by Duncan Shields | Jun 5, 2012 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
Bringing the sleepers out of cold storage was always a difficult process.
The actual thawing out was almost fault-free. That was no problem. The problem was the emotional and psychological fallout that happened when they tried to join in with the new society.
The old ones, the ones that were dying of cancer or whatever disease was incurable at the time, are the ones that adjust with a minimum of fuss. The fact that they’re now alive is the most important thing to them. Everything’s gravy after that. They can be rejuvenated, shunted into new skin that suits the environment, and put to work. They don’t care that everyone they know is dead or that this new future is an alien place. It’s an adventure for them.
Suicide rates for them only hover around sixty per cent.
It’s the idealists that we hate, the ones that voluntarily went under, going the only direction in time that was available to them. There were a lot of people in the past that believed that they were born in the wrong century. They believed that they would have been way happier in the middle ages or on a starship sometime in the future. They were usually meek assistant managers in retail stores or online-warrior data-entry drones not at home with their own egos.
These are the ones we have the most trouble with.
They immediately demand to see who’s in charge. They want to see the future. They want to see the planet. They want to see the space ships. They want to taste the cool future food. They want. They want. They want.
They didn’t have what it took to enjoy life to the fullest in their era so they expect it to be different here. When they’re shown their cell after being taken out of the Awakening Compound, they start to complain. When they’re put into the new body construct that can withstand the vacuum and the solar radiation, they complain more. When they’re told that they need to work, they complain loudly.
When they’re told what happens if they don’t stop complaining, they stop complaining.
They usually only last a few months before cutting their tethers and hopping out into space, dying silently if we’re lucky, sobbing into their intercoms on widecast if we’re not. In the last twenty decades, only two have lasted more than a year. They have no compunction about throwing their life away after the Big Disappointment.
We have a joke. We say that there’s a reason why it’s called ‘cry’ogenics. That always makes us laugh. It helps us not to feel cruel when they start wailing and sniffling. It helps us not to feel like murderers just for waking them up.
Life’s a disappointing one-way trip. It’s an immutable law for the universe. Even in the future, there’s no exception to that rule. These fools thought it would be better down the line. My heart used to go out to them but not any more.
by Duncan Shields | May 21, 2012 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
Shades of coffee and caramel run under my fingertips like love letters written in goose-bump braille. There’s a heat from the honeyed angles and well-oiled hip joints that quietly beg me for a brush of fingertip. The skin is warm and dry to the touch. You’d think from the smoothness of her back that she’d been polished every day and you’d be right.
She’s easy to turn on. There’s a switch behind her left ear. The new prototype Gabrielle.
I’m putting the finishing touches on my masterpiece. It’s late on a Friday night. I’m one of the only people who manufacture custom units. This warehouse has vats of perfection in the basement. God is in the details, they have said, and details are all that concern me. I hardly sleep.
Robotic lovers are available all over the world but I am the most popular designer of companions.
I have designed the women and men, much to the delight of my customers. I am an artist. I know that it is the flaws that make perfection attractive. A perfect lover must be unique. I make women whose eyes are just a little too far apart. There is a gap in between the front teeth of some of the men. There are two extra pounds of flesh on some models and others who were just that few ounces too thin.
One flaw was all it took. The clients went crazy. I was paid more on top of my already exorbitant prices.
People fell in love with my creations.
On the way up here, I wandered between the vats and looked at the shadows in the murky protein-rich water of each plexiglass container. Renee. Violet. Jessica. David. Thomas. Christopher. Each one was different in the details but similar in perfection.
I looked forward to these nights and I dreaded them. I always dove in with a feverish need to outdo myself and I always left with a horrible crushing feeling of failure in my gut.
I was the best at what I did. A little godling churning out love for the rich.
by Duncan Shields | May 10, 2012 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
There are over a billion species represented. Finding out information and language about a species happens quickest during coitus, they say, and the more plentiful the better.
I was selected from over eighty thousand applicants. I am a mating specialist.
The stink of this planet is incredible. Every single race’s raging pheromones waft heavily through the air. The aquatic races make the ocean reek of vanilla, the avian races pepper the air streams, and us land-lovers stumble through a thick fog of undiluted sex.
The planet, predictably, is pink.
Minutes after my shuttle leaves, a plantform from Karssis shows me his datapad and wiggles his stamen in query. I nod, and it rubs some pollen on my head that quickly burrows into my brain, grabs control of my motor control, and forces me to walk twenty feet west to another plantform from Allorway whose sweet smell of fennel coaxes it out of my brain through the pores on my face. The pollen seeds bloom dark red parachutes, steering themselves towards the Allorwayan pitcher bowl mouth.
The experience is harmless and I have insight into the cultures of the two species that cannot be described.
I am scratched by love bugs that burrow deep and lay benign eggs in my liver. They will never reproduce and will dissolve in my bloodstream in weeks. I am tongue-painted with photo-sensitive, fertilized-egg paint over one half of my body. It dries in the sun and disappears. Cheek cells are taken from me for a race that hybrids itself with others. I trade minds with two of the races that reproduce mentally. My gene type is mimicked by those that mate by copying. I am lucky enough to find a race that can gestate inside of the flesh on the back of my arms in under an hour. The babies burrow out of my triceps, blinking and mewling. I am crying and smiling as it happens, ecstatic.
I am rubbed against, massaged, pounded and washed in juices. I am touched briefly by some races, held for hours by others. Some scare me to drink in the pheromones of my fear in order to start estrus.
I am deadly to some and some are deadly to me. I smirk sadly to these ones and I walk past. I’m too big or too small for others but if it’s at all possible, I give it a try.
I have sex in the air with six of the flying races, one of whom drops me in orgasm but catches me over thirty seconds later before I hit the ground. It’s the most exhilarating experience of my time there.
That is, until I’m taken into the oxygen-breathable egg sac of an aquatic mammal and my body is dissolved completely and painfully by the breath of her needy eggs. I am dead and completely nonexistent for a full half hour before I am reassembled by her internal genetic generators and deposited laughing back on the shore. My eyes are now a different colour. Not an accident, an improvement by her standards. A flirtation.
I have hundreds of similar experiences. With my boundless enthusiasm, I cover 0.0003% of the races on the planet. Rich with experience that will take a lifetime to tell, I return to our docking bay for debriefing.
I will be smiling for years.
I have scars from my time on the love planet; beautiful memories. I have new eyes that will stare back at me for the rest of my life. I am missing a finger. It doesn’t matter when I die now, I will die happy.
by Duncan Shields | May 4, 2012 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
We tried everything but the kid was just too fast. We were hoping to break speed records when we bred him. A snip of a molecule here, a tweak of an atom there. We only wanted to cheat and win some gold medals for our country.
We were too good. The kid could move himself around the room with a muscle twitch. The snap of each muscle fiber contraction set off miniature sonic booms. We had him contained but he’d run into the walls just by taking a step. He’d rocket around in his room like a pinball every time he had a nightmare until we strapped him down. The concussions were killing him.
We had to let him out. We had theories about how to slow him down so that he could function in society and we tried them out. Speed retardant. Friction enhancers. We injected negative velocity serums into his bloodstream. We coated him with time suspension gel. We even dialed his quantum universe placement signature to always be ten feet behind where he actually was.
Nothing worked.
Early in the morning, we carefully put him into a wheelchair and told him to stay still. We took him out into the field above the secret sub-basement where he’s spent his entire life. He was immediately agoraphobic when he saw the blue sky and clouds so far above. His eyes were wide.
“No walls.” He said. He was six. Those were the last words we heard him say.
He twitched his head to the left and my glasses broke from the shockwave. He stood up, immediately displacing the air into flames around him for a second with the friction. Anything standing in front of him would have been vaporized from the small blast wave.
He looked into the distance and cocked his head.
And disappeared. The trail of churned earth and scorched grass that flew up like a roostertail fell back to earth lazily, reclaimed by gravity. His tracks ended twenty feet away. At first, we’d though that he had vaporized.
Then I looked up and saw the hole in the clouds. Taking a minute of drift into account, it looked like it would have been about parallel with the end of his tracks.
We got the defcon warning two minutes later that there had been an unauthorized missile launch from our co-ordinates. We invoked our black book top-secret status and that went away. Defcon stood back down to previous levels.
I want to believe that our child broke the light barrier. I want to believe that he has landed exhausted and happy on another planet.
I want to believe that he hasn’t run into the heart of a star or that he hasn’t died in the cold vacuum of space.
by Duncan Shields | Apr 20, 2012 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
The pins and needles stopped caressing her body. Her muscles twitched to life as she took her first gasping steps out of the cryotube and lit a cigarette from the pack beside her clothes. She tossed back the two whiskey shots provided by the rider in her contract. After she had picked up her guitar and tried out the fine motor control tests on the chords, she noticed the red envelope taped to the small desk in the middle of her waking chamber.
She opened it:
October 20th, 2344
Dear Janey Starr (nee Alice Winthrope)
Further to a shareholder’s/publicity meeting held on January 16th, 2337, we regretfully confirm that your employment with us is terminated from October 20th, 2344 with immediate effect.
This is due to your position having to be made redundant, and in no way reflects your performance of your job, which has been entirely satisfactory/excellent.
The last ‘Legends of Yesteryear’ concert was not entirely sold out and as you know, popular music has continued to evolve as the decades go by. In a ranking of longevity popularity, you have come to be on the bottom of the list. We’ve had to add higher-grossing artists to the top of the bill and remove the least popular acts from the bottom. (see attached studies and lists in appendix 1) That was you and three others. The other three are not from your time frame so their names will not be familiar to you. It’s a testament to your talent that you’ve lasted as long as you have with us.
As stated in the minutes of the meeting (included here), the terms of your redundancy are as follows.
A payment to the order of 800 NWD dollars adjusted for deflation (see appendix 2a for your time frame equivalent). An iStar credit rating boost of 11 per cent (see appendix 2b for your time frame equivalent). Class 4 mating, smoking, and drinking privileges. (see appendix 2c for your time frame equivalent). Free access to your savings from your initial investments with your original bank. (see appendix 3 for changes to your bank’s interest rates and company holdings during your storage).
Don’t hesitate to get in touch with us for a letter of reference. Please vacate this cryochamber immediately. Make sure to take all your personal belongings. Temporary housing and employment options will be provided for you for one month.
A representative will be waiting outside the chamber for you. Have an enjoyable life.
Yours sincerely
Acquisition Entertainment Star Services Incorporated
Well, thought Janey Starr, it’s not the first time I’ve hit the ground running. All I need to do now was write some hit songs and sing them. Find a few bars close to where I live and show them my stuff.
It was time for a comeback tour.
