Wendy Nikel is a speculative fiction author with a degree in elementary education, a fondness for road trips, and a terrible habit of forgetting where she’s left her cup of tea. Her short fiction has been published in Fantastic Stories of the Imagination, Daily Science Fiction, Nature: Futures, and elsewhere. Her time travel novella series, beginning with The Continuum, is available from World Weaver Press. For more info, visit wendynikel.com

Steven Fischer is a medical resident living in the Pacific Northwest of the United States. When he’s not too busy cracking open a textbook (or a patient’s thorax) you can find him exploring the Cascades by bike, boat, or boot. You can read more of his work at stevenbfischer.com or follow him on Twitter @stevenfischersf.

Peter S. Drang builds 3D printed robots by day and writes fiction by night. In prior lives, he’s been a high level software engineer, an entrepreneur who helped launch the ebook industry, and an AP Physics teacher whose diabolical labs scarred many young minds for life. This is his second appearance in FFO, and his work has appeared in Daily Science Fiction, the Flame Tree Press newsletter, and other fine fiction markets. He has numerous nonfiction credits as well, including an 850 page tome about an obscure programming language. You can find his blog at drangstories.com, including an analysis of his writing process for this story.

Andrew Kozma’s poems appear in Rogue Agent, Redactions, and Contemporary Verse 2, while his fiction appears in Apex, ergot, and Seize the Press. His first book of poems, City of Regret, won the Zone 3 First Book Award, and his second book, Orphanotrophia, was published in 2021 by Cobalt Press. You can find him on Bluesky at @thedrellum.bsky.social and visit his website at www.andrewkozma.net.

lives in New Delhi, India. She’s a lifelong fan of horror, video games and dragons or any combination of the three. She’s also got bit of a soft corner for the occasional artificial intelligence. She can usually be found at her Twitter, yelling bad opinions about TV shows.