by Duncan Shields | Jan 18, 2010 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
It’s dawn. Unisun now, Twosun later. Wee mickle Trisun appresta that.
The colony’s ticking up. Auld’uns like me waken up early. Shipment-time belding crops back to Earth coming down uswards. Myself, I’m worrying.
The woild musk flanders through my nostrils. Cornhufflers plackitly domingo the nerfwhistle crandles. Innitchtime approaches. Horace is probably merrytackling Renee favant harkfast. What mickle harkfast there is. The floondust tryses slowly up mouthwards in the helden shuffs of sant-light. I’m nomotion-still, eye-fasted to the suncoming.
A tang shart nibs up from the uddle crops. Last worthward, we sonely reaveseted tucks and nips. Not enough. It’s a ferreal cold-wint that’s coming. Toothwork will be rationed. Even the hardweathers have remissed. No blooms means thin times.
A sturrum’s bound to shandy down this eventime. Whuthercast’s bellin’ so. Six and two halling per forebrick is how they’re dicting. Shallen be a morst one, I gemise, marking by our nowluck.
Harmly does the riddle focus in, or so they say.
I’ll have to sound it to Renee and Horace apressta harkfast. Haymaps, itsa poss we’ll pass-market this annumnal. We nev pass-market. That means the welly. We’re dicked until the muckrake. We’ll be deep-enders. It’ll be tilla-time favant we can throwd the creds table resure.
Our thenluck was a gooden. I mark my horgan that our nexluck will be gooden twogain. Now, though. Preska now. Preska here. We’re smackit midlands twixteen billsowing and failcrops.
Crops go to Earth First or it’s a faily. Quota death. Mayhap we’ll scrafe by with plus-bribes.
It’s a billow of a preska. I purst my sniffler and wallen back to homewards. We be trength. We don’t back. We’ll shuff it.
All will be gooden.
by Duncan Shields | Jan 1, 2010 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
I’m a mechanic. I work on time machines. It’s tricky work.
Having done this for a while, I’m developing a theory that some people can sense when they’re in the wrong reality. Reality bifurcates and splinters every second and sometimes, with a shudder and whip, a person can jump the tracks over onto the wrong set of rails. Their life is similar at first, then increasingly divergent. People that can sense this get more and more bewildered.
Me, I’m just happy to be drawing breath. Being as close to these engines as I’ve been for the last twenty years, I’ve probably shuffled through dozens of alternate realities. I have no sense of my reality changing but sometimes I listen to the air around me for ripples, anything to tell me that something’s ‘gone wrong’.
You can see how people in my line of work tend to go crazy after a while. It helps to have a hobby.
I collect the journals of teenagers that have committed suicide and cross-reference them for similarities. I suppose as hobbies go, it’s a little dark. Whatever. It keeps me humble, rooted in the now, happy to be alive, and aware of death.
The fourth-dimensional propellant for time machines is notoriously unstable. We had a time fire last Monday that’s burning for two weeks forward and back from the explosion. A fuel leak hit a spark and all of a sudden, I could remember the fire starting ten days ago, working up to the explosion. This reshuffling of memories is what sends most chronomechanics around the bend.
I’m pretty passive about it. I just go back to reading my journals and try not to think about it.
The journal I’m reading tonight is for James Peter MacDougall. He hung himself two years ago up in the old Jenkin’s place on Powell Road.
What’s interesting to me is that I saw James yesterday down at the Safeway.
I have to get to back to work.
by Duncan Shields | Dec 24, 2009 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
The body was huge. Seven feet tall, at least, and heavy.
X-Rays had shown a delicate tracery of machinery throughout, strengthening the huge frame to allow it to move quickly.
Its bright, neon-blue hair glowed in the dark. It was the same colour as the lips, fingernails, and nipples.
It was the same colour as the glittering eyes.
It was dead now.
It stared out at the scientists, unblinking, and awkward.
It had been found, naked, stumbling through the snow up in Alaska close to a week ago. Its skin was as white as the snow.
We called it Codename Winter because of it.
In the week before its death, it had picked up a few words of our language and could respond to rudimentary questioning. It was a slow process as it seemed to be straining not only to find the words but also the concepts behind them. I hate to say it, but it seemed really stupid.
Its story, told through clumsy mime and pieced together as best we could, was that it had come here from space and had left its ship to explore the wilderness in Alaska. A passing human airplane had spooked Codename Winter’s ship. The ship bolted and the alien was left alone.
It insisted that it was the only one on the ship. It insisted that the ship was probably worried about it and was looking for it.
It had been dead for two hours and there had still been no contact with the ‘ship’ of its story. Planes that had passed in the region she was describing witnessed nothing.
While it was alive, a tennis-ball sized lump of what we took to be biocircuitry in the center of it had given off a steady stream of data that seemed to be directly tied to its sensory organs but we couldn’t decipher the data we collected from it. We were still trying to figure out what the densely packed stream of trinary data meant.
However, it had not issued any transmission that we could detect after the alien’s death. No homing beacon, no SOS message, nothing.
Its death had been immediately preceded by a burst of a data washing through the biocircuitry that burned it out. Codename Winter had looked at us, puzzled, and died that way.
We’d come up with a saddening hypothesis:
Its warranty was up and it had been switched off like a light.
Its ship had scanned our planet, looked at the dominant life-form and made a copy out of the material it had on board. The ship drank in all the information that skin, eyes, ears and nose could provide. Maybe it didn’t waste time on colour or maybe it just had no idea what colour was.
Maybe the next step would have been to make a better copy that could fool us and let it wander around downtown Los Angles or something.
The ship wasn’t coming back for this creature any more than we would return to the site of a picnic for a lost fork.
by Duncan Shields | Dec 16, 2009 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
The sensor charges go off and for a second I become a percussion instrument for the Devil.
I’m wreathed in black smoke and dropping like a stone. Explosions kick me like excited children. I’m a trillion-dollar pinball of curled-up offensive weaponry plummeting towards the enemy with the wrath of god in storage.
There’s sudden silence as I pass beneath the flakfield I was designed to penetrate. The air rushes by, whistling through the feathers of shrapnel embedded in my hull.
I unball and snap open the wingspread. Screaming with delight, I pull a tight three-gee loop in defiance of the enemy and in pure celebration of life.
I look left and right through amped senses to check out limb integrity.
A quick diagnostic reveals an acceptable level of damage.
I transform from a rock into an arrow pointed down.
The last of the clouds snap past me and my ocular facets becomes a rainbow of targets flowering towards me. Incoming priorities overlaid on city blocks and towers. Starpoints with missiles in the middle are getting larger as I look at them. Contrails are forming a spiderweb in the sky with me at the center. The city below me sends its best.
It’s too complicated to take in with my primary brain so I dump a priority comp request through and feel the jabs, waking up the other two brains. My ego dissolves and I become trajectories, vectors and tracepoints.
Even my memory fades. The only time I remember this state of mind is in my dreams during testing and repairs.
The city is a dartboard and I am headed for the bullseye.
It’s with a high whine that I pulse the accelerator. Two mach-donuts of ruptured air smash out from my tailfins. Windows shatter in the top floors of the towers below me as the sonic booms hit them twice.
I pull horizontal just above the tip of the tallest tower. The missiles aimed at me adjust accordingly.
I spin, turning the exhaust streams of sixty-eight cruise missiles behind me into basket weavers. My twinjets leave a dna helix of superheated gas.
I am flying flat now with a pet arsenal of enemy ordnance at my disposal. Automated defenses are so stupid.
I take a wide left and circle back towards the tip of the building that’s worth the most points.
I crank up an old recording of Marilyn Monroe singing Happy Birthday Mr. President as I fly straight towards the top floor.
He’s looking out the window. I couldn’t ask for more. I zoom in on his widening eyes as he takes in what’s happening. He moves in slow motion and I have entire tenths of a second to take in the picture.
I’m an angel chased by suns reflected in the glass he’s standing behind.
With a smile, I spread my wings again, wide, to brake.
I stop before nuclear fire overtakes me and I become Daedalus and Icarus rolled into one.
I’m a record cover for a second. Then I’m burning atoms.
Mission accomplished.
by Duncan Shields | Dec 8, 2009 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
We had created a society free of disease and violence. We had a society that was centered on fun and learning. We had a society that knew the difference between entertainment and education. We had cross-bred to the point that there were no more ‘races’ left.
We had a peaceful empire that spanned three systems and an average individual life expectancy of five hundred years.
Human beings have always thought of each point in their history as their most advanced. It’s like there’s a temporal egotism that says This, Right Here, Is the Best We’ve Ever Been stamped into everyone’s brain.
I suppose that’s what screwed us up as well. They say pride goeth before a fall.
We should never have woken them up.
There was a system wide ‘awakening’ party that had been organized for a decade. Everyone that had ever been put into cryogenic storage was taken out, cured, cloned, re-canted, simmed or given a construct and brought back to life on the same day.
It was joyous. Great15 grandchildren met with ancestors for the first time. Wet, happy eyes looked at historical figures live and breathe. Great learned minds were brought to us intact. It was seen as a heartfelt victory of the soul for all of humanity.
It was the stupidest thing we’d ever done.
Remember, we looked at warfare like witch-burning; an embarrassing footnote on our race’s way to glory. We hadn’t had a war in two centuries. We had no idea.
War takes no time to spread. With our long life spans and peace-loving ways, it didn’t take long for the Cryos to band together for familiar company. After they bound together, it didn’t take long for them to have a problem with us and demand space for themselves and *only* themselves. We gave it to them.
They wanted more.
They attacked. The reports came out from Earth with bloodstained shock. Reporters openly wept when reading back the details from the teleprompter.
We had to refer to our nets to look up the meanings of new words like ‘border’ ‘money’ and ‘opressed’. A dead vocabulary sprang back to life. Sparks were lit in distant recesses of the collective unconscious.
Horrified people on Earth were angry. A human thirst for revenge, long dead, awakened in dormant parts of the brainstem. Suddenly, there was a ‘them’ and it was invasive. Protection was the only answer.
Battles became frequent and even more disturbing was that on all sixteen planets, we watched, wide eyed and panting, at the carnage.
It changed us. That was the beginning of the war. It took seven years.
In the end, the Cryos were exterminated in a final solution reminiscent of an ancient political party known as the Nazis. So were the people that helped them. And the friends of the people suspected of helping them. Even the Cryos that had sided with us were put to death as well for the good of us all. It was too late.
A division grew amongst us at the gory repercussions of our murderous bloodthirsty decision. First political battles broke out, then actual physical ones. Earth01 demanded to secede from the union. Then Saturn’s Moons and archipelagos. Korthos followed suit.
Sides were drawn. Tempers were high.
We lost Mars altogether in that flashpoint attack. We have a larger asteroid belt now in the Sol system where that planet used to be.
That was the end of peace. We run and gun now. The sleeper has awakened. We look back and shake our heads. We should have let sleeping dogs lie.
