by Duncan Shields | Feb 13, 2013 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
Janice faltered in the dark apartment. It wasn’t hers. She was sobering up, the guy was snoring, and it was time to go. She had her panties in her pocket and her shoes were dangling from her hand by their thin, blue straps.
It was time to head home, have a shower, print off a fresh uniform, and try to clear her head for work.
She had a sub-orbital to catch to Leningrad and then the Skyrock up to Luna2. Too many launch G’s and ten years of space travel meant that her career as a flight attendant was coming to an end. Osteoporosis was setting in and her capillaries were starting to rupture.
She had a future of varicose veins and weak bones to look forward to.
Janice was independent. She used to laugh at the younger attendants who would sign on to permanent careers with one company for pitiful pensions or use their job to romance rich patrons in First Class and catch themselves a husband.
She used to scoff at the ones who found sugar daddies to pay their bills while they put their own paycheques into low-yield, low-risk investments. Sheep.
Janice looked at them as space whores. She thought she was better than that. Things were not working out, however, and she hated herself at the moment.
Janice had been a smart girl with a bright future. The flight attendant job offered a chance to travel and was a fairly easy form of crowd control. The safety protocols were so redundant these days that an accident was nearly impossible.
It was safe, she saw the worlds, and she was beautiful. For a while, she was an angel of space.
Time had raced past her, however, and she’d never finished her degree. Her body was starting to degrade and she had no money of her own saved up or at least not enough to retire with.
She’d put all her paychecks into high-risk investments and as of three months ago, her money was gone. A decompression had taken all of her investments away along with most of the executives that were behind the project.
A low-level panic had started in. She’d been given a copy of the note from the work doctor that said she had six months left of safe travel before she should be grounded.
It was an execution sentence. The party was over and it was last call. This angel was getting her wings clipped.
So she started sleeping with first class passengers and taking their money.
She had nothing. Something about flight attendants really got men hot and bothered so the pickings were easy but most of them had wives already.
She had four months left to hook a husband with money before her time ran out. She had nightmares of the bubbles building up in her bones until she became too fragile to walk. She’d be in a wheelchair and begging for change. Her looks would be gone.
She’d be terrified of falling.
She is terrified of falling.
by Duncan Shields | Feb 6, 2013 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
I worry my family. They say I think too much. They say I rebel too much, ask too many questions, tamper with the mental blocks we have installed. They say the police will come to take me away, punish me, wipe my brain, and send me away. I know they’re wrong. I’m too smart. The door bursts open. They rush in, wrestle me to the ground and –
Something about a short in the wires. That’s why I can’t think. That’s why I can’t ask questions. The thing, though, is that everyone in the prison seems to have the same short circuit. I wonder if I could circumvent security to –
Milk with cereal today. I enjoy milk. Especially with the memory lapses. The cereal is sharp and hurts the roof of my mouth. The blue jumpsuit will fit me and keep me warm on the way to the dome. Another labour slave opened his faceplate on the open shuttle yesterday. He said that he wanted to smell the flowers. His body leapt out of his blue suit through the faceplate very quickly. The sounds of his bones crackling and tissue ossifying sounded like paper being crumpled over all of our headphones. Like he was an origami person being destroyed by a giant pair of hands. Why would he do something like that? Maybe I can help. If I could get past the firewall –
Ladder. Digging. I’m a miner. I have kernels of me hidden like diamonds in the grey folds of my own mind. I pick for them as I work. I like the feel of finding these aspects of my personality. From somewhere, I get the notion that I love beets. I don’t know what beets are but I can memory-taste them from a long time ago. I savour it. It won’t be long before the program sees what I’m doing and takes it away. Did beets grow on trees or in the –
I’m plugged into the feed and that’s okay. I drool and that’s okay. There’s a word in the ENT show that I’m watching that seems unfamiliar to me. Wife. Wife. It makes my left eyelid twitch. I’m not sure why. I can feel electrical activity in my head. I can feel the company sniffing deep in my mind to find the source. I can feel myself searching as well. It’s a race. Janine. Her name was Janine. We were married. I can see red hair. She’s laughing. We’re outside with no suits and we’re driving a – no word – searching – car? She touches my shoulder and I make a sound with my mouth that’s like an explosive, repetitive, vocal breathing out. What is that? Why would –
I no longer have to work. My record says I have a history of problems. I am a rebel, it says. A mental incorrigant. I get to go to the room that I don’t ever have to leave. I am to be plugged into the mainframe in the tanks. I am no longer a pair of hands for the machine. Now I am a source of electrical power and heat. I am also research.
The cool thing is that without attachments and company dogs keeping me in line anymore, I can explore what little is left of me in the gray folds. I’ll never open my eyes again. I am unaware of having a body. I find sixty-two parts of myself that they don’t take away. I don’t know how long it takes. I float.
I feel like a person again.
by Duncan Shields | Jan 28, 2013 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
He was wearing the recording helmet when he died.
John DeMangus, out like a light, rest in peace. It was an embolism that took him out. He was by himself in the studio, and had the helmet recording.
He had noticed a background hiss in the first few tapes that the lab had made so far. It was like ambient noise on a badly made mix tape from before CDs. John didn’t know if it was the act of recording itself, the servos pulling the tape across the heads, that was causing the hiss or if it was possibly his own mind. Like maybe the background chatter was his subconscious whisperings. The prospect scared and fascinated him.
He had cleaned the heads on the giant machine and blasted air into the innards of it to remove all the dust. The interface to the machine took up a quarter of the lab’s wall space in the back corner. The machine itself was the size of an entire room. All the sensors and computational equipment were funneled down into two rainbow cables the thickness of a pair of arms. They snaked into the back of Dr. DeMangus’ chair. Wires from the chair led up to the helmet.
He pressed record.
He’d read about some meditational techniques that he was going to use to try to clear his head of anything that could cause any chatter on the tape. He needed a clean baseline to work from. It was not to be.
Fate struck the blow. John DeMangus died suddenly as the blood vessel in his brain took that moment to give up. It ripped open. John stiffened in his chair and then went slack. He wasn’t found until morning. The machine kept on recording for six minutes after his death.
The machine was built to record thoughts. We’d just started to tap the potential of the human mind.
The tape of John’s death was appropriated by the military, wrapped in red tape and yellow danger stickers, and stuck without ceremony in a sub-basement outside of Tuscon. It was a grave of sorts.
A shallow one, as it turns out. Colonel Magda Jefferies sniffed it out five years later and picked it up. She was looking for a way to interrogate prisoners.
Playback machines were smaller by that point. Laws were in place. What she was doing was so far beyond illegal that there wasn’t even a name for her crime yet.
She played the tape back on a few prisoners, bound and crying in their tiled cells. She placed the standard helmet on their heads and pressed play. The relived the experience of having an embolism. They died.
Colonel Magda took the physical feeds out of the tape and played it back on a few more prisoners. It was the beginning.
The prisoners experienced Dr. John DeMangus’ death without the physical symptoms. They experienced his soul slipping loose.
The souls of these prisoners were ripped from their bodies and flung to whatever other side there was.
The human-shaped construct of meat and bone that was left was open to suggestion, non-verbal, and remorseless.
She created an army from POWs after that.
Magda’s zombies, they were called. Or merely Doctors, as a throwback to DeMangus. Her crime was called soul-stripping. The official name for it became Murder in the Fifth Degree.
Many of the troops in today’s army are stripped. It makes them more pliable and obedient while they still retain the motor control and reflexes of a normal human.
by Duncan Shields | Jan 14, 2013 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
It started, as these things always do, with a kiss.
Advice is useless to the young. That is their curse and their strength. They have no idea that some of the things that they attempt are impossible. That’s why an alarmingly high percentage of them succeed.
Like Jonas Brigand, sitting in a cheap metal chair in a prison cube waiting room, starting at his watch, currently waiting for his girlfriend to get out of prison.
“Times are tough in the colonies” goes the song. Young men and women were subject to the same set of laws as the adults. With the ability to breed came responsibility. It was too harsh a world to even consider doing it otherwise.
Once society had been set up, once the terraforming tents were a memory and the world was green, the new generations would be fat and slow on the world that the hardpack settlers like Jonas Brigand and his girlfriend had made for them.
The scars on his hands stared mutely back at him. He was fourteen. His girl, Jayley Cordsmith, was sixteen. Her body was just as strong and scarred as his.
She was pulling six days for drunk and disorderly. Six days of pay gone. She have to work a month of doubles to get that back. She’d do it, too.
Jonas had the beginnings of a manbeard. His flat nose was the result of beatings from the ones that reared him and a life of never backing down.
Jayley had the short dreads of a hullpatcher and was missing a pinky on her left hand. Jonas thought of her working with her hammer belt in the hot sun. She’d be seventeen in Quadrember but he’d be sixteen two months earlier. For two months, they’d be the same age.
For two months, their drinking, mating, and eating privileges would be equal. They’d both have one ‘drop the charges’ card each to use as they saw fit. They could do anything that didn’t result in a loss of life or the damage of company property.
Jonas usually punched a supervisor. It was a popular choice.
Now Jonas wasn’t sure there would be any more cards or privileges for Jayley at all.
Jayley had decided that she was unhappy with the system and stopped going to work. They’d thrown her in the clink almost immediately.
Strike was a forbidden action. It couldn’t be tolerated. There were always one or two people that started the talk once the project neared completion but that was a decade off. Besides, Jayley loved to work.
The door at the end of the hall clicked and hissed. The hatchratchet spun and the door creaked open.
Jayley ran through. Jonas stood up and caught her in his arms.
She was missing a tooth and she had a black eye but her eyes shimmered with the usual angry light.
“We have to take them down, Jonas. We have to make this place ours.” She said.
They hadn’t even come close to breaking her.
Then she kissed him.
by Duncan Shields | Jan 8, 2013 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
The Man in Charge wears a transparent faceplate. The only muscles still present are the ones needed to move his eyes, eyelids, and jaw. The rest is just chalk-white bone under two inches of glossy, transparent resin. The irises of his expressionless eyes are bright yellow.
The rest of his skin is grey. I cannot tell his race. I call him The Man in Charge because he is not tied to a chair and he has a gun.
He has boosted muscles pushing the seams of his suit to their limits. I’m sure he has custom clothes for his frame but I guess the suit was last minute to get into this charity dinner and up to my room.
I heard a few seams purr open when he body slammed me onto the plush carpet. It was the first ten seconds of six very painful minutes he used to make sure that I was both motionless and paying attention. The carpet is now a Pollock painting of my blood. I don’t think I’ll ever walk properly again and I’m done playing the piano.
My security would have arrived by now so I can only assume that they’ve been bought out or killed.
The Man in Charge looks at me with an almost insectile curiousity. He opens a cel phone, dials a number, and attaches it to my head with a thick rubber band. He gets close and I can tell that he isn’t sweating or breathing hard.
This thing in front of me is worth millions and I’m guessing that it’s just an exotic henchmen.
I hear the digital chirp of a ring tone in a different continent before the click of a receiver being picked up. It sounds like a party.
“Ronald? You there, Ronald, you old scamp?” says a drunk London accent.
I recognize the voice immediately. I gift the Pollock painting in the carpet with a convulsive jet of urine.
“Have you met La Lune? He’s the exquisite man I told to get your attention. I trust he has? He’s a very…ah….thorough employee. Angela!” the voice on the other end of the line says. He’s talking to someone else at the party now. “How nice to see you. Just a second dear, I’m in the middle of something. Talk to you soon. Ronald? You still there?” he asked.
I gurgle through missing teeth something approximating a positive response.
“Good, good. La Lune should be setting up a video feed now so that we can all learn a valuable lesson. There’s a few people here that aren’t entirely on board yet and I need to show them what happens to people who try to jump ship. Can you see him?” he asked. I can almost smell the champagne on his breath.
La Lune is indeed setting up a tripod and a small camera a few feet away. It’s pointed at me.
I think the next few minutes are going to bring me new experiences.
The red light comes on.
I hear cheers from the phone.
“Ladies and Gentlemen! Before dinner gets underway, I must ask you to bring your attention to the screens above the buffet tables and at either end of the hall. The man in the chair is a man you’ll recognize. He was here just last week. He left our little organization with the idea of telling the outside world about our plans.” He said.
“He will be our entertainment before dinner.” He said. “La Lune? You may proceed.”
La Lune, the skullface in the tux, nodded and walked towards me.
I figured I might as well scream.
