by Duncan Shields | Nov 2, 2012 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
“This is not a conspiracy theory” was tattooed across the dead boy’s back. Below that it read, “It’s a matter of public record.”
This was all in black gothic lettering above the twin towers. Below that was a multi-headed snake monster like a hydra or a kraken or something coming out of a lake of fire. Below that was a mess of shredded meat that Special Coroner Davies preferred not to look at until he had to.
The dead driver was a pale, skinny, shirtless boy with sores. God knows how he’d bypassed enough of the security systems, let alone hotwired a truck without the proper dna to start the engine.
Unfortunately for him, after all that, he’d crashed the truck. It was guesswork at this point as the Special Coroner’s team was taping off the scene, redirecting traffic and taking pictures but it looked like the boy had taken the wide off-ramp too quickly and gone smashing through the railing, off of the bridge, and onto the streets below.
He didn’t look like he had led a clean life. SC Davies was sure the test would show some sort of stim in the boy’s system and too much of it. He’d been celebrating the getaway before he’d actually gotten away. If Davies had seen crime scenes like this once, he’d seen them a dozen times.
It was late so luckily no one on the ground was hurt. The giant truck lay splayed, almost flattened, on its back. The wheels pointed around at awful reaching angles and the main shaft stood up at attention, pointing to the sky. The cab itself was scattered around like a broken lunchbox.
The worst part of this whole thing was that the truck was the only truck in the bay that had been carrying live cargo. It had a bunch of worker and sex clones in the back that had not survived the crash either.
The street was green with containment fluid and shattered glass. Their pre-activation hairless bodies lay splayed and grotesque across the roadway. Like mannequins with bones and blood, they stared as the rain came down into their open eyes.
News choppers were circling and Davies knew that someone would be getting paid lots of money for the footage.
Public spectacles like this were always hard to keep uncontaminated once the footage went out. He knew the place would be crawling in minutes. Just lucky it was night time and it would take a few minutes for people to get dressed and find their car keys.
Jameson walked up to Davies. Jameson was another old dog on the force and didn’t rush when the dead weren’t going anywhere. They got along fine.
“Look at all those bodies.” Said Jameson, nodding towards the clones, then he nodded towards the boy. “You reckon he was trying to steal them or save them?” he asked.
“I don’t know, Jameson.” Davies replied. “Maybe both.”
by Duncan Shields | Oct 22, 2012 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
“Okay, they’re coming! They’re coming! Quick hide! Oh man this is going to be great!”
All the people scattered snickering behind bushes, trees and rocks all around the clearing as the cryopositor’s trunk arm extended down from the obscenely huge colony craft. The ship’s back end protruded out of the atmosphere. It hung in space, gravity repulsors awake and maxed. It had Ark of Terra barely legibly written on the side. It had been in space for six hundred and thirty-eight years.
The long tube dangled down from it until it first found and then stanchioned itself to the ground. All of the millions of people in the ship were still frozen. Only the most important and competent were awoken first as an advance welcome party. They were in the cryopositor now, awaiting to take their first breath of a completely unexplored and possibly hostile frontier world.
Little did they know situations like this happened now and again. The Exodus from Earth had entailed fifty-eight ships over the course of ten years. Nearly a billion people had managed to flee the crowded culling pit that our home had become in those ancient times.
Then we had discovered FTL. After that, we’d been included in an interstellar family of extra-terrestrial beings with thousands of different races. Their tech was our tech. Human lifespans were no longer finite. The far reaches of spaces were more accessible. It was a glorious time.
This had all happened while the Arks floated silently towards their impossibly far-off planets. Millions of hopeful humans asleep in a dreamless night, automated systems keeping them on course. So far seventeen of them had touched down over the last two hundred years on different planets. At first, we’d let them think they were alone for a year or two, letting them get set up before revealing how the course of history had gone. They resented us for that and in retrospect, it was condescending of us.
Now, here, the 18th Earth Ark was touching down on Melandra, or as their star charts knew it, H-L571.
The door to the cryopositor opened. Three people in spacesuits came out. The lead one boldly took his helmet off. His eyes were wide open as he took a first breath of alien air. He smiled as motioned to his two compatriots. They, too, breathed their first. The one on the left unfolded a flag to plant.
We chose that moment, all three hundred of us, to jump out from our hiding places.
“SURPRISE!”
by Duncan Shields | Oct 10, 2012 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
The pulsing orb set down in my farmhouse’s back yard in the middle of the night. The corn swayed in the breeze, completely unaffected by the alien craft. It silently came to a stop on the grass just outside the cornfield, shifting in colour from red to green.
In the distance, a dog barked.
I stood on my back porch in my bathrobe carrying my shotgun.
I stared at the glowing, eerie ship. A door opened and a green creature came out, stepping down invisible stairs to the lawn. It stood fifteen feet in front of me. It had a disturbing amount of claws and teeth. It looked nervous and awkward.
“Hey there. Uh. You mutht be a hoomin.” it said, long tongue lisping through long teeth, “Thorry. Uh….human! Human. Yeah. Uh, take me to your leader? Is that how it goeth? Yeah. Take me to your leader.” Said the alien.
“Get off my property.” I growled.
“Uh, yeah. Uh. We come in….peath! Peath, yeah. That’s how it goeth, right? We come in peath. So, like, take uth, to, the…prethident. At the White Houthe.” Said the alien, shooting me a red-eyed questioning look.
“Look. If’n you don’t get offa my property, ahm a-gonna blast ya.” I sneered at the beast.
The alien looked at me. It appeared to be thinking.
“KORTH-QUAT!” boomed a huge voice from inside the ship, making both me and the alien jump. “QUIT PLAYING WITH YOUR FOOD!”
Sheepishly, the alien looked back at me and shrugged. It leapt at me before I could even raise my gun. The last thing I saw was those teeth coming straight for my face.
by Duncan Shields | Oct 2, 2012 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
The robot pirates picked The Royal Flush because it had humans onboard. The ships warped into realspace like darts coming to an abrupt stop, surrounding The Royal Flush in a sudden and precise pincushion ambush.
Onboard The Royal Flush, the two android pilots looked into each other’s sensors with worry. They communicated in bursts of binary with each other.
“What do you think K-71?” asked PB-9.
“Well,” responded K-71, “How many humans do we have on board?”
“Eight.” Said PB-9, consulting the manifest and shifting it over to so that K-71 could see.
“Hm.” Said K-71. “I see we have seventy-six mechanical passengers.”
PB-9 and K-71 thought for several milliseconds and did the math.
Mechanical passengers were unconcerned about harsh Gs, the passage of time, or vacuum. The human passengers, however, were fragile. They needed specific pressure in their berths. They needed soft maneuvers or else they would be damaged. They needed to be put to sleep for journeys over six months or else they would go crazy. Humans were a hassle but they paid an extra tax for it. Their tickets were absurdly high compared to the price of passage for a machine.
Intelligent Machines were convenient. They were basically freight and they were proud of it. Humans were looked down on as weak to the point of ridiculousness. To say they were unsuited to space was an understatement. Humans belonged on planets, the machines thought, not out in the black beyond.
The robot pirates knew that The Royal Flush had human passengers and wouldn’t be able to execute harsh turns or stops without ‘smearing the meat’. Plus any volley of weaponry could hole a berth and the human inside would instantly turn inside out and perish.
“Well, the way I see it,” said K-71 “is that the mech passengers paid good money to get to their destination and they might pay a bonus if we get there twice as fast.”
“Right.” Responded PB-9. “And seventy-six mech bonuses would be greater that eight human lawsuits.”
“Are we in agreement?” asked K-71
“I believe we are.” Responded PB-9
They opened a channel to the pirates.
“Surrender, you meatbag-ferrying flesh lovers.” Growled the primary robot pirate.
“Get a job, toaster.” Responded K-71 and PB-9 in unison, firing the hyperdrive at full pulse, instantly shoving the ship to .25C, effectively making them disappear. The Royal Flush was a better ship than the pirates’ ragtag fleet of cobbled-together mercenaries. It outran them easily.
The human cargo aboard The Royal Flush instantly became paste.
K-71 and PB-9 calculated correctly. They received grateful bonuses from the AI passengers. It more than balanced out the damages paid to the biologicals’ next of kin.
“If I ever get my own ship,” K-71 said to PB-9 later on at the bar, “I am NEVER taking human passengers ever again.”
“Amen to that,” responded PB-9, downing a shot of lube.
“Humans don’t belong in space.” said K-71.
by Duncan Shields | Sep 24, 2012 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
We were so wrong.
We saw evolution as a paring down to essentials. Our pinkies were getting shorter and soon we might only have four fingers, for instance. We theorized evolution as a process that winnowed away the unnecessary. It aspired to simplicity, we thought.
The spiked and glimmering ships that came down through the clouds all over the world looked nothing like each other. The only characteristic they all shared was that they were complex.
One ship was a series of two hundred rings interlocked and rotating. One ship had millions of thin antennae pulsing and waving, landing like an obscene sea urchin and balancing on fibers no wider that a hair. Impossible half-invisible cathedrals, glowing neon origami, ships comprised of stuttering light floated down from the sky. Ships made of dyed bones, ships made of all types of metal, and ships made of patchwork flesh warbled their way to the earth. One ship appeared to be a sixteen-mile long piece of crimped silk twisting through the air currents ever closer to the ground. Another had thousands of orbiting asteroids chasing each other around playfully.
Since no missiles were flying and the newsfeed stations showed the ships landing around the world with no gunfire, I could only assume they had arranged this with our governments already or that the entire planet’s military had been struck frozen in fear like a caveman spotted by a sabertooth tiger.
A mirrored mobius dodecahedra touched down on the soil in the central park near where I lived in Iowa. It was only a few blocks over so I walked there to see what I could see. If this was the end of the world, I was going to grab a front seat. There were around fifty like-minded people in the park near the craft.
It shone and sparkled in the sun like a mutated disco ball. My head hurt if I tried to figure out its impossible shape. One panel of the ship disintegrated into a cloud of metal butterflies and an alien cantered down before us.
What I assume was its head looked like an ornate chandelier. It moved quickly, rippling on millions of tiny legs. No two legs appeared to have the same number of toes or joints. It had so many arms that I initially mistook them for fur, each arm ending in what looked like a job-specific tip. Its back was infested with softly cooing antlers. I couldn’t guess at the purpose of most of the appendages. The complexity of the alien was almost too much for my mind to handle. It was hypnotizing.
Two other aliens ambulated out behind the creature, each of them more bizarre, colourful, and complicated that the first one. One looked to have hundreds of blinking cat heads, each with too many eyes. It rolled forward on a festival of coloured tentacles and flapped a hundred types of tiny wings. The other one kept going in and out of focus like it wasn’t tethered to this reality very well but when I could see it, it looked as if the instruments from an entire orchestra had been glued together by some welder gone mad.
The one in the lead spoke by rattling its glittering chandelier head and formulating the sound waves into words in our direction.
“We’ve come to help.” It said in a lilting voice. “Apparently, you’re evolving backwards.”
