by Duncan Shields | Jan 1, 2012 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
My entire celebrity life is online for people.
There are over a million people looking out through my eyes, breathing in time with me, feeling my exhilaration as six months of rehearsal come to a head and I perform my number-one hits to a crowd of fifty thousand people in a Barcelona arena. My body is taut with the proportions of a goddess thanks to Olympic trainers and amazing surgeons. The online population’s hearts are racing along with mine. They’re smelling the air of a packed coliseum and tasting my Evian in between songs. Women and men both are dialed in behind my eyes and being me.
Each one of them is paying six hundred dollars to experience it. In my peripherals, the ones that have kicked in an extra hundred are chattering to each other and sending me messages. Scrolls of text run up either side of my vision that I have trained myself to ignore.
My encores end with a massive fireworks discharge and the stage goes dark. The crowd screams my name as I strut backstage along with my backup dancers and band.
A swath of names in my peripheral vision pops and fades. Their tickets have expired.
The half a million that are left have paid a thousand dollars each for the backstage experience. My body’s vital signs pump through the optical cables all over the world to wherever they are. Other celebrities are backstage crowding me for smiles and handshakes. Fans with real-world passes are there. There’s one girl with cancer who got her ticket as a last wish. I pose for pictures with her and I nearly cry. All over the world, five hundred thousand people nearly cry with me.
That lasts a half hour. I say a prayer with my fellow performers, we talk about how good tomorrow night is going to be in Los Angeles, and I head down to my dressing room. As I walk down the stairs, many of the names in my field of vision wink out.
There are a thousand people left in my field of vision. The super rich who can afford to be at this level at most of my concerts and a bunch of lucky strangers who have scraped together ten thousand dollars each to get this far.
Once in my dressing room, I undress slowly in front of the mirror and let them stare at my toned, sweaty body. Then I climb into the shower for a long, long time. Even when I close my eyes, I can see the names in my peripheral talk to each other about how amazing this is.
As soon as I reach for my towel, most of the names wink out. There are sixteen left and they have each paid a million to still be here. There are four new names but the rest are familiar to me, almost old friends at this point.
The door to my room opens and my lover enters with that famous smile. His body is also perfect. He won another Oscar last year. Behind his eyes, people lean forward in their sense chairs, aching with the knowledge that they are about to have sex with one of the best-selling pop musicians on the planet. Behind my eyes, sixteen people brace themselves , ready to athletically fornicate with a dreamy leading man.
The only time we’re alone is when we are asleep or going to the bathroom.
He touches my shoulder, going in for a full, hungry kiss, and my towel dramatically slips off of me and onto the floor.
by Duncan Shields | Dec 19, 2011 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
The Grandfather paradox states that a time loop will be created if you go back in time to kill your grandfather. If you kill your grandfather, you will end up not existing. But if you can’t do it, then he will not be killed by you. So he’ll exist, and you’ll exist, and he’ll be killed, and you’ll be erased, and he’ll exist again, and you’ll exist again, and he’ll be killed again, and you’ll be erased again, ad infinitum.
She came back to 2036 shaking and crying. She was wet and her hair was tangled. It must have been raining in 1978. I immediately got a towel around her and took her off of the temporal reception platform. She was steaming from the transition. She collapsed into me and we both lay down in the middle of the lab with the technicians staring.
“Oh god, what does it mean? What does it mean?” she kept saying.
Dr. Lauren Kim. The scientist responsible for the time machine, was here in my arms, soaking wet and obviously shaken to her core after her fourth trip back in time. The first three had gone quite well and she’d returned as her usual curt self. This trip had caused something to go wrong.
“Dr. Kim.” I said. “Doctor KIM!” I shouted. She focused on me.
“John? Oh John.” She said to me. She’d never called me John in my life. I didn’t even know she knew my first name. “I wasn’t thinking, John. He was there. He was going to die. But I saved him. The bus was coming so fast. It didn’t occur to me… I mean, I knew what would happen if he died but…”
“Dr. Kim?” I said, ice forming in my stomach.
“My great grandfather, John. I saw him. I looked him up. I found him and I went to observe him. I don’t know what I was thinking. I felt compelled. It went against everything I know as a temporal scientist. But I had to just see him, y’know? So there I was. On the street corner, and the bus ran a red light. And I…and I…oh god.”
“What did you do, Dr Kim?” I asked, already dreading the answer.
“I saved him. Oh god, I saved him from certain death. I ran and gave him a tackle into the gutter and the bus missed us both before crashing into a dumpster. My great grandfather would have been crushed. He was only nineteen. He hadn’t met my grandmother yet. He thanked me.”
“Dr. Kim” I whispered. Nervously, I looked around the lab at the other technicians, at my own hands, at Dr Kim. We all still seemed to be here. Nobody was going invisible or winking out of existence. Would I even know it if they did?
“If I hadn’t have been there to save him, he would have died. And none of this would exist.” She looked around wide-eyed as if seeing the lab for the first time.
“Dr Kim.” I said. “Take a deep breath. Calm down. The lab is here. We are here. If there is a paradox, it’s not affecting us. Or at least not yet. Or at least this universe. Listen to my voice. We’re here.”
Dr Lauren Kim looked at me. “Are we, John? Are we here?” She put a hand on my face and then she passed out.
She’s in sedation in the recovery room now. I’m not sure how to handle this. The universe seems stable. Nothing about the world seems different.
Does the paradox exist if you save your grandfather?
by Duncan Shields | Dec 9, 2011 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
There is a tremendous amount of other life in the universe.
The universe is encrusted, moldy, infested, slushy, teeming, and stuffed with life. The amount of life in the universe is staggering. Much as the earth is populated with a bewildering array of lifeforms developed to take up refuge and thrive in the most bizarre of niches, so too does life perform on other planets.
The segmented iceworms who would evaporate from the touch of a human hand on far-away iceballs. The gas-giant sparrow clusters and tectonic-plate-sized manta rays that lurk deeper. Algae that lives under constantly shifting volcanic plates. Spores that float dormant and content in vast reef schools through space. Entire asteroids of silicate life that steer themselves by committee like herds of sheep.
There are no sets of temperatures, gas composition, gravity, radiation or light that completely precludes life. Anywhere in the galaxy. We are engulfed and surrounded by it.
The one thing that all life besides us has in common is this. It speaks no language and has no conscious thought. It knows fear, the urge to reproduce, affection, and the thousand other instinctual gifts that any natural life is heir to but it does not think. It does not reason. It does not question. It has no sense of self or sense of God. It merely lives.
Our television programs that spew out into the universe have contacted over five hundred million species of aliens. But those ideas and tv scripts have hit other life forms the way that sunlight hits a fox.
Giant centipedes with massive, radio-receiving antlers get our shows and shake their heads at the noise and paw the ground. Old reruns of Three’s Company tumble through the photo-voltaic flake crystal storms of fibre-optic minnows on dark blue ammonia shores, lighting them up in waves of colour that play havoc with their mating rituals. Broadcasts of old black and white films cause entire herds of black spheres on tiny moons near a distant planet to stop rolling, all sense of direction disrupted. Saturday Night Live reruns from the early eighties are cutting tiger-stripe swathes through the flimsiest space-webs of solar sail creatures astronomical units wide drifting in space. Reality television is causing one planet’s dominant predators to enter hibernation early, triggering a continent-wide shift in the ecosystem.
We are contacting, inundating, and even harming millions of races daily. All to no effect other than the casual ebb and flow of natural selection. The universe is crowded.
But we are alone.
by Duncan Shields | Dec 2, 2011 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
I am too old to enjoy the future. I am physically unable to.
People, like older trees and metal from the ground, could not be retro-engineered. Transporters were finally here but everyone who had dreamed of their existence could not use them. Anyone already born at the moment of their invention were forever denied the use of them.
It was a magic man-made molecule. A destabilizer, a cataloguer, and a quantum anchor pairing that, when activated, allowed for a temporal reversal field to happen to all particles attached to its field. Basically, one pressed ‘play’ and the object with these designer molecules took itself apart down to the base level. When the completion trigger was transmitted to a sister pad, it activated a ‘rewind’ function on the other half of the quantum anchor pairing, making the object build itself again by performing the actions backwards in time. The time debt repaid itself to the trillisecond and the universe remained in balance.
In effect, it made transporters a reality.
The only hitch was that transportable objects needed to be manufactured from the base up with the molecules embedded into their chains. This presented no problem to ferroplastics, ceramics and chemical compound agents which were the basis for most building materials and household utensils destined for the moons or the outer rim.
It was a simple operation to have the molecules chemically bonded into the DNA chains of an embryo but only in the first trimester. A new generation of people were being created with the ability to flit between transporters both on Earth and her fifteen colonies in the solar system. It worked for other biologicals as well. NuMeat and ReFish were plentiful among the planets.
The rest of us were planet-locked.
Cargo slingships pushed Gs that would crush a regular human, let alone an old one like me. Passenger ships were fewer and fewer in number with the new generation’s ability to transport instantly. It drove ticket prices into a cost bracket only the superrich could afford. And I was not rich. I could never leave Earth and even when traveling around my own world, I was restricted to fuel-burning planes and buses with the other old people.
I’ve read about getting old. How events around you seem to speed up. How life gets harder and faster while your ability to deal with it weakens. I feel that it must be more apparent now than ever before in the history of mankind.
I am not merely slow. I am going extinct. The other seniors and I are the last few remaining members of a pruned branch of the human race. Airports and bus stations are only for the aging and the already ancient.
We have an official classification now. While the rest of humanity is still referred to as homo sapien, we have been re-designated as homo tardus. Slow humans. The young ones simply call us ‘tards.
It is humiliating to have to move so slowly. I dearly wished to be a part of a future with transporters and now that it’s happened, I have my nose pressed against the glass with no ability to take part. Myself and the other science fiction fans who have lived to this moment are cursing our longevity, growing bitter.
We take trips together and huddle in our apartments, watching vintage science fiction shows using antique ‘DVD players’ and 2D ‘televisions’ with tears in our eyes as our numbers dwindle.
by Duncan Shields | Nov 24, 2011 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
My name is Control V. My boss calls me Paste. I am a clone.
I work for the government. I am a secret agent.
There are a few of me kicking around. I don’t know how many. I am given orders that I can’t disobey. I get through metal detectors. I smile and shake hands. When I’m close to my mission’s objective I carry out my orders. Maybe murder. Maybe courier service.
This is the life of an expendable snowflake. This is the life of a genocopy.
The real me is fetal in a bunker, kept like a baby in a high-security specimen jar that might as well be a museum. I don’t have his memories but I am told that he was the best secret agent available and that he volunteered for this.
This was his reward for being the best.
They shattered him into splinters and now we roam around the world like Styrofoam coffee cups in human form. Shadows of the master. Rainbows thrown by the prism. We are given whatever fraction of his abilities that will help us most.
His talent for disguise, for instance, or his quick reflexes. Some of us are amped up romantically for ‘seduce and destroy’ missions.
Every time the phone rings and I see that it is my boss, I feel a little tingling of fear that he’ll say the word that will cause all of my synapses to fire at once, wiping my mind clean of anything in a tiny supernova of death inside my skull.
I can no more throw away my phone that I can tear off my own arm. I am conditioned.
I am an extension of policy. Technically alive but not human.
I’ve been stationed here in the Frankfurt airport for a year and a half. High numbers of undercover agents from other countries come through here. I am on standby to intercept them if necessary. Most of my time is downtime. I am a mole.
I get the feeling that most of my brothers are not given this long to roam. I handle baggage and try to keep from talking to my co-workers. I’m friendly but I reveal nothing. I don’t attend their poker games or parties.
I tell them I’m busy then I go to my pre-furnished apartment and stare at the wall until I get tired. I sleep until my alarm clock tells me it’s time to get up and go to work again. Once every month or two, I get a call with details about a mission.
I stare out the airport window on my lunch hour and wonder why I’m afraid of the call that will kill me.
That’s not supposed to happen. I think it’s because I’ve been alive too long and am starting to value it. That in turn makes me fearful that my boss knows that I’ve been alive too long and that makes me even more afraid that the next phone call will be my last. It’s a cycle gathering volume in my head.
I look at the planes landing and taking off against the blue sky and I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything so beautiful in my life.
