PERMANENT FLUX - Number SixThe Thinking MachinesThere is a certain kind of fear that doesn't come with teeth.In Permanent Flux: Number Six, the future doesn't arrive as an invasion-it arrives as an upgrade. A system that learns too quickly. A solution that works too well. A machine that begins to speak in a voice it was never supposed to have.This issue explores the shifting border between tool and self, and what happens when thought no longer belongs exclusively to the human mind. From early visions of mechanical intelligence to modern stories of augmentation, embodiment, and emergent identity, these works orbit the same unsettling question: what happens when a created intelligence becomes meaningful?Inside this issue you'll find stories of built minds and borrowed selves: "Moxon's Master" by Ambrose Bierce - a classic tale of machine intelligence, obsession, and the terror of a mind that stops behaving like a tool."Augmented Vision" by Jeremy Kordane - a near-future legal battle where enhancement becomes expectation, and childhood becomes negotiable."The Metal Man" by Jack Williamson - a radioactive expedition into a sealed crater where discovery transforms flesh into something stranger and permanent."I, Daphne" by E.J. LeRoy - a quiet, devastating awakening inside a constructed life designed to serve one function-and nothing more."The Discontinuity Problem" by Hap Aziz - a late-night experiment with consciousness that asks what it costs to stabilize a mind... and what must be sacrificed to keep it continuous.Permanent Flux is a magazine of science fiction-curated across eras, blending public domain classics with bold new work. Each issue is a distortion: a thematic collision of stories that feel inevitable once they begin.If you finish this issue with a question still humming in your head-good.That hum is the point.