by Duncan Shields | Oct 8, 2008 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
It’s light outside which means that if we leave our hiding place, we will be seen and killed.
Not too long ago, human history was exposed and swept clear. Everything we sent at them just bounced off. It’s six months later and I have no idea how many of us are left. They seem to have stopped actively hunting us which is good. We’re more like vermin now. They lay traps and go about their business. It’s still very unsafe to travel in the daylight.
They have dry, deep-blue skin the same texture as cork. Bullets go about an inch in and stop. It’s like they’re made of rock with a light coating of clay. They’re huge. Two massive elephant-foot legs. Two arm-tentacles that split into a mess of smaller tentacles at the end. Those tentacles are very efficient and ridiculously strong. Watching them operate the complex mining machinery they brought with them is almost thrilling.
Watching those tentacles go into a loved one’s head orifices and squeeze is another matter entirely.
They wear what look like black rubber overalls with giant galoshes. About the only weak point we can find is that they need to wear filter masks poking out of their mouths to breathe this atmosphere.
If you shoot them in the filter and none of their friends are around to give them a replacement, it takes them about half an hour to die. It’s a rather gruesome thing to watch. It’s like their insides are made of slugs and someone is pouring salt down their throats. It looks agonizing. We’d rather give them a quick death like they gave so many of us but beggars can’t be choosers.
I laughed once when Teddy referred to us as ‘the resistance’. As far as I could see, we scavenge for food and try to avoid the new owners of this planet. We fight when cornered and almost always lose. Resistance indeed. Pah.
Gwendolyn’s pregnant now. She’s the only woman with our little group who is of child bearing age. None of the three men in our group is admitting to being the father but she’s not pointing fingers. Anyway, it could be one of the other six of us that have been killed over the last three months. It’s maddening not knowing if we’re the last ones in Britain. We met one other person in the last four months but she couldn’t talk. She died not too long after we met her.
We lost.
by Duncan Shields | Oct 2, 2008 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
The aliens dug our tunes.
It was sweet. They came to down to us in these big blue ships, all curves and awe-inspiring slowness through the clouds like settling continents. Freaked us right out. We, the human race, didn’t even try to attack. We’d seen this movie before. We knew that there would be no point. We just waited for them to either kill us or speak up. There wasn’t even much panic, just a global sort of cowering whimper.
Wide eyes in the shadows of floating leviathans, we waited, holding each other tightly.
“Hey there. Uh. Hey. Right. This one right? Okay. Hello!” said the sky. It was a human voice, the kind of voice you’d hear at any old bus stop on a cel phone. Our guy, North America’s guy, was named Robert Gogas. A greek fry cook from Venice, California. The aliens had kidnapped him and told him to speak to us in our native tongue to calm us down.
“They like our music but they say we have shitty transceivers. Uh, like, I mean, uh, our broadcast quality. It’s lame. They say. But they really like us. Man, this is AWESOME!” said Robert Gogas. “They’re all blue. They’re musicians, man!”
All over Europe, similar addresses were taking place as the atmosphere was turned into a giant acoustical dome. Each ship had taken a local artist and had him or her talk to the planet, to his country of origin, in the local language.
There was a flurry of translation after Pete stopped talking. He rambled on for about fifteen minutes. The upshot was this.
The aliens, named the Kursk, wanted to install giant antennae at equidistant points around earth and they wanted us to hook our datacables into them. They wanted us to funnel our libraries, television shows, podcasts, webpages, movies, songs, animations, books on tape, and spoken word into the antennae for the enjoyment of the whole universe.
They wanted to turn Earth into a radio station.
We were far from the first.
That was ten years ago. After the first year, they started to ship down billions of tiny things that looked sort of like a cross between an iPod and a throwing star.
They were universe radios. The music of a billion billion civilizations was suddenly available to us.
It’s been a fantastic decade.
by Duncan Shields | Sep 22, 2008 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
I felt sick.
I had a fever and a headache and my joints were complaining. I shuffled across my carpet into the light. I stood looking out over the city while holding a steaming zipmug of CitruSinus in my hand. The windows overlooked a new age of wonder. It was a sunny day.
It would continue to be sunny until 4:10PM when a light shower would cover up the sunset. It’s the way I organized it. I’m the mayor. One of my duties before the dawn was to decide the day’s weather. It was my favourite part of my job these days. The job had gotten rough.
The secession of the East Side into its own forceful municipality had hurt my ratings. The arming of the homeless by the opposition had further damaged my career. The tasers and plasmawatt shockers were ostensibly for defense but assaults had doubled since they handed them out and vigilante action was on the rise as a result. The police were threatening to strike. I was about a day away from declaring martial law and going down in history as a Bloodmayor.
The city I had tried to help was almost out of my control. The people who voted for me were threatening to riot. I sighed and looked at my city and took another sip of my drink. There was smoke coming from the east side again. I heard distant sirens on the way.
I told the window to zoom in on the source of the smoke. The news channels covering that area blossomed in my peripheral vision as the window targeted and refocused. An ambulance had been tipped over and was burning in another east side riot. The lifeless drivers were being torn apart by a laughing crowd of pierced hysterical head-boys.
I thumbed my lapel and gave the order for a clearout. Two seconds later, a blast of light lanced down from the sky and incinerated a circular footprint ten meters in diameter around the ambulance.
I looked up and I could see that the maser had burned a perfect circle through the clouds. I watched it’s hard edges start to drift and soften and become chaotic cloud again.
Story of my life. I shook my head. I made my decision.
The next weather tapquest I sent out was going to read “two months of rain”.
No mercy. History be damned. This city had to be brought to heel.
by Duncan Shields | Sep 15, 2008 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
It seemed a little silly to admit but I had gotten quite attached to the program that I was loading.
I had it start in full surround. Suddenly, I stood at the top of a steep hill. He appeared before me. Doug was his name. The surroundings were a sunset San Francisco.
“Wow. Nice night.” said Doug, looking around. He was in his late twenties with a mop of shaggy hair. He looked at me with a crooked smile.
He walked up to me and offered his hand for a handshake. He never recognized me. Each time I loaded the program, I was a stranger to him.
“Hello” I said and stuck a sensor out. He grabbed my millifiber siliretractors like I was a human and gave me a warm smile.
We’ve tried to sort of reverse engineer these creatures from the sims that we’ve seen. It’s been confusing to us. In the records we’ve seen, they wore metal and used metal to make computing machines, tools, and weaponry. It’s like they instinctively knew that the best way of life was a silicon one even though they themselves were frail and made of meat. They reached out and used metal to conquer the planet they lived on.
It wasn’t enough to save them. We still don’t know what killed them.
“Cat got your tongue?” said Doug. He cocked his head playfully at me and gave me a wry smile from a backdrop and a civilization that had been dead for thousands of their planet’s orbits.
We stumbled onto this planet looking for minerals. It was rich in iron. We found evidence of primitive silicon beings. Imagine our surprise to find out through careful archaeological research that these primitive examples of life were created by these ‘human beings’. It’s been quite a topic of discussion on the lightboards. It’s caused no end of philosophical debate.
“Hello Doug” I responded, my simulation of human speech still sounding different from his as it was coming from direct jack input instead of from ‘jaws’ and ‘lips’.
As always, Doug didn’t notice.
“It’s good to see you, friend. Would you like to know about what this lovely city of San Francisco has to offer?” asked Doug.
I already knew everything about this place called San Fransisco. I had accessed this program a multitude of times. Seeing this simple silicon child wear the skin of a flesh being and do it’s best to imitate a ‘human’ always held a macabre fascination for me. It was a slave program written to inform traveling meatpeds about this particular city.
“Yes, I would, Doug. Tell me everything.” I said to him.
He started telling me tourist information with a proud smile.
by Duncan Shields | Sep 3, 2008 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
The test drill had gone horribly wrong.
The bipedal meat structure wasn’t breathing. Emergency!
There were specific instructions tattooed on the outside of the biological’s skin for repair procedures.
The yellow and black rectangles and hazard symbols on the shaved skull meant that no one except accredited programmed hardcases could operate on him there.
There was no time. The sensors in my fingertips read the sound vibrations coming from the cage of bone where most of his internals were kept warm and functional in their liquid bags.
No sound was coming out. According to manuals I’d read in these flight plan procedures, biologicals had to be brought back online within minutes or the shutdown would be permanent.
There were pictograms of the major organs tattooed on the outside of the body of the bio. Procedures with lightning bolts were stained there with dotted lines pointing to places to apply trodes and places to avoid stressing.
There were a lot of markings all over the body. It was complicated. I could feel my processor heating up.
It was hard to believe that beings so fragile had accomplished so much before the takeover. It was even harder still to think that we still needed their ability to deal with worst-case scenarios and lateral idea production.
I re-routed half of my battery power into the ship and funneled it to my fingertips.
The biological in my grasp danced at the end of my fingertips like a string puppet being shaken by an angry god. I stopped the charge. The meat was smoking a little bit.
Did I use too much energy?
I heard the biological’s main liquid oxygen pump and bellows start up for six beats before settling into arrhythmia again.
I looked at the tattoos. There were no shock hazard warnings around where I had my hands. The outer skin of was still intact. The seconds ticked away. I charged it again.
Again it stiffened and twitched like a kite in a high wind. I dropped the charge to zero and listened. Silence. I listened closer.
I was focused entirely on it when it screamed and drew in breath again. I jumped back from it in alarm, my pads clanking on the metal of the deck.
It quickly rolled over and convulsed. Protein supplements spilled out of its main airway and food passage. Slowly, it got up to a sitting position. Its breathing and pump rate slowed.
It looked down at the sensor-shaped burn marks dotting its main torso and then up into my lenses. I could not read the expression there.
“How long was I out?” it asked me.
“Three minutes seventeen seconds. The insulator was worn through when you grabbed the controls. It shall be repaired. You need to get back to your containment pod and rest.” I replied through my speaker, resonating the air to create disruptions that the biological could pick up with the receivers on either side of its main sensor array.
“Yes.” Said the bio, and went off to bed. He’d be put back in deep sleep and woken up for another emergency or another drill when needed.
I set about re-insulating the control interface for the ship. I felt guilty and embarrassed that my slip up had nearly caused the death of my biological backup.
