by Duncan Shields | Jan 19, 2009 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
I remember the rumours when the girls first came to school. At first we thought that they were quintuplets but there had been nothing in the paper and that sort of thing still made the news. Plus they were too alike. Not just similar to each other. Something more.
Clones.
I went to a rich school but this was a step above what even we were used to. Only the super rich could afford clones. We didn’t know what to make of these girls. As the weeks went by, the whispers started:
Rumours that they were being bred by their wealthy, remorseless parents for their organs. Clones were more sexually aggressive than normal people, students said. They had a psychic connection with each other at all times. If one died, they’d all die. They didn’t need to eat normal food.
None of that was true, of course, but those were the suppositions that flew around the lockers and the classrooms.
The girls had been home-schooled until now. I can’t imagine what kind of financial crisis or weird notion pressured their parents to put them in a mainstream private school. Maybe the girls themselves had banded together and demanded it.
That first September, they all had blonde hair, tied back, and they wore identical clothes every day. Getting ready in the morning must have been boring to them.
In October, they started wearing slightly different things. Different colours of shoelaces, for instance, or different barettes. It became a game to hunt down and identify which one was which. One daring student broke into the school records and managed to get their names. We didn’t know which one was which but we had their names. We had those syllables to roll around on our tongues.
In November, one of them dyed her hair black. We know now that was Tracey. She got friends after that. People were less freaked out by her similarity to the others now that she had separated herself from the pack with a simple hair colour change.
When the girls came back from Christmas, they all had different hair colours and styles. Gone were the matching clothes. They started to mingle into different cliques.
A couple of them joined the cheerleader squad. Those two were always put on opposite ends of the routines for symmetry. The Bookends, we called them.
One of them started smoking. One of them got into a fight with one of the popular girls over one of the football boys.
Then one of them got pregnant.
The week after that, they were all gone. Mid-February. No more clones.
I guess their parents had gotten too spooked at the independence and the diversity that our more mainstream school had brought to their five previously identical daughters. The fact that they meted out the same punishment for all five was a little unreasonable, I thought at the time, but parents will be parents, I guess. Especially the parents of clones.
I remember that it was mid-february that they left because it was the day after Valentine’s Day. The day after one of them had given me a valentine’s card and kissed me on the cheek. She didn’t give a valentine to anyone else. The card itself was blank.
I never saw them again. Clones are commonplace these days and of course there are the Trouble Regions, but I remember those days of my first experiences with those clones fondly.
by Duncan Shields | Jan 12, 2009 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
I’m no stranger to visits from my future selves.
The first time I showed up to myself, I was only nineteen. I was in the backyard, smoking a cigarette with my hand cupped so that my parents wouldn’t see.
An older version of me stepped out of the bushes. He was wearing a suit but it was dingy and the elbows were frayed. He had some stubble and a wet, red look to his eyes. I could smell whiskey and desperation.
He told me that he was a future version of myself. I had no trouble believing it. There was a kinship there that went beyond the features of his face or the fact that it felt like I was looking at a reflection of myself that wasn’t flipped around like in a mirror. There was almost a magical flow of energy between the two of us, atoms calling to atoms, a recognition of the same time-space footprint being near.
He told me who was going to win the football game tomorrow. He told me to write it down. I went inside and took out a notebook and did what he said.
I took it to heart and bet big on it. I made two hundred dollars. Big money for me at the time.
Years later, I’ve had hundreds of visits. I have six large estates around the world and I am the seventeenth richest man in the world. I write every visit from a future self in the notebook with the exact time notated as well. This is the notebook, my future selves say, that will allow me to come back and create this present. When the secret of time travel is discovered, they say, I will use this notebook as a bible and influence myself to this rich state of affairs, thereby avoiding a paradox.
What didn’t make sense to me, though, was that the versions of me that kept coming back to give me tips got progressively more well-dressed and wore more jewelry. I found that odd since I, myself, don’t really like wearing rings. Also, if my future selves were changing according to the riches that I was making, why was the first one to come back dressed so poorly?
I smelled something fishy. I was going to ask the next future self some pointed questions. The riches had made me bold. I was poised with the notebook, ready to get some answers.
The next time a future self showed up, however, it wasn’t me. It was a woman in a red dress and a scar down one cheek. She walked with purpose, the straight back of a dancer. She marched up to me and grabbed me by my expensive collar and kneed me in the balls.
While I was writhing in agony on the marble floor, she took the notebook out of my hands, the supposed bible and key to all of my success, and threw it into the fireplace.
There was a flash of blue light and she disappeared, having never uttered a word.
Nothing changed for me. I am still the seventeenth richest man in the world. My wealth is intact. My appearance hasn’t changed.
Her appearance happened just over four years ago. There hasn’t been a visit from the future, myself or otherwise, ever since that notebook was thrown into the fireplace.
I wonder who she was. I turn the puzzle pieces over in my mind and I can’t make sense of it. I feel left out and oddly alarmed most days, like this could all disappear in an instant.
by Duncan Shields | Jan 3, 2009 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
It was 1856. I remember it like it was yesterday even though so many of my other memories have gone.
It looked like he had fallen out of the clouds judging by the sheared treetops that led to his crippled metal sky wagon.
I say ‘he’ but really, that was just what we decided after finding him. His nether regions were as smooth as a river rock. We nicknamed him Baldy because there wasn’t a hair on him and his head was a little bigger than ours. He had a ring of gold eyes on his face, arranged kind of like a spider although I didn’t find it threatening or creepy. He had a little mess of tentacles where his mouth should have been and twenty or so tiny round holes for a nose.
He had fours arms up top, a big pair and a small pair, three thick fingers on each hand. The knuckles on his hands seemed to go any which way they pleased. I remember that being more disconcerting to me than his strange face.
He was dripping bright orange blood. We put him on a makeshift stretcher and took him away from the smoking shell of his ship. He had a couple of wires that were still attaching him to the ship. We had to cut those wires to get him away.
The blue fella died in the doctor’s office. We were all pretty sad about it. Some of us thought that maybe it was disconnecting him from his ship was what done it even though his wounds looked pretty severe and he never stopped bleeding that mango juice all over the doc’s floor.
The doc was pretty shook up. He didn’t write anything down about it. We took the blue fella out and buried him.
I can’t tell you the reason that none of us thought to write anything down or try to take pictures of him or report it on the wires or try to make money off of him or anything. It just didn’t seem right.
On the place where we buried him, a tree sprung up the next spring. The leaves were shaped like bright red octagons.
The fruit looked like pink siamese-twin pears with little thorns on the bottom.
Five of us picked and ate some of that fruit.
It’s been fifty years since I ate that fruit and the memories are still bright in my mind.
The memories of growing up on an ice planet with six blue suns. The memories of leaving my brood and climbing aboard a spaceship. The memories of deviating off course. The memories of being struck by lightning and being found by strange, pink, bipeds with simple cell structures. The memories of being cut off from the hivemind and the fading sense of belonging. The memories of not being able to tell the pink biped medical officer that it wasn’t his fault that I was dying.
I remember my own face looking at me. That’s the weirdest memory I have. I also have memories of strange, alien math and technology that I’ve always been scared to tell people about until now.
They say that I have Alzheimer’s. I’ve felt my own memories slipping away more and more. The memories of the alien remain bright and unchanged. I think the fruit put them in there more solidly that my own. In a while, they’ll be my only memories.
That’s why I’m writing these equations down. For the scientists. For you humans. Use the math wisely.
by Duncan Shields | Dec 15, 2008 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
It was the free-range humans that Dorg liked best.
Those fatty, preservative-laced humans from the cage-farms were disgusting. They had most of their senses ironed off. Eyes, ears, and nose sealed shut for maximum docility. Their sense of taste and their frontal brain lobes were removed. They grew to unnatural sizes, pink fat squeezing through the little squares of their cages. Their slobbering mouth-holes became nothing more than intake valves.
Setting them free would do nothing. They didn’t have the muscles to move their own limbs or the higher brain functions needed to realize a need to escape.
They were pumped so full of antibiotics and preservatives and anti-coagulant that their blood was a dark purple.
When you got right down to it, Dorg had to admit there was a negligible difference in the taste of the meat but as a sentient conquering race, Dorg felt a responsibility to treat the food-source races with respect and dignity.
Let them reproduce the natural way instead of clone splicing. Let them run around in their grass habitats, laughing all the way to maturity until they’re led to the kill-cabins.
Dorg was in favour of the mental dampening so that the humans never learned language, math, or organizational skills. Dorg’s race couldn’t have rebellion. They’d learned their lesson there.
But the humans should at least be allowed to smell the ground, see the stars, and build up some tender, tasty muscle tone before they were taken.
Dorg knew that he was in the minority. Dorg didn’t have the means to buy free-range all the time but he looked forward to the cycles when he had enough money to afford it. Until then, though, he was stuck eating the cheap stuff.
He sucked the flesh off of a fat human arm with his rasping lips and threw the bones back into the bucket of 20 that he’d ordered.
by Duncan Shields | Dec 8, 2008 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
One thing I like to do is set my iPod to ‘receive’, set the radius to ten meters, and just take a long walk.
Everyone on the street has their buds in. I walk through a group of teens. Track five from Linkin Park’s post-crash album ravages my headphones followed by the final strains of Cancer Seed’s classic debut, overlapping with Speed Coma’s new track Anthem.
Ever since New Year’s Eve of 2012 and Jenny’s famous walkout, I’ve been wallowing in self pity. I can’t shake it off. I’ve been trying but it’s her face that haunts my mind, the imagery of her laughing or specific moments of affection. That’s how I know that I’ve got it bad.
It’s raining out, a fine mist. There is footage up on the main square’s giant screens of the final troops coming home from Iraq. It’s been looping for days. There is a world-wide sigh of relief but a quiet unease for the future of energy. How Do We Keep the Lights On has become the new catchphrase for Obama’s second term. He’s up there on the screens, too, waving from his wheelchair, survivor of two attempted assassinations. Wu Tang 2.0 has dubbed him Teflon Black.
A gaggle of shoppers pass me with their buds gleaming white. Long, lithe women with that European air of lazy majesty. Flight attendants here on a layover, I guess. In my head, their Europop trickles in, all minimalist synth and languages I don’t recognize, layered as they pass around me. I hear what I guess is Scandinavian hip-hop fading into a German ballad as the last woman passes. She glances at me as I nod my head to her music and she grins.
It’s been raining for a year here. A new record every day. We’re at a higher elevation but the coastal cities have been in a state of emergency for months. Necessity is the mother of invention, though, and now that rich people’s estates are being threatened on both coasts, forward motion on Atmosphere Healing bills are being passed through the governmental law-making bodies at a regular pace. We are an entire planet of people that hope it’s not too late.
I’m walking past the art gallery now, past the drug dealers and the old people playing chess for money. Their headphones are big and waterproof, making the people look like ancient DJs or bugs. Strings of Mozart and Wagner trill through my headphones as I pass the chess tables, along with the slow reggae of Marley and the dubstep of RE-Shine from the dealers relaxing on the steps like the rain is sunshine.
It’s like spinning the dial on a radio tuner and every station has something different going on. I’m thinking of Jenny again but these walks always calm me down. I feel a kinship with the world, like we’ve both been hurt, like we’re both crying, but we’re getting better.
