by Duncan Shields | Feb 22, 2011 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
God give me patience, she thought, as Peter ran into the living room with another ‘great invention’.
Peter was wearing a flanged-open broccoli steamer on his head with a crude system of wires sticking out of it like dead flowers in a vase. He was wearing what looked like most of the entertainment system strapped in pieces around his left arm and joined together with more wires.
The iPhone duct-taped to his right wrist was glowing in a series of rapid colour flashes. A bucket was on one of his feet and it sloshed water on the hardwood.
I’m going to have to call the police again, she thought. He’s going to have to go back to the mental hospital. I barely made it through the last stretch. This was supposed to be Peter’s last chance.
“What is it this time?” she sighed.
“It’s a time machine!” he shouted gleefully. His eyes were wide and it looked like he’d chewed most of his nails down to the bloody edges. His lips were raw. He’d shaved part of his head. “It was the capacitor. If I reverse the polarity on it, this should work. I’ve got a line running up to the satellite dish turning the data into energy. That was the power problem I was talking about, remember?”
“No.” she replied. She was actually a little worried. He might electrocute himself this time.
Peter chuckled at his own brilliance and actually danced a little jig of anticipation, splashing more water around.
“Peter, let’s just calm down a little.” She said, starting to stand up and walk towards him.
“Wait! No. I have the prep field humming. Don’t come any closer. This is going to work! Now, I’ve set the reception point to be right here in the apartment in one minute. It’s going to take a lot of power so be prepared for a brownout. It takes a lot to send but it shouldn’t take any to receive. I’ll be okay on the back end. Oh MAN, this is the GREATEST! Honey, we’ll be so rich!” he shouted.
She looked at him warily, really worried now. More worried than she’d ever been, even more than the time with the knife-juggling. But it didn’t make sense. There’s no way this could actually be anything other than a danger of electrocution.
“I’m going to start singing a song and hit the button. I’ll disappear and then in one minute, I’ll appear right here. For you, there will be a one-minute pause but for ME, it’ll be as if nothing happened! Are you ready? On the count of three.” He said.
“Peter, I’m not sure-“
“ONE!”
“-this is such a good idea.”
“TWO!”
“let’s talk about this.”
“THREE! JINGLE BELLS! JINGLE BELLS! JINGLE ALL THE-“
And there was pop, a shower or sparks from the light socket in the kitchen, the lights went out, and the bucket that Peter’s foot had been in clattered onto its side. Peter was no longer standing in it.
She stood there with wide eyes staring at the spot where Peter had been. She dropped her coffee.
Thirty seconds passed.
She picked up the phone to call the police and actually forgot what number to call. When she remembered, she stopped after the first number when it occurred to her that she had no idea what to tell the police. She waited.
Twenty more seconds passed.
Five. Four. Three. Two. One.
One minute. Nothing happened. Two minutes. Nothing happened.
She waited for an hour. She waited for a week.
She’s still waiting.
by Duncan Shields | Feb 14, 2011 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
The invaders had left automated sentries in charge of the human race. They’d really cleaned Earth up. All animals, vegetables, and water were being managed expertly for maximum freshness and yield. They left the precious metals in the Earth alone. They weren’t nearly as valuable to the universe as they had been to us before the invasion.
We’d been kept as a slave labour force. Every single living thing on the Earth was a commodity to be exported besides us. Because feeding us plants or animals would literally eat into the aliens’ profits, we were only allowed to eat each other. They’d really done a good job. Human meat had never known such diversity of preparation. Pudding, steaks, burgers, crispy-fried, protein bars, gelatin, even a type of ‘skin salad’. Those of us old enough to remember the old ways were horrified. What scared us most is that the children didn’t seem to mind. They accepted it as reality and ate their fill.
We planted the seeds, tilled the fields, harvested the crops, and loaded them into the produce ships. We raised the animals, fed them, cared for them, and herded them into the meat ships. We diverted the rivers into small dams that led gushing into the water ships.
The horrible thing was that they aliens weren’t raping our planet. They weren’t squeezing it until it dried up and broke. They were carefully managing the output so that Earth could produce enough to feed entire planets but would always replenish. The irony was not lost on us.
We were here eternally, eating ourselves and keeping the process going under the threat of punishment from the machines left to keep us in line.
The machines that were now coming over the hill and questing for us. To our left, a gout of flame found an empty silo where the seniors were hiding. With a chill, I realized that the machines were probably programmed to start with the elderly but they’d leave the children. I hoped the tale of our tiny rebellion would be spread as myth amongst the survivors.
The juice of nectarines ran down my chin, mixing with the blueberries I had eaten earlier. All of us huddled in the darkness, reeking of fruit and vegetables. Today would be the day we died but we all had a belly full of what was worth dying for.
by Duncan Shields | Feb 9, 2011 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
The world demanded immortality at gunpoint from the ones who had it already. A transfusion of the nanotech-laced blood from the wealthy was all it took.
For those without access to transfusion equipment, it wasn’t long before the rebels realized that merely eating the flesh or drinking the blood of an immortal would transfer the tiny machines over to their own bloodstream. A vigorous bout of sex would also work, consensual or otherwise. Those were dark days for the rich.
The problem with taking death out of the equation, however, was that a dam of life formed. The population grew exponentially faster without the mitigating factor of terminal illness or disease. The already glutted seas and landfills overflowed with garbage.
Then the babies started dying. It was what happened when nanotech flourished among the stem cells of the newborn. The nanotech didn’t know what to do with these unfamiliar cells and so they were treated as a disease and shunted out of the body. A new form of cancer, it could be said, caused by health gone wild.
The machines at this point had iterated to a point of their own evolution. Reprogramming them was tried but the majority of the machines already in the bloodstreams of the world merely found the new machines and destroyed them.
A monopoly of machines that could protect themselves were in the blood of the world now.
The trade-off for immortality was humanity. With nanotechnology humming through the bloodstream and repairing all damage to every organ, the only thing needed was the input of raw materials. Anything worked. Food was preferred but if one wanted, one could eat splinters or small chips of iron. Sand washed down with salt water.
Other people.
Humans had become a finite resource. They were like extra-hardy locusts without the ability to reproduce. The population of the earth had nowhere to go but down.
by Duncan Shields | Jan 24, 2011 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
Technically, there were still two sexes.
The gene techs realized that there was one way to double the births of a new colony. Doubling the births meant a more stable gene pool in half the time it usually took. The solution was obvious but it was hard for the human minds back on Earth to swallow.
Two puberties.
One set of people grew up as women and then changed into men on their twenty-fifth birthdays. The other set grew up as men and then changed into women on their twenty-fifth birthdays.
In theory, this meant that everybody got a turn being pregnant and giving birth. The younger women would be impregnated by the older men and the older women would be impregnated by the younger men. Fertility drugs meant that twins and triplets were common.
Scientists. Too deep in their own experiments and repressed sexual urges to see the trouble they were creating. Freud would have had a field day.
The scientists thought that the men who turned into women would still have aggressive enough sex drives to seduce the younger men and that the women who turned into men wouldn’t objectify the younger women in an oppressive way.
In practice, the young ended up having sex with the young and the older ones ended up wanting to have sex with the young. Second puberty became a death knell. The second puberty women became known as cougars and the second puberty men become known as trolls. It was demoralizing to go through the second change.
The colony doctrine makers tried to make it a law that each person must impregnate at least one person while male and have at least one child while female.
The added pressure of legislation caused a resistance. That resistance became a violent rebellion. People were executed when they turned twenty-five. The colony’s social structure took a downturn into hedonism and savagery.
The colony was branded off limits to the shipping lanes and abandoned. They were on their own. It’s a dare now for new space-freighter drivers and pirates to visit the place and attempt to ‘enrich the gene pool’. The planet is no longer on any official charts and its location is spread by word of mouth.
A colony of young savages. Its nickname is Logan’s Eden.
Now, new colonies are populated solely by either male-to-female humans or female-to-male humans but never both. Everyone gets a turn being male and female and giving birth but rebellion is avoided.
by Duncan Shields | Jan 19, 2011 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
The control harness turned blue a second before I knew we were going to be hit. I pressed up against the back of the transport in a futile simian effort to get as far away from the pain as possible. The light outside the windows went nuclear. God’s donkey kicked us in the side of the head. In a lighting-flash world of white, I blacked out.
I woke up a few seconds later. We were a submarine in an ocean of fire. Our craft was in a flatspin in the top third of a mushroom cloud. We were a black dot in a great orange lake of fiery death. We were a tadpole in the heart of a manmade sun. The pilots were screaming. I looked across to my fellow dropouts. Their smiles echoed my own.
Everything was going according to plan.
I stood up and kept my balance. My men did as well. Our suits were too bulky for salutes but they stood still, waiting to follow my lead. The plane kept spinning. The eight of us stood there swaying a little like we were on the deck of a boat. The pilots had stopped screaming. They were probably dead.
I nodded and walked forward. My giant boots clunked on the grates like one-ton magnetic dragon feet. I put my gloved hand on the hot peeling paint of the door release handle. I counted to three loudly in my helmet. The men tensed.
I pulled the handle.
Hell was let into the cigar-tube body of the plane. It was too much stress for the vehicle. It flew apart. In pieces, its molecular integrity couldn’t take the heat and it turned to dust. The pilots were incinerated.
We dropped like rocks. We dropped like spiders. We freefell through thick plasmic radiated atomic hellfire. The displays on our face shields showed us where we were in relation to the others and the ground. The ground was coming up quick.
One of my men starting twitching. His face shield had a flaw in the monocrystal. It cracked. One second later, it was like he never existed.
We hit the ground feet first with no chutes like God’s hammers. Five thunderous beats. Five men in the middle of the worst that science had to offer. We were standing at the center of the crater. We were standing in the bottom of a bowl of red heat. We were standing at the eye of the hurricane. It was a vacuum here surrounded by billowing upward swinging curtains of smoke and flame like a Bedouin’s bedchamber. We stood in silence. We stood equidistant like the points of a pentagram in position around it.
The arrival. There was a fifteen-dimensional diamond floating in the center of our formation. It was aware of us.
We primed our weapons. We were going to nip this in the bud.
