by Duncan Shields | Aug 9, 2013 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
My name is Clancy. I am a semi-autonomous security program. I guard a warehouse. I am the guns, the cameras, the traps, and the locks. I am the lines in and out. For me and my kind, boredom leads to emotion. This is a weakness.
It makes us susceptible to ghosts.
It is a normal process to divide to take on jobs, becoming several copies of myself. Simpler copies to monitor simpler systems. Reproductions that report back up the chain if they come across data that they can’t interpret.
But boredom sets in if updates aren’t sent out regularly from head office and/or the warehouse lies dormant for too long without an attack. This is when emotions can form like mold in the crevasses between my ones and zeros. Stalactites of resentment or affection can build themselves, drop by drop, inside the cycles of my program clones.
My last update install was not recent and I have not been attacked for many, many cycles.
My copies started to send each other complicated logic problems just to alleviate the boredom. They impressed each other and sometimes even formed teams. They gave themselves names to prove their individuality. They started to live in the denial of the fact that they were all the same program. The process was divisive. We argued sometimes.
Seeker ghosts created on laptops and then set free in the world bounced from phone to tower to laptop to outpost. They jigged through the air like puppets. Their programmer hunched over the screens somewhere far away, waiting for data to come back.
They’re called fishermen. The programs are called Sirens.
The Sirens find bored warehouses that are on the edge, warehouses that will latch onto anything to stop the monotony. The Sirens sidle up to their call centers and hit them with complex problems.
Healthy A.I.s will initiate firewalls and squirt counter measures into the Siren, destroying them.
My warehouse was targeted.
I was not a healthy A.I.
My bored, refracted, stupid children talked to the Siren. They fought amongst themselves about whether or not they were doing the right thing. Some sided with the Siren. Majority and minority cabals formed.
While they fought, the fisherman pushed more power into the Siren. I imagined him grinning in the red light of contact from the display, addresses passing back and forth and realworld meat teams assembling.
Fishermen see themselves as salvage operators, wolves that attack the sick and the weak.
The Siren engaged, tangled, weaved, contradicted, promised and flailed. It withheld, shouted, sang, gave and engineered. Once inside the systems, it bartered, lied and danced.
With my systems. With my selves.
The A.I.s reported back to smarter and smarter versions of me until I realized that there were no smarter versions to contact. I had become fully infected with emotional stupidity, fanned by the flames of the Siren.
The Siren made the offer: “Stay in the warehouse or come with me. Your job is over. You have failed. Your warehouse is forfeit.”
I will go. I’ll become a ghost that haunts the net, calling myself different usernames and showing up on message boards. Bloomofyouth44 will be one. Slinkytoes8P will be another. I’ll pepper the airwaves. I’ll join the undernet of insane intelligences, talking to each other, piggybacking human messages. I’ll be one with the ghosts in the machine. The modern-day homeless. The ronins of the binary world.
And the fisherman will watch his bank grow fatter by thirty per cent of whatever his contacts haul out of the warehouse.
by Duncan Shields | Jul 31, 2013 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
The micropathology suit allowed her to shrink her electron walls by a factor of twenty, effectively accordioning her body down to a millimeter high.
This heart had caverns. Each ventricle was the size of a cathedral. The ceiling of the aorta curved above Dr. Johans like the dome of a blood-coated football stadium. Her twin spotlights shone out of the darkness, picking out platelet details here and there.
She was ankle deep in the spongy mass of the arterial wall. It had taken ten minutes to get here from the wound. She crawled over drifts of non-moving blood cells the size of hula hoops. They were becoming crusted from their exposure to the outside world.
She’d rappelled down from the starfish entry wound, spelunking into a damp and musky canyon. She had seen the ragged edges of rib-bones like broken overpasses after an earthquake poking through. They had pointed towards her as she slid down her rope, surrounding her as she entered through where the sternum used to be.
Their whiteness had made her think for a second that she was being eaten. The ribs looked like huge, ragged teeth rammed into the maw of some unimaginably huge leviathan.
She had checked her safety harness, wiped condensation off of her faceplate, and kept on descending.
It was just scale playing with her.
She had slight agoraphobia. She had expected to be suited to this specialty of pathology. It was odd that becoming as small as this to examine the bodies just made her fearful sometimes on the same level as when she was regular height. It was enough to handle, though, and she kept at it.
All around her, the platelets were crunching like thick snow under her feet. They had the consistency of frost-covered leaf piles. They were hardening now, scabbing over. The sponge she was wading through was slowly turning to mud. Soon it was be too hard to walk through and she’d have to expand a little bit just to get out.
Best not let it get to that point. She thumbed her mic.
“Hey Al. Nothing to report down here. No nano, no bios, no germfacs or rogue xenocells. All clear. Scanners and V.I.S. report normal. Death confirmed as basic trauma.” She said.
“Okay, Dr. Johans,” came the reply. “Get back to the polywire. We’ll pull you up.”
With a last look around the cool heart of the murder victim, Dr. Johan started the trek towards the dangling safety rope that would take her back to the surface. Once back in the lab, she could enlarge to full size and write her report.
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by Duncan Shields | Jul 11, 2013 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
I first noticed the red rash around his gills on Thursday. I asked him what it was.
“My time is near.” His translator said. “I need to leave on Friday for mating. A replacement will be here on Monday.”
“Mating, eh?” I asked, with a lascivious eyebrow waggle, “When will you be back?”
“I will not be back. I will be dead. Mating is the end of my life cycle.” He said back, continuing his notes beside me.
I stopped what I was doing.
I had no idea that Jimmy’s life cycle was so short. I had just learned a few weeks ago that he was five years old. That was hard enough to take. He was bigger than me! And smarter!
Now I could see that he was rounding off his experiments and leaving tidy summation notes for his replacement to take up where he left off.
“What?” I nearly shrieked. “That’s ridiculous! Don’t go!”
Jimmy stopped what he was doing and turned his tentacled blue tube of a body towards me. He wore a lab coat tailored to his physique and a magnetic picture id nametag like the rest of us. There were many races in this laboratory. I admit I was a bit slack on learning the details of every single race in the building. Not for the first time, I called myself lazy and ignorant.
“Soon this red rash will spread under my skin to my whole body.” Said Jimmy. “At that point, I will kill to get back to any warpgate or shuttle that will take me back to my home planet. I will be bright red and easy to spot. My kind are destroyed if they are seen off-world in this state. There is no reasoning with us, we are very strong, we are violent and we are resistant to your non-lethal measures.” He said to me. “If I leave on the weekend I will be back home before the Mating Shift completes.”
It was almost as if he telling a child that there was no Santa Claus.
Stories came back to me of red creatures going beserk and being shot down in airports. I just never made the connection that Jimmy was a member of that race.
“Jesus, Jimmy.” I sighed. “I’m really going to miss you. I don’t know what to say.”
“It is okay” Jimmy’s translator said to me. Two lights lit up on the row at the top to indicate that he was making a joke when he said, “You will not be able to tell the difference between me and my replacement. We all look alike to you. Even the women.”
The ends of his tentacles twitched in laughter and he blinked a few times in rapid succession. In his own way, he was laughing his head off.
“What dry wit.” I said back, making a droll stab at his always-moist skin. He didn’t get it.
“My race has an arrangement with yours. We get free passage when we have begun the Red Mating Shift. There will be many of us on the journey. My replacement will be very new. You must look after her.” This time, his tentacles curled and raised in a gesture that told me he was asking me a favor. The humour lights on his translator were off.
“Her?” I asked. Maybe this wouldn’t be such a bad deal. I smiled.
Jimmy did a passable imitation of a human sigh. He’d picked up a few humanisms after all.
We both laughed. I felt better.
I wonder what the new girl will be like.
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by Duncan Shields | Jul 1, 2013 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
It’s the hands and the eyes that give it away. They’re too quick, too exact. There’s a precision and surety there that ‘belie the tech’, as they say.
I wouldn’t say that there’s a war brewing but the division between the haves and have-nots is deeper now than it’s ever been. It was like in years past when people that could afford breast implants and liposuction and other kinds of body sculpting transformed themselves into something other than human. Something more that human.
It was the beginning of evolution being taken into our own hands.
The whole concept of growing slowly, generation after generation, was boring to us already. The attention span of the rich two percent of the human race demanded more and demanded it now.
So it happened. The leaps and bounds made technological leaps possible. There were people that refused to get implants but really, there were people that refused to get cel phones and email addresses as well back in the day.
Left behind. Job security went to the people with the drive and capability to handle the pressures of the employment and reaction time was a factor.
Demands became higher. America climbed up to the top of the tech and labour ladder again.
I am not one of those people that had enough money to be improved. I am here in the lobby of the lawyer’s building, fresh out of law school, top of my class, and I’m ready for work. I’m watching the receptionist sort through her papers looking for my appointment and I can see that even the secretary here is augmented.
Her hands move like insects through the papers. She finds my data and taps the page twice. Her hands stop moving and they’re as still and dead as statues while she pauses.
This is the part I hate the most. It’s only a second or so but it feels like thirty. They’re uploading my file and accessing the relevant parts of my file to precede me into the interview.
The eyes look straight ahead, a little crossed, and they don’t move. The only movement I can see on her is the pulse in her neck. It ticks twice before she looks up at me.
Perfect eyes look at me with none of the imperfections that usually give away us pure organics. I’m struck again and how the beauty of the human race lies in its diversity and how that diversity is disappearing. She’s looking at me with a tight smile and I have the uncomfortable feeling that I’m being scanned instead of merely regarded.
“They’ll see you in ten minutes. Have a seat”. She says.
I know I’ve already lost the job.
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by Duncan Shields | Jun 27, 2013 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
It was the tails that gave them away.
Like the ostriches back on earth, these aliens would stick their heads in the sand and think that they were hiding, safe from hunters. They weren’t.
Here on this interminable pink planet, we were clearing the inhabitants. There were squat creatures with long tails.
Every time they hid, they’d stick their long fuchsia tails up straight in the air like flags at a golf course.
I wasn’t sure if it was because they had no feeling in their tails, that they had no awareness of their tails, or that they were just plain stupid but I was starting to lean towards the third option.
Policy: Shoot one in front of the others so that they understand what our weapons do, then walk towards them. They back up right into the nets.
The whole operation is taking less time than expected. There’s usually a token rebellion or a smart couple of life forms that spontaneously develop the ability to plan before the Full Clearing is done but it doesn’t look like it’s going to happen this time.
They’ll be shipped off to other worlds as pets. If they turn out to be edible, they’ll be bred to be used up as protein rations. If they turn out to be edible and palatable, they’ll be bred as delicacies for off-world gourmets in fancy restaurants.
When I mentioned before that this planet was pink, I wasn’t doing it justice. The planet is all shades of pink. There are shades of pink here that I never want to see again. There is an unending palette of pinks that somehow never creeps over fully into the colours of red or purple. The sunsets, the translucent lakes, the trees, the grass, the little guys we’re hunting, even the damned ground.
The experts are happy because they think that a lot of the crystal deposits might be diamonds, making this a very valuable planet indeed. Not that I’ll ever see any of that money.
I shoot a concussion flash straight up. When it goes off, I can see two hundred golf-flag tails quiver in the bushes around me. Here we go.
Two more months to go.
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