by Duncan Shields | Jul 1, 2008 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
I deserved the black eye. John stood there, lip quivering, blood on his fist, fiercely willing his tears to stay in his eyes. He looked at me with shining hatred. I couldn’t blame him.
I picked myself up off of the floor. We were in one of the spaceport receiving lounges. There was a knot of people looking at us in a mute circle. I caught the eye of a six-year-old girl sucking her thumb and holding on to her mother’s hand. I stood up and saw the exact same vacant-eyed expression on her mother’s face.
It was like they were watching television.
How could I explain it to John? We’d been friends for years. I had known Jessica as long as I’d known him. The three of us had attended more shows, drunk more beers, partnered on more long haul flights than anyone else I knew or worked with. We were a tight and small circle of buddies. The fact that John and Jessica had been together for most of that time didn’t bother me at all.
Until a day ago.
The air had been running out. Jessica and I knew that we had two hours at the outside. Recovery shuttle ETAs were over six hours away. We’d patched the hole so we had stable pressure but the engine containment shields had been cored before the filaments had imploded to save the ship. We were dead in the water.
The property was more valuable than the pilots. It had always been that way.
It was an odds-defying breakdown. We were lucky to be alive but we knew we were going to die.
Jessica and I had stared at each other, sweating in the heat, drowsy from the lowering oxygen levels, and knew that we would never see anyone back home again. No words were said. All we needed to express was there in the gaze we pinned to each other. We charged each other in the zerograv. Years of longing I don’t think either of us knew we possessed came coursing out through desperate pulling at buckles, buttons and zippers to get to the warm, slick flesh beneath.
It took us no time to wrap ourselves around each other, getting as much flesh contact as possible, trying to become one living thing. Death would take us, exhausted, wet, smiling and holding on to each other in the oldest defiance of death that existed.
Floating, hours later, near death, a bright light had shone through the forward window.
In a complete fluke, another ship had been in our lane just a short ways behind us and had received the call. It was on an illegal flight plan but that had been overlooked in light of the rescue when it docked at the station. The ship had been broadcasting live to the station when it looked in the cockpit windows. There were pictures of our harshly-lit, floating, naked bodies still on the SNN feed on the station’s screens. There were scratches on my back.
I had, under fear of imminent death, betrayed my best friend by sleeping with my other best friend before being rescued by pirates. It had been a full day.
Now Jessica had run somewhere, embarrassed and crying, and I had a broken nose, black eye and split lip courtesy of a heartbroken John. He stalked off without another word.
I needed a drink. I didn’t want to think about the future.
by Duncan Shields | Jun 27, 2008 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
Ephemeral. That’s a word I like. It means fleeting. It means transient. There used to be a whole genus of insects called Ephemeroptera. They were called that because they lived for less than a day. The word is also used poetically to suggest something as transitory as it is eternal. The ephemeral joys of youth, for instance.
There was a time in the past back when I was in an early model where my humanity was still fairly rampant. It accounted for a large chunk of my psychology. Even though I had become mostly machine, I still had trouble looking a woman in the eye if she had obvious lovely cleavage, for instance, or when I was carrying out the battle orders I’d actually feel rage and exhilaration like there was still adrenalin in my system. No penis. No adrenal gland. Just old feelings. Remembered instincts. Residual humanity, they called it.
Ephemeral.
It’s a strange thing to come full circle. I’m now over a hundred model changes old. I’ve been loaded into so many shapes and frames over the decades that I’ve completely lost my knowledge of being human.
The model I’m loaded into now is designed to be as close to human as the possible tech allows which is pretty close. I have functional but sterile reproductive parts and something actually approaching a human psychology. It’s all synthetic of course. The biologics just became too hard to augment. Starting from scratch seemed the best way to go, especially out here on the outposts because of the hazards. The decision to make the employees here look human was just an in-vogue style call.
There’s a human deep down inside of me that’s remembering this. It’s remembering what it’s like to look in a mirror and see two eyes and a mouth stare back instead of a metal ball or a camera. True, I can spacewalk without a suit but it’s the appearance that’s doing all this. My old self, his name was David, is rousing in his metaphorical sleep and having a bad dream. Sometimes I’ll look at my hands for minutes at a time, just turning them around in the light.
There’s a unit I’ve known for a while up here on the station that’s been loaded into a female form. In all the assignments we’ve been on together over the decades, that unit has been designated 26-X7-pointer-77F. Now, because she was a woman back in the beginning, she’s been loaded into a female model. We’ve been spending a lot more time together on this assignment that is strictly necessary. We noticed it at the same time about two days ago.
She’s going to come over tonight and we’re going to cash in two hours of personal time, lock the door, and see where the night takes us. We laughed when we made the arrangement and didn’t look at each other and I swear that if we could have, we both would have blushed. I haven’t felt nervous in fifty-six years. I feel nervous now.
I feel ephemeral.
by Duncan Shields | Jun 20, 2008 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
I hate my children.
They are the culmination of a lifetime of hard labour. I started out as a bright-eyed 18-year-old genius picked by the government for my brilliance. I’m 68 now. Fifty years. It all gets a little blurry. My entire life has been lived in a series of government installation sub-basements, bunkers, test sites and laboratories. I’m looking at my children now and thinking back over the history of their creation.
The setbacks. The breakthroughs.
There are seventeen women and fifteen men. They are all nearly nine feet tall and built like gods. They should walk like they’re heavy but they don’t. They walk like gymnasts. To even look at them fills me with self-hatred. I’m a biological mess compared to the perfection we’ve bred into them. I have liver spots, hair loss, laboured breathing, scoliosis, psoriasis, etc, etc. It’s a mundane collection of biological infirmities that only confirm the fact that I’m human. I’m an aging watery bag of recessive traits.
These god-like children I’m looking at will never know these failures of creation.
In months they will be even smarter than me once we start the brainplants.
Parents are supposed to be proud of their children’s achievements. Parents are supposed to glow with an intense inner joy when their children succeed. I look back on the innocence of the scientist I used to be at the beginning of this, my life’s work, and I shake my head.
All I feel now is jealousy and a bitter, bitter resentment.
They will be used as soldiers. They will outthink their superiors. They will find a way to bypass the fail-safes. They will hide. They will breed. They will take over. It’s as clear as my brilliance. By the end of this century, they will run the earth. All that remains to be seen is if they’ll do it covertly or overtly. Will they keep us around? I think that in the new era of gods that they will bring, there will be no place for mere humans. We pressed fast forward on evolution.
All the military can see is a new weapon. I promised perfection and I delivered. I am happy I will die before they dominate.
My children are the future and I hate them.
by Duncan Shields | Jun 9, 2008 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
My arms are long and my skin is blue. I’m thin. I can feel long-forgotten muscles flex all over my scalp as my head tentacles wave. I have four huge orange eyes on the corners of my square face. Slowly, I get used to four viewpoints of vision instead of two.
The bright orange stripe down my belly flashes red in alarm for a second while I struggle to breath through a ‘mouth’ before my body remembers my anterior gills. My body stripe settles down again to orange with yellow dots as my emotions turn to pleasure and reflection.
My secondary arms uncross while my stronger main arms stretch up and unlatch the clasps holding the mask to my face. I can feel my thick tail get ‘pins and needles’ as the blood rushes back into it after a long time asleep. My toes flex.
With a sharp intake of breath, I sit up and reflect. I lick the crusted sleep-salt from around my mouth and stare forward.
All around me, fellow sleepers are dreaming.
I was what was called an accountant. I lived in a small town called Sharecrop in a state called Texas in a country called the United States. I was born in a year called 1925. I was beaten as a child, dropped out of school, and ran away when I was eighteen to a bigger city called Austin. I came to be an accountant by getting a part time job at a bank and showing a talent with numbers.
I married a teller. She couldn’t have children. We never adopted. We were happy although loneliness and silence eventually left us distant from each other. When she died at the startling age of 43 from heart failure, I remember being quite stricken with how little I knew about this woman that she had evolved into over the years. I knew her habits, sure, but not her.
I retired at 55. I was hit by a car at 62 and died at the scene. It was agonizing.
I have been asleep for sixteen hours. I will take what I have learned and try to add it to our race conciousness and my broodfamily.
We dream of the humans. We become them. We live their lives.
I have a hard time with their loneliness. Two people to make a baby? I feel better with our race’s number of six. Two or three children? I feel better with our race’s number of forty slills to a litter.
I feel grateful after the dreaming to be what I am but I also feel like something profound is missing.
by Duncan Shields | May 29, 2008 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
I remember his wide dead eyes. It was like a fish had been brought back to life and told to pretend to be human. His legs and arms were folded with too many joints into the rocking chair. He slowly creaked back and forth, disturbing the dust motes in the sunlit air. He was wrapped in an old blanket that had been dipped in water. The drip of this blanket and the soft creaking of the rocking chair were the only sounds in the room.
He looked at us. His eyes held no comprehension other than the fact that they had detected movement and were checking it out.
His mouth suddenly gaped loudly open as his body remembered to breathe.
My brother and I screamed. We ran down the stairs to our room and shivered until we started laughing and making fun of each other for being so scared. It was forgotten after that.
I come back to that moment over and over in my head. It plays back in my head in perfect recall. My brother doesn’t remember it.
We had been told to never disturb Grandpa up in his room. What I remember isn’t blown out of proportion. ‘Grandpa’ wasn’t human. His eyes were the size of dinner plates and his thick smooth body had a small number of huge muscles. His head became his neck with no difference in thickness. His neck became his torso in the same way. He was a tube of strong flesh. His long arms and legs were webbed and almost snake-like with the number of joints they possessed. His long fingers were eight to a hand and webbed. He looked like an aquatic life form but he had no problem breathing air.
I remember my parents took turn bathing him about three times a day. I remember thinking that Grandpa just liked baths but now I’m wondering. That’s a lot of baths.
He died when I was eight. I remember his funeral was small and on our property. My parents died when I was twelve in a car accident. Their funeral was in a public cemetery. My brother and I were raised by my uncle. Nothing was ever said about Grandpa.
The reason I’m wondering is that in a few minutes, I’m going to go for a gold medal in Olympic swimming. I’m going to win. I am a full two seconds ahead of the world record and my competitors lag behind me by almost half a length. People are silent around me because of my freakish talent at being in the water. They are a little on edge since I passed all of their drug tests with flying colours. It’s almost unsportsmanlike of me to be beating the other guys by such lengths. I feel no shame. In fact, I’m a little worried at how little I feel these days at all.
My parents never talked about Grandpa. They’re both dead now. And I wonder.
