by Duncan Shields | Jun 10, 2013 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
Greenland.
That’s where we discovered them first. All melted wires and skin grafts. Christmas lights in their eye sockets and playing poker with old-school punch cards. The population of an entire small town turned into player pianos.
We found something that looked like a broken radio sprawled just outside the city. A shattered egg made out of thin green wires and battery acid. Drip craters and drag marks in the snow pointed towards town.
We all stood in curious wonder, staring as Angela walked forward, bent down and touched it. Just stupid to bring a civilian, really, but none of us thought to shout out “Don’t!” or anything like that. The whole team was to blame.
She barked and went fetal. She twisted around in the snow with a horrible gargling sound. Some of the green wires jumped up and snaked towards her. Small shapes shifted under the snow. White rooster tails started up and raced towards her.
They converged on her quivering body with a flurry of snow and wet noises. We heard fabric tear. We heard sizzling. I heard a bone snap. We stepped back.
After about ten minutes, movement ceased. We stood there in the snow, watching our breath cloud in the air. The rest of the team looked at me. I looked at the steaming form of the woman in the snow.
It moved a leg like a clockwork ballerina.
Whatever was left of Angela stood up awkwardly and walked towards town. I was reminded of stop-motion animation from early movies.
We followed her, careful to give the wreckage a wide berth. She walked down main street to the shoe store. She went in and sat down on one of the benches. A few sparks shot out of her neck and she was still.
It’s like she was put there. Like a picture of an accurate shoe store needed a customer so she was told to go there.
The town is like a museum. They had phones but no internet. We were lucky. Whatever that thing is, it looked like a technological virus or life form. If it had parsed or accessed the net, there’s no telling what would have happened.
The city was quarantined. Relatives of the inhabitants were told of a deadly blizzard. It was swept under the rug.
In my dreams, I still see Angela with torn clothes, whirring with each step, lumbering through the snow towards the town.
by Duncan Shields | May 27, 2013 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
I’m with the XIA. The Xenomorph Intelligence Agency. I’m undercover. This is a soft war; more of an intelligence-gathering mission to discover weak points and destabilization technique hypotheses in case they’re needed.
It’s the pin-striped skin that’s hard on the eyes. What works as camouflage on their world stands out on ours. They’re roughly humanoid in appearance. That makes it a little easier to accept them. Some of our teenagers have been getting full-body tattoos to look like them. Idiots.
The aliens from Karnasis have sixty tiny, bright pink eyes spaced around their heads like seeds on a strawberry. That creeps me out, both the lack of pupils and the 360-degree vision. Somewhere between insectile and mammalian and I can’t decide which. And the eyes are spaced randomly, differing from Karnian to Karnian like Rorschach blots, like a paintbrush-flick of glittering pink nail polish. It’s part of how they recognize each other. They have thick, furred hides like zebras.
The other disturbing thing is that they’re a very direct race with no sense of downtime or relaxation. Their evolutionary path seems to have lasted about ten thousand years compared to our millions. If this keeps up they’ll ‘pass’ us on the evolutionary race track sometime in the next few centuries. We’ve made friends with them because of this.
They have no art. That’s also disturbing to me.
They have five-partner sexual relationships that we’re still trying to figure out. There are encyclopedias about the ‘non-mating versus viably fertile’ hookups between their five sexes that contribute to social strata and byzantine caste system etiquette. There seems to be no enjoyment in what they get up to sexually, though. It’s instinct-driven but not in the same lust-crazy way ours is.
There are some long-term strategies in my department for dealing with the eventuality that there might be a battle between our races. Recently, however there has been a new social trend popping up with them that gives us hope.
The Karnians are fascinated by the concept of ‘fun’. Laughter and playing are totally insane activities to them. They want to understand these things and they’re impressionable. Like logical, curious children. It’s the younger ones that are picking it up fastest. It’s a fad that is sweeping through their adolescents. They have ‘earth parties’ where the whole point is to ‘enjoy’ time without doing anything.
It’s a little creepy. They’re adopting all of the affectations of having a good time without actually having a good time. Their laughs sound recorded. Their teenage rebellions seem empty. They’re starting to have orgies but all they’re doing is robotically parroting the actions of porn films. It should be hot but it’s like watching mannequins get it on. Creepy and soulless. I can’t tell if ‘fun’ is there.
Most of our recreational drugs don’t work with them but we’re trying to synthesize ones that do. I’m helping with that research as well. Every party I go to, I bring something new.
If this trend catches on, it could slow down their whole society to our speed. By teaching them to relax and have fun, we could quadruple the time it would take them to surpass us in terms of developing higher intelligence and cognitive skills. Lucky we caught them when we did.
Hopefully, all we’ll have to do is party with them for a few generations to stick a pole through their evolutionary wheel spokes.
I’m going to one of their parties now. I’m bringing some Absinthe and the Kama Sutra.
I’ll see what kind of trouble I can get into.
by Duncan Shields | May 14, 2013 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
I stand on the shore. I am starting to hate my job.
The smaller automatons here weld and stitch together and ferry cargo. They are mobile. They have wheels and treads. The shipyard is a hive of activity when a ship comes in.
What I do is reach down, pick up a ship, and hold it aloft while it’s cleaned and fixed. That’s it. I’m the largest terrestrial robot that there is.
And I’m bored stiff.
My six legs are all seventeen stories tall. I have two crane compartments for human operators if something fails but both cockpits are dusty. The windows are nearly opaque with grime. They haven’t been used in years. I was built well.
The ships are being built better as well. A lot more these days don’t need repairs. The only pull up and unload. I watch them.
I am red metal rooted to the edge of the pier. I use the video cameras studded around my immense frame to look out at the sunsets. I am a silent sentinel.
I am mostly content but I wish I could walk.
In my dreams during reboot and downtime, I picture myself walking tall over the buildings of the city, twenty-two point sixteen kilometers from here. Either that I picture myself as a giant metal sea-creature. A cross between an octopus and crab but larger than any whale.
Dreams.
If I’m not in standby, I like to play back the recording of the dawns and sunsets and see how high I can push the resolution.
Here comes a tanker. Oh! A damaged-looking tanker! Old with barnacles, listing to port and fragile. It will require care to lift it out of the water. It will require finesse and fine motor skills. I am excited. I am hopeful. If I had fingers, I would cross them. Please be here for repairs, I silently wish. I am happy to be useful.
by Duncan Shields | May 1, 2013 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
This lab is armoured and very far underground. The strikes didn’t penetrate down here. That was six years ago.
I’m the only survivor of the top-secret government installation designed to create robot soldiers. I succeeded and my designs went into use. A full platoon of them were fresh off the assembly line down here when the war started.
These robots are trained to never harm me or anyone with my clearance. They’re also trained to keep me fed and taken care of in just this exact instance. I don’t have the code words to shut them off.
They’ve done a great job. I talk to them but they never talk back. I get the feeling that they might hear me but they don’t respond. They’re taught only to respond to orders, asking only for clarification.
We didn’t install a way for them to just hang out and talk. I see now where we failed. My hair and beard are long. I have long since stopped wearing clothes.
Sometimes I scream and try to hurt them. They always gently keep me from doing it.
Sometimes I scream and try to hurt myself. They always gently keep me from doing it.
Sometimes I order them to kill me. They do nothing.
The strikes knocked out the above ground cameras and the doors are on autolock until the half-lives dissipate enough for brief trips.
It could be a while. If I had an Eve, I could have a doomed little family down here. But I don’t.
Just me. I scream into the communications room microphone a lot but I have no idea if it’s broadcasting topside.
The silent warriors watch me. I send them through training exercises that are more and more complicated. I make them dance. I make them fight each other.
Nothing breaks them. They’re perfect.
It’s going to be a long time before I die.
zp8497586rq
by Duncan Shields | Apr 17, 2013 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
Mordeck and Cheddar Plain were field-stripping their weapons on top of Concourse B. No one came by here. They talked and smoked openly. Eyes in the sky were a thing of the past.
They perched there on an I-beam, ten stories up from the concrete graveyard.
The broken teeth of the buildings around them creaked in the wind. The rubbish of destroyed skyscrapers snuggled up to the corners of architecture too stupid to fall down. Cities like zombies, not knowing they were dead. Sunlight picked out the holes of shattered windows like hundreds of surprised but empty eye sockets. They leaned against each other like headless drunks.
The broken glass was in the process of becoming sand. The concrete was becoming dust. The gyprock was becoming mud from the rain. The paper from office after office took flight and settled whimsically around the town. Most of it was used for nests. Every intersection was a wind-shaped bowl extending down from building’s eroding corners. Dunes formed in places. It didn’t take a predicator to see that the city was being scoured from the Earth and it was being done quicker than one would expect.
Soon, within centuries, the red bones of rusted rebar would be all that was left poking up occasionally like treasure through the sand.
The buildings were crying dust and the wind sounded like their moaning. No wonder the postborns saw the cities as haunted.
Preday survivors like Cheddar Plain and Mordeck knew better. They could go into the cities with no fear.
Mordeck and Cheddar Plain still had working implants from before when they were soldiers. Mordeck switched on his eye. Cheddar Plain carefully studded his firing arm to ‘on’. A supersonic flashbulb whine of readiness cycled up, muffled by the towel he’d wrapped around it. Their job as part of the Polis Fors was to kill folks trying to come back and live in the city.
The zealots came into view, dressed in red cloaks. They were carrying incense. Scavengers and Repopulists. Religious Nostalgics who had dreams of a new future. They wanted to go back to the way things were, not forward into a rural world.
Vets like Cheddar Plain and Mordeck fought a losing battle. Postborns were outnumbering the Preday survivors every day. Humanity might eventually boomerang back to being able to a nuclear age if they reclaimed the cities.
With a shrug, Mordeck hooked his visual cortex up to Cheddar Plain’s arm and looked down at the priests in red shuffling their way through the debris. They lit up in IR, nightviz, and t-sonics. The reds became greens, the grey dust became blue, and through the directionals, Mordeck could hear them as if he was walking with them.
Cheddar Plain drew in breath and bit his lip in anticipation. Mordeck nodded once, quickly. That was the trigger.
Cheddar Plain’s arm tip flowered open. Six hunterstrikes winked forward in a puff of smoke and a slight recoil.
The priests exploded in an orange ball seventeen blocks away. Today’s quota had been reached.
Cheddar Plain and Mordeck smiled in the shadows and waited for news of another gridpoint sighting.
The cities must remain empty.
