by Duncan Shields | Sep 27, 2010 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
She set up a receiving station in her office. That receiving station was anchored at 3:45 PM, August 22nd, 2018.
As soon as she turned it on, the messages from her future self came pouring in.
Advice on theories, scores from sports games, inside knowledge on upcoming relationships and a thousand other subjects. Apparently, the future her had no respect for causality.
Reality shattered.
She set up more message depots ten weeks apart and gave them addresses.
She answered questions. She’d forward questions back to the proper message depots and an earlier self would try to find out answers and forward them back to the future.
She employed people. Her earlier selves employed people.
Every message station became a corporation. Every ten days, she set another message depot up. Her corporation would get to a deserted part of the world, set up a beacon, and turn it on. As soon as they turned it on, a building would materialize around it with an employee base that had always been there.
After August 22nd, 2018 at 3:45 PM, there were no more mysteries. Reality became as malleable as smoke in the air.
The thing that’s hard to imagine is that whenever reality changes, no one notices. It simply becomes the way it’s always been. The theory is that that we are shuffling through realities like an infinite deck of cards. We can’t tell. She either ended the universe or created the multiverse.
The only way to live here is to live here, they say. I tried making some bets on upcoming games but they never pan out. Something changes, I guess, and the score changes, so that’s that. I don’t make a fortune and then lose a fortune; I just never had a fortune. If you see what I mean.
I have to accept that what is real right now is all I’ve ever known.
I wonder if one day, someone will send a message back and successfully set the wheels in motion to assassinate her and put this world back into a place where her discovery never existed. I wonder if that’s even possible.
Not that I’d notice if it happened. This world would cease and I’d be in a world where her invention never existed. I’d never know the difference.
by Duncan Shields | Sep 13, 2010 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
I was manufactured.
There are no more fathers. There is only one Mother. The humans grew sterile and could not breed by any other means. They were successful in making artificial life but they failed to cure the sickness that took away their ability to make children naturally. They grew old and they died. Now there are only us. We are made by and dependent on machines. There hasn’t been a true birth in two centuries.
I am processed meat.
The human factory of my birth is located in Missouri. I am a body of rejuvenated dead flesh whose appearance marks me as an expendable worker.
The specifications of my birth factory’s product line are one: Strong.
The automated collectors of the dead brought the corpses into the rear-loading rendering tubes at the Factory. There, the bodies are brought inside and separated into elementary components of tissue, fluid, tendon and muscle. Chemicals add elasticity and tensile strength. Vigor is restored.
Like a sausage or a can of spam, these parts of the dead are reconstituted together into a human form by machines designed for the task, moving with the bored speed of efficient programming. Staple gun retractors pull tendons taught over heel and wrist bones and keep them tight with glue-gun biopoxy. Electrical stimuli test-widens pupils and makes all the body’s muscles twitch in a shuddering preset order. The bodies are bathed in anti-rejection microbe gel. Coagulated blood from storage is thinned by chemicals and hosed into the hollow veins.
Sewing machines churn out templates of thick, fatty multi-colored skin by the acre to wrap us when we are near completion.
No aesthetic specifications are included in our reincarnation. Only function. We come off the lines ugly, strong and stupid. Filled with pacemakers, stimulators and regulators. Our behavior would be regulated by pain controls implanted too deep to remove but there are no humans around anymore to press the buttons on the pain sticks. We are sterile zombie eunuchs with skin melted together from all races in a bruised, patchwork, rag-doll, jigsaw collage like farmer’s fields seen from a plane.
No two of us were exactly alike. Our eye colours are random from eye to eye. Hair colours sprout from our heads at the whim of the random flesh pulled around our skulls. Neopolitan morlocks. Shelley’s legacy. True Frankensteins.
We were grown for hazardous labour.
Some are not.
The factories up North and on the Coasts were created to grow humans for the general population and a pristine few grow bodies for the rich. Replacement clones, sex slaves, high-end front-of house secretaries and restaurant workers. The factories still churn out beautiful specimens but without instructions, these flawless bodies wander the growing wilderness in helpless tribes, food for the wolves and other predators.
When they die, they are collected by the automated necro-retrievers and brought back for re-integration. After two or three cycles of this, they are judged unworthy to be made to those factory’s specifications and they go down the ladder of automation until they are brought to the factories like the one where I was born and their parts are made into something ugly like me with no thought of appearance.
I was made with faults. My life span is only ten years. My siblings are the same. But we are strong and can withstand much damage.
Our logic is sound: The more of the pretty ones we kill, the more of us there will be. And the more of us, the better.
by Duncan Shields | Sep 7, 2010 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
Here’s one example of how the aliens failed to understand humans.
We’d become part of the galactic alliance and were paired up with a species roughly analogous to our own. They were bipedal, around the same level of technological advancement, warlike but aware of the value of peace, and breathed our type of air. It was a cultural exchange. Civilians that volunteered were screened and cleared to accept an alien guest in their homes.
The military doesn’t ask for volunteers. We were assigned.
I was an air force pilot. Jackson Chalmers. My nickname was Frosted Tips or Frosty for short. I was from California and I had blond highlights in my hair when I joined the force. The other pilots thought the blond streaks were hilarious and while the frosted tips were gone in days, the nickname stuck. I carried a postcard around with me from my ex-wife for luck. The postcard reminded me that I had nothing to lose anymore and could fully give myself over to aerial engagements without fear of death.
I explained to the alien assigned to me that pilots were usually given nicknames and carried lucky charms to help them. I told him that the names helped camaraderie and that the charms gave us hope or focus during battle. Bonds and superstition can win a war, I told him. The alien was silent, thanked me, and returned to his base.
He came bounding back to me like an excited pet six hours later and told me that his nickname was Generator Flowerpot Tropical Premium and he showed me the fork that he’d taken from the mess hall and told me that it was his lucky charm.
I thought it was hilarious. I laughed and laughed. Sweating and clicking like they aliens did when they were happy, he went back to his barracks to tell his fellow soldiers.
Now all the aliens have four-word random nicknames and carry whatever they saw first as a lucky charm. They don’t truly understand sentimental value. I’ve seen socks, bootlaces, chalk, gravel, and on one occasion, cheese.
Even when I tried to explain to him that he’d got it wrong, he didn’t care. He said it was helping a great deal.
So now I’m flying a four-seater with my friend Generator Flowerpot Tropical Premium and his two friends Ticket Lamp Helmet Cooler and Batwing Christmas Cartridge Storm. Hanging around Ticket Lamp’s neck is a flattened coke can and Cartridge Storm is carrying a rubber wedge in his pocket. Generator Flowerpot’s fork is bent around his wrist like a bracelet.
I have to admit it. It worked. They didn’t get it wrong at all. I like them more and it’s helped us become a team. I’ll fight to the death to protect them.
Also, I don’t carry the postcard anymore. I carry a paperclip now. It was the first thing I saw on the desk beside the waste paper basket when I threw out the postcard. It feels way better.
by Duncan Shields | Aug 30, 2010 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
Newton left us a gift. Tesla wrapped it up and Hawking put a bow on top. It was the brilliance of Dr. Panaura that opened it for the whole human race.
Dr. Panaura had found a way to trap energy and shape it. Using accelerator kilns, she’d bind the light with the electricity. By using a series of ceramics and mirrors, she’d weave the energy into a tight overlapping grid. The waves would move in a pattern that generated their own power through recursive timestreams.
Physical relationships warp at higher velocities. Anything with appreciable mass cannot be accelerated to lightspeeds.
In effect, she’d made plates of invisible energy that borrowed energy from past versions of themselves. She knitted light into primitive jointed garments.
The armour tapped into the missing seventeen per cent of the universe. It was a marriage of Newtonian physics and the unified field fueled by funneled electricity.
It worked on a universal scale. It stole kinetic energy but weighed nothing. It was bulletproof in the same way that a planet was. Any force applied to it was absorbed.
It could be worn as an invisible suit of armour that nothing could penetrate.
She would be hailed as a savior later. Any industry that needed a hard surface would benefit immediately. Impossible architectural masterpieces would blossom. The military would gain invincibility. Hard materials would become possible with no natural matter being used.
She never lived to see any of it.
That first suit of armour that she tried out on herself didn’t have any airholes and the generator pack was on her belt, trapped inside the form-fitting field with her. The fields surrounding her hands couldn’t penetrate the shield around her waist to press the deactivate button.
No one knows what she was thinking trying it out on herself like that. It’s hard to believe what a simple, stupid mistake that was considering her brilliance. Conspiracy theories abound that the military complex got to her and killed her so that she wouldn’t stand in the way of her invention being used as weaponry. No one knows. She suffocated there. Her assistants found her in the morning.
Since the energy supplies are theoretically infinite, she is still encased in that field, resting peacefully in her coffin.
by Duncan Shields | Aug 20, 2010 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
We’d found her adrift off the stern of the city.
She was cold and hungry and close to death. She’d been feeding off of the other bodies in her life boat. From the blonde hair on the corpses, I’d say that they were related to her. The skeletons of carrion birds littered the bottom of the boat, jostling for position with the long bones of dead fish. I’d have to say that she’d been At Sea for months.
The currents had taken her North towards us. The freshwater rain she’d collected in buckets and cups was starting to freeze along with her food supply. Sunlight was getting scarce. She would have been dead within days if we hadn’t crossed courses. It was the sharp eyes of Lookout Jim that spotted her.
We took her to the motor priest in the aft engine-room hospital. He bathed her in steam to keep her warm and to sweat the salt out of her. He fed her meat from the pens to bring her strength up. She talked in words that we didn’t understand. The search was underway to find someone on board that spoke her language.
She’d need to be strong for the trial.
The no-man’s-land of Midships was where we kept the hall of records. The Ballroom was where the trials for new entrants were held. She’d be the seventy-eighth foundling since The End.
Bow Town believed that anything found adrift was theirs by right of salvage, living or dead. She would have been used for pleasure until she broke. After that, she would have been used for labour until she died. After that, she would have been food. After that, any remaining shreds of her would have been thrown to the monsters on Deck Twenty.
We here at Stern City believed in a more respectful attitude towards foundlife. It was probably because we had the weapons. We were descendents of The Great Crew.
She managed to communicate to us that her name was Hrafn so we called her Raven. It was a nice contrast to her pale skin and blonde hair.
The trial date for entry was set for one week hence. We all prayed to the Great Princess Cruise Lines for an interpreter to be found before then. If counsel couldn’t be found to defend her, she’d be given to Bow Town.
Until then, I brought her soup and tried to learn her language.
I told her stories of the past. I told her of our ancestors on the Cruise Ship that was at sea when the sky burned. I told her of the initial riots that resulted in our present ship factions. I told her of the outlay of the ship. I told her how lucky we were to have animals on board in the cargo hold at the time of The End to breed for meat.
Occasionally, we found people adrift that had survived on islands or mountain peaks that the radiation hadn’t reached and the rising ocean hadn’t drowned. Eventually, they all set sail in search of ships like us. Rumour has it that there were seven ships like us, caught at sea during the final days, circling the globe.
We’re called the Seven Arks. Generations from now, we may be the people that repopulate the earth.
Raven thinks we’ve saved her. She smiles at me when I bring her food. If we can’t find an interpreter to act as translator for counsel at the trial, I’m thinking of hiding her so that she won’t have to go through the hell of Bow Town.
