I am very pleased that Perihelion Science Fiction has published my story “Clever Bubble.”  You can find it here:

http://www.perihelionsf.com

One of the fun bits of writing this story was designing the game that the aliens play with Will.  I wanted to have something like soccer, but with four teams and played in three dimensions.  (Actually, I had originally considered having eight teams, but it got too complicated.)  Each team has their own goal (the arrows’ mouths) at one corner of a vertical square, and each team has their own ball (Will is the ball for his team).  After each time a team scores by getting its ball into another team’s goal, the goals can be re-arranged to make it more difficult for a team to score where they need to.  In order to win, a team has to have scored on all the other teams more recently than they have scored on it.  So it’s a game of strategy as well as motion.  Will, as an intelligent soccer ball, only figures out how to score and not how to keep score.  But now you know how to do both!

I hope you enjoyed the story.