by Duncan Shields | Aug 11, 2009 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
It was the physical changes that were the hardest to get used to.
I’m not just talking about the year of physiotherapy. I’m talking about the grey hairs. I’m talking about the soft skin. That and the gradual discovery that life had passed you by. People looked at you and nodded but that close trust was gone. The connection was severed. Parties, deaths, deals, power struggles, marriages, births. They’d all gone on while you slept. You showed up years later with canes and an older body.
There were no prison visits. There were no gyms. It was a snap of the fingers and they took years away. Parole for good behaviour didn’t exist. For guys that had been sentenced to really hard time, it was a slow execution.
You get caught, you go under. That had become the answer to the prison crisis. People were put on trial, sentenced, and given a shot. They were slotted into a sleep chamber in a penal hotel somewhere to carry out their sentence in a dreamless sleep. The liberals loved the humane aspect of it all, the conservatives loved the cruelty of it all, and the general populace had a nice, happy image of cons sleeping like babies. Everyone wins.
When a criminal’s time was done, they were woken up. The light on the front of their chamber changed from red to green with a little ‘ding’ sound, just like a toaster oven telling the cook that the pizza inside was done.
Muscles do a little shrinkage if you don’t move them for a few years, even with the electrical stimulus in the coffins. It’s really painful to get those muscles working again. It takes a long time.
But like I said, that wasn’t the hard part. I’d been under for twenty years. I went in when I was twenty-six. I’m forty-six now. When I went in, I had the body of an athlete. My memories were full of sex, murder, fights, and running from the cops in a body that did it easily. Those memories end, in my mind, about eight weeks ago.
I don’t recognize the cars or the fashions. I walk so slow.
I looked up my old gang friends. All dead except for three of them. Those three took pity on me and gave me some cash but I could tell from the look in their eyes that they’d never let me back into the syndicate.
I looked up my old girlfriends. Couldn’t find any of them. Names changed because they got married or they’d died as well. None of us led a good life out here. We all wanted to die young and most of us got our wish granted.
I feel like a ghost. Time to make some new friends. I don’t have the faintest idea where to begin.
I could feel the need to commit a crime and go back to sleep twisting around inside my head like a hot wire.
I felt too weak to deal with this new life.
by Duncan Shields | Aug 1, 2009 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
We called the rich kids ‘Upgrades’.
They were the ones that had been born with all of the benevolent tweaks and cellular advantages that money could buy. Longer life spans, all possible congenital defects erased, optimum health, even faster mental response times.
You’d think that we would envy them. Well, we certainly envied their bodies. They looked like gods. Like they’d stepped out of commercials and into real life.
What we didn’t envy, though, were the mental changes that the parents felt justified in doing to their children.
The Pixelator was one such augmentation. The rods and cones on the back of the eye were enhanced for better-than-perfect vision. However, a filter was placed between the brain and eye to make sure that all nudity was seen as pixelated blocks of colour. It was put there to keep the kids from seeing naked flesh before they reached the age of majority or until the parents deemed it acceptable to remove the block.
Of course, it didn’t work. Kids were having sex anyway. The entire experience for them visually became a jumble of oversized flesh-tone boxes. They lied to their parents about being virgins.
When the mental/visual block was lifted, some of the kids went and had it secretly reinstated. One glimpse of actual nudity, of actual sex, and they were turned off. Their entire sexual awakening had been in a haze of blurry cubism and they wanted it back.
Playing with the body is one thing, but playing with the mind was always something I felt uneasy about.
I’m grateful that my parents never had enough money to change me.
by Duncan Shields | Jul 24, 2009 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
The tattoos writhed.
The tattoos strobed through creatures and colours in time to the music and the backbeat of her heart. They’d flash up in blues and purples, mapping out her internal organs before slashing to a zoom-in of Hercules battling the Hydras across the bladed bones of her hips. Stories unfolded down her legs. Reels of film patterened across her shoulder blades. Home movies from Old Earth flashed nostalgia across her buoyant breasts. A burning python lazily wound underneath it all down from the hairline of her neck, around her waist, between her thighs and around one leg to the ankle.
After ten minutes of watching her, one could detect patches that would repeat, see loops start to form, pick up on what images were generated by her consciously and what was being influenced by the music but still, the artistry and complexity involved was breathtaking.
I can’t even imagine how much it must have cost to get the whole back done up like that, let alone the legs and arms as well. She was one of the hottest dancers in the club and rumour said that for the right price she’d cook you breakfast. But still, even if she was the highest-paid hooker in the spaceport, she must have saved every penny to get that kind of work done. The level of detail was amazing.
All I knew was that the six-frame animation of the purple butterfly on my shoulder looked pretty weak in comparison and that tattoo alone had cost me a month’s pay.
I sucked back another beer. For the first time in a long time, I wasn’t looking forward to what I’d been sent here to do. The puzzle pieces were falling into place.
She must have borrowed heavily to get the work done. Borrowed from my boss. I guess she’d defaulted on that loan a few times too many.
I was the one they sent in when things got physical. I was there to make sure that she wouldn’t be able to dance anymore. I was here to make her into an example.
She caught my eye. There was a rabbit-warren terror there. She recognized my job in my stare. She recognized what I was there to do and she knew that she could try to run. Both of us knew nothing was going to happen until after her songs finished.
She danced like it was the last time she would ever dance. I watched with a respectful awe. I’m no art expert I never saw anything like it. I didn’t want it to end.
I suppose that’s why she and I are here, in Devil’s End, two planet-hops away from that backwater moon. We have fake IDs and watch our backs.
She tells me she’s in love with me but I don’t buy it. I know I’m only around for protection. I don’t care. I know I love her. As long she needs me, I’m having the time of my life here. The days are a chase, I have someone to protect, I’m living in the moment, and every night is heaven.
I feel like I matter.
by Duncan Shields | Jul 15, 2009 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
The soundwaves are so short that they actually shatter meat.
Bones shudder but remain intact. Cloth turns to ash. Skin goes translucent and turns into a fragile carapace that break like ice on a puddle.
Then gravity takes over.
When people get hit by the invaders, it’s not pretty. That’s all I’m saying.
The invaders have no eyes. As far as we can tell, their entire bodies are one giant ear, a resonance cage that detects sound for miles around in the air. Their weapons are grown from the grey flesh-skirts that surround their pointed dunce-cap bodies. Weapons that baffle and focus every decibel into whatever they want.
They’re like church spires come to life. They have one giant foot like a slug at the base but they move so very fast. They’re from a volcanic planet where life evolved from a silicate form. They operate at a sizzling operating temperature.
They are living rock with lava for blood from a high-gravity planet and their entire technology is based on sound manipulation.
They have sounds that can drill holes through apartment support beams. They have sounds that can solidify air. They have sounds that separate anything made from metal or rock into separate molecular components.
They have sounds that turn people into what looks like a spilled strawberry dessert.
People like my children. And my wife.
Their groups sound like orchestras of death coming for us. There’s a heat haze in the air above their formations as the sounds distort the very air. Echolocation. We only move when it’s silent. They give off huge plumes of steam like underwater eruptions.
One good thing is that if enough water is spilled on them, they crack wide open and their blood cools into rock as soon as it hits the air. It looks like a horrific death from the way they thrash around. It’s addictive.
I imagine fighting naked in the middle of winter and I think I can get a feeling for how the invaders must feel fighting here on Earth. They must hate it here.
That thought keeps me comfortable at night when I try to sleep.
by Duncan Shields | Jul 7, 2009 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
Aside from the “more-arms-than-us” thing and the blue colour of their skin, they weren’t as alien as they could have been. They didn’t look like insects or floating blobs, for instance.
At first contact, we all conceitedly thought it just chance that they looked somewhat human. I mean, we’re great, right? Why shouldn’t our form be on other planets as well? Sheer self-centered assumption.
The aliens were bred in tanks in giant arkships.
Remember the hype over the last fifteen years or so about rednecks being kidnapped by aliens and experimented on? All those anal probes and skin samples and implants and all that?
Well, it all happened. It was all true.
The aliens went from planet to planet and kidnapped intelligent life. They studied the inhabitants, bred their own genes into dominant splices and grew the results to maturity.
All of these blue-skinned creatures with black eyes, wide mouths and too many arms were grown from a half-human base.
The aliens’ “true” shape on their homeworld was like a cross between a centipede and an octopus and they were used to an atmosphere that would corrode a human in seconds. They needed our genes to survive here.
And to be ‘compatible’ with us.
Half a million aliens were put down in each capital city. They knew English, Mandarin, and were fluent in the language of the city into which they were dropped. They had food and clothing to last them six months.
Males and Females. There was an exactly equal number of each sex. For a full week, nothing happened. There was an uneasy peace.
But humans are humans. There were attacks on the aliens. A worldwide panic started to build. It looked like a mass genocide was about to take place but immediately, their leader talked to us. I say ‘talked’ but it was more of a telepathic shout that brought every human to a quivering standstill.
The leader of the aliens made us an offer that we couldn’t refuse: let them breed with us and become part of our society or face certain extinction.
He made an example of Paris.
We took the offer.
That was over a decade ago.
There are nearly a billion children now with eyes that have no whites. Their skin has a bluish cast and they have smaller sets of arms poking out at random around their ribcage.
They are polite. They study. They word hard. They are creative.
Their race has shared their knowledge with us.
The entire planet is now on a schedule of the aliens’ devising. We are overcrowded but we’ve been assured that we will be a space-faring race within the decade. This is a plan that has worked hundreds of times before, they say.
There is an even split between us who are repulsed by what they see as invaders and people that have welcomed them and volunteered for marriage and babies.
Religion is taking a beating and a lot of politicians seem to be pretty depressed. The aliens have let us keep our elections and our money-based economy but there’s a general feeling on Earth that we’re children eating at the adult’s table.
Children that have been allowed to keep their toys so that they’ll be quiet.
