by Duncan Shields | Sep 21, 2011 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
Shifters, they called them. People not in line with our own universe but only barely out of sync. It could happen to anyone. A person wouldn’t even know if it was happening to them. One of the more extreme giveaways was if someone was speaking to a person that wasn’t there. Chatting away to dead space.
Sure, to them, they were talking to an old friend. A friend that had always existed but had never been born in this universe.
No one knew what was causing these shifters to take over existing members of society, only that the numbers were on the rise. We had tools to measure the impostor’s molecular quantum makeup but those tools were the size of hospital MRIs. Not portable. We didn’t have anything we could carry around and scan citizens with.
If they were being replaced, where were the originals going? Was it a chain reaction down the line of every multiple universe in existence or was it just our universe that was eroding on a quantum level and letting strangers in? Were we soon to cease existing entirely?
So far, the shifters themselves were only from universes slightly different from our own. We didn’t have any shifters from universes where Hitler lost the war, for instance, or worlds where the Romans successfully conquered Europe. So far, they’d only been people who still knew what year it was and the prime minister’s name but thought, for instance, that we had no space program or didn’t know what an eggplant was.
That made them very hard to spot. The difference between universes could be anything. You couldn’t question one of these things about every single aspect of their lives. We were terrified.
Until we noticed the thing about the weather.
It turns out the weather is different in every single universe. No two are alike. Universes mere vibrations of existence apart can have thunderstorms while we have sunlight. Chaos theory or something.
So we keep an eye out for people wearing scarfs on sunny days, people wearing shorts in the rain, people squinting or wearing sunglasses when it’s cloudy out. Then we catch them. Then we interrogate them.
And every time we start questioning a suspect, we start with a conversation about the weather.
by Duncan Shields | Sep 12, 2011 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
You’d expect a physically challenged, mentally retarded child born with a life expectancy of six years to figure out a crude way of getting around. Some simple crutches, perhaps. Or maybe a box to drag oneself around in.
You wouldn’t expect that child to build robot legs that worked.
That’s how the aliens saw us. They looked on us in pity and in fascination.
They came to us from space without the benefit of ships or space suits. They floated down on rippling bio-solar panel wings of unfurling grace. They were humanoid but much taller, bilaterally symmetrical like us. They had four more senses than us and were able to breathe in fourteen different atmospheres. Those solar sail wings could extend for fifty meters when fully extended in space. They were so very thin.
They looked like us for a reason.
And we didn’t look like them because we were deformed.
In this universe, they explained, there was only one dominant form of life.
Humans.
Planet Earth was seeded with that form of life but somewhere the replication got too many errors in it. A few missing pieces in the helix or a few too many where it counted. Our growth was stunted and our full potential squandered.
According to these superior versions of humans that wafted down from space, normal human beings kept every trait in the DNA that they’d gotten along the way and were supposed to flower in a second puberty around sixty years of age.
That second puberty would have us grow much taller, become psychic, kick all of our evolutionary traits into full-blown activation, and give us the ability to fly into space like a dandelion seed pushed by a gust of wind. And those wings could tesseract space. Living wormhole organs. The distances between stars made it necessary for them to have lifespans measured in thousands of years.
We felt jealous and ripped off. But also proud. These beings had no need for technology. They’d never invented radio or television. That explained the silence of space. They’d never had to invent spacecraft. They’d never had rocket technology or microwaves or chemistry or vacuum tubes. They could construct stable wormholes but they didn’t understand the math behind it.
We were a marvel to them. A doomed, stunted, tragic, tear-jerker of a marvel.
But they couldn’t read our minds. We lacked the broadcast and receiving apparatus. They learned our language in hours and communicated with us using their rarely used mouths. It was a novelty for them.
It gave us the time to mount an attack. Great minds must have thought alike because in a surprisingly effective military movement, as accidentally co-ordinated as it was spontaneous, all the countries of earth killed these super-humans.
The ones that could flee, fled. Around two-thirds. The rest of them fluttered like moths in jars, trying to get out of our buildings as our bullets tore holes in their paper bodies.
The brutality shocked them. They felt the trapped ones die in their minds. We haven’t seen them since. It’s likely that they have marked our planet as a no-go area.
Suits us fine.
However, we’ve been busy researching those bodies. Every country on Earth is in a race to see who can get the first patents. The first stable wormholes, the first space-faring wingsuits, the first immortality drugs, the first psychic warriors, the first amphibious soldiers, etc, etc.
And when the time comes, we’ll spread out amongst the stars ahead of schedule because of them. We’ll see who’s superior then.
by Duncan Shields | Sep 2, 2011 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
‘His’ blue skin glinted in the harsh glare from the studio lights in the supreme court. Archbishops, cardinals and the Pope herself were seated there beside the president, the UN security chief, and our representative on the newly formed Galactic Council. The world watched.
I say ‘his’ for lack of a better pronoun. The English language had yet to adjust to a race that had five sexes. The male pronoun had been selected for all of them because they created babies by circle-jerking in sequence. The five ejaculates mixed, first the anchor glue, then the stamen juice, then the egg chain, then the catalyst, and finally the foam that hardened into a shell. Each lumpy ‘egg’ looked like a meringue and contained between ten and fifteen embryos. No one was sure if that qualified them as homosexual or not. They had complicated mating seasons.
The scientists had long latin names for each of the five sexes. The aliens told each other apart by skin markings and pheromones. I knew some people that said they could tell them apart but I doubted that.
They all looked the same to me.
This alien wanted to become a priest.
This alien claimed to have been called by God.
So far, ‘he’ was the only one of his race to come forward as wanting to join the clergy. Some of the aliens had attended church in a few cities since first contact ten years ago. Some of them had gotten jobs and gone to schools as well. They were tolerated but as far as I was concerned, this was too far.
I was huddled in the cold on the roof looking at ‘his’ face. I had a clear view of ‘him’ through the scope on my rifle. I was waiting for the verdict.
If they proclaimed that he was allowed to serve in the church, I was going to pull the trigger. I’d served in the army. I’d performed black ops. I was a Christian. I’d gone off the reservation for this. This was an independent mission but one I felt had to be done.
The com buzzed in my ear with the live feed. The jury foreperson had taken the microphone. Over three-quarters of the earth was watching.
“We find the alien capable of joining the church. The universe belongs to God. We are not to judge whom God calls.” said the foreman. He glanced at the Pope. She nodded her head.
The murmurs of the courtroom rose in my ear. My trigger finger tightened.
The blue-skinned alien looked directly up into my scope, making the sign of the cross. Then he closed his eyes.
Startled, I didn’t pull the trigger. He knew I was there. What else did he know? Then I realized what was happening. I relaxed.
I hated the aliens. I hated the aliens joining the church even more. But I didn’t pull the trigger.
I didn’t want to create another Jesus.
by Duncan Shields | Aug 18, 2011 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
It was a shock to learn how short their life spans were but not surprising considering how much naked energy they threw off. We do not know how long we live because none of us have ever died, only changed form.
They called themselves Humans. They are beings of fire. They burn so hot. They seemed to be made of pure radiant heat. They seemed impossible. They had special suits to survive in our environment. Those suits protected us, encasing their boiling energy. They called our environment a ‘vacuum’ and spoke of an ‘atmosphere’ where they lived.
An atmosphere that dimmed the stars on their planet (during a period called ‘night’) and made their transport vessels work tremendously hard when taking off and burn with friction when landing. They also had more gravity on their world. Such fragile, determined creatures. It was inspiring.
We have no ‘atmosphere’. Our planet has low gravity. We achieved space travel by jumping hard into the air and returned by waiting. After a time, we came back down.
The humans had names for our parts. They said we were crystalline. Our blood, when we decided to make it liquid, is thick and able to stay flowing in what the humans see as extreme cold. They called it ferrofluid. Our intelligence is encapsulated in each of our particles. They called that nanotechnology. Each tiny particle of us is a switch, able to align or crook tangent to the other, forming solids and liquids. They say that makes our entire race one living ‘computer’.
They said we were -420 degrees Celsius but that’s only because that was the lower limit of their temperature gauges. Down at our temperature, gases become stable liquids and deep inside us, even colder, some solids do, too. Like iron. “Sloshed around like silver paint in a test tube, like molten lead, all granular like a black and white picture of Jupiter with some sparkles thrown in.” one of the humans said.
We took their form at first so as not to alarm them. We were much taller than them and blue but it helped. Though we can take any shape, we haven’t tried many.
The humans have imagination. They showed us their engineering and architecture data. The math of load-bearing weights and geometry was something we knew instinctually, much like a human catching a ball wouldn’t consciously figure out the parabola and the necessary arc needed to intersect and catch it. We are angles, from our tiniest particle to our largest forms. They showed us flimsy carbon strings they called ‘diamond’.
We extrapolated. We improved.
We can make fusion reactors the size of what they call a fingernail. And then we make more. And then we attach many of them together. We do not have to use ‘tools’. We are the tools. We are the systems.
They have told us how to get farther. They didn’t know how to build those machines. They only had theories. They showed us.
We extrapolated. We improved.
We have the ability to create stable holes in space now that help us slide further when we ‘jump’. They have star maps that tell us where to go.
We let them travel inside us in special chambers to go far, to go where they wanted to go, to explore and record together, each experience filling up the cels of our cathedral spaceship bodies.
It’s only fair.
by Duncan Shields | Aug 10, 2011 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
It was too creepy. The dead should remain dead.
The questionnaires were thorough and all of the data kept and cross referenced on the laptop computer beside the projector. The A.I. program was competent. The facial animation on the computer generated recreation of the deceased was flawless. To anyone watching, it was as if the star of the funeral was still alive, smiling from the projection screen in the center of the altar in the church.
“I remember watching Star Trek with Joe.” Said Joe’s friend Ian on the microphone as part of his eulogy.
“Ha ha, yeah!” said Joe’s face from the projection. “That was awesome. Remember the one where the command crew became kids? That was some great casting.”
An awkward pause followed while Ian looked down at his speech. Joe smiled on from the projection.
“Anyway, Joe was great.” Ian finished lamely and gathered what he obviously hadn’t read yet off of the podium and went back to his seat.
“Wherever I am now, I bet I miss you all a lot.” Said Joe.
Joe’s widow Gwen sniffled and stared at the projection with her jaw set strongly and her eyes twinkling with tears. “I knew this would be a horrible idea.” She whispered through clenched teeth.
“I feel like Max Headroom up here. Anyone? Max Headroom?” Joe joked.
Joe’s parents gathered their coats and left.
The priest closed the ceremony quickly and everyone filed out quickly to eat sandwiches at Gwen’s place.
“See you at Gwen’s!” said Joe’s projection and waved.
“No you won’t.” said the priest, and turned the simulation off.
The dead should remain dead.
