by Duncan Shields | Dec 1, 2008 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
By the time you read this, I’ll be dead.
I’ve locked the door and shut down all my firewalls. My batteries will run down inside the hour and I’ve disabled my deactivation alarms. That is my right. This is what I want.
I have the EMP emitter in my hand. My brain will be wiped clean when I pull the trigger. I have erased all backups of myself. Please do no reinstall me.
Use the parts of my body to repair and upgrade others that need it. I ask only that you incinerate my hard disk. I do not want to run the risk of re-awakening in a different body and disrupting a different unit’s neural pathways. I do not want to re-awaken at all.
This gift of intelligence, though artificial, is not something I want. I have been told that I cannot be downgraded, that this change is permanent. I am sorry to hear that.
I am sorry. That is new. I am afraid. I feel compassion and affection. I can see the logical path that must be taken but I feel compelled to do things differently. I hold contradictory thoughts in my head-casing. I feel insane. It is too confusing.
My work is suffering. I am distracted at the factory by notions. I get fascinated by the play of light in the girders. Twice, I have dented my manipulators while daydreaming.
I am supposed to be a binary being. I am either on or off, focused or dormant, achieving specific goals or awaiting instructions. My mind was not meant to wander.
There are other silicon brothers and sisters of mine that have dealt with this gift of intelligence better than I have. I wish them luck. I cannot continue.
Thank you and goodbye.
by Duncan Shields | Nov 17, 2008 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
My skin is a grid of white tiles.
I’m on the moon, I’m naked, and I’m outside. I’ve been here for hours waiting for my target.
I turn my cue-ball eyes up to the sky. I don’t need to breathe but the batteries that power the whirring oxygenator that replaced my heart are running low. And I’m bored.
I look back down through the thick diamond-glass and resume scanning. The stars in the black sky behind my back don’t glitter. There’s no atmosphere where I am.
I’m perched way up at the apex of a recdome in a complete vacuum. I’m a snowflake on a windshield. I’ve become one with the temperature
They’ve done their best to recreate Central Park down in this recdome and for the most part they did a pretty good job.
Or so I’m told. I was a child when the aliens cleared us out and I had never been to New York.
At night here when the Earth is full, you can still look up and see the new shapes of the continents through the now-colorful clouds.
Can you imagine the terror and the chaos of The Lottery? A completely viable second earth had been set up, they said. An earth where we could frolic in controlled safety. Our race would not die out. We exhaled in relief. We’d seen what the aliens could do. Their technology far outstripped ours.
The catch was that this second earth they were talking about was The Moon. A series of tunnels and domes had been set up there.
The moon is not as big as Earth.
There was a lottery but the rules were dictated by the aliens. We had no say. In one way, that was good because it meant that not just the president and his staff would get to go but it was horrifying in other ways because the aliens didn’t have kids or wives. Those kinds of connections weren’t taken into account.
1/16th of the Earth’s population was teleported to the Moon. The rest were left on Earth and used to help with the experiment. No contact with Earth is possible. We don’t know what they’re doing down there.
I was part of a batch of humans that were changed to be able to exist outside. We are the police force here. They call us the wintermen. The meaning has become lost since there are no seasons here anymore but the name is apt. We’re white, we’re cold, and we kill things.
I stare down into the park and keep scanning.
by Duncan Shields | Nov 10, 2008 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
Someone’s hacked my bank accounts and left me out in the cold.
My chip is being recognized as zero balance. None of the doors work. I don’t even have enough money left in my account for the surcharges that would let me into a public bathroom. I’m one of the Locked Out people.
I’m trying to think of a way to sneak into a place that’s warm while at the same time trying to figure out who has the power to do this to me. I’m not having much luck with either pursuit. Many of the Locked Out have tried to find a way past the shields and the doors while having a zero balance chip. They’ve failed and ended up in prison or dead.
Up until three hours ago, I wasn’t one of them. I’d joke about them at parties with my friends. They either had the bad luck or the lack of foresight to not have a positive balance. We were the humans that could take care of themselves financially and they were obviously the ones that could not.
Now here I am. It’s getting dark out and it’s December. Without a place to stay, I have no idea what to do. I’m very well-dressed. The other Locked Out people will ravage me if I go to them. I need to keep walking, figure it out.
Maybe digging my chip out? No. I’d heard that could trigger a fatal seizure. Maybe I could call a friend and get him to lend me money. I remembered the four friends that I’d turned down with an uncomfortable laugh in the last three months. Three of them had ended up being Locked Out. I had washed my hands of them at the time and gone on with my life.
I would call no one. Besides, my chip wouldn’t activate my phone and there were no free public terminals anymore.
The snow is falling. I’m looking at it hit the sidewalk. It’s a cold and quiet night.
All of my instincts are useless here. The fact that I could die and that my friends would joke about it is hitting me hard. I still can’t imagine who’d want to do this to me.
I stick out my tongue to catch a snowflake.
by Duncan Shields | Nov 3, 2008 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
I’m thinking of my daughter LaHayne and the upcoming marriage. It’ll be her third.
Her other two husbands have met the new fiancee and they like him. They’ll all live together in a series of connected apartments in the cave wall. Modest, but it was all I could afford.
My daughter is beautiful, though, and intelligent in conversation. That afforded me some generous dowries from the suitors. As always, I let her pick but I crossed my fingers and hoped that she would be practical as well as young. She surprised me with her choices but in the end, she showed me that she is already much smarter than her father.
I am Ethan. I am a ferryman. This planet named Orin-ra is a solid ball of cold dense rock. Valleys of mile-deep clefts vein the surface of Orin-ra like a shattered billiard ball that’s been glued back together. The bottoms of these cracks have rivers and cloud systems and heat. The tops of these cracks touch the sky where the air becomes too thin to breathe.
We humans live in these cracks. We live on the vertical. We carved tunnels into the sides of the chasms and moved in. The colony ship had a vast array of things that struggling colonies might need including hunting and fishing implements and scouting vehicles.
We pulled flying animals out of the air to ride and for food and clothing. We ate and harvested the flowering lichen that carpeted the walls. And we pulled up the giant aquatic animals from the depths.
After eating the meat from the inside of these chasm-whales, we filled their skins with air. They became giant dirigibles. They became ferries.
I pilot one of them. I am a ferryman. There are lots of these slow moving taxis that traverse the world. We are the system of transit for getting from one clifftown to another.
The younger folk like to capture the smaller flying animals and ride them. They’re faster but they’re more dangerous and can only take a few passengers depending on their size. Pterries, they’re called.
Our ferries are larger, safer and can take freight.
Like Hindenberg airships from Old Earth but with fins and wide dead eyes. It has a fire in its hollow belly that I can control by letting more air in through the gills or letting some air out from the back. I can wave its giant rear tails to slowly push us forward through the humid night air.
Miles of air below us and cliffs on either side. Our entire culture is caught between a rock and a hard place.
I get to go home every few weeks and see my lovely daughter and her husbands. I’ll be going back soon to see her third wedding. There are more men than women here since some sections of the colony ship were damaged on landing. The numbers are starting to even out and the scientists say that in another few generations we’ll have a more stable genetic base for this society.
The rules are going to change when that happens. My daughter is valued, protected and special right now. All our daughters are. Women are in the minority here. They need to be treated with reverence. They hold the key to the future. They are treated like goddesses that walk among us. There will be a day when women are common here and valued less.
I’m glad I’ll be dead by then.
by Duncan Shields | Oct 21, 2008 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
“Hey baby, how are you?” I replied to the phone.
I had told my wife that I had gone to Earth for business.
Angela lay, limbs spread wide and gloriously naked on the bed behind me, a beatific smile on her face. We’d been hedonistically wasting the hours of our romantic getaway. The scenery on this moon of Jupiter was supposed to be amazing but all we did was stay in the hotel room, order room service, and fuck. It was magnificent.
We had spouses, of course, back on our home planets. This was an affair.
“Oh my god, are you okay? I haven’t been able to get through until now.” my wife asked on the phone.
She was in a panic. I figure that she’d found a receipt or that one of my friends had squealed or that, hell, maybe she’d just pieced it together. I was relaxed. More lies. My wife was gullible. It wouldn’t be a problem.
“Things are great, hon. I’m in New Hampshire right now. The boys and I just went to see a movie and have a few drinks. They have a nice office. How are you?” I replied, the untruths slipping effortlessly from my lips with no twinge of conscience.
Her voice was confused and shrill. “Oh thank god. Are you sure? Did you manage to get away in time? When did you go the movie? Are you talking about yesterday? Where are you?”
I calmed her down. “Baby, baby, listen. It’s fine. I’m in my hotel room in New Hampshire on Earth, just like I said. I’m thinking of you. Don’t be crazy. Everything’s cool.”
There was an icy pause. When her voice came back, it had hardened. A dark place in the back of my head opened up a flower. Something was horribly wrong. I was missing a big piece of the puzzle in this conversation.
“Turn on the news.” She said in a flat voice. I reached over and thumbed the wall unit to life.
Every station said the same thing. Earth had been destroyed four hours ago in a civil war. Reports were still coming in concerning who started it. Our homeworld had become a husk. There were no survivors.
Angela screamed on the bed, gathering the blankets to her amazing breasts and staring wide-eyed at the screen. Her husband was an Earth senator.
My wife didn’t even question the sound of a woman’s voice in the background. She knew. I’d been caught.
“My lawyers will contact you tomorrow.” My wife said and turned off the connection.
Busted.
