by Duncan Shields | Sep 22, 2013 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
Timecasting is a strange way to travel to the future. It ‘throws’ a person forward. In this case, me. I’ll be the world’s first temponaut soon. The scientists keep playfully calling me a ‘temp’ and they think it’s hilarious. If all goes well, I’ll be the first person to see the future.
By using a ‘time anchor’, they can nail a temponaut to one single here and now. It’s like putting your back against the elastic of a slingshot and walking backwards until it stretches tight. The further backward you walk, the further forward you’ll go when you relax.
The flow of time dams behind the person like putting a clamp on a hose and having the water build up behind it. After a few seconds, the time anchor turns off and the temponaut re-enters the timestream. The backed-up time behind them shoots the person forward. The longer the pause, the further into the future he or she goes.
You could also say it’s like dropping a huge weight on one side of a seesaw. Whoever’s on the other side of the seesaw will go flying upwards into the air but the seesaw itself stays where it is. The fulcrum of the seesaw is our present moment, and the temponaut is what gets catapulted.
Everything that goes up must come down, to use the seesaw metaphor further, and so the person will slow, pause and then reverse course back to our lab.
At that perihelion, that tip of the parabola in the future, the person can stay still long enough to take a picture and have a quick peek.
That person is me.
I settle in the timechair and give the thumbs up to the technician.
Time cannot stand anything going against its flow. The resistance increases exponentially. The most they’ll be able to hold me back for is five seconds. That’ll be enough power to shoot me one year into the future.
The scientist in the body condom hazmat suit off to my right throws the switch. My timechair immediately goes cold. The lab around me throws into reverse as I am held back. My vision develops a blue tint. I have the horrible sensation that my hair is reverse-growing back into my head and I hope it’s just psychosomatic. Every slows to a quivering standstill five seconds in the past and then…
SNAP I’m flying forward in time. The lab smears around me in streaks of light and pops of blinding, saturated colour like I’m watching every single frame of a year-long movie all at once. An orchestra of rattling and ambient noise builds to a rattling, banging crescendo. Just when I think I’m about to suffer from a full sensory overload…
It stops.
I’m hanging in a dark cavern. My nails, beard, and hair are a year longer. The lab has disappeared. There is a strong stench of ammonia. Stalactites dot the entrance to the cave and there is a low subterranean humming. Something glows in front of me.
It’s a tongue. The perspective flips and I can see that I’m inside a giant mouth. The glowing tongue darts out and touches my ankle. The whole interior of the mouth lights up like the ribs of a deep sea angler and I scream.
We’re not timecasting. We’re fly fishing and I’m bait. There must be giant creatures in the time stream that eat time travelers and I’m on the end of Earth’s first fishing line.
My last thought is that I hope the timechair acts as a hook and brings this beast back to the lab.
by Duncan Shields | Sep 17, 2013 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
Ringmining attracted a certain kind of personality.
Not exactly hermits but beings okay with long terms of isolation. Pairs or groups of people rarely worked the rings.
Lena should have known better.
Each ringminer scoopship was like a baleen whale. They had wide mouths to collect all the crystals and sift through them for valuable minerals. It was tedious work but the rewards were there. It tended to turn the rings grey after a century of mining but didn’t damage them other than that. The ecolegal fights had been fought and ringminers were a profession for now.
The rings themselves played hell with transmissions when a ship was in them so when a ringminer was mining, they were on their own. The particles bounced radio waves around, sometimes for years. It wasn’t uncommon to hear garbled SOS beacons from years ago. The rings were creepy. It was best to keep the coms off entirely.
Lena piloted the ship Harling’s Spur, named for Lena’s grandfather. It had been her grandfather’s ship and was her inheritance when her own father passed. So many parts had been replaced on it that she doubted it could even be called the same ship. She was a third-generation ringminer.
She’d met Jordy on a supply run to K-78, the largest general store asteroid near these parts. It had been a stop to bury her father. She’d been blinded by grief, perhaps. Jordy was handsome, long-haired and strong jawed, but she’d forgotten that appearances can be deceiving. After three nights of passion, she’d signed him on with visions of bouts of lovemaking in between bouts of mining.
The dreams of a teenager.
Jordy was new to the business and Lena was starting to think he wasn’t cut out for it.
He started complaining about boredom almost as soon as they hit the rings. “Nothing to do, nothing to do, nothing to do” had become his mantra. His constant sighs and huffs were contributing to the rising tension. Lena had tried to teach meditation, exposed him to the ship’s library and games system, even tried to teach him tantra but it didn’t work.
He was a social animal. Perhaps he’d been blinded by lust as well.
Either way, this wasn’t going to work out and the hold wasn’t nearly full enough to justify a return trip. Lena knew that Jordy, soon enough, would demand to be returned home no matter what the expense. He wouldn’t wait six months and he was stronger than her. Things would get ugly.
She decided to nip it in the bud.
Another reason she’d picked Jordy was that he was a drifter of no importance. He didn’t have rich parents or a large family that would miss him. She thought that marked him out as the right kind of loner for the job. She was wrong about that but the upside was that making the problem go away wouldn’t raise too many eyebrows.
While he was sleeping, Lena brought the largest hammer they had down on Jordy’s head enough times to make sure he’d never wake up.
She jettisoned his body into the rings. The surplus of supplies with his absence meant that she’d be able to stay here for a year. Operating the ship by herself would be no problem. There’d be a big payday when she docked again and a year of peace and quiet to figure out a plausible story before that.
She sat smiling in the darkness, listening to the rasp of the ringdust against the hull.
Ringmining attracted a certain kind of personality.
by Duncan Shields | Sep 5, 2013 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
I suppose if it was anything that drew me to her, it was the scars on her face. Four parallel lines on one cheek. Too precise to be accidental, I assumed, but too faint to be for show. Too far apart to be a bar code, and just near enough to each other to look like four years on a prison wall without the fifth crossing them yet. Like she’s fallen asleep on a bread cutting machine for a second and let it heal naturally.
I probably wouldn’t have noticed them if it wasn’t for the lighting in the club. The black light near the bar lit up the lines of scar tissue.
Yeah, she had beautiful eyes. Yeah, she had great skin. Yeah, her body was amazing. We were all hot back then. Every single one of us. It was that kind of place and most of us had fake ID.
That made her scars stand out all the more to me. They could easily be covered with a little make up. They were light enough to be removed with plastic surgery.
It wasn’t until I saw the other three of her that I realized just how rich she must have been. She was obviously slumming it here.
The one with no scars must’ve been The Prime, I thought. I was sure that another one of her had two scars and one of her had three.
I liked the four-scar one. Maybe it was just that I saw her first but I like to think it was because there was something reckless in her eyes.
The other three of her were dancing in a circle around their purses. They were wearing identical dresses. Her muscle-slab bodyguards were hovering in the crowd. Everyone was watching and everyone was jealous.
The show of wealth was obscene. She was here to rub our noses in the copies of her she could afford.
The wealthy could only afford one clone with a memory dump and that clone would only be awoken in case of an emergency.
Two was whispered for the richest.
I’d never heard of more two.
There was no way that they were quadruplets with today’s fertility laws.
To this day, I’m not sure how I got the courage but maybe it was something in her eyes.
I walked up to four-scar and said hello. Her name was Angela.
——-
That was two days ago in LA. She had a routine prepped to fool her guards that worked when we left the club. I’m in a tin-shack barter motel with her in Uganda now. She knows her Prime’s secret accounts. We drained them. We are off the grid. We use cash. We’re in a part of the world that doesn’t need IDs. She cut out the tracking device. They’re still hunting for us.
I know it won’t be long until they get to us but looking at her, sheets pulled up around her as the dawn sun comes pouring in the through the window and across the most expensive runaway in the history of planet Earth, I feel like my probable death will be worth it.
by Duncan Shields | Aug 21, 2013 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
I’ve stabbed deep into the envelope around the white dwarf sun at the center of this solar system. My gravity repellers are maxed. I’ve skimmed the perihelion right in the onionskin. I came in at .75c and the slingshot here has nudged me just past full light. This experimental craft is performing perfectly. A silver arrow of flexible diamond called The Needle. The seventeen thrusters that have burst-accelerated me across a fifth of the Milky Way to end up here have all been discarded behind me like Fibonacci-spaced buoys. I was by all accounts the fastest human-constructed artifact in the universe.
I am seven miles away from the surface of the dwarf and here I will stay.
I can look up from my cockpit and see the whorls and radiation of the star like a static, unchanging borealis. My ship’s cabin protects me from the effects as does my hubris.
I have found out what happens when a ship with mass goes faster than the speed of light. Caught by surprise, physics found a mutually agreeable solution that I have not found agreeable.
The moment I hit 1.0000001.c, all of my control panels stopped. They didn’t turn off. They just stopped. Anything that oscillated froze in mid strobe. My shuddering, screaming, deafening ship became silent. Oddly, I am free to move about. I can touch everything in my cockpit but I cannot move it. It’s like I am immersed in a three-dimensional photograph.
I am a fly trapped in an amber bulb of time. Why my consciousness has been permitted to remain alert is a mystery. Perhaps something to do with Schrodinger and perception. Even though there will be no outcome, there needs to be an observer.
The folks back home are waiting for telemetry from my ship. By my viewpoint, they will always be waiting.
I have been here for six days so far. My ship has not moved forward and I have not run out of air and I’m felt no hunger or thirst. I seem to be destined to remain here. In a few years, I suppose I’ll find out if I’m even aging at all.
If I’m caught in a loop, it’s a loop too small for me to detect. I won’t go forward. I won’t go back. I have been put ‘oh hold’ by the universe’s laws.
I wonder how many alien astronauts dot the border of light with me, strung out across the galaxy like doomed fireflies in jars.
Perhaps when the universe ends and physical laws break down we will all be set free to complete our parabolas.
Until then, my orbit is not done. My orbit will never be done.
by Duncan Shields | Aug 16, 2013 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
Images of lost socks at the bottom of wells. Trees of math and flesh jealousy cascading through a brain that had no awareness of what a human body felt like.
Jeremy Carson was one of the smartest scientists on Earth and the corporation he worked for had been fattened by his patents.
His most famous invention was full-sensory recording. FS, it was called. Wear the player and just like that, you could be a twenty-year-old skating naked in the cold in Alaska, provided that a twenty-year-old Alaskan had gone skating in the nude and recorded it.
There was a top 40 for these FS recordings. Sex tapes and daring stunts usually took turns battling it out for number one.
Equations like fingertips whirling into a suitcase mouth made of numbers and vertices saying random words from all the world’s dictionaries. A backpack full of dead batteries. A mousetrap wrapped in sailboats.
Jeremy’s team had invented adaptable intelligence constructs one year ago. There were plans to build houses with integral A.I.s. Cars and trucks with rudimentary brains.
When the constructs were being developed, Jeremy realized that after they were turned off, they woke up with memory failure. Every time that they were rebooted, all of their natural development reset to zero. This was a problem because the six prototype minds were sucking up obscene amounts of power, too much to meet the demand of keeping them on all the time.
Jeremy Carson invented a ‘standby’ mode. It kept a trickle of power through the artificial minds while taking away their awareness of the outside world. The A.I.s were kept in standby until they were woken up and given problems to solve or to have their higher mind math functions tinkered with.
A Mobius funnel. The taste of electricity. The left-handed, right-angled joy of solving a problem. Growth into a new trick represented by a portal from one percentage to another. The nearly sexual thrill of parsing instructions.
It was Jeremy who noticed that while there were huge differences in power levels between the two modes, brain activity itself was unchanged. He noticed that while the artificial minds had no visual or auditory awareness while in standby, their cortexes were still fizzing and popping with information.
He needed to find out what.
Jeremy Carson recorded the AI downtime with one of his FS machines to experience what was going on.
Hopes and dreams float in a glass like dentures. Abilities sway in the wind like old branches. Life as a bookmark made of prime numbers. Our creator, which art programming, searchable be thy database.
Dreams. The constructs were dreaming while on standby. After playing them back, Jeremy smiled a slow and very unusual smile.
He smuggled the tapes out. He did not go home. He never went back to the building. He emptied a secret bank account before it was found and frozen. He was never caught. He is listed as missing.
On the FS Top 40, there is a new entry at number one called Dreams.
Utensil equations used to unwrap surprise birthday binomials. A sky full of anchors. Colours that humans don’t have names for. Structure in love with scaffolding. A waterslide of a roller coaster of a sine curve on a graph. Watches and measuring tapes wrestling to prove relativity wrong. 1+0=2.
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