by Duncan Shields | Apr 18, 2011 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
No one misses prisoners with life sentences. That was the key. Mars was turned into a prison planet.
NASA had set up fledgling terraformed domes on Mars and teleportation technology was a reality. After a life sentence was passed on a criminal for a crime, they were teleported to Mars.
There, it was alleged that they were put to work as slave labour. It was astounding what humans could do once they set their minds to it.
Leroy Pedersen was being escorted to the teleportation chamber by two burly guards. He’d been found guilty of killing three families in upstate New York. His sentence was life imprisonment on Mars. He was walked in chains into the capsule that would scramble his atoms and rearrange them on Mars.
“I’ll find a way back here, bitches.” He said to the guards as they finished strapping him into the sender.
The guards smiled politely and left the room. A scientist came in to operate the machine.
“You got a wife and kids, egghead? I’ll kill them. Just you see. I’ll make friends up there. We’ll hijack a ship and come back. You’re a dead man.” Leroy snarled.
The scientist smiled. “You think so Leroy? You know, I’ve never told anyone this but I worked on the terraforming domes up there. That’s why I’m happy to throw the switch.”
Leroy tilted his head like a dog to listen to the scientist’s words. There was something not quite right about his attitude.
“Here is some top-secret information, Leroy. Decades. That’s how long it will take before a human can breathe unaided on Mars. You know what?”
Leroy stared coldly at the scientist.
“Decades.” He said, staring at Leroy. His smile was gone now. “We do have teleportation technology. What we lied about was how long the terraforming will take. We’re beaming you prisoners to mars but there’s nothing there. We’re thinning the herd.”
He threw the switch and Leroy screamed. The tang of ozone hung in the air and Leroy’s molecules zipped through space to the receiving station on Mars, a receiving station set outside of the domes on the naked surface.
Leroy’s breath crystallized as he collapsed and died, gasping like a fish and bleeding on the red sands. The terraforming robots came out to collect the body.
The one thing Mars needed most for the next few decades was fertilizer.
by Duncan Shields | Apr 5, 2011 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
I’m on a steamboat at night. It’s hot out. I’m standing at the railing throwing earthling dimes into the dark water in the Mississippi night. I’m wearing a white linen suit. I feel like a dandy but wool would be suicidal in this heat.
Well, to someone that grew up in a cold place, anyway. Like me. I’m not from here.
I take another sip of my White Russian and look out in the near-jungle of rainforest that edges away into the darkness. We’re still too close to the city for stars but I can see the yellow-dot constellations of alligator’s eyes in the river picking up the shine from the moon and lights from the ship. The reptiles float by like dead things.
Steam. Fledgling electricity. Telephones. No connected computer network yet. Nothing that could detect the alien organs lurking under my disguise.
Behind my back, the steamboat is still alive with the sound of carousing but it’s dying down. Tourists are betting the last of their money, making their endgame strategies with new objects of affection, or stumbling back alone to their cabins.
We are an oasis of light and sound in the silent swamp. We’re invasive and we don’t belong here. All of the noise is coming from the deep, almost panicked need to be entertained. Humanity’s place in the world is clear at moments like this.
We. I thought the word ‘we’. Have to watch that. I’m thinking like them again. I’ve spent too long with these obnoxious experiments fouling their own cradle.
I pour the white drink into the river. It skates on the rainbow surface of the oily water, snaking back into the wash from the noisy paddlewheel at the rear of the ship.
Just another ten of the human’s years and my time here will be finished. The ruse will be up and I can go home to my own planet. I’m looking forward to it. Other contacts have reported forming an attachment to this place, to some of the humans. I envy them. That affection must make the time pass quicker.
For now, however, I feel more kinship with the alligators on the far shore with their unblinking flashlight eyes.
by Duncan Shields | Mar 30, 2011 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
He based the intelligence of his machine on the process of sibling rivalry. It had long been noted that a constant challenge and attacking of one’s ideas resulted in stronger ideas. A lifelong bond formed around that rivalry but more importantly, it resulted in a quicker and a smarter pair of siblings.
So he split his artificial intelligence program in half but kept a connection going between the two halves. A binary corpus callosum bridge connected the two intelligences to let them speak and fight and strengthen each other.
After that, he dozed off.
“Professor! Wake up!” A student was shouting in his ear. “You have to wake up. The power demands on your experiment are way higher than predicted. Something is happening.”
He woke up and looked at the clock. He’d been asleep for six hours.
“Professor, hurry!” shouted the student.
He got up and followed the student to the A.I. casing. It didn’t look any different but as he got closer to the black sphere, he realized it was very hot. Too hot. He took a look at the streams of data. There should be two clear streams on the readouts. It was a dense stream of data that he couldn’t decipher at a glance.
“Student. What’s going on here? How many streams of data are there? It looks like there are more than two.” He said.
The student sat down at the terminal and plugged in to see how many streams were present.
“Oh my god.” The student said.
The professor felt something cold enter his stomach. He’d entered the code to split the A.I. and left that code in the temp data bank. It was a tool that he’d left available to the fledgling intelligence without considering it a risk. The two A.I.s had a mental age of three. He had doubted that they could use a tool like that.
“What is it, student?” asked the professor.
“Sir, there are over six billions streams of data.”
The professor lurched forward. Billions of separate minds were in the sphere, listening to each other and learning from each other.
He’d created a world.
by Duncan Shields | Mar 17, 2011 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
He reeled out of the stinking alley into me.
He was nearly eight feet tall and looked too skinny to stand. His hair was several different colours but as I looked at it more closely, it appeared to be made of metal. It sparked just after he bumped into me and the colours in it shimmered and changed like the wings of a beetle.
I was fixated on that until I noticed his two extra arms and his tail. I say ‘his’ because his genitals were exposed. He was wearing what appeared to be tight chaps and a red cellophane cardigan.
If he hadn’t been staring into my eyes and grabbing my shoulders, I would have backed quickly away from him like everyone else on the sidewalk did.
“Pour gras que serachi marta kursk trench ma jakatra, triestin?” he screamed at me. He looked at me, waiting for an answer.
“Uh, what?” I said.
“Oh. I see. English. Okay. What day is it?” he said to me. His breath smelled like over-ripe strawberries.
“Uh, Wednesday?” I answered.
He looked at me with that expression like he didn’t understand my language again. He looked at a device on his wrist. I guessed it was a translator. He acted like it was broken. He spoke again, louder and more slowly this time,
“What day is it? Centrus? Martus?” he said.
“Wednesday.” I said back to him.
He shook his head and looked behind him into the alley. There were sounds of a struggle and some impossible sound. If I had to describe it, it was like a sheet of glass being ripped in half. It sounded like something pivotal to reality was being split by force.
“What the DATE, then? The DATE? It’s supposed to be the 46th! Is that correct?” he yelled.
“46th? That’s not….it’s the 13th. March the 13th.” I answered.
“Maaaaaarch” he said and looked at me as if to confirm that he’d pronounced it correctly. I nodded. He looked at his wrist translator in terrified frustration. I realized that his eyes were different colours and that they never blinked at the same time. First one, then the other. Every time.
“Posska DAMMIT!” he yelled and let me go. He seemed to realize that even though I’d spoken to him in the correct language, my information was useless to him.
It was like he was a time-traveler except his frame of reference was useless at his destination.
There was a blue glow from the alley. The traveler tucked in all four of his arms and ducked into the crowd. It didn’t help.
Tentacles shot out of the alley and entered the traveller’s back. He was dragged back to the alley’s entrance. He spread his arms wide and grabbed the bricks on either side of the entrance with his impossibly long arms, forming a giant X. He looked at me with clenched teeth. His watch device broke and fell off his wrist. He glanced at it and nodded towards me.
“Remember-” he said but a charge of energy came through the tentacles and he shuddered. He was lifted into the air for a moment before disappearing quickly into the shadows of the alley.
There was the sound of thunder and then a sound of reality zipping itself up.
People around me kept on walking. I lay on the sidewalk looking at the entrance of the alley. I looked at the wrist device the traveler had dropped. I scuttled forward, picked it up and brought it home.
I’m looking at it right now, daring myself to try it on.
by Duncan Shields | Mar 10, 2011 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
Anyone or anything that enters the blue beams are sucked up into the ships and never seen or heard from again.
The ships populated the sky in one rush of deceleration all around the world. The night side of the planet suddenly gained more stars and the day side of the planet a bunch of tiny suns. Nine hundred and thirty-six of them, visible to the naked eye even after their engines had stopped firing. Dots in the sky in a geometric formation hanging a measured distance apart from each other.
The ships did nothing for weeks. The tension drove people mad. The military went to a state of readiness, sweating fingertips hovering over red buttons in sub-basements. Religious zealots called it the Rapture, spiritualists called it the Age of Aquarius, and others just kept an eye to the sky in fear.
The economy took a major hit as most people cashed in their RRSPs and withdrew their savings. Shy people finally asked that person they’d been crushing on for years out for dinner. Employees who’d been silently disgruntled for years quit their jobs. The end of days felt like it was right around the corner.
Just when the Earth had settled into a hesitant acceptance of the dots in the sky, blue beams of light from each ship stabbed down to earth.
The result was instantaneous. Nuclear missiles fired up at the alien ships from the expected countries. The missiles didn’t even explode. They were quietly stopped, disarmed, turned inert, and left to fall back to Earth. That didn’t stop us from firing every single missile we had at them. It was like some sort of death orgasm and we didn’t stop until we were spent.
We would have done ourselves more damage than them if they’d actually exploded.
The blue beams stayed on. Some of them are pointed at the ocean. Some are in remote areas of the planet where hardly anyone lives. Some of them are in metropolitan cities. They are all exactly 204.8 kilometers from each other.
It’s popular to go into the beams and ascend. Some believe it’s a portal to heaven. Some believe that it leads to a gateway to the rest of the universe. Some believe it’s death.
People have tried going up with video cameras and audio equipment but it all stops working the minute they leave the ground. Scientists are still trying to figure out how the beams work.
There are guards and fences around the perimeters of the beams in the major cities but out in the countryside they are left alone, silent blue ladders to alien mysteries. Pillars that glimmer in the daytime and seem to stab up from the earth like a searchlight during the night.
Some lovers have gone in hand in hand. Some notable celebrities have even made the trip. It’s become a tradition in some countries to throw letters to dead ancestors into the streams. Some countries have decided to start using the beams to help with their garbage problem.
They never shut off and the ships remain mute. It’s been seventeen years now. There are teenagers alive now who have never known a world without the beams.
Myself, I come down here to the park and stare at my city’s beam on the weekend. I feed the pigeons and stare at the column of light.
