by Duncan Shields | Apr 2, 2013 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
Dawn jumps up from behind the mountains and splashes over the city, making a high tide of light that reaches with bright yellow fingers up to my bedroom window.
The glow filters through the dust motes and the blinds. It paints stripes onto my floor. My dry body twitches, climbing the ladder up from dreams to a state of awareness. The images let go of me as my brain re-orders into something more limited. My conscious mind asserts itself, pushing the dreams away, eradicating the memory of them.
I remember. Last year that the road outside would have been filled with cars, honking horns, the hum of radials on warming pavement as the first world went to work.
That’s missing now. I can hear the scuffling of footsteps and people talking to each other. This is the new world. There are still banks and borders but cars, those dinosaur-blooded monsters come to reclaim the earth, they’re almost all gone.
I hear the ratcheting of changing gears on bicycles. I remember that rent will be due in two days.
Those of us that can afford it carry firearms now.
A frontier mentality is taking over, a mindset that always happen to humanity when faced with tough challenges. There’s an bluntness to it that I find refreshing in its brutality. Like the human race is going through a chapter of being honest with itself.
Gold is still gold but a majority of the businesses in the world have gone bankrupt. The upper floors of most high-rise downtown buildings are deserted. Offices have become hovels for nomads and squatters. We haunt this city.
The desert is reclaiming the world. I’ve heard the term ‘dustbowl’ from old books about the depression of the 1930s but I never understood it until now.
We all wear handkerchiefs or cheap air filters on our faces.
We feel lost. No leader has risen yet to take over. The whole notion of government has become informal. Local leaders are making the rules. The republicans were well-prepared. The liberals think the end times are here.
Myself, I know that I have to find some food out there and a day’s work. I wipe the sleep from my eyes and swing my legs over the edge of the mattress. I’ll check the condensation tanks and see what the day’s water levels are.
I’m awake.
by Duncan Shields | Mar 20, 2013 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
It was China that finally did it.
So little was known about the whys and hows of explosive decompression of the human body in space. There had been assumptions and guesses but nothing had happened yet in terms of accidents to give the scientists any bodies to study.
China’s space program was also curious.
It also happened to have ten criminals that it had condemned to death and were in good enough physical condition to qualify as astronauts.
They were strapped into their roller coaster chairs and kept in the back. Funny how the government didn’t balk at the idea of how much ten bodies would cost them in terms of fuel but they felt it was okay to skimp on anesthetic.
China’s government wasn’t doing it completely independently. They had been caught early on in the planning. After some top-secret political wrangling, the other two major governments of Earth had given China the silent go-ahead with the proviso that they share their data. They’d condemn the action if it ever came to light but other than that, they wouldn’t interfere. The information would be valuable and no one except China had the balls to do something like this.
And since there were no civilians up in space at the moment, eyewitnesses would be scarce.
The chairs were fitted with restraints bolted to the floor of the cargo bay. At no point would the prisoners be released. They’d simple be exposed to the vacuum of space for ten minutes and then the cargo bays would close and the shuttle would head back down to Earth.
Simple. Easy. Effective.
Like all horrible plans.
First of all, two of the criminals were adept at escaping locks. Second of all, space agencies weren’t as good at designing criminal restraints as prisons were. Third of all, the plan was to do the mission in radio silence. And fourth, the shuttles these days were mostly automated except for landing.
Weng Pen got out first when the G’s stopped. Pei Sheng followed suit. They freed the others.
One of the crew needed to do a final check on their bodies before the decompression. If only he’d checked the feeds coming from the inside.
That open door was all they needed.
The prisoners overwhelmed the crew, killing them or rendering them unconscious. They prisoners strapped the five crew members into the chairs.
The prisoners gathered into the cockpit and watched the red numbers count down.
The doors opened. Ten minutes passed. The doors closed. The ship turned slowly on its pre-programmed course back to China.
The dead bodies of the crew were the first images that ground control saw when the ship was back within accepted broadcast range parameters.
The other thing they saw was the laughing faces of the prisoners in the cockpit as manual control was restored to them for the landing.
One hard right later, the entire shuttle port and ninety government officials were ionized gas in the crater of the shuttle’s impact.
The rest of the governments of Earth have gone back to waiting for an accident to provide them with what happens upon an explosive decompression.
by Duncan Shields | Mar 13, 2013 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
It’s a time traveler thing.
I’m always walking up to people that I haven’t met yet and saying ‘hello’. I jump around so often that I can’t keep it straight. Then I have to go back and stop myself from doing it. It can get confusing but as long as I keep all the distortions to my own timestream, things are okay. A lot of people think I have a twin who occasionally appears, angry, and gets my attention.
It’s cool. I’m my own guardian angel, I guess.
I like seeing these people who I’m not going to meet for years by their reckoning. Some of them will be recruits, some of them will be lovers, some of them will just be pals with no idea of who I truly am.
I do enjoy a good ruse. I’m also quite the practical joker. I like to go around and leave little traps for myself. I’ve had people come up to me in public places and slap me silly because of what I did ‘last night’. I know my future self is laying down more shenanigans for me to find out about. It’s a gas.
What has me worried this time, though, is this woman in front of me. She’s crying in a way that suggests that she’s witnessing some sort of miracle.
“David?” she’s saying through her tears, hope warring with disbelief on her beautiful face. “Is it you?”
And then she says the words that chill me.
“I thought you were dead. I saw you die.”
Now, my name’s not David. I use a lot of aliases. But this woman seems pretty sincere. We talk for a while. She tells me that I died in her arms four years ago after a car accident. After her tears dry, she admits that I do look younger than her late husband but that the resemblance is still uncanny.
I died? Four years ago? I was married? How could I even begin to screw the timestream that much? That goes against everything I’ve been trained for. She has no idea I’m a time traveler, though, so I guess I at least kept that secret from her.
I’m very unsettled now. I hope all will be revealed. In time.
by Duncan Shields | Mar 5, 2013 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
Humans are crazy. This is a long voyage.
I pretend I’m a greedy Noah sometimes. I pretend that I brought two hundred humans and said ‘fuck it’ to the animals.
Transporters have given the human race the ability to flicker from post to post at speeds previously believed to be impossible. Good for us.
However, a human can’t just beam to Alpha Centauri. There needs to be a receiving station there.
There are long-range ships peopled with volunteers like myself that take centuries to reach far-off planets and set up a transporter sender/receiver. Input/Output posts, they’re called, or I.O. towers. Fitting, since the first transporter was invented on Jupiter’s moon Io by the poor, doomed, Doctor Swanson. The one that took a bite out the gas giant, adding an extra eye.
The ship is huge and mostly automated except for us humans. There are two hundred of us. Only one is awake at a time and we work in two-month shifts.
There are astrophysicist and engineering specialists amongst others that have downloaded their brains into A.I. constructs that we can awaken if an emergency arises.
Other than that, we are free to stare out the windows, eat, and just monitor the passing Doppler universe as we skate under the milk-skin thin ice of lightspeed.
Personally, I think us two hundred volunteers with a penchant for loneliness are completely redundant. I mean, if a true emergency happened at these speeds, we’d wink out of the universe in a flurry of greasy atoms and be none the wiser. We wouldn’t know what hit us.
I think we’re included as lucky charms. We’re the prize in the cereal box. The drive to include humans on the ships is verging on nostalgia. It’s inconceivable to have a space mission without humans, regardless of how superfluous we are.
But hey, that’s why I signed up. I like the isolation. Sometimes, I turn on the lights in the crew room. 199 full green tubes and one empty one; mine. I’ll walk down the white alley and look into the green tubes. I’ll see my co-workers faces, sleeping in fluid, suspended like they’re falling. I’ve only ever met Jared and Tina, the one who comes before me and the one that comes after me. There’s an hour of overlap. I wake them up, they put me under. It’s brief and we don’t talk.
We’re all the same, picked for our sociopathic natures. We prefer to be alone.
Communications at this speed are nearly impossible. Sometimes, I wonder if we’ll get to where we’re headed and it will already be populated. Like we’ll be regarded as antiques or that day’s curiousity. Maybe there’ll be a parade.
Or maybe it’ll just be a rock system and we won’t be able to find any planets to hook up our terraformers to. We’ll just spend our lives in the spaceship, out of fuel for a return journey, winding down like a handmade clock.
Most likely, everything will go textbook. Computers are hardly ever wrong.
I’m a passenger and I’m happy about it.
by Duncan Shields | Feb 21, 2013 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
This was my fourth summer paving the flat parts of Nevada with solar panels. The project had been going on for four years and looked like it would go on for another six.
A summer under the cruel desert sun will teach you about yourself. The sun teaches you your limits and it teaches you the elastic nature of time.
The solar panels are printed off and cut into lightweight, paper-thin wafers before being loaded into heavy groups of four hundred panels each. These panel-blocks slot nicely into our backpacks.
To lay the panels, we reach back in a motion as old as archery to grab a panel, flop it down onto the dusty ground and latch two of the corners to the panels already laid. We dust the leads, spray the protectant and walk one step forward to do the next one.
We put the black thermal side down and the shiny blue solar side facing up.
It’s a mechanical and quick motion that needs to be done in a relaxed manner at a steady pace without being straining. New guys come in and race ahead only to burn out with tennis elbow or RSI halfway through the season.
People ask why this process isn’t automated but the answer is obvious. It’s always cheaper to employ meat to do this kind of work. You don’t have to repair a human. You just hire a new one.
A few Workers Board lawsuits had resulted in the relative guarantee of job safety but you needed to pay attention. Water rations, sunscreen, night tents, proper gear and clothing, everything was yours and needed to be looked after.
I thought of Fremen. I thought of Arabs dressed in pristine white robes on camels. I thought about the Egyptians and their capitulation to Ra, the sun god.
I felt like I could teach them all a thing or two about desert living by now.
Our crew marched forward up the dusty walkway until the edge of where the other team had stopped before us. The irregular border spread out in a jagged line for miles on either side of us. Half of us went single-file to the east and half of us went single-file to the west. All across Nevada, hundreds of other teams were doing the same.
From orbit, the tiles were bright, sky-coloured, shining, square kilometers with thin sandy walkways in between. We were turning the desert into a grid; an energy-producing azure powder-blue plaid. Vegas and Reno now sprouted from fields of shining sapphire glass.
America’s desert was becoming the colour of a tropical ocean. Baby-blue batteries. Powder-blue powerhouses.
The earth was done giving up her oil.
We didn’t have the number of bodies for the bicycle farms of China. We’d dammed up all of the rivers that we could. The wind farms, wave booms and geothermal drills were giving us a good deal of energy but still not enough.
Paving Nevada with solar panels was going to recharge the entire country’s economy. Regular repair and upkeep would keep just over ten percent of the entire continent’s population employed.
Panel People. Redbacks. Sunkids. There were many names for us, depending on where you came from.
The sun screamed down at all of us. We were ants on the hot ground. I looked up through reflective lenses and smiled at the sun’s punishment, daring it to do its worst.
I walked to my grid point designation, reached back over my shoulder for a panel, and got to work.
