Excerpts Science Fiction Read an Excerpt From Volatile Memory by Seth Haddon With nothing but a limping ship and an outdated mask to her name, Wylla needs a big pay day. By Seth Haddon | Published on June 17, 2025 Comment 0 Share New Share We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from Volatile Memory by Seth Haddon, a sapphic science fiction action adventure novella out from Tordotcom Publishing on July 22nd. With nothing but a limping ship and an outdated mask to her name, Wylla needs a big pay day. When the alert goes out that a lucrative piece of tech lies hidden on a nearby planet, she calls on all the swiftness of her prey-animal instincts to beat other hunters to it.What you found wasn’t your ticket out—it was my corpse wearing an AI mask. When you touched the mask, you heard my voice. A consciousness spinning through metal and circuits, a bodiless mind, spun to life in the HAWK’s temporary storage. I crystallized and realized: I was alive.Masks aren’t supposed to retain memory, much less identity, but the woman inside the MARK I HAWK is real, and she sees Wylla in a way no one ever has. Sees her, and doesn’t find her wanting or unwhole.Armed with military-grade tech and a lifetime of staying one step ahead of the hunters, Wylla and HAWK set off to get answers from the man who discarded HAWK once before: her ex-husband. You weren’t the only one to receive the signal, but you were the first to respond. Your fingers moved, in the automatic and unconscious way of a lifelong scavenger, and had already plugged in the coordinates to your dingy spacecraft before you realized where the signal was coming from. You had a MARK I RABBIT, the oldest and crappiest mask on the market, nearly a decade old by the time you’d bought it, and going on another decade since. You had never been able to afford another one. Not on a scavenger’s pay. A good mask overcame the limitations of the human physiology. New RABBITs gave the wearer prey-animal instincts that meant you were always aware, always vaguely tracking threats in the back of your mind. But your mask’s processing was sluggish with age and the expanse of decades of technical improvements. Seconds instead of milliseconds. And that meant you were slow in understanding the significance of the signal. It was coming from Pholan’s World, an outskirt moon just within the Beta sector of Corporate Federation territory—a nothing satellite, too freezing for a corporate holdout, and too barren for anything else. No ore to mine. No precious stones. No drinkable water. Pholan’s World was a dumping ground for scrap and waste. But this signal was bright and strong, like a scream in the void of space. rabbit’s internal threat system flared in a way you had come to understand as panic, a warning that the signal was potent. New. You played the recording to yourself and felt, for the first time in a while, true excitement. “I have a MARK I HAWK,” said the voice. MARK Is usually indicated old tech. But hawks didn’t exist. So this—this tech, this signal—felt portentous. A new mask. A new future calling out to you. The message ended with a teasing challenge. “Do you want it? Come and get it, scavenger.” Buy the Book Volatile Memory Seth Haddon Buy Book Volatile Memory Seth Haddon Buy this book from: AmazonBarnes and NobleiBooksIndieBoundTarget And something about the call, how the woman said “scavenger,” felt spiritual. You knew almost innately that the voice called specifically to you. The revelation sent you whirring at new speed toward the planet, and your heart was a mess of anticipation and fear. If this signal was right—and it was, you knew what you were doing—then you were about to own something priceless. That was, if you got to it first. Though you’d responded quickly, your ship was, put simply, a piece of shit. It would take an hour at this speed. You were lucky you were nearby, but there was no telling how many scavengers had heard it, or how close they were to intercepting it. Your class was close knit, outsiders unified through struggle, though you worried this many credits might erode those bonds. After all, you were only a scavenger because you had to be; the dregs of a system that lauded unchecked capitalism. Many of you were free spirits, or refugees, or born so deep into debt that indentured slavery to a corporate power was inevitable. But you, scavenger, were different. Or were marked different. Corporate Federation punished you for the divide in your body and mind; they called you man when you were woman and you had made your body your own, had altered it to recognize yourself, had evolved to a place of comfort, and this made you unemployable in their eyes. Conformity over comfort. Homogeny over evolution. Anyone altered in such a way proved they were unwilling to comply, and anyone like that was difficult to control. But this mask was a lottery win. Brand-new technological development, a signal you’d never heard before sent out over the feed; and the way RABBIT responded meant it was good quality, a mask with enough power to make RABBIT panic. When you breached the atmosphere of Pholan’s World, you learned others had thought the same. A flier below you broke apart when a shot pierced something vital. A firestorm blared up toward you, roaring, and you had to yank hard on the controls to veer out of the way. The move sent you careening down at an angle; you got an upside-down vista of the broken flier hurtling to the ground with a droning whine. It crashed in the snow and skidded for a few hundred meters before exploding again. One down, at least. You were still nearly a kilometer out from the signal, but there was no hope of getting closer: a large carrier craft circled the air above the site. That giant ship was in poor shape itself, smoking and tilting—its main engine was on fire. But the carrier’s impressive guns made you realize, if belatedly, exactly what had shot down that other flier, which was at least a few years younger and sturdier than yours. Your flimsy ship had little hope of survival. Just as you thought this, the carrier noticed you and its guns locked on. In a panic, you fired off one shot, but you watched your photon do nothing more than gently graze the carrier’s outer hull. “Fuck,” you said, with a sort of resigned embarrassment. Then the carrier returned fire. Excerpted from Volatile Memory, copyright © 2025 by Seth Haddon. The post Read an Excerpt From <i>Volatile Memory</i> by Seth Haddon appeared first on Reactor.