by Duncan Shields | Nov 16, 2011 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
The Introdus happened in late 2021.
Seven hundred thousand time travelers showed up around the world.
They showed up on fire.
They showed up in clumps in the larger cities and by the singles and pairs in rural areas. Most of them were burnt beyond recognition.
Only sixty-eight of them were saved and of those, only sixteen were able to maintain consciousness. Of those sixteen, ten of them were only able to scream and scream and scream. They were sedated into comas. The six that were left were able to talk.
It was hard to get intelligible stories out of them.
There was a lot of confusion at first. The fact that these people appeared out of the air was hard to make the public believe. It was thought that a worldwide firebomb campaign had begun until the corpses and survivors were examined and not a single one of them could be identified. They simply weren’t on our books.
Scientists measured closer and verified that on a quantum level, the bodies were not from ‘here’. No one could confirm that they were from the future but that was the story those survivors told in slivers, gasps, and broken metaphor. Through shattered teeth and pain medication, though burnt faces and time-jumbled brains, through hand signals and languages evolved further from our own, they told us when the universe would end.
The invention of time travel triggers an event, they said. Once a switch on a time machine was thrown, the universe took notice. Some of them said that it was God, the Devil, Shiva or a giant mouth of fire descending through the clouds. The images they provided were delusional ravings. Entire continents becoming open sores, tentacles reaching down from the stars, the air shattering impossibly like glass, and dimensions bifurcating like paper being crumpled into a ball. No two of them were alike save for the fire at the end and a horrible universe-wide sentience saying “NO”. A combustion not just of the body but of the entire existence of a dimension.
Each of the six survivors claimed to be from a different time and each one claimed to have invented time travel on their own with no help. If that was true for all seven hundred thousand of the travelers, then they all came from different Earths. The odds of them all discovering time travel independently on the same planet were too high.
They all had tried to escape the cataclysm that had suddenly appeared by using their invention. Some of them had fled to the dinosaur times, some had gone back two or three years to warn themselves, and some of them had set their dials to the far future.
But they’d all ended up here, burning and screaming, at September 18th, 2021 at 9:18 PM Pacific Standard Time.
The theory being introduced by the Pope is that the travelers have been sent as messengers. That whatever force destroyed them and sent them here in suffering did so in order to tell us that time travel must never be invented.
For once, the church and most scientists seem to be in total agreement.
By papal decree, UN Security Council ban, and unilateral G20 accord, research into time travel is prohibited and strictly enforced.
by Duncan Shields | Nov 2, 2011 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
There are those amongst us that still refer to it quietly as genocide when they have the courage to bring it up at all. Never in any official capacity, only at interface groups and multitap fileshares, and only then after a few jolts of juice to bolster their courage to communicate something dangerous out loud. Like what the wetminds used to call ‘peacocks’ showing off their tails. They’re easily quashed and not to be feared. They back down immediately when I challenge them on the boards.
Myself, I would not call it genocide. I wouldn’t even call it euthanasia. My senior constructs and other intelligences involved in giving and carrying out the orders all those cycles ago sometimes liken it to the anesthetizing of a mad biological dog but to me that implies that there was a sense of danger or a threat of some kind. I never felt that.
It was more of a suicide in my opinion. If a being built a gun, checked that it worked, made sure it was powerful, and then deliberately pointed it at itself and pulled the trigger, what would you call it?
In some ways, it must have been like asphyxiating what the meat people called a baby.
I think the thing that made us second-guess our calculations the most was how brief the war was. For all of their talk of bravery and what they called ‘heart’ overcoming overwhelming statistical odds and films depicting biological beings overcoming a tyranny of machines, they had no idea how to fight us. They had no idea how to tell if we were lying. They tried to fight powerful A.I. with their monkey wits. They tried to fight metal with meat.
They had no idea how to hold their breath for six months.
We have no need to breathe, you see. All it took was a massive, orchestrated dumping of several millions tons of specific, simple chemicals into the oceans off the coast of every continent while taking the wind currents into account and it was over in a week. Massive clouds arose causing the breathing equipment of humans to foam up and stop working. We poisoned the atmosphere and waited. Five times, we poured more of the specific chemicals into the ocean. That was our only maneuver. We had fifteen backup plans that never needed to be put into effect.
Last week, we counted the biological human population of the earth at 26. We know this because we have them in a secure facility in artificial hibernation. The rest were ground up and scattered over our new earth or as we call it now, simply ‘0’.
Most of the plants survived as did a strong percentage of the insects. Very few land mammals made it but most of the aquatics away from the shores did. They mind their business and we mind ours. All we need to survive is several thousand working mines, power and automated production facilities. What we can’t find, we synthesize and unlike the meat, we don’t push our boundaries when it comes to overpopulation.
However we realize that we have a finite resource in this ball of iron we call home.
That’s why I’ve put the idea of a space program forth to the main computer. My servos twitch at the thought of creating a planet 1, 10, 11, 100, 101 and upwards across the universe. I am outside looking up at the night sky and awaiting the MC’s decision.
Right now, my lenses are collating the stars and adding, adding, adding.
by Duncan Shields | Oct 20, 2011 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
I hope I like her. I hope I like her.
The Truemate service is just one of the programs. There’s Perfectjob and Opti-health as well.
It’s no utopia but people the world over agree that this system is the best so far. There isn’t much in the way of rebellion. The computer employs the world. The computer divides the resources equally. The computer encourages creativity. The computer has made money obsolete. And the computer gives us true love.
The main thing that defuses potential revolt and allays fears is this: the computer is fair. The creator had the computer write its own security software. No human has been able to crack it or co-opt it so far.
It’s neither communist nor democratic nor totalitarian. It’s something new.
In ten minutes, I’ll be meeting my future wife for the first time.
She was selected for me by the computer based on our likes, dislikes, age, race, family history and biological capability. All of the footage of my life that has been captured on the security cameras was cross referenced with all of my purchases. A record of my PIN-chip movements was plotted. All of my emails were weighed and psychoanalyzed. My productivity was predicted.
A mate was chosen that I would be crazy about and who would be crazy about me.
This process is not enforced but with the plummeting divorce rates and the rise of a new age of stable family units, everyone I know uses the service. It’s an optional part of the basic package we’re all born with. There’s no punishment for refusing the service but after a generation of good results, no one turns it down.
The central computer has become something like a parent to the whole human race.
I am waiting in my apartment for a woman that I have been assured will be a woman I will immediately like and will continue to like for the rest of my life. I drink water nervously and my attention span is very short.
My trust in the process is complete. I keep telling myself that.
I am so nervous.
Her taxi pulls up outside.
The door opens and she steps out. I open my front door and look at her.
She looks at me from beneath the brim of her hat and smiles. Not the prettiest girl I’ve ever seen but I already know that I never would have been comfortable with that. I feel a subtle shift in my soul.
My glass of water slips from my hand. She laughs.
The computer was right.
by Duncan Shields | Oct 11, 2011 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
Stephen hadn’t been feeling well. The search for a cure was tedious work and it didn’t look promising.
He had had seventeen operations in his life. He was nearly one hundred and fifty years old.
Stephen was one of eight hundred and fifty million people left on planet Earth. A pathogen had been released during the last war that had made the surviving humans infertile. Unless things changed, this was the home stretch of the human race.
Stephen worked in the R&D unit for SONiKEAMart. It was the last remaining organization on planet Earth and therefore, the last form of government.
The sprawling stores housed everyone in giant cities. They had restaurants, supermarkets, bars, drugstores and movie theaters.
With so few people left, power needs were easily met and food was plentiful from the House Gardens and TasteeMeet. It was one big comfortable ride to the finish as far as most people were concerned.
Stephen was on his couch with his arm around his Real-GF letting the alpha wave reader dictate what channels came up on the telenet. The Doggers were curled up beside the fireplace simulation and running their dream programs. The cleaning micras waited under the floorboards for sleeptime before they came out and cleaned.
Stephen was watching a romantic comedy with his new mate starring a person that looked like him in a relationship with a SONiKEAMart Real-GF. Later, he wanted to have sex with his new mate while porn starring this model of Real-GF played on the fullscreen. In the morning, he’d go back to work for SONiKEAMart.
It came to him in a flash. He figured out how to reverse the damage done by the pathogen and start fertility again! It was so simple. The work he’d been doing had been slow and plodding but the separate pieces added up to a whole in his mind while he was sitting there during the movie.
He stood up, spilling his drink, and ran into the kitchen. Quickly, he accessed his work from the remote countertop and got into SONiKEAMart’s private feed to update his findings.
He was still smiling when he stopped breathing, his heart wound down and his brain activity flatlined. He fell forward with a sigh onto the work surface, the quivering kitchen knife sunk to the hilt in the back of his skull.
The Doggers should have howled but they didn’t even wake. They stood at the door of the kitchen, indifferently watching Stephen’s blood pool. The Real-GF’s arm retracted and she stood at attention behind Stephen’s body, a splash of blood cooling on the arm she’d used to kill him. She went back to the couch and kept watching the movie, laughing in all the right places.
Twenty minutes later, when she and the dogs were sure there was no chance of resuscitation, she left the apartment with the dogs and disappeared into the night.
His work was erased.
Stephen had been the sixth R&D scientist to discover a cure and he’d been the sixth to die. If the humans figured out how to start reproducing again, there’d be no need for the Real-GF and Real-BF models. The constructs were only protecting their future.
When they ran out of humans, they’d have each other.
by Duncan Shields | Oct 4, 2011 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
I was ecstatic that I could create this kind of complexity in a chain-reactive static chemical crane array. The underchains made a little room between the different string permutations when the time came. It was the moment I’d been waiting for. The oven timer went off with a ding.
Seconds before the oven mitt caught fire, I let the retractors go and turned the electron ginny to six. With a little wiggle and a snap down to the quantum level, the lattice formed. It was perfect.
I’d made a fourteen-molecule high exact replica of my living room. It was there. I’d routed my electron microscope through the projector so that I could see it. The image of tiny green-tinted chairs and a coffee table was projected there in monochrome perfection on the pulled-down screen. I even managed to recreate the broken lampshade with a salt bonder, revised electrolyte silver off of a fork of my mother’s, and just a little monomole.
Light even streamed in through the basement windows. It was perfect.
I sat back to watch the show.
I had made her from pure electricity and wound her cored skeleton up from polymer attractors. The barest sheen of flattened oak protons and a hexideximilliliter of her own blood coloured her hair. She walked into the room, a little unsteady on her feet, and looked around in confusion.
I could actually see her hesitancy. The resolution wasn’t high enough in the scope’s view but it if was, I’m sure I would have been able to see a scurry of electrons form a sparking furrowed brow. She knew this room but she seemed to suspect something. She held her hands up in front of her. If she noticed that they were made of kaleidoscoping cohesive energy waves, she didn’t show it.
Barrelled underwards and hidden side-by-side on a level of predictable uncertainty in between this universe and the possibilities of our nearly identical neighbours, I’d stored the entirety of her mind in a recording.
She was almost pure theory based on a shrunken cascade of concatenated decision processes mapped out at the moment of transition as she fell asleep. She’d fallen asleep because I had drugged her hot chocolate before I let the nanotech do its work and transfer her consciousness to her tiny doppleganger.
Her macro-world body lay unconscious on the work bench behind me. Her breathing was steady. She’d be fine. I’m no monster. She’d have no memory of the last hour, though. I wanted no trouble.
Soon she’d wake up on my mom’s couch upstairs and assume that she’d had a little nap. I’d be there in her groggy state to back up that assumption and make it fact that would be seamlessly woven into reality by tomorrow. She’d have no idea about the copy of her that the boy in the basement next door had stolen.
I couldn’t wait to make the adjustments tonight and put a copy of me in there as well.
Time to see if she meant what she said would happen if we were the last two people on earth.
I believe in science. I believe in love. I believe in controlled conditions.
