by Duncan Shields | Jun 22, 2009 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
James sat in his chair/life-support system in the back corner of the room next to the banks of monitors, keyboards, and mice.
He reminded me of the James I used to know. He reminded me of a James that laughed without that edge of cruelty. He reminded me of a James that was above making money by hurting people, of a James that liked it here in the physical world and only occasionally went into total online immersion.
That James was gone. He never jacked out now, and the hypercancer had taken nearly fifty per cent of him. The 3HIV was working over his ability to resist the treatments. They’d given him six months to live back at the beginning. That was six years ago. He was a confirmed medical miracle now. Sheer drive seemed to be holding him together until he met his goal.
He was fighting the disease by trying to escape his flesh.
He’d made millions off of the poor security systems of tiny personal banks in the smaller countries. He’d started famines by bankrupting the economies of the smallest of them.
He’d had experimental biofilters installed in his head so that he could talk to me and surf at the same time. Time-share boosters, he had called them. He didn’t see the need to wash. He looked more and more like a special effect every day.
He was putting the money towards digitizing himself. New attempts in other countries were getting closer and closer every day. He had a fortune in not-yet-patented experimental equipment cluttering his apartment.
I had known him when he had a ponytail and sunglasses and liked to walk in the sun. I didn’t kid myself that I knew this James, here, in this room. He wasn’t the man I’d grown up with.
“I’ve found a way to transfer my mind, David.” He said to me, one eye glowing red above his wet mouth and white skin. The respirators squeezed like death’s accordions behind him.
“That’s great news, James.” I said. “Why do you need me here? Moral support?” It came out as a dig, escaped before I could block it.
The silence after that question and James’ alien gaze made me suddenly afraid. I knew that James’ morality was eroding but I always counted myself as safe since I had always been his best friend, now his only friend.
I was wrong.
“I’ve found a way to transfer my mind into another human.” Said James. “The digitizing process for full net transfer won’t work for the silicon just yet but it might in six year’s time. I’ll be dead long before then. However,” he said and his wheelchair moved forward, “you won’t.”
The screens came up behind him with an image of a monkey. Shaved head, brain plugs.
“We’ve been shuffling the minds of monkeys in and out of each other all week. It’s been a total success. Yesterday, we did it with two of the research assistants. We switched them into each other and then switched them back the next day. There was a small amount of degradation but they were essentially okay.”
The screens pulled up images of two people. A man and a woman in lab coats. The man had a nosebleed and was staring at his fingernails. The woman was crying and biting her lip, her face turned to the wall.
“Are you my friend?” asked James.
I heard a door lock behind me.
by Duncan Shields | Jun 10, 2009 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
It was slave labour, that’s what it was.
My nose drew a little circle in the center of the condensation on my faceplate. The visors were supposed to be moisture resistant but like everything else, the company had cut corners. We could see enough to do our jobs.
Tiny, valuable crystals coated the billion square kilometers of the half-Dyson. Very dense carbon deposits.
Blue diamonds.
Manual labour was the cheapest way to get them. Like any loser here, I’d believed the hype about getting shares in the company. We were paid well but they took everything we needed to do our job out of our pay at exorbitant prices. It was the oldest scam in the book and there was always another crop of uneducated fools ready to sign up.
When a person was prying a diamond off the hull, the cheap tool would snap and the worker would rock back. Sometimes, he’d rock back too quickly and break his gravplate bonds.
That person would float off into space. That person’s screaming intercom would be cut off by control. He’d dwindle to a speck over the course of a day.
We were supposed to have tethers. We were supposed to have maneuvering jets. There were supposed to be ambulance shuttles standing by. All very expensive. Safety inspectors were bribed. We cut corners ourselves to heighten our own wages.
It was stupid and dangerous work.
I crawled, stuck to the surface by weak gravplates on my knees, feet, elbows and hands, on what appeared to me to be a flat black plane stretching away to the horizon on all sides.
Weak flashlights on either side of my helmet kept trained on the ‘ground’ one meter in front of my face. I was in the stimulus-response trance that repetitive work brought on. It was almost meditative.
That when I heard Julie’s frightened bark of a scream click off into silence.
We’d been sharing a bunk for two weeks. It was against company regulation but really, the ignorance of the law went both ways. This was deep space.
I loved Julie and she loved me.
I looked up and saw Julie floating away. I had a clear memory of being back on earth and seeing a child accidentally let a balloon go, crying as it flew slowly up into the sky.
Julie was kicking frantically, trying to ‘swim’ back to the hull but she was too far away.
Both of us had forfeited our jets and tethers for the dream of making enough money to get away from here and live together within two years.
I was watching that dream float away into space.
Without thinking, I kicked off towards her.
My aim was true and we collided. She panicked at the collision and we scrambled for contact before she realized it was me.
Her face smiled in relief through the faceplate for half a second before her eyes widened in horror at what I’d done. Then she choked back tears. She hugged me as much as the bulky suits would allow.
We floated in an awkward waltz. Maybe two deaths in one day would look suspicious. Maybe they’d grudgingly send a wagon out. Probably not, though.
We each had eight more hours of air.
I touched my helmet to hers so that she’d be able to hear me when I spoke.
“I won’t let you die alone.” I said.
by Duncan Shields | Jun 1, 2009 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
I can’t believe that it used to take years and years of real-time school to become a doctor. I slip the jack with the red cross on the dust-cover into the plug at the base of my skull. Just like that, I’m a surgeon, which is good news for my friend currently trying to breathe around the hot shrapnel sticking through his lung.
We’re beneath the firing level in a crater in a no-person’s-land between the forces. I find it ironic that huddling there in the mud with bone-shattering explosions happening around us, I could probably speak to a soldier from World War I and we’d know exactly what each other went through.
Maybe I’ll get my chance sooner than I think.
My friend’s wild eyes are looking at me with a silent scream as I get to work.
Every soldier on the force has seven spikes. Medic, Sniper, Engineer, Strategy Officer, Languages, Scout, and Beserker. We keep them in an arm band. They’re used when they’re called for.
This way each man can play whatever role necessary in the changing tides of infantry ground battle. It hasn’t alleviated the chaos.
They people up top keep trying to take the disorder out of war and failing.
I remember that up the line, a battalion of troops all jammed their Berserker chips in at the same time to try to freak out the enemy with a suicide run at their guns in the hopes that a few of them would get through. They didn’t even make it out of the trench. They tore each other apart.
I’m still working around the cooling metal sticking through my friend’s chest when I realize that he doesn’t need my help anymore. I stop working. I sit back. I slip out the medic jack. Dirt and body parts fly through the air above me amidst the deafening explosions.
I wish they had a jack that erased memories.
by Duncan Shields | May 19, 2009 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
“Oh please let me die for you! Please!” said the gleeful soldier in front of me.
Soldier. I couldn’t believe we called them soldiers. I mean, she’d had the proper basic training and had passed all the physicals and all that but I don’t know why we even had physical tests for these bullet sponges.
“Not yet, Tara.” I said through my rad-suit’s throat mike. We were pinned down behind the wall next to the Tel-set’s compound, primitive kinetic missiles they called ‘bullets’ thudding into the red earth around us. It was red from the blood of all the soldiers I’d killed coming in this close during our invasion. Seeing it fantail up under that hail of bullets reminded me of Mars.
“Now?” she gasped with barely restrained giggles. She reminded me of my five year old child back home saying “Are we there yet?”
We’d taken the prisoners and rewired their minds. They didn’t have any hardtap backups or defenses. Still a hundred per cent biological. Easy. Like building a train set. We hooked up their follower centers to their pleasure centers to their religious awe centers to their love centers.
The result was that we ended up with human shields that were aching to die for us and followed our orders unquestioningly. Their eagerness was repulsive. I didn’t like it. By some cyclical reasoning, it was determined that making them love us made it morally alright to send them into certain death. It helped that they usually knew some of the enemy. It made it easier for them to get closer when we sent them, smiling and waving, back towards the compounds.
I could see the radiation poisoning starting to work on Tara. She wouldn’t have long without a suit. If I kept her here much longer, she wouldn’t be able to walk. Thin streams of blood trickled down from her eyes and nose to her smiling mouth. She absent-mindedly wiped it away like she was a tired child and didn’t want to go to bed.
“Okay, Tara. Now.” I said. She clapped and shrieked, bouncing. Her happiness was contagious. I smiled despite the gruesome look of her. “Turn around.” She squealed and turned her back to me. I keyed in the primer numbers to the explosives strapped to her back. The readout blinked up with three minutes to go.
“Okay Tara, you ready?” I asked. She wiggled like a puppy on Christmas morning.
“Yes boss, YES!” she yelled back.
“One….twooooo….” I held back. She was poised like a sprinter, shuddering and taut, waiting for me to say the magic final number. She was actually quite pretty despite the scars I could see on her scalp from the operations and the pale, pale dying skin of her.
“Three!” I shouted and slapped her on the ass.
She ran up over the hill, scrabbling in the bloody sand. The bullets stopped when they realized she was on their side. I heard her footsteps get softer in the distance amid the sounds of celebration. A loved one had returned to tell a great tale of survival.
I thumbed down my sun visor and locked my joints with heat-retardant foam. Her proximity timer counted down to zero. I chinned the trigger.
The world went white and then black.
The recon ship would dig me out of the sand when they saw the mushroom cloud.
Mission accomplished.
by Duncan Shields | May 12, 2009 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
“Hit him again,” said Milly, “Let it go for six seconds this time.”
That smile played into her lips again, making me glad that it was this blubbering, fat loser in front of us that owed money and not me.
“Please!” he begged between ragged gasps, sweat pouring down the rolls of his face. “Just another two days! I swear I’ll get it to you!”
I flipped the switch.
He fished back onto the couch, arching. The wires from the Senz-Deck that I had brought for this torture tracked into the ‘trode-net headband we had forced him to wear. His hands were tied. They twitched against the duct tape on his wrists.
I watched the readouts of his heart and pulse rate as they slammed into the ceiling of the acceptable limits.
I was playing an ancient tape of a sprinter from the 2022 Olympics. The recording was of an athlete at the peak of physical health, a winner of hundreds of trophies before clinching the gold medal in Madrid. His name was Michael Shandal.
The man in front of us was so fat that he couldn’t leave his apartment. Something wrong with his thyroid, the medical report said.
In other words, not an athlete. If we let this tape of the sprinter spool for the full ten seconds with the physical safeguards off, this guy’s heart would explode with the effort of trying to match the strength on the tape.
He was in deep with us. Owed us thousands off the books. If we didn’t get the money from him soon, we’d have to make an example of him.
Six seconds. I studded the off switch.
His body sagged forward, wheezing and crying.
“So” said Milly, “What do you have say to that?” she said, stifling a chuckle. She scared me when she got like this. Like she had no leash and was happy about it.
“It’s in my bedroom,” said our victim, voice raspy with the effort of ravaged lungs, “under the mattress.”
Milly walked into the room. A minute later, she came back with a handful of credits. She nodded to me.
“What do we do with him?” I asked, nodding to the huge bastard on the couch.
She appeared to consider him, then me, and then the money in her hand.
“Go for the gold.” She said.
Fatboy screamed and I set the timer for a three minute loop before pressing play.
He didn’t last fifteen seconds.
