by Duncan Shields | Aug 10, 2010 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
They were a race that liked to live amongst the other races to better understand them. They were diplomatic yet fearsome, possessing great weaponry but very gentle in one-on-one conversations. They looked like starving centaurs crossed with giant centipedes. Very thin and stable on the ground, surprisingly quick in the water and capable of short bursts of flight. They were stronger than us physically.
When their ships first surrounded Earth, they transmitted a resume of the battles they had won and proved it by setting up a brief example in the space around our planet for the scientists and military to monitor.
It was a terrifyingly graceful display of military supremacy, both in tactics and in weaponry. After it was over, however, they started peaceful and fair negotiations for cultural exchanges. We never felt defeated. It was interesting. One columnist from the New York Times wondered if they did this with everyone or merely recognized that it would work with us specifically. The aliens never answered his question.
The alien diplomats assigned to aspects of our society joined in, spoke our language, and tried to mimic us. It was like as a race, we were given bizarre little brothers. Alarming at first but their earnest need to learn was disarming. Their gentle voices assuaged our fear regardless of their appearance.
It’s been strange to think we’ve been conquered. There’s been no rebellion. They brought their own food and they don’t want our resources or money. They aren’t here to eat us. They just want to learn and explore.
There are two aliens in my office. They’ve been here for a year. They wear clothes just like us except cut to fit their long bodies. I remember footage of one of them that had gotten into the fashion industry. Seeing that six-legged body standing upright on its hind legs and sashaying down the runway in clothes made to fit its unusual body was a strange sight.
The ones in my office are named Doug and Tina. Doug wears suits with extra arms and Tina wears dresses with extra arm-holes. They talk around the water cooler with us about what was on television last night and Doug remarks on sports scores. Their lean, horse-like faces over-enunciating our language no longer seems creepy to me. It’s more like they have an accent from a country I can’t identify. Tina is getting better at wearing makeup.
I find it strange that as a race, we’ve adjusted to it so quickly. I find it fascinating. They’re so dull and friendly.
What’s even more alarming is that I’m thinking of asking Tina out to a movie next week.
by Duncan Shields | Jul 26, 2010 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
Headfirst into the mainstream with my lawsuit buzzing, that’s the only way to do it. The cold data can stop your heart. Bright red crosses dance around me, warding off viruses that can infect my setup and make it drain others.
The pile of reflexes and soft meat back in my room smiles as the brain inside its head sees the entire world in an agreed-upon colour code.
A filter of money, information, governments and public works light up the pinball machine on the floor of the e-net worldview. Flyers like me cluster moth-like around the bright, shapely nodes. We are superheroes but there are billions of us. We are gnats in clouds buying from the neon pyramids.
How little things change. Commerce uses creativity to drive innovation. They say that necessity is the mother of invention and what greater necessity is there above surviving? Therefore, one invents. One invents stories. One invents tales.
One lies.
I’m here to check up on how my lies are doing. People worry about powerful viruses without realizing that the most dangerous virus of all is the most prolific; the spoken word.
A simple paragraph of text gets past all of the defenses. It’s innocuous. I sprinkle them behind my glowing sylph of an avatar as I float down to the e-street floor. They follow in my wake like phosphorescent algae behind a boat in the hardworld. They are my dandelion seeds.
My body is dying back in the meatspace. I need a new one and I need backups. I need volunteers moved by pity and motivated by greed. I need the gullible and the feeling. I need bleeding hearts in healthy bodies. I want non-smoking liberals to travel hundreds of miles, knock on my door, and walk in to the trap.
I need fresh organs. I have no more in the basement.
I’ve spent months honing my snare. My perfect paragraph moves, promises, affects and drowns. It twists reason with emotion to give birth to plausible reasons. It manipulates logic by employing religion. In places, it tells outright untruths.
With luck, it will make you give your body to me.
Cross your fingers. Wish me luck.
by Duncan Shields | Jul 12, 2010 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
It’s one of those moments everyone dreads. You’re standing in front of an observation window looking out at open space and you see a crack silently trace its way up from the corner and across the glass.
Once when I was seven, I stayed with my mom on an Earth farm during the winter. The snow was deep and the air was cold. There was a small pond on the property that froze over in the winter.
I walked up to the pond and out across the ice. I was nearly at the center when I felt the ice crack. It was a crack I felt in my bowels, in my bones, in the very bottom of my soul. It wasn’t so much a sound as it was a muffled concussive force from beneath my feet. It became the subterranean creak of a door. I could feel very, very subtle changes in balance starting to fire up inside me as the vector of the surface I was standing on started to change.
I looked at the shore and in the clear cold air of winter panic, I calculated how long I had to get to the bank of the pond divided by how fast the ice was breaking and came up with a totally unknown quantity.
The spell broke and I dashed back to the shore. I never fell through the ice. If I had been older and heavier I never would have stepped through the ice on the shallow shore on my first step. If I was younger and lighter, I would have been safe on the ice.
I’m remembering that moment now looking at the flaw in the monocrystal of the spaceviewing window in front of me. It’s creaking its way across the glass with questing fingers that look like crystal tree branches growing in stuttering time lapse.
With a sharp intake of breath, I run. The alarm sounds on my first step towards the deck doors. I know the emergency shutter seals are going to come crashing down the millisecond they detect a drop in pressure.
I’m screaming like I didn’t know I could as I leap and dive through the doors into the hallway. The blast door comes down suddenly to cut off the doorway. There is a moment of silence. A second later, the blast door stiffens with a bang as the window on the other side blows out.
This is an old ship. I’m gasping and crying as I get to my feet and the emergency crews arrive. I swear if I see the engineer in next few hours, I won’t be legally responsible for the bodily harm I inflict on him. I cannot wait to dock and get off this ancient freighter.
by Duncan Shields | Jul 1, 2010 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
I remember entering the room. I was eighteen, cold, naked except for the paper underwear, bred for this and still nervous. I suppose terrified is more apt. Even after the rigorous physical training I was still very skinny. My breathing came in quick gasps as I struggled not to cross my arms or shiver. I came to a stop and stood at attention in the middle of the circular metal trapdoor grill, my shaved skull glinting in the spotlight. I was barefoot. My identification tattoos and punishment wires were out there for all to see. Gooseflesh ran over me and I could see the little puffs of my breath. Primed and ready. The drugs they had given me this morning to ease the transition were working. I felt more alert and attentive than ever. I felt curious about the future, eager to take part and slightly dreamy. Itchy.
A blue light scanned up, over and through me.
I saw some indicators come up on the panels in the darkness just like in the instructional videos.
Green circles skittered across all of the terminals. I’d been confirmed and we were a go.
I wish I could say I felt the moist eyes of my family and friends staring out hopefully from the observation enclosure. This was a proud day for most people. Most families gave one kid up to the SAPCorps. If you gave a child to the SAPCorps, it meant more birthing privileges.
However, SAPCorps was also the country’s orphanage. In some cases, it was also the juvenile detention center. I could still remember the day when I found out that this wasn’t a hospital and that my parents and sister were gone. That was ten years ago. The doctor who had told me also remembered, I think, going by the fact that he had requested to pull the lever for me on this occasion.
He looked down at me. Doctor Fines. My stepfather, for lack of a better word.
He twitched a smile at me. We were being monitored but other than that, it was just the two of us. I stood in the middle of the trapdoor. Our relationship had always been antagonistic but defined and limited. I don’t think anyone on the outside world would have referred to him as paternal but he was the closest I had.
“David.” He said. He nodded at me.
“Sir.” I replied. I stared straight ahead, willing him to get this underway.
“You ready?” he asked.
“Absolutely sir. Let’s do it.” I replied. I trembled a little.
“Here we go. I hope that…well. Here we go.” He said and flexed his hand on the handle.
He yanked back.
The trapdoor opened and I fell.
————————-
I look down at my skin and see the moonlight reflect off its purple brick-like surface. I see the little octagons that my pores have become breathing in the night air. I was a lucky one. My transformation turned out to be beneficial to the military. I’m dwarfstar dense with my human intelligence retained. Most conventional projectile weapons can’t harm me. I don’t have internal organs. It’s been this way for eleven years now.
I’m standing in the rain in the night time graveyard beside the grave of Dr. Fines. He died two days ago. I can’t define what I’m feeling. His death was sudden and I didn’t find out immediately. He was my last tie to my humanity. The last person who could remember who I was ‘before’.
I turn and walk away into the night and return to base.
by Duncan Shields | Jun 24, 2010 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
To be a CEO of a company that’s grown as large and as fast as this one has, a person needs a mind that deals quickly with high pressure situations and possesses a natural talent for leadership. One needs to be charming, ruthless, and efficient. There’s a reason I have no wife or children. I am all of these things. People will follow me into corporate battle on the slimmest of reasons. I have resolved conflicts between bitter rivals and competitive holdouts with one personal meeting. People trust me and want to follow me.
It’s standard practice to have oneself cloned when one is the CEO of such an important company. Last year, the old me was kidnapped by Red Tears Terrorists. The kidnapping itself was kept quiet. We didn’t respond to their demands. They threatened to kill the hostage.
We said, “Go ahead.” and woke up one of the clones. That clone is me. Maybe a day of memory missing but other than that, there was no lull in business.
That was a year ago to the day.
He’s sitting in the center of my living room when I get home. My security is disabled. He has a gun. One of his eyes has been replaced and there’s a scar across the cruel smile underneath the tattooed red tear on his cheek. One. That marks him out as one of the terrorists responsible for the kidnapping and it means that he’s been with the organization for a year.
I have no doubt that he must have had a difficult and interesting time talking them out of executing him and taking control during the last twelve months.
It’s the old me.
“Hello, Nathan.” My clone says to me. “How’s life?”
He looks at me with the tube-grown eye that’s a mismatched brilliant green and a little too large. It takes effort to stretch the eyelid over it to blink. It must be tricked out because it flashes red for a second and I find that I have trouble breathing. Some sort of neural disruptor. My knees go weak and I kneel. My vision starts to swim.
He walks over and kneels beside me, cradling my chin in his hands.
When he nudges the tip of the knife up against my eye and looks at me, I realize what’s going to happen. He’s going to take one of my eyes to replace the one he lost and then he’s going to take my place. He’s also going to keep me alive here for as long as he can to show me what real pain is. He’s going to show me what he’s learned over the last year with those soulless men. He’s going to show me what he has become used to.
I realize that in his eyes, I’m the copy. I realize that to him, I’m the betrayer.
I think of what I would become capable of if pushed in that direction and I feel my bladder let go, staining the expensive rug like an untrained puppy.
