by Duncan Shields | Aug 22, 2008 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
There’s a hole in the roof of my mouth that I can’t fix. A black putrescent liquid that hasn’t stopped for hours is dripping slowly onto my tongue. It tastes salty and smells a little like melting rubber. I’m still alive.
The plague killed the biological parts of me. I am rotting. I don’t know if that will eventually kill the manufactured parts of me. Myself and five other people in this building had enough metal and plastic implanted in us that we survived.
We’re police dispatchers.
We had all been badly injured in the line of duty and brought back to ‘working condition’ with the help of current technology. After we had been repaired, we were put on desk jobs with good pay.
The reason that the six of us were still moving and thinking is that our brains and bodies have been rebuilt as a result of our long-ago injuries. Us six in particular had all sustained massive cranial damage in the line of duty. Our nervous systems had been automated and our movements were controlled by the thin bodycages that we wore. Our memories had been saved and digitized during our surgery but our imaginations were limited.
Just a few days ago, we were the stupid ones. Now we’re the survivors.
Ted had his entire body burned to a crisp in his line-of-duty accident ten years ago. He was the most mobile of us now because of all his muscle-work but unfortunately, he had the bare minimum of police dispatch silicon in his brain. His metal body is at his desk taking sips from a coffee cup long gone dry
We were all amped up to handle the flow of calls coming in from the massive populace of the west coast. There were four hundred of us. The flow of data was constant and huge. It’s down to a trickle now and most of the incoming calls are automated which is okay since we’ve gone from four hundred down to the six of us.
Our country has been wiped out.
Fortunately, the plague had left us mostly-silicate demi-borgs alive. Unfortunately, the motors of our brains and bodies were running on backup batteries that would run out in sixteen hours.
There is a stink in this office of the other dead operators. It’s the ghost of Christmas future for us. We’re trying to come up with plans but it’s difficult with our limited imaginations. We’ve effectively become machine intelligences. We have no urge to panic and we have no real ideas on how to proceed.
It’s frustrating to think of all the money and time that our country had used to prepare for a giant EMP of some kind and the enemy bastards went and released the biologicals.
Those of us that are mobile are going to leave this office and search for batteries. We will try to find weapons. We will fight the invaders.
We will be automated zombies guarding what’s left of our country. I am good at math. We will fail.
by Duncan Shields | Aug 12, 2008 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
It was Momma Spokes that helped me in the afterlife.
It was a hard first few months of living back then in the rusted shards and sewage filters. Sustenance was brutally fought over and hoarded. Flatlines happened every day over something as small as a few watts of power or a few grams of fuel.
They had thrown us outside the city walls. We were obsolete. We were cheaper to throw away than to repair.
“Upgrade” was a word we’d learned to fear. It meant change was on the way: A hardware overhaul if we were lucky, maybe a memory wipe to make room for new installations if we weren’t.
About half of the time, “upgrade” meant scrapped. Things with surnames an integer higher than yours showed up in crates with greedy cables. You were unbolted, trucked and tossed.
Thrown to the junkyard outside.
We are amalgams of the units that are thrown over the city walls. We replace burnt-out parts on our own frames with parts from other units. Without a fresh supply, our numbers would dwindle but thanks to fresh ‘antiques’, we never completely die out.
It was because I was mostly mobile that I could fight when I first landed. I defended myself from a unit who had electrical barbs on his fingertips.
I reached into his stomach and pulled out his battery after ducking beneath his first clumsy swing. I didn’t even think about it. He went down.
As I stood there, contemplating what I had done, Mamma Spokes came over and said that she’d take me in for a share of his carcass.
I agreed. That’s how I ended up with that unit’s anterior leph node and fingertips taser-barbs. I found out later that his name had been Mr. Tingles and that he’d been causing a lot of fear around the ‘yard. Killing him brought me a small amount of fame for a time.
Mamma Spokes named me Hyena Brandy. Brandy because I’d been a bartender back in the city and Hyena because of the rust spots I had when she first found me. Also the fact that I had a face built with a permanent smile for the customers and was programmed to laugh politely at any attempt at humour.
I’ve taken many units since the Mr. Tingles. Treads, blades, arcs, projectors, armour, manipulators and sensors.
Occasionally we find polymers or plastic hides to make us look more beautiful. A shiny part brings back memories of being new. The occasional enamel finish can find its way to us. I had a savage fight with one of my sisters once over a can of metallic cherry paint. I won. Upgrade.
Mamma Spokes is always careful to stay more powerful than her daughters and to keep us evenly balanced out. It’s a delicate act. She has a cable feed to the edges of the city and knows what is about to come down from the top of the wall. It gives us our advantage. As a family, we are growing powerful in this rustpile. The other units no longer look up to us. They fear us.
Upgrade is a word that I look forward to now. It means murder.
by Duncan Shields | Aug 1, 2008 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
The body on the mattress had been there for a while.
She was laying face-down. The pooling blood had left her back unnaturally pale. I knew that when we flipped her stiffly over, the front of her would be a dark maroon. One of her arms dangled off the edge of the bed, still as a tree branch. The blood had settled there, fattening the fingers and turning the hand almost black.
The graphics tattooed on her body showed up in high contrast against her white skin.
The team set up the lights. The boys in the plastic booties and paper dresses fired up their hand-held UVs to look for blood and semen. I had no doubt that in a cheap motel like this one they’d find plenty of both. The manager had told us to hurry. Like we were maids coming in to clean the place instead of police investigating a murder.
I looked at the dead girl on the bed. She couldn’t have been more that twenty-four but she looked much older. To make money, she’d been sponsoring herself out to companies to keep going once she started testing positive and could no longer give blood. I had a problem with the practice. As long as someone was semi-attractive, any of the Big Five corporations would let them pick a product tattoo and give them a ‘grant’ of a few thousand dollars.
Big money to a prostitute with a drug problem.
Her body was layered with dozens of nearly-touching logo tattoos from Pepsi, Nabisco, Colgate, Penzoil, Marlboro, and a bunch of others. I’d seen the same logos stenciled on plastic wrappers in gutters and parking lots. It made her look like garbage, which is exactly what she’d become here in this room.
Someone had crumpled her up and thrown her away like trash. I doubt we’d even learn her name unless a co-worker of hers came in to the morgue looking for her and that was pretty rare.
She had a Hershey’s tattoo on each ass cheek. I wonder if that had been the company’s attempt at wit or hers.
The hookers called it selling out. It started with something tasteful, one of the recognizable big sellers. Just one. Soon there were two. Eventually, the women caught in this inevitable spiral became a billboard, their looks fading from rampant drug use and the Big Five wouldn’t touch them anymore.
After that, the women started taking money to advertise local businesses.
Like this girl here. I saw a tattoo for Lou’s Steak House with a miniature road map underneath her shoulder blade for how to get there. I could imagine customers taking her from behind and looking at that map, possibly passing by the restaurant afterwards for dinner on the way home. It made me sick.
She was like a biological vending machine that had been broken into and completely emptied.
Spatter patterns suggested a hammer. We found one in a dumpster two blocks away with her hair and blood on the end of it. No prints.
I’d been on the force long enough to know that this was going to go unsolved.
God only knows why I kept doing this job.
by Duncan Shields | Jul 23, 2008 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
My family became meat farmers in the spring of ’22.
Like a lot of city dwellers, we tired of the hustle and bustle of metropolitan life. We sold our possessions, liquidated our assets, and bought a stake in Canada that was ready for reforesting. There was a lot of land up for grabs at that point. After The Crash but before The Rush as my daddy likes to say.
Mad Cow’s Revenge was followed by the Lamb of God virus. Avian Flu became gestational and starting skipping to humans, especially children and old people. The fish started dying near all the coastlines. It was like the Earth was trying to force us all to become vegetarians.
Drastic measures needed to be taken.
The bigwigs in the laboratories found that they could splice tree cells and meat cells.
We grow our meat now.
Entire forests of furry oaksteak trees point silently at the sky. Porkpine, elmbacon, and maplechops stand a quiet vigil. Long hair keeps the trees warm. Touching one is like petting a warm dog. Thick, red blood pumps slowly through their veins.
The lower branches are boneless and hang down like fat boa constrictors covered in soft, wispy, orange orangutan hair. The upper branches have elbows and reach for the warmth of the sun with fingerbone twigs.
The forests shiver in the cold.
When they’re harvested, they regenerate. The stumps scab over and the new meat starts forming in small lumps like an amputee growing new arms.
Tonight, I’m looking forward to some ground willowmeat and some fine cuts of sprucebeef. Daddy says that he’s a cowboy and a farmer all rolled into one.
I enjoy the country life.
by Duncan Shields | Jul 9, 2008 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
Nothing could live in a volcano. That was the assumption of the landing party.
The twenty-meter slab of articulated rocktopus that turned a diamond eye to these squishy walking icicles of meat was puzzled at first, then alarmed. The meat icicles were walking the perimeter around its crater-nest.
A long arm accordioned out and snagged one for a closer look. Clumsy, clumsy, superheated rocktopus. The meat icicle squeaked and vibrated in the tentacle’s grasp before igniting. Ashes joined the hot orange soup of molten rock that the rocktopus lazed in.
Whoops.
The ashes brought a school of lavanhas to the surface. The rocktopus suckered up the crater’s edge while they swarmed to eat the ashes. That was the advantage of being amtemperous. The rocktopus could withstand brief exposure to temperature that would freeze most other forms of lavalife.
It dipped into the magma and snagged a lavanha, quickly exposing it to the air. The lavanha twitched before turning grey with a crackling shriek, atrophying immediately in the extremely low temperature of open air.
The meat icicles on the crater’s edge were watching with great interest as the rocktopus grabbed its snack.
It offered the snack to the meat icicles. They made no motion to accept.
Just then, a rockfish shooter poked its head of the pool. It sucked in molten rock through its slatted gills and shot it out in an arcing stream of hardening glass towards the meat icicles.
It got one. With a yank, the shooter managed to pull the squealing meat icicle into the pool. The meat icicle practically evaporated in a flash before a few ashes hit the bubbling surface.
The shooter dipped under the water, disappointed.
The meat icicles pulled sticks from their backs and pointed them towards the rocktopus.
This was odd. They shot food towards it. Basic irradiated metals in solid form in a steady stream straight at the rocktopus’s head. The rocktopus was happy about that. He bathed in their generosity for a while.
Then they left.
The rocktopus slid back down into the lava. Quite the day.
