by Duncan Shields | Oct 8, 2009 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
The old man was a genius but kept it to himself. He lived in an old house outside of the city. He didn’t have friends. He kept himself busy with hobbies. His latest project had been a frustrating one.
The problem was material. By his calculations, he would have needed a dish over six miles in diameter. Tin or lead-lined steel would have been best.
He didn’t have the money to afford that much metal, let alone get a grant from city council to build something so huge that close to the city. He was stuck.
Until he thought smaller instead of bigger. He bought an old television picture tube and a faulty electron microscope from the university that they were going to throw out anyway. He bought thirty magnets from the hardware store, salted them, and aligned them all in a very unique and specific way on a chunk of stolen chain-link fence. By pulsing the electrons from the busted television through those magnets with the electron microscope turned on to observe them to make them collapse, he created a tachyon spray gun.
With it, he could mark a radius of five miles around his house with an invisible web of time-retarding, mostly-stable tachyon nets with its focus ending in the middle of his basement.
Totally harmless to the normal population.
To time travelers, it might as well have been a brick wall.
The first traveler arrived five minutes after the old man turned the time-net on.
There was a flash and there he was. Dressed in blue and with goggles. He had a bright orange plastic fin on the top of his head. He was wearing black rubber gloves and his chest had a tangle of monitors on it. His whole setup looked pretty homemade. He had what looked like a motorcycle throttle in his left hand and some sort of blender in the other.
“Sweet! It worked! Where am I?” he asked. Looking at the old man and then at his surroundings with a wide, goofy smile on his face.
“1958.” the old man lied.
“What? That doesn’t make any sense.” He looked down at one of his dials.
The old man raised his gun and shot the traveler through his left eye.
The old man turned off the time-net. He took off the traveler’s clothes and looked at the equipment strapped to his body. There had to be about six patents in the chest equipment alone. And judging by the traveler’s inexperience and naiveté, he probably wasn’t even that advanced.
The old man would rob more travelers and steal their technology. He’d leak the patents out on the market. He’d be rich.
Seeing as no temporal police had showed up at his house yet, the old man figured that he had already gotten away with the crime.
The old man smiled in the darkness of his basement.
by Duncan Shields | Sep 29, 2009 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
She left me for a space trucker. I wasn’t even mad. Hell, I understood.
The thing about space truckers is that they drive space trucks. They go from place to place. They come in to port, drop some stuff off and then, and this is the important part, they leave.
I liked it here. She didn’t. I thought that marrying her might change that. She was eighteen when we married. I was thirty-one. She was my second wife.
Susan grew up here. Ever since her fourteenth birthday, she couldn’t face a single day without illicit drugs to make her feel like it wasn’t so bad. Her doses were increasing. Her late-night searches for anything to distract her from her existence were becoming more frequent.
This rock isn’t a very big place. There are only six bars.
I’d heard stories about her late-night carousing with other men. I put it down to being young. Given time, she’d adjust. I forgave her. It’s not like her behavior was unusual. Anyone in their teens here tended to go a little insane for a while.
Anyone can watch the screens and see that there’s a whole connected universe out there with excitement and input. For teenagers, it’s the biggest tease there is.
For us folks over thirty, it’s a little reassuring to know that we’re safe from all that noise down here in the rock, away from the noisy universe.
Here, we have the rock, each other, and a perpetual night sky. If I were to wear an outsuit and walk around the entire asteroid, I’d be back home in a month. It’s not a big place.
Mining runs in my family. I honestly don’t know what else I would do.
Susan was the soft body that took the edge off of my constant world of grease, dust, and machinery.
Turns out she was doing more than just carousing in the bars with other men. She was, like a lot of the girls and boys here, looking to trade sex for transportation and get the hell away from here. The prettiest ones succeeded.
It’s a shame. It seems like our second highest export besides the ore is beautiful teenagers.
I’ll always remember Susan.
by Duncan Shields | Sep 17, 2009 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
It’s late. I’m smoking a cigarette in the ruins of a burned-down orphanage.
I’m standing in what used to be a room full of cradles. The scorched floor is cluttered with little black bones and black charcoal cribs.
It’s all I can do to stand there. The dome’s supports make black ribs miles above this city cutting the sky into pie slices down to the horizon. I haven’t seen the sun since I got here.
I remember Earth. I haven’t been back to there in over twenty years now. I remember blue sky. I remember not living in domes. I hate this place.
I hate the ignorant first-wave colonists and their ignorant lives. I hate their aversion to learning anything not needed to run the machines. I hate their lack of imagination and lack of originality. They’re augmented slightly to see better in the dark and withstand a few more seconds of vacuum in case of a decomp. Owl eyes that glow in the dark and hard bodies for hard work. All physical. Nothing mental.
I’m a cop. I pissed off my boss and caught a transfer out here to the gulag. The boondocks. Long time ago now. The only way I’m going back to Earth is after I retire which is in five years. Five long years.
I have the standard cop upgrades: total recall, overextended acuity, critical stat sensitivity that makes me into a human lie detector, and bumped-up lateral reasoning.
It all just adds to the torture. Time doesn’t ‘fly’ for me. With my photographic memory, I’m aware of every second going by exactly as long as a second is supposed to take. I hate it. Drinking does nothing to mute it. Believe me, I’ve tried.
To fool a lie detector like me, perpetrators have to be careful about the evidence they leave at crime scenes or at least passably devious during an interview. That would at least lend a little spice to my interrogations. No such luck. I swear that almost all of the population here is legally retarded.
For instance, I’m staring down at a wallet and a gas can right now. It looks like maybe the arsonist must have squatted down to light the fire and dropped his wallet out of his back pocket.
And more than that, he’ll be shocked when I trace it back to him.
I look at my partner. His eyes reflect the starlight back at me in big orange circles and his strong, thick skin blends into the night. He’s a local. Him and I are the only ranking detectives in the colony.
“Don’t you hate it here, son?” I ask him.
Completely stoic about my non-sequitur, he answers, “I grew up here, sir. Don’t know no different.”
I keep standing, staring down at the wallet. My partner stands with me, still as a statue, endlessly patient as only the truly stupid or enlightened can be.
I sigh and pick up the wallet. Time to go make an arrest.
by Duncan Shields | Sep 4, 2009 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
We lived in a tribe outside the main disc. The arm struts of the cogshield branched out above us like a gear. Where we lived was all angles. It had been this way ever since our creation.
My little one was sick. I’d built him according to the proper specs using the proper tools. I’d been licensed and refitted for programs to propagate. Even with all the shielding and over-protective parenting I’d put in as a precaution, a recursive virus had still gotten into his wiring.
My little one had a stutter that was getting worse. Soon he’d be locked in a loop with too little time between the repeats to do anything but power him down. No backup, complete wipe, start over. He’d be dephased and I would lose my right to build for another cycle.
Our lattice had a central nexus that our main struts grew out from like crystals. We took up a square block of vacuum equal to what The Human’s library called a hydrogen atom.
The Human had come to us several cycles ago. He communicated with us by beams of binary light flashes. We set up nets to capture the particle waves and record the frequencies.
At first, we thought that the strobing sun was another one of us giving us a first contact. After The Human had downloaded a small repository of his own knowledge to us called Encyclopedia, we realized that humans were a race of creators made of complex structures to big for us to see.
Our creators.
The revelation was astounding. There were many debates on how to treat the situation.
He continued to download information to us.
We gathered a concept of ‘male’ and ‘female’. It’s a fad that’s still popular to build little ones in an image that conforms to one or the other. I made mine a male.
They have an understanding of an art called psychology that they use for organic minds. I was hoping that this art might help my boy before I had to shut him down permanently.
I needed to take my stuttering boy to Contact Point out on the Proto-Spur from whence we all came. There, I need to stand on the endless plateau and walk into the light underneath the Viewing Plate.
With the particles of light falling around me like hail, I need to speak to them by using binary flashes of my headlamp.
I need to ask the Human for advice on how to fix my boy.
by Duncan Shields | Aug 26, 2009 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
“Man, we got ripped off.” said Manuel.
He was watching an old tri-D of a Flash Gordon serial made in the fifties. In the show, the year was 1998, just like now. It was hilarious and depressing all at the same time.
Manuel’s robot servant brought him another drink. “Will there be anything else?” D-11B intoned.
“No.” answered Manuel through his thought-amplification helmet. “That will be all.”
D-11B went back to the kitchen dispensary to prepare the dinner pills. Manuel continued watching Flash Gordon.
On the tri-D, Flash Gordon got into his ‘internal combustion’ ground car, put something called a cigarette into his mouth and drove to his ‘apartment’ using what he referred to as an ‘onboard navigational computer’ that told him exactly where to go.
In this series, there were little robots in space that took pictures of earth that everyone could see and use as a map. They called them satellites. No tethers! Amazing.
“Imagine how easy it would be to fly around without having to avoid all the tethers,” Manuel said to himself, “my personal jetpack would have a few less scratches, that’s for sure.”
Flash Gordon’s friend, Dr. Zarkov, had something called a pacemaker. It used metal wires to stimulate his heart with electricity!
Complete flights of fancy. The miracle material called ‘plastic’, for instance, made from the magic ‘oil’ liquid that came out of the ground, or electricity that was only in wires and not the free-floating Tesla storms that we had so many problems with.
“We hadn’t been able to live on the ground since 1938,” said Manuel to himself, “that’s why we all lived in nuclear-powered levitating houses. It was a matter of survival after The World War.”
Manuel could hear his wife’s flying car come in for a landing outside on the inner rim. He turned off the tri-D and stood up. “She’d kill me if she caught me watching this old claptrap,” he murmured, “it always makes me cranky.”
The bio-coral bone-thickeners helped Mauel’s hips as he stood up. He was wishing for a pair of those magnificent ‘plastic’ hips like in the Flash Gordon film.
No ground cars, no satellites, no shuttles, no gasoline, no plastic.
Manuel sighed. “Man, we got ripped off.” he said again.
“Honey, I’m home!” said his wife as she came in the front vacutube elevator.
Manuel forced a smile and went to greet his wife before dinner.
