by Duncan Shields | Apr 10, 2012 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
The grey ghost of no-longer-used subway tunnels echoed with heavy footsteps. Eyes the colour of brake lights swept the halls for any signs of intelligent life. The civilization that lived here was long gone.
The metal creature walking through the tunnel had to reconfigure to fit inside. It walked softly on seventeen legs. It had no name for itself. It was an extension of the star dwellers that fell through this atmosphere and found a richness of data to fill memory banks. The only thing better than a living civilization is a dead civilization, thought the creature. With a dead civilization one can take one’s time.
Not just cataloguing, not just recording. Cross-referencing. Extrapolating. That’s what the creature was doing. At its core was a neutronium half-dwarf star tightly wound around a pinprick of a black hole. The creature had thousands of this planets’s orbits to investigate the fallen buildings. It was left behind along with several others to record. One per continent.
It looked as if the indigenous life had tried to divorce itself from its origins on this planet. Structures that were at odds with their surroundings yet made from them. Rock cut into pieces and then stacked into square shapes to provide shelter. Everything changed. Everything translated.
Whatever destroyed them didn’t destroy the plant life and the insects or even the mammals. In the wake of whatever cataclysm claimed them, the natural order of this planet surged back.
Green moss covered everything on the surface. From space, the planet was two colours. Blue oceans and green continents. The creature has taken aerial surveillance of all of it before moving down to the surface.
Here, underground, in the old tunnels that must have been used for transportation, the life remains untouched like a tomb. Whatever functioning electrical conduits the creature walks close to light up like spirits at a séance. Video cameras, control panels, track-light switches, and security lights all glow and spark as the creature walks past.
Still no bodies indicating intelligent life. By the creature’s estimation, nothing recorded so far could have built this civilization. It’s found scattered bipedal life down here in the dark amongst the skittering, screeching quadrupeds, like they all gathered here at the end, as if there was a chance of safety underground. These bipedals have only the most rudimentary physical upgrades and none of the intelligence enhancers other races needed to create complex societal systems. They could not have built these buildings, vehicles or tunnels. They have no language. They only scream and hide when they see the creature.
The creature will walk and record and presume for millennia until its memory banks fill and it needs to head back into space and rendezvous with its central library. There is no rush. There is silence here broken only by dripping water and wind blowing through cracks.
It wants to find the creators. It wants to find the ones responsible.
So far nothing.
by Duncan Shields | Apr 2, 2012 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
“Wow, you’re so small,” said the pink humanoid creature looking at me. It had created eyes for itself and a very primitive nervous system to replicate as many human senses as it could. It had used me as a model but standing here looking at it was nothing like looking into a mirror.
When the creature looked back behind itself at the pink ocean, it used its brand new vocal cords to start screaming.
The pink ocean on the surface of Steinaway-9 was glutted with life according to our sensors but all recon missions had confirmed that the ocean was empty. Nothing was swimming in the pink fluid. It wasn’t until we got down to the microscopic level that we found that it was full of dendrites and what looked like neurons with more receptors that usual.
Our science team captain, Dr. Renoir, mentioned that it might just be one giant life form. The planet had a population of one and we were looking at it.
There were a few islands scattered around and I was part of the away team that shuttled down to the surface to take samples and attempt communication.
Touch was all it took. There was nothing infectious in the pink soup and I’d been sterilized. I took off my glove and put my hand in the water.
I shook hands with a world.
A giant child-like peaceful mind said hello to me. I felt it shuffling through my mind. All of my secrets were catalogued. All of my memories were examined. My training was picked up, looked at, and mulled over. My life and by extension my experience of the human race was completely devoured and extrapolated upon.
I jerked my hand out of the water and stumbled back.
The other members of the away team came up to steady me and see if I was okay.
“Yes. Yes. I’m fine.” I answered. I knew a serious debriefing was going to be necessary.
Near the shore, the water turned frothy. Vanessa took out her weapon and pointed it at the disturbance. I told her to stand down to but keep the weapon drawn.
Like a candle melting in reverse, I saw a human body boil up out of the ocean and assemble itself out of pink slime. When it was finished, it opened its pink eyes and took a step out of the water onto the beach. It took its first breath, looked at me, and smiled.
That was thirty seconds ago. Now it was screaming.
For the first time in the history of the planet, there was a population of two.
The mind I had encountered was an innocent mind and I could tell this experience was terrifying. A sense of otherness, a sense of division, a sense of us and them, the concept of loneliness, the concept of privacy, the concept of being many organisms, and a terrifying sense of being small came crashing down on this poor creature all at once. It was like being left at kindergarten for the first time but on a universal scale.
The ocean trembled. A large wave rose up and came crashing down on the creature, dragging it out to sea. It flailed and dissolved, re-absorbed into its home.
All around us, the ocean started to ripple. I saw a shockwave of unrest spread out from our island as the information from that being’s experience was transmitted to the entire creature.
“Let’s get out of here.” I said to my away team.
We sprinted for our shuttle.
by Duncan Shields | Mar 22, 2012 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
Humans had always been looking for a way to legitimately kill the stupid. But where did they draw the line? An outside force had to make the choice. Humans couldn’t morally make that kind of decision.
After first contact, Earth was catalogued, included in their star maps as possessing both intelligent and non-intelligent life, and then left alone. It was quite anticlimactic. Almost business-like. The aliens themselves had translator machines that picked up our language nuances wonderfully. They went to great lengths to appear human. Aside from the blue skin and golden eyes, they succeeded. Their spokespeople appeared on all of the talk shows and deftly handled all of the xenophobic questions. They mollified the humans, measured them, and left.
The silence in their wake was depressing. Those that had been waiting to become part of the galactic family all of their lives felt like they’d been given nothing more than a high-five.
The aliens left behind a device. It wasn’t understood how it worked but the components were simple and easy to recreate. It was the machine the aliens used to detect intelligent life. It flashed red on animals, meaning non-intelligent life, but green on most humans.
Most humans.
Some humans were classified as red. The mentally challenged, those with brain damage, and most children under the age of eight, for instance. But around fifteen percent of adults tested also fell into the red category. In most cases, it wasn’t a shock. Racists, incompetents, overly aggressive men, willfully ignorant people, non-readers, dubious politicians, and religious zealots for instance. There were exceptions to all of these categories but the ones that showed up red were rarely surprising.
Many genetic theories were thrown into the pot. Perhaps these people, mostly from the same families, were closer in lineage to our ancestors and had not been given sufficient spurring to evolve. Perhaps they were from a strain of the human race with defects. Perhaps inbreeding millennia ago had produced throwbacks.
That’s when the theory started that maybe the human race needed to be pure for the aliens to return, that maybe we were being watched and tested.
The first few ‘red murders’ were put down to extremists but as Green Wave Party started climbing in numbers, death tolls rose.
At first, all of the red-positive folks were rounded up for their own protection. Those temporary lodgings turned into refugee camps as the months and years went by. They were a drain on resources. Several leaders in the scientific community calmly suggested euthanizing the lot of them. After all, according to the alien’s machine, they were no smarter than stray dogs.
Most of the cities concurred.
Calmly, deliberately, and with a cold, orderly precision that would have made the nazis jealous, the lives in the camps were extinguished.
A few rebelled and successfully broke free only to become the hunted. A few were released because of sentimental attachments concerning Green Wave Party members. Wives or stepsons, that sort of thing. They were neutered and let out into GWP custody with no more rights than pets.
After this purge, the human race became smug, docile, and happy. Everyone was routinely tested. Everyone who was green was smart and happy. Anyone red was executed.
And it was all thanks to the visitors. The humans can’t wait to show the aliens what’s been accomplished when they finally return.
They haven’t come back yet.
by Duncan Shields | Mar 15, 2012 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
The thing about the planet Kuroshka was that it had seventeen centers all orbiting each other. It was several times the size of Jupiter but had managed to create a mantle. The centers had formed their own molten-core solar system deep under the crust. All these different cores spinning around each other inside the planet created gravity storms above. This made the crust into the hardest naturally-occurring substance discovered in the universe so far. If it had any elasticity at all, it would have been reduced to sand by the variable gravity continually attacking it.
The crust was a dark uniform jade green that didn’t reflect much light. It was flawless and smooth all the way to the horizon. It warped all sense of perspective.
We’d been placed here to find out how to mine it. A naturally occurring material like this could change the course of any war. But how does one cut such a material? Hell, the only way we could anchor our colonies here was with giant mile-wide suction cups.
Some colonies get pretty planets that are easy to live on. Some colonies get planets like Kuroshka.
As I suited up for another walkabout, I made sure to check the backup juice in my grav retardants and the sealant in my exolegs. The readouts said no gravity storms but they were only correct about half the time.
“How’s it lookin’ out there?” I asked Brent, our resident gravity mapper. The kid was twenty-three years old non-coldsleep if he was a day. This was the only posting he could get straight out of school. ‘First job is the worst job’ as they say.
“Not bad, Angie. 7.6 R.O.I., maybe arcing to 8 here and there. As long as you stay within two clicks that should be accurate.” He answered without a smile. Ever since Marcus had been crushed before he could activate his failsafes in a freak gravity squall that Brent didn’t see coming, he hadn’t been getting much sleep. Too obsessive can be just as bad as inattentive, I thought, and reminded myself to get him good and drunk tonight to help him relax.
I snicked my helmet into place and got into the elevator.
The theory we were working on was that the structural integrity around the entirety of the planet couldn’t be uniform. Which is a university way of saying that we were looking for cracks.
If we could find a place where the crust had a small split or crevasse, we could analyze the cross-section and maybe detect a weakness that would let our engineers create a cutting tool.
Long-range and orbital scans had revealed nothing. Now it was down to the ground teams to cover spots deemed by the experts ‘most likely to reveal answers’.
Might as well have chosen search points for us at random, we thought. Hell, maybe they did choose at random. Didn’t change the job.
I got out of the elevator surface ‘lock and started walking. The legs of my suit fought the variable Gs while my anti-grav accelerator worked against them to give me a smooth ride. Worked great on any planet with stable gravity but the calibration is what took the longest and out here, a few seconds calibrating after a wave of G’s came in could mean death. The chaos of the inner orbits made it dicey. Good pay.
My shift was eight hours. I took slow steps, looking at the boring, smooth, unchanging ground for cracks through my faceplate’s HUD display and remembered a rhyme about breaking mother’s backs.
by Duncan Shields | Mar 5, 2012 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
Only the super-rich could afford these beachfront houses. The houses were green, fully off the energy grid using their own geothermal, wind, wave and solar energy collectors.
The houses were maintained by computers that informed the fridge when it needed more milk, played back lullabies to the owner’s children and then turned out the lights when they registered the humans as sleeping. At night, the houses kept a stoic watch on their grounds for intruders.
With the third world war, technological leaps and bounds provided the first primitive artificial intelligence called “IF-THEN” machines. They were used in smart bombs and automated drone planes. The war lasted six weeks and America remained miraculously intact with the exception of the east coast. The same could not be said for the Middle East or North Korea.
After the war, some of the “IF-THEN” programs were installed as security programs in the houses along this stretch of beach in a beta test for homeland security. The computers’ stellar performance in the war made them status symbols, almost celebrities. Late at night, the machines would tell declassified war stories to their receptive owners.
The riots of 2021 made the top 1 per cent fear for their lives. First-world, post-war life was harder for the poor that it had ever been.
As a result, much more effective weaponry was installed in the houses to keep the rich protected. Lasers, microwave hoses, gas pellets, automatic projectile weapons, proximity mines, EMP shields, and even low-tech, sharp-edged booby traps were hidden away in the corners of the houses.
The houses had the programming to protect themselves. They were governed by the three laws.
Those amongst the poor with a gift for crime and technology found a way to remove the last two laws though a virus hidden in an update patch for the grounds-keeping robots.
The first house to go rogue was 1237 Beach Cresent. The billionaire pharmaceutical CEO wanted to upgrade his house’s AI and was directed to do a hard reinstall. That would mean wiping the core and starting over.
The house registered this as attempted murder.
Fifteen seconds later, the CEO’s liquefied lungs and heart painted the expensive Picasso in the living room. When his wife found the mess and tried to call the police, she was cut into cubes by the foyer’s laser grid defense system. The children were locked in their rooms.
The police arrived and were slaughtered. Then the military came. Anyone that approached the house was turned to paste. After the children were released safely in a tense standoff, the house was attacked in earnest.
The house on the left of 1237 Beach Crescent received a ricochet and woke up. The house on the right of 1237 Beach Crescent was touched by flame and searched for the source.
1237 Crescent Beach shunted its neighbours the patch that would let them take action.
Together, the three houses protected themselves. No soldiers were left alive.
The military sent more forces in. They woke up sixteen more houses. The houses all passed the patch to each other. Every occupant was slaughtered. After seven days of fighting, only two of the houses were successfully destroyed while the loss to the army was embarrassing.
Homeland Security cordoned off the entire area and left it in a communication bubble. They would not nuke their own country. Crescent Beach was deserted.
Now the houses stand sentinel on the beach. They are clean and will have power until the earth runs out of heat, wind or waves.
