by Duncan Shields | May 14, 2008 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
My nervous system registered a strong palm-print between my shoulder blades just before I was shoved hard towards the ground. I landed face-first amongst a scatter of hot shell casings and a reek of spent gunpowder.
I heard bullets whine and snap into the thin wall where I had been standing. The hall was littered with the bodies of fellow officers.
It wasn’t going well. This was a small apartment building in a slum. The most these kids should have had was bottles and bricks and maybe some home-made pop guns.
High caliber slugs stitched their way up the floor towards my wrist. I yanked my fist over to my chest but not quite in time. A few of my fingers flipped up into the air, suddenly free of my hand. One of them had my wedding ring on it.
I made a mewling sound like a kitten. Maybe two seconds had passed since I had been pushed down.
I looked up to see who had saved my life.
Straining the regulation uniform was the scarred, thick frame of a 40-year-old bodybuilder. Her face was warped with rage as she emptied a gun that would have looked more at home on the front of a tank.
She stood like a warrior from a completely different and much better movie.
I realized that her body had scars that matched the lines of her muscles at the same time as I saw her take six bullets in the chest and two in her face.
Her head barely snapped back as a shower of sparks from her forehead lit up the hallway. Her body actually slid back on her heels a couple of inches from the stuttering impact of the torso hits.
With an animal roar, she fired back. The gun whirred down to a series of clicks after a few deafening sweeps of the hallway.
Cries of the wounded echoed back to me from down the hall. Profanities of rioters who had taken decent cover came back as well. The clicks of weapons being reloaded. A preparation for more battle.
She tossed aside the weapon. It landed like an engine block beside her.
She threw her head back and yelled at the ceiling. I saw little blue lights warm up in the crevasses of the inset muscle plugs. With a body wide spasm, they strobed a blinding pulse out that sent the whole building into darkness.
The biologically generated EMP caused the militants down at the other end to shout and then whisper amongst themselves.
There was a change in the air pressure next to me and then the sound of bare feet on dusty ground padding softly down the hall. It sounded like the feet of a ballerina or a young child. So fast and so quiet.
That’s when the screaming began down the hall. It sounded like a slaughterhouse. In amongst the gunfire, I could hear the sounds of metal on bone and see occasional flashes of blue taser fire.
This riot was over.
by Duncan Shields | May 5, 2008 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
There are people in the depths of this city that have literally never seen the sun. They live in artificially lit shanty-arcologies and depend on shipment piracy for survival. Whatever they can’t grow hydroponically, they barter from the city above, Topside.
These people don’t live in the sewers. They live in the city that used to be. They live among the roots of the golden-age hivetrees. They live in a pre-nan world where people did the building for other people. It’s a political statement.
They work with their hands down there. They don’t depend on magical microbes or tiny eyelash centipedes to build and shape. Their bodies are ‘pure’. They are strong and infection resistant.
You have to see the city as a gradient. The area down there would be Black.
I’m wearing an airmask and leaning over the edge of a balcony in Lower White.
It’s cold up here. To my left and right, between the other spires and plinths, is the curvature of the Earth. It’s always night above me. My apartment is in the upper reaches of the atmosphere but lower than the levels above me stretching away to Upper White. In the vacuum of space, their apartments twirl.
I hold patents on Earth that have started to be exported to the rest of the Universe. That is the reason for my wealth. I’m the richest human.
Which, I am finding out, means nothing. The levels above me are entirely populated by alien races. Alien Races with universe-wide generational patents. I am a curiousity to them; the richest local.
My own kind can barely relate to me. My wealth has made me a pariah and I trust no one. The aliens up here laugh at my lack of abilities. I can’t change shape, I have no retractable claws or prehensile tail, and I have only the bare minimum number of feet and hands needed to walk to manipulate the world around me.
I always thought that evolution was a paring down to essentials. To them, it’s the opposite. The more complex a race is, the further up the ladder it is and the more respect it gets.
Earth is a lawless watering hole. We’ve been sold architectural miracles and replicators. We’ve been sold the means to produce an end to most sickness lengthen our lives. The unbroken bristling metropolis that extends over every inch of the planet has eradicated the need for countries. Earth is a planet and a city now, covered in a blanket of apartments. There are no more visible oceans but they still pulse beneath the cities, protected and lit by massive sun tracks.
We had more immigration last year from the rest of the universe than we had births on the planet.
This is an age of wonder for most of humanity. An age of great change.
I am standing, close to space, the floors below me lost in cloud, thinking about the pale people living in the basement of Earth.
And envying them.
by Duncan Shields | Apr 22, 2008 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
â€Say what you wantâ€, said Shane to the house A.I., “ever since the war, this part of the world has spectacular sunsets.†He was on a balcony overlooking the Mediterranean.
“Incoming. Three sigs.†stated the house A.I.
The airhounds had caught up to Shane just as he was starting to relax.
The house defenses sent up lift-tickets to confuse the semi-sentient missiles. One of the airhounds cranked left with an angry twist of its rudder and stabbed into his neighbour’s house, crunching centuries-old stucco. Napalm gushed forth in an almost sexual explosion from its black nozzle before blooming flesh-rending fire across the inside of the building. Luckily his neighbours were on vacation.
“I’m going to miss this locationâ€, Shane thought to himself as he dropped his drink and jumped over the railing. There were other safe houses around the world being dummied up but this one had been Shane’s favourite.
Had been. Already he was thinking of it in the past tense. The training goes deep.
Running as fast as his muscled form would allow, he dashed down the courtyard towards the water. His terrycloth robe hung open and flapped behind him like a flag of surrender. He was getting close to the pier when he felt the force of the blast.
Shane was built for strength, not agility. It was a contest between the armoured plating on his back and the shrapnel of his exploding mansion before he leapt off the edge of his pier. The concussion wave picked him up and kicked him forward.
His robe blackened and shriveled in the flame before he thudded into the waves.
He dove deep into the pale green water. Twisting around and looking up, his government-supplied eyes saw nothing but flames. He registered the ambient temperature of the water going up a few degrees.
Shane’s hair had been burnt off and the salt water was doing nothing to make his back wounds feel better. He was bleeding a lot. He could take a lot of bullets but a shark could probably still take his leg off.
He had a few tanks of air stashed around with beacons on them. With a few head nods, he called them up. The closest was fifteen feet away. He started swimming.
Jackie had gone out to get groceries and wasn’t due back for an hour. Shane hoped that she would believe him killed in the blast.
Incoming had said three airhounds. It was possible that a third was still above the fire scanning for him.
Shane had to swim as far as his augmented legs could carry him before surfacing.
Grabbing one tank and heading for another, he devised a route up the coast in his head that would get him closest to a populated beach where he could steal a few tourist identity cards and bail up to Europe.
â€What the hell,†though Shane, “it’s been a while since I’ve seen Denmark.â€
by Duncan Shields | Apr 15, 2008 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
“I mean, what I’m saying is,†he said, “is that going skinny dipping never killed anyone.â€
Her eyes trembled back for a second and her look softened to a vacancy that let him know that she was accessing.
“Brandy and Jorge Garcia were killed in 1956 by their own village for skinny-dipping.†She replied. “It was seen an indecent behaviour for an unmarried couple. There are twenty such incidents on file and 48 more hits unexplored on the subject.â€
She took the fun out of everything.
Every open-ended argument about what the capital of Zaire was, or what actor starred in that action film ten years ago, or how the words to that song were sung was suddenly a five-second conversation that ended correctly and abruptly.
His friends teased him about going out with a girl with implants. They said that she was obviously slumming it by going out with a kid too poor to afford brainwork. He told them all politely to get fucked. He was in love with her.
The implants were trying his patience, though. He realized that the inadequacies of his own memory and lack of connection to the network were basically the reasons that he had conversations at all.
The only things that she wanted to speak about were the unknowable answers to age-old questions like “what is life?†and “which religion is best?†and even then she had volumes of theories to draw upon.
They had a lot of sex together which was pretty mind-blowing considering all the tantric volumes that she studied and downloaded but afterwards, he got the feeling that while she knew, well, everything, she really didn’t have a personal opinion on anything.
When he asked her how she felt about something, she’d get a confused look on her face and he could see the effort it took her to frame an answer. In a way, she was even more naïve and simple than he was.
That’s why he loved her and that was the reason why she loved him, he thought. He could challenge her in ways that her implant-ridden, philosophy-obsessed pals uptown could not.
He was wrong, of course, but it was a fantastic summer for both of them.
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by Duncan Shields | Apr 8, 2008 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
It wasn’t until I opened my eyes that I knew what had happened.
Lisa Sagan and Andrea Hawking were helping Petra Turing make sure my vitals were stabilizing. It was Henrietta Einstein that was chairing the ‘wake. I could see my dear Shelagh Newton looking down from the observation booth with tears of joy in her eyes.
I’d been caught and killed. They’d had to wake up another copy of me.
I needed to know how much memory I was missing and if the Two-X project was still functioning.
We’d wrested control from the governments. We were the smartest minds on the planet. We’d taken over from the war-mongering males and turned the entire continent into a matriarchy that was feared and respected.
It wasn’t enough.
We need the world to be with us if we were to conquer space.
“Don’t try to move†said Carla Marconi. I bristled at the sound of her petulant voice but remained still. Soon, I would leave this hospital bed and be debriefed and rebriefed. The project was safe. I could see that much from here.
The black ceramic hummed above us in the nuclear cooling tower. Miles long, it crackled with barely restrained power. It wouldn’t be long before the world would fear us and have no choice but to obey. It was regrettable but the quickest solution.
The weapon is of my design.
My name is Tamara Tesla. A glorious future awaits.
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