Sent in a 418-word short story to Apokrupha’s Vignettes from the End of the World anthology. They’re looking for stories about the end of the world happening, all in 500 words or less.

I was doing a bit of research on the Large Hadron Collider, and I ended up on Wikipedia. The page was about an exotic particle called a Strangelet, made up of up, down, and strange quarks. There was a concern that one would be created, and that it would interact with other atoms and create a stable Strangelet. This would create something very similar to Vonnegut’s Ice-9.

A storyline popped into my head, and I wrote it before I went in to my day job. I love when that happens.

I hope they enjoy it. I’m in Apokrupha’s Dark Bits anthology, so perhaps the luck will continue.