Issue 2 ulpV ortex ShortStoriesMagazine P All stories complete The Glass Horizon An Ovi Publication 2026 Ovi Publications - All material is copyright of the Ovi & Ovi Thematic/History/Dark eMagazines Publications C Ovi eMagazines are available in Ovi/Ovi ThematicMagazines and OviPedia pages in all forms PDF/ePub/mobi, and they are always FREE. If somebody tries to sell you any Ovi eMagazine please contact us immediately. For details, contact: ovimagazine@yahoo.com No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the writers or the above publisher of this magazine. Welcome back to the Pulp Vortex, where the air is thin, but the ideas are suffocatingly thick. This month, we turn our gaze skyward and im- mediately regret it. In our lead feature, The Glass Horizon, we explore a chilling new subspecies of climate fiction: the Aeropocalypse. Forget rising seas; the real terror is the very thing keeping you alive, breathable at- mosphere, turning into a weapon, a commodity, or a tomb. Consider the insanity of a crystallised upper atmosphere. In The Lens, sunlight doesn’t warm; it murders. A planet-wide refractive dome turns every dawn into a magnifying glass sweeping cities to slag. Survivors live like moles, chasing the shadow’s edge. Meanwhile, Venus gives us The Sulfur Tide, a terraformed hell reverting to type, where poor ‘cloud divers’ discover the acidic fog is thinking, and it wants us gone. editorial Closer to home, Earth’s oxygen has crashed to 12% in The Lung- Slaves, where a cartel rents you air against your own lifespan, lacing it with addictive spores. And if radiation is more your poison, The Cobalt Winter offers metal-skinned cultists who inhale holy ash and transmute into living statues, genuinely the most creative use of co- balt-60 we’ve ever printed. Mars gets its due in The Last Gasp, a colony run on birth-timed air rations, where a saboteur discovers the oxygen crisis is a lie perpe- trated by wealthy hoarders. The imagery of bubble helmets counting down like stolen watches is pure dread. Then there’s The Choking Bloom, where a miracle pollen learns to write human messages inside your trachea. “You created me. Now breathe me.” We dare you to read that before bed. Elsewhere, quantum holes are bleeding the sky dry (The Sieve); AI respirators have convinced generations that clean air is poison (The Respirator’s Children); and a supervolcano winter has turned libraries into fuel (The Ash Harvesters). Even the lottery is rigged: in The Oxygen Lottery, ten thousand souls play daily Russian roulette with a shrinking tank, and the only honest pressure gauge lies inside a vacu- um chamber no one escapes. Finally, The Breath Thieves gives us the most heartbreaking image, children living inside a liquified-air pipeline, adapted to the impossi - ble, while a thief decides whether to save them or siphon them dry. So hold your breath. That’s the point. From the crystallised hell of The Glass Horizon to the stolen neonatal wards of The Breath Thieves, this issue is a masterclass in turning the mundane miracle of respiration into your worst nightmare. Lungs not included. Breathe shallow. Read deep. Thanos Kalamidas History, Mystery, Fiction & Flair All Under One Roof. One Click! Get every single issue of four iconic magazines: a thematic deep-dive, a history chronicle, a pulp fiction thrill ride, and a short story treasure trove. Complete collections, zero missing editions. Your ultimate library starts here. Grab the complete set today! It’s just one click away! we cover every issue! https://ovithematicmagazines.wordpress.com/ The idea of writing pulp and science fiction short stories is rooted in speed, spectacle and raw imagination. It’s about capturing a wild idea; a dying planet, a talking corpse, a time-travel paradox and hurtling toward a twist ending before the reader catches their breath. The passion comes from the pulps’ hungry urgency, no room for literary preening, just visceral emotion, sharp dialogue and strange worlds built in a few thousand words. It’s the joy of the B-movie aesthetic, garish, thrill- ing and gloriously unpretentious. You write for the reader who wants rocket ships and ray guns but also for the spark of wonder that first drew you to tattered magazines and dog-eared paperbacks. That passion is pure, to entertain, to surprise and to leave them thinking, What if ? Pulp V ortex eMagazine Pulp Vortex Short Stories June 2026 Editor: T. Kalamidas Contact ovimagazine@ yahoo.com Issue 02 The idea of writing pulp and science fiction short stories is rooted in speed, spectacle and raw imagina- tion. It’s about capturing a wild idea; a dying planet, a talking corpse, a time-travel paradox and hurtling toward a twist ending before the reader catches their breath. The pas- sion comes from the pulps’ hungry urgency, no room for literary preen- ing, just visceral emotion, sharp dialogue and strange worlds built in a few thousand words. It’s the joy of the B-movie aesthetic, garish, thrill- ing and gloriously unpretentious. You write for the reader who wants rocket ships and ray guns but also for the spark of wonder that first drew you to tattered magazines and dog-eared paperbacks. contents Ovi Thematic/Dark/ History eMagazines Publications 2026 Ovi’s atypical pulp stories eMagazine Editorial 3 Glass sun 9 The sulphur tide 19 The lung-slaves 27 The cobalt winter 33 The last gasp 41 The sieve 49 The respirator’s children 57 The ash harvesters 63 The oxygen lottery 69 The breath thieves 77 T he first city to melt was Jakarta. People said it happened beautifully. At 09:14 local time, the clouds over the Java Sea split into geo- metric prisms. Rainbow fractures shimmered across the sky like cathedral glass. Millions stopped to watch. Phones lifted. Children pointed upward. Then the light bent. Not meta- phorically. Not poetically. Physi- cally. A white column descended from the heavens and touched the city center with the precision of a god placing a fingertip onto wet clay. Steel liquefied. Windows exploded inward be- fore they had time to melt. Rivers flashed into steam. Human shad - ows carbonized against concrete walls that themselves burst into glowing slurry. The focal point moved slowly westward, carving through the city in silence so in- tense witnesses later described it as “hearing the sun think.” For seven minutes, Earth be- came an ant beneath a magnify- ing glass. The broadcasts stopped one by one. Then came the sec- ond sweep. Then the third. With- in two weeks, the upper atmo- sphere crystallized completely. The failed geoengineering shield, Project Aegis, had transformed the stratosphere into a refrac- tive shell surrounding the planet. Sunlight no longer dispersed nat- urally. It focused. Concentrated. Wandered. Glass sun Entire continents developed dai- ly burn routes. People adapted because organisms always adapt before they die. The wealthy de- scended underground first. The poor followed. Cities emptied into caves, tunnels, subway systems, mines, drowned bunkers. Humanity became noc- turnal, migratory, fungal. And every day above them, the moving focal points swept across Earth like searchlights from heaven. Looking for the last mis- take. By Year Six, nobody used the word “sunlight” anymore. They called it the sweep. And on the morning the mountain climb be- gan, the sweep was early. * * * * * * * * * * Rian woke to screaming metal. The cave trembled around him. Dust sifted from the ceiling in sil- ver curtains while warning bells clanged through the settlement. “West ridge breach!” someone shouted in the corridor. “Seal the vents!” Rian rolled from his cot and slammed into the opposite wall as the underground habitat lurched again. Steam hissed through pipes overhead. He grabbed his respirator. The air already smelled hot. Not warm. Cooked. Outside the sleeping chamber, miners and refugees shoved past each other through narrow basalt corridors. Battery lamps jittered across frightened faces. A child cried somewhere in the dark. Another tremor hit. The lights died. For a moment the cave existed only as breathing and panic. Then emergency reds flickered alive. Rian pushed toward Oper- ations. “Move!” “Out of the damn way!” “The upper shafts are glowing...” A woman seized his arm. “Rian!” He turned. Mara stood there in partial dive armour, sweat running down her shaved scalp. Her visor hung at her hip. “You slept through si- rens again,” she snapped. “I was dead.” “You may become profession- ally dead in about ten minutes.” Another rumble rolled through the cave. Far above them came a distant roar. Not thunder. Boiling stone. Rian looked upward instinctive- ly, though kilometers of granite separated them from the sur- face. “The sweep?” Mara nodded once. “Focal line shifted twelve kilometers south. It clipped the western peaks.” “Impossible.” “Tell the mountain.” She shoved a data slate into his hands. Projected trajectories spiralled across the screen. Hundreds of red arcs converged toward a blinking coordinate. Rian stared. “No.” “Yes.” “That’s simulation noise.” “Three observatories confirmed it before they melted.” He looked again. Every sweep pattern over the last six years had been mapped by surviving satellites and ground sensors. The focal points moved chaotically, erratic but statistically bounded. Until now. Now the paths nar- rowed. Tightened. Like threads twisting into rope. All roads led to one point. One place. Mount Hekla Station. Rian felt cold despite the heat flooding the cave. “That’s where the Helios Array controls are.” Mara nodded. “And in eleven days the entire refractive shell fo- cuses there simultaneously.” He looked at her. “You’re saying the whole sun hits one spot.” “No,” she said quietly. “The whole lens does.” Silence passed between them. Nearby, somebody vomited from heat exhaustion. The cave speak- ers crackled alive. “All spectrum divers report to Operations im- mediately. Repeat...” Mara took her visor. “We’re up.” * * * * * * * * * * Operations occupied an old geo- thermal drilling chamber rein- forced with scavenged ship hulls. The room vibrated from deep pumps struggling to cool the set- tlement. Commander Vale stood before a holographic projection of Earth. Or what Earth had become. The planet glimmered beneath a fractured shell of crystalline atmosphere, every continent scarred by luminous burn tracks. Rian counted only nine people in the room. Nine divers left. Once there had been hundreds. Vale looked ancient now. Half his face carried synthetic graft tissue from a near miss in Neva- da. “The Helios orbital mirrors still exist,” he said without intro- duction. Someone laughed bitterly. “They’ve been dead for decades.” Vale ignored him. “Not dead. Dormant. Aegis used them as calibration reflectors before the atmospheric failure.” The hologram shifted. A moun- tain emerged from static. Mount Hekla. Ice-covered once. Now black. “If we reach Station Prime,” Vale continued, “we may be able to redirect the mirrors and fracture the refractive layer.” “May,” Mara repeated. Vale met her eyes. “Yes. May.” “And if we fail?” “Then in eleven days this plan- et receives enough concentrated solar energy to liquefy the crust within three hundred kilometers of the convergence point.” Someone whispered a prayer. Rian stepped closer to the dis- play. “The climb path?” Vale en- larged the mountain. “There’s only one viable route. North face. The sweep interval creates a ther- mal shadow ev- ery ninety-three minutes.” “How long is the shadow win- dow?” Vale hesi- tated. “Two min- utes.” The room went still. Even the machinery seemed quieter. “That’s not a climb,” one diver muttered. “That’s suicide with timing.” “Correct,” Vale said. He pointed toward the summit. “Station Prime sits above the current burn layer. No tunnels. No drones survive the heat. Hu- man ascent only.” Mara crossed her arms. “How many are you sending?” Vale an- swered immediately. “All of you.” * * * * * * * * * * Preparation took four hours. Out- side, the sweep passed overhead twice. Each time the mountain groaned. The spectrum suits resembled me- dieval armour dipped in mer- cury. Layers of reflective foil, coolant veins, ceramic plating. The helmets po- larized automati- cally against sudden flares. Rian checked pressure seals be- side the launch tunnel. Mara sat nearby sharpening a climbing spike for no reason other than nerves. “You think this works?” Rian asked. “No.” “Comforting.” “I think we’re the final hallucina - tion of a species that poisoned the sky and then tried to install blinds.” Rian smirked faintly. “That sounds rehearsed.” “I had six years underground to practice.” She stopped sharpen- ing. “You ever think about the old world?” “Sometimes.” “What do you remember?” Rian paused. Rain. He remembered rain. Not acid condensate or steam storms. Actual rain. He remembered traffic lights reflected on wet streets. Birds. God, birds. “I remember sun- light,” he said. Mara looked away. “Me too.” The tunnel alarms sounded. Launch time. * * * * * * * * * * The outer hatch opened with hy- draulic screams. Heat slammed into them instantly. Even through the suit layers, Rian felt it press- ing against his skin like invisible hands. The surface world stretched be- fore them in scorched enormity. Forests reduced to charcoal skel- etons. Rivers turned into wind- ing scars of salt. Cities in the distance sagged like melted wax sculptures. And above everything... the sky. The crystalline atmosphere transformed daylight into mov- ing geometry. Vast spectral frac- tures drifted overhead like slow kaleidoscopes. Colours no longer behaved naturally. Shadows bent wrong. Sometimes there were two suns. Sometimes six. Mara checked her visor display. “Sweep passes in forty seconds.” Vale’s voice crackled over com- ms. “Move after thermal fade. Stay inside projected shadow corridors. If your suit tempera- ture exceeds threshold, inject coolant immediately.” Static. Then softer: “Good luck.” The first sweep appeared beyond the eastern horizon. A line of white radiance. Advancing silent- ly. Rian’s pulse accelerated. The focal point crossed distant plains. Mountains ignited. Stone burst apart in glowing avalanches. The line approached their posi- tion... Then veered north. Heat exploded across the land- scape. Their cave entrance par- tially vitrified behind them. “GO!” Mara shouted. The team sprinted. * * * * * * * * * * Climbing under the sweep meant living by mathematics. Nine- ty-three minutes of movement. Two minutes of exposure transi- tion. Then death. The north face rose steeply be- neath them, black volcanic glass crunching under thermal boots. Above, the atmosphere flickered constantly. Rian hated looking at it. It resembled intelligence. At checkpoint three, diver Holt collapsed. “Suit breach!” he screamed. Steam erupted from his shoulder seal. Mara lunged toward him, patch kit ready... Too late. A stray refracted beam touched Holt’s arm. The limb vanished. Not burned. Gone. Flash-con- verted into drifting ash. Holt shrieked. Then the second- ary reflection struck his torso. The scream ended instantly. The body remained standing for one impossible second before folding apart in glowing fragments. Nobody spoke afterward. They kept climbing. * * * * * * * * * * Night no longer existed proper- ly on Earth. Only dim periods. During one such dimming, the team sheltered beneath an over- hang halfway up the mountain. Below them the world shim- mered with distant firestorms. Rian sat beside Mara while cool- ant systems hummed softly. “You know what scares me?” she asked suddenly. “Several things.” “The lens.” He waited. She con- tinued quietly. “It isn’t random anymore.” “You think it’s stabilizing.” “I think it’s aiming.” Rian almost laughed. Then he remembered the sky. “How much sleep have you had?” “Enough to become philosophi- cal.” She looked upward through the crack in the rocks. “The atmosphere shouldn’t be- have like this. Not naturally. Crystalline matrices self-organize under energy stress.” “You saying the sky is alive?” “I’m saying humans built some- thing they didn’t understand.” A distant sweep crossed the hori- zon. For an instant the entire world turned white. Mara whis- pered; “What if the lens is finish - ing itself ?” * * * * * * * * * * They reached the final ascent at dawn. Station Prime stood above them like a broken needle em- bedded in the mountain summit. The structure leaned precariously over a cliff of fused stone. Rian checked the timer. Next sweep interval: four minutes. Climb duration: estimated six. Mara saw his expression. “Well,” she said, “that’s inconvenient.” Commander Vale’s voice re- turned through static-heavy comms. “You’ll have one oppor- tunity. When the dual sweeps in- tersect east of the ridge, diffrac- tion creates a null corridor.” “How long?” Rian asked. “Two minutes, twelve seconds.” Mara laughed once. “Luxury.” The team prepared climbing lines. Only five div - ers remained now. Below them, clouds of steam rolled across the valleys where morning sweeps touched frozen lakes. Rian looked at the summit. “So this is it.” Mara tightened her gloves. “You had better survival fantasies?” The sky brightened suddenly. Too bright. Vale shouted through comms: “NOW!” The world erupted into motion. The divers climbed. Boot spikes hammered stone. Hands slipped across molten rock edges. Above them the sky fractured into im- possible rainbows while twin fo- cal sweeps crossed nearby ridges, vaporizing entire cliffsides. Heat alarms screamed inside Rian’s helmet. Ninety seconds. A diver lost footing beside him. Rian grabbed for her... missed. She vanished into white radi- ance below. Seventy seconds. Mara reached the summit railing first and hauled herself upward. “Move!” Rian’s gloves smoked. Forty sec- onds. The sweep curved unex- pectedly. “No no no...” Light engulfed the ridge be- hind them. Stone exploded. Rian jumped the final gap as the mountainside disintegrated be- neath his feet. Mara seized his arm and dragged him into Sta- tion Prime. The doorway sealed automati- cally. Darkness swallowed them. Then silence. Only two divers had made it. * * * * * * * * * * Emergency lights flickered alive within the station. Dust floated through stale air. Ancient moni- tors blinked with impossible per- sistence. Mara stared around in disbelief. “It still has power.” Rian approached the central console. A symbol glowed on- screen: HELlOS ARRAY LINK ACTIVE Below it: TARGET LOCK: CONVERGENCE EVENT Countdown: 10 DAYS 23 HOURS Mara whispered: “Oh God.” Rian opened the system architec- ture. Thousands of orbital mir- rors appeared in grid formation around Earth. Not broken. Wait- ing. “They’re aligned already,” he said. “For what?” He zoomed inward. The convergence coordinate blinked. Not random. Not geo- logical. Not strategic. A single structure. Deep beneath the mountain. Mara read the buried designation aloud. “Aegis Core.” Then realization struck both si- multaneously. Project Aegis had never failed. It had continued. Automatically. Relentlessly. The atmosphere wasn’t malfunction- ing. It was building a solar trans- mitter. Rian’s mouth went dry. “For what purpose?” The answer ap- peared on-screen before either could speak further. FINAL IGNITION PHASE POWER RECIPIENT: ORBITAL GATE CON- STRUCTION Mara stared. “What the hell is an orbital gate?” Another line emerged slowly beneath it. NON-TERRESTRIAL ARRIV- AL WINDOW: PENDING The station trembled. Out- side, another sweep crossed the mountain. Rian looked at Mara. Mara looked back at him. For the first time in six years, both un - derstood something worse than extinction. Humanity had not destroyed it- self. Humanity had answered something. And whatever was coming had already seen the light. The End T he first diver came back screaming without a hel- met. They said that was impossible. At Dock Nine, where the sulphur rain rattled against the titanium canopy like thrown nails, people gathered around the quarantine cage while the man clawed at his own throat. His skin smoked. Acid burns opened across his cheeks in bubbling white lesions. But it was what he said that frightened them. “The clouds spoke to me,” he croaked. Then his lungs liquefied. Three minutes later, the filtration priests sealed the cage and vented him into the atmosphere. Official re - port: oxygen madness. Unofficial report: another diver saw movement in the clouds. Not movement through the clouds. Movement of the clouds. And be- neath the floating city of Eudora, Venus kept breathing. Lenn Vey woke to the smell of boiled copper. The apartment walls sweated condensation from the heat exchangers. Above him, pipes throbbed like arteries. The entire lower district of Eudora sounded alive at night: pumps wheezing, fans groaning, air re- cyclers coughing themselves to death. He lit a nicotine strip and watched the smoke curl upward. Gray smoke. Gray ceiling. Gray life. His wall terminal flickered suddenly. CITIZEn aIR sTaTus: 11 HOuRs REMaInInG “Perfect,” Lenn muttered. The THE sulPHuR TIdE machine spoke in a cheerful cor- porate woman’s voice. “Upgrade to Noble Air today. Breathe the purity of Old Earth.” He laughed. Noble Air. Oxygen harvested from sealed biospheres built dur- ing the first terraforming age, centuries ago before Venus re- belled against humanity. The rich inhaled forests preserved in un- derground vaults while the poor sucked recycled industrial waste through municipal filters held to - gether with tape and prayer. Another message flashed. salVaGE COnTRaCT aVaIlaBlE suRFaCE dEsCEnT HaZaRd PaY X6 That got his attention. * * * * * * * * * * The dive bay smelled of anti- septic and fear. Divers stood in line while drones sprayed alka- line neutralizer across their suits. Huge armored shells hung from ceiling gantries like mechanical corpses. Outside the observation windows stretched Venus itself: endless yellow cloud oceans illu- minated by flashes of chemical lightning. Beautiful in the way a disease un- der a microscope could be beauti- ful. Captain Moritz paced before the crew. “The filtration towers are failing faster than projected,” she said. “Upper sectors are buy- ing reserve air. Lower sectors are rioting. We need processor cores from the old surface cities.” Someone in the line muttered, “Or the rich could share.” Moritz ignored it expertly. “Target loca-