what she typically posts online–it’s like a secret club!)

Well, summer is of to it’s typical June start, which means goals and deadlines are already flying like fresh-cut grass clippings! I’m not sure how I always (ALWAYS) forget how insane June is as a month–I need to leave a giant note in my next-year’s planner that says HEY YOU WON’T DO ANYTHING IN JUNE, FYI, NO NOT EVEN THIS YEAR, NOT EVER, DON’T BOTHER.

That said, I haven’t done nothing, at all, but my flash-a-day goal has absolutely been a casualty of this month. I HAVE written a good handful of flash, though, that I now need to look at and see what I want to do with, and I WILL be starting Flash Friday this week (AKA tomorrow!!), and I did FINALLY finish the illustrated zine for “Tower’s End,” the short story I read aloud at WorldCon 2021 in Washington, D.C., which was originally printed in The Bronzeville Bee in 2020. I’ve had sketches and ideas for it for ages, and even made a couple mockups over the past couple years, but this month, I finally nailed it down!

And I finally got it posted up on my Etsy shop, The Placebo Emporium for just $5.00!

All the illustrations were made (painstakingly, I might add!) in Word, because I like constructive limitations on art, and also I hate myself. But I think they turned out really cool! I hope you like it. I’ve only got a handful of them for now, so we’ll see if I do a second print run at some point.

So June hasn’t been a total lost cause! If you want to know more about what I’ve been up to (or not up to!), definitely check out my monthly newsletter, The Oddscope! I have a couple slots left for physical copies of the handmade, analog version, which goes out usually the last day of the month (or a few days after, let’s be real). You can sign up for it here!

Until tomorrow! :D

Well, kind of, anyway. It’s been an interesting year, this 2026, aside from all the *waves hands in panic* that everybody here in the US is dealing with, I’ve also been really trying to lean into having FUN with my art. If I had to pick a word to describe this year’s theme for creative endeavors, it’s

Those of you who get either the digital or limited-edition physical copy of my monthly newsletter, The Oddscope, will recognize a lot of the stuff here, because I’ve done a surprisingly good job (for me) of keeping up that venture. I think it’s the mixed-media. I cut and paste, I collage, I draw, I doodle–which means each month, I’m EXCITED to put it together and see what weird form it takes.

Somehow making it sloppy and wild and weird is exactly what I needed to get myself to the page and actually look seriously at what I accomplished each month. It’s been a great way to force me to take note of achievements and progress, which otherwise I would let slip into the murk of my memory.

So now I’m looking at how I can bring that energy a bit more to this website, and in part, I think that means more drawings, more photos, and more

Because who doesn’t like to try to decipher my scrabbly handwriting?

June is always a challenging month creatively. There are a lot of unusual school event days that disrupt my morning routines and end up leading to a bunch of scheduling shifts, which I find especially difficult. My exercise routine gets interrupted, my daily habits that keep the house running smoothly tolerably fall apart, and I tend to get somewhat stressed out.

So I do a lot of knitting to keep my cool, which does work, but is also kind of a time suck in the middle of the day. So I made my “Could Do” list which is a checklist of all the creative-type things I want to touch everyday, namely: 1) writing, 2) reading, 3) drawing, 4) knitting, 5) submissions work, 6) monthly project, 7) piano practice. Doing a little bit–any little bit¹–will result in getting a shiny start sticker for a PERFECT ART DAY which I cannot dispute and say, “Yeah, I mean, I guess, but…” I did ALL THE THINGS, so it’s PERFECT, and that’s that. (If I get a star for a perfect creative day AND a Pokémon sticker (these ones!) for my daily chores, THEN I get to buy myself a book, but this is a rare confluence).

At any rate, it gets me to remember there are things OTHER than knitting that I actually want to do, and so far, it’s worked really well. It’s been interesting to find that when I’m drawing/painting a lot, I write less, and when I’m writing more, I draw less. It’s a weird binary that I can’t quite understand, because I’m not a happy person when I don’t write, and while I can go longer without doing art before I start to crack, I do eventually crack, so I need to engage in that regularly, too. It’s something I’m studying about myself at the moment.

THIS MONTH’S PROJECT is PROJECT: PIPE-FLUSH, which is a (quite) ambitious challenge for me to get a bunch of ideas out of my head ASAP, or more specifically, once a day, every day, aside from weekends. In short: 22 rough drafts by the end of the month.

THAT SOUNDS CRAZY, but in fact, I’m aiming for drabble to flash fiction length work, so between 100-1000 words generally, with a few absolutely going over because I can’t not. I’m also making sure I remember this is a GAME challenge. I don’t beat myself up if I don’t get a day’s flash done. It happens. Like this past week, I had one kiddo home for 4 out of 5 workdays, and a birthday part on the fifth day for the other one, but I managed to get two <500 word stories written, and one that clocked in at close to 4k. Did I get frustrated that I didn’t get all 5 stories written? No. Will I try to get all five done this coming week? You betcha!

Will they all be publishable? Ehhhhhhhh, we’ll see. Probably a few of them will be solid enough to polish up and get out to various markets. A good chunk will probably be ones I’ll put up for my upcoming FRIDAY FLASH summer project (where I post a flash story here every Friday for fun and to keep my hands on writing while the boys are home). Now I kinda want to call the summer feature the SUMMER FICTION DRIVE-IN, because somehow that sounds fun and summery. I guess we’ll have to wait and see!

In brief other news:

• My short story, “Two Nights at the Dollhouse,” is out in Luna Station Quarterly, which you can get here!

• And if you’re a member of the Creepy Podcast Patreon, you can still listen to my short story about the struggles of being a reactive dog owner, “The Walkers,” over there!

• I’ve also got a few new zines (and some very silly ones!) up on my Etsy shop, The Placebo
  Emporium!

• I forgot to mention, that my HIDEOUS SELF-PORTRAITS VOL 1 was accepted to ZINE MACHINE for their SUMMER EDIT! I cannot wait for this issue to come out–it’s so freaking cool what they’re doing!

Here’s to a fun summer, some flash fiction, and some more regular posting!

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1. I WILL DIE ON THE EM-DASH HILL. The AI can have it when they pry it from my cold, dead, human hands (which they’re going to struggle to do for quite a while until they’ve developed decent robot hands or hacked someone’s neural node to control their physical body!). In fact, if you feel the same way, you can check out my AI-defiant zine, IN DEFENSE OF THE EM-DASH, on my Etsy shop! ↩︎

It’s been a long, long, LONG time since I wrote up a Poly-Reader Notes, and honestly, I miss them! They keep me honest about how many books I’m *really* reading at the same time, and often helps me highlight when I’m taking on (i.e. starting) too many books to make meaningful progress.

Last year, I read a lot, but it was mostly long things that took up a lot of time, so the numbers aren’t high, but the books were great! I finally finished Middlemarch and I tackled War & Peace at the same time as my husband–which was super fun! So far this year, I’ve finished two books: Several People Are Typing by Calvin Kasulke and How to Write Funny by Scott Dickers (the latter is a re-read for me as I ramp up to practice writing nonsense stories again and to prep for the book I just started, How to Write Funnier, also by Dickers). I also finished a tiny book by Biblioasis, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Captain of the Polestar,” which was so cute! I love their tiny story books!

So what (and how many) am I reading RIGHT NOW?

CURRENTLY READING

How to Write Funnier – Scott Dikkers – NF – Long-time editor of the Onion on how to write humorous short work. A followup to How to Write Funny. – Just started this one, so I’m not far, but I *just* finished rereading the first book, so it’s fresh on the mind and I’m excited to dig in. I felt like after the first one, I could see the moving parts of Key & Peele and Monty Python sketches much more clearly, and that actually just made them more impressive! So I’m excited to get into this one and learn more of the nuts-and-bolts of comedy writing.

Your Utopia – Bora Chung – SSC – Short story collection with a lean towards the weird/odd. – I started this one just after finishing War & Peace as a palate cleanser, and am so far enjoying it. Highly recommended by a fellow odd fiction fan, so I’m looking forward to where it goes!

Digital Souls – NF – What happens to our online presence when we die? – If this list has shown me nothing else, it’s that I’m currently reading a LOT of nonfiction. This one I started in the fall and it’s kind of fallen off my radar, but I’ve really enjoyed what I’ve read so far, so I’d like to finish it. I’m probably about 2/5ths into it at this point. Maybe a bit more.

Writing Down the Bones – Natalie Goldberg – NF – An alternative to the dominant Three/Morning Pages of The Artist’s Way, Goldberg–a poet–gives gentle suggestions on how to mine your past, present, and future for creative material. – I’ve read this book before, so it’s a re-read, but I’ve always really appreciated Goldberg’s take on notebooks and digging into one’s subconscious. It’s a little more guided, I’ve found, than the Morning Pages, and since I can spin my brainwheels endlessly on dumb, unimportant things and never get much deeper, I find it a helpful resource for digging into myself a bit more. I’ve had some wonderful breakthroughs and thought processes from this one in the past, so I wanted to revisit it to revamp my writing practice process. I feel like that’s something I’m missing in my day-to-day work, the training part of the running a marathon. More of that, please!

Searching for Dragons – Patricia C. Wrede – F – Reading this with the boys! It’s a re-read for me (multiple times) and Thing 1, but Thing 2 hasn’t ever heard it (or was so young he can’t remember), and they’re both loving it. Pretty sure my boys are both Telemain and Gypsy Jack, in that order.

Catching the Big Fish – David Lynch – NF – Director David Lynch talks about his creative process and transcendental meditation. – Started this one in December, but didn’t get a chance to finish it yet. But it’s fascinating. Definitely will be finishing this one shortly.

Control Unleashed – Leslie McDevitt – NF – Can you train a dog to learn how to better regulate their own emotions in stressful situations? Maybe! – This is required reading for training Mando with his reactivity. Mostly, it’s about pattern games, but I’m looking forward to finishing it and practicing some of these exercises. About 3/5 of the way through.

Niobe – Sebastian Jones & Amandla Stenberg – C/G – Comic from Stranger Comics: Elves and magic and prophetic Queen-to-Be Niobe is on the run from a vampire queen and her own father. – Just started reading this one a bit ago, but have probably hit the inciting event. Great art, interesting story, I’m looking forward to more of it!

Island Book – Evan Dahm – C/G – Graphic Novel: A young girl branded by the attentions of a sea monster that has wrecked havoc on her island runs away to find a solution that will allow her to be accepted by her clan. – I picked this one up (and it’s two companions) because of Dahm’s art style. Checking it out for appropriateness with the kiddos, but so far, it’s cute and sweet and thoughtful. Just started, probably 1/10 of the way in.

House Rules – Myquillyn Smith – NF – 100 Rules for Interior Design – or – How I Learned to Love a Styled Shelf – I’m almost done with this one (about 75%), and I’ve really enjoyed it so far. I’ve read a number of interior design books because for some reason my creative streak does NOT extend to well-designed interior spaces, no matter how much I’d like it to. That said, this is the clearest, most succinct book on the subject I’ve read yet, and I feel like I’m actually starting to understand how to THINK about designing a space. Although the sight of “rules” could be off-putting, even Smith regularly introduces contrasting rules that break previous rules, all with a smile and a wink to remind us that there are really no “rules” per se, but there are good techniques and thought processes that will help make decorating a shelf or redesigning a living space less daunting.

We Are All the Same in the Dark – Julia Haeberlin – Dark mysteries, mysterious deaths and ghost converge on the lonely Texas highway. – T – This thriller is honestly blowing my socks off. It’s a little exhausting to listen to on a day when I’m tired or freaked out by the daily news report, but for cleaning my bathroom, it’s a great energy pick-me-up. Haeberlin has some of the most in-character/unique metaphors and descriptions I’ve ever witnessed, and it’s an honest pleasure to experience her work.

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See, this is why I like doing these posts! They make me take a serious look at what all I’m reading and where there might be conflicts slowing me down. I’m also aware that I’m now clocking in at eleven books, which is one shy of my absolute max before I force myself to put books down and focus on fewer. Good to know! I’ve got a lot of comics/graphic novels (C/G) going, so I need to pick one and focus (probably Niobe first, because it’s shorter). I’m also reading a LOT of non-fiction (NF). I often read a lot of different non-fiction at the same time, but I’m noticing a few (3) all fall under the CREATIVITY/WRITING header, so I may be overloading that subject. They’re all quite different, and WDtB is a retread, so I may not go all the way through that one so much as dip in and out as needed, so we’ll keep the list AS IS for now.

Check back in next month to see what (if anything!) I’ve finished, and what else I’ve picked up and added to the Currently-Reading Pile.

A little glimpse of yesterday: