by Duncan Shields | Mar 27, 2008 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
Being a temporal border guard is an okay job. It pays the bills.
It seemed like a cool perk when the position was first created after the The Great Restart of 205?. You’d get to work, do your eight hours, and then get put back into the time stream a millisecond after you’d left.
You would be tired, though, and end up sleeping the day away and then you’d be up all night. Unless you were single or married to another Temp Guard, it sucked. Plus, it aged you a little quicker. Those eight hours didn’t pass for others. After a while, you would be ahead of everyone else in physical decrepitude.
So now, it’s just like all the other jobs. You work eight hours, they put you back into the time stream eight hours after you come to work. It gives the illusion of normalcy that most humans need to cope and survive.
It’s head-bending, really.
There’s a political movement afoot that doesn’t respect the temporal borders. They think it’s all just a nefarious plan by the temporal government to restrict people’s ability to research the past and investigate what they call ‘The Truth’. They use guerilla time sliders to flit about all over the place.
To their credit, these ‘tempests’ generally do seem to leave the time line somewhat intact, keeping interference to a minimum, not a lot of fuss, but it’s the principle, really. If they were to do something in a non-interference time zone accidentally, the consequences could be retroactively catastrophic.
Not that we’d know that difference. That’s why the Temp Guard doesn’t hire thinkers. Me, I don’t get bored easy. I’m great and doing nothing, filling out forms, following orders, or just staring at the wall.
It’s the ones that start to really try to figure out how it all works, what it all means, and whether or not this reality is really the real reality that start to slide off the rails eventually.
It’s actually a rogue Temp Guard that’s leading the Tempests right now. Alazariah Hackson. Reputedly insane but if you ask me, a guy would have to pretty smart to wage a careful non-interference war of attrition with the government.
Myself, I actually take comfort in the fact that I’d never have any idea about retroactive changes.
Like if I woke up tomorrow with one eye and no children, I wouldn’t even know that there had been a difference.
I’m happy enough sipping on my sugarwater and wanding my tachyon detector over the folks coming through the borders and filling out the forms. I’m not even tempted to think about the changes that could be happening around me every day.
by Duncan Shields | Mar 19, 2008 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
We’re both standing on the rooftops of the train city. Two hundred and twenty-three tracks wide, slowly migrating polewards to more oil and frozen fresh water.
Metal groans as the temperature drops. Tenpenny nails shrink and loosen in the planks holding shacks together. Coal stoves are fueled and ready to go. The whole city has a heartbeat as the connections between the rails tick by beneath the wheels.
Wind-jenny and I are up top amongst the blooming solar fields. She lives up here but I only have a daypass. I’m one of the Engineer’s children. I can’t spend too much time away from my station or I run out of juice. Wind-jenny keeps telling me that she could hook me up with a solar generator and I’d never have to go back, no problem.
“That would be against the rules. This city’s not big enough for renegades.†I tell her, quoting the maxim laid down by the first Engineer.
Motion and Power. The whole society was based on it. Feed the engines. Stoke the lights. Keep moving.
Once every two months or so, a junction comes up. If anyone wants to see what life is like on a different traincity, they’re welcome to get off and set up camp to wait for the next one. The schedules are right there on the wall. It’s encouraged. The more folks know that there’s no difference between the other cities, the more they spread the word and the less people want to leave.
There are rumours, of course, born of young dreams and hope, of traincities made of white marble and gold that run on magic. Badlerdash. Boxcar madness.
The Engineer has told me through my downtime interface that this traincity is as good as any other. The Engineer keeps granting me daypasses because I’m twice as productive after a visit with Wind-jenny. I love her and the happiness she causes in my heart makes me tend the engines faster down in the smoke-soaked darkness of the stokeroom. The burning of the coals reminds me of the colour of her hair.
My daypass has five minutes left. I tell Wind-jenny that I’ve got to go soon. She kisses me and snuggles up to the biological parts of me to give me a thrill of a memory that will last me until the next time I see her.
She pulls down her goggles and raises her scarf. It makes her look like a desert ant. She looks at me as I throw a metal treadleg over the lip of the porthole, hooking on to the ladder chute that’ll take me back down. I pause for a moment, looking at her red hair being pulling by the angry children of the wind and take a picture with a shutter click in my right eye.
I’ll turn it in my mind like a jewel in the darkness when I’ve put on my shovel hands and I’m back to work. I’m already looking forward to next time.
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by Duncan Shields | Mar 6, 2008 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
With those sleek shoulders and sculpted faceplate features, I would have guessed her be a Russian model.
Hard to tell with the standard techniques. The criminals always had their own serial numbers sanded off and I2P addys scrambled. I don’t know how it’s possible to live like that.
I’d seen the initiation ceremonies for those involved in the ferrogangs. I understood needing a sense of belonging but the bosses of those gangs were so brutal. Plus, having your identifying marks removed in a shower of sparks just didn’t seem to me like something that a friend would do.
I was made by a good parent company, though. Still in business, still under warranty, still protected. I guess I’d never really know what it would take to become like the unit here in the interrogation chair in front of me.
I had guessed her make to be a relatively recent design going by trends. I’d have to check the catalogues. Wear and tear made her look to be about thirty kilocycles old. She was more likely sixteen with no repairs or upkeep. I’d never know her serial number but at least I’d able to pinpoint year, make, and O-stats with a little research.
Her chipsets were a mess. They’d been booby-trapped, privacy-looped and dust-locked to the point that it was a wonder she could form rational sentences. A low-level soldier for the gang, I’d say. Expendable to the point of being borderline scrap.
I had the wiretap link spooling across the table from my head to hers. It was touch and go. I was sniffing around in her head to find evidence without tripping a defense charge that would kill her. She sat silently during the process. She knew that her life was in my hands. She had to trust that I was a careful detective.
Colleagues of mine cared less about the fates of units like this. I had seen fellow officers hook up, go in and laugh when their clumsy antics triggered their prisoner unit to freeze up and smoke. Feeble excuses and a few months of probation later, they’d be back on the street. It made my wires cross.
I probed slowly, looking for something circumstantial that seemed harmless to her internal watchdog programs but might lead me to a physical location that we could search later for something more incriminating.
Trawling through her memory directories, I found .3pegs and bitmap snapshots of units she’d allowed herself to love and save in non-password protected folders. Their faces were pixilated to me, of course, but the backgrounds weren’t.
There. A signpost in the background. 12th and Iron Ave. Next to a rundown house that was a ferrogang hovel if I’ve ever seen one.
Feigning boredom so as not to alarm her, I copied the shots into a viral protected temp folder in my memory and jacked out.
She looked up at me. “Find anything, sparkpig?†she asked with a sneer.
“No. You’re free to go. Don’t leave town, though. We might need to ask you more questions later.†I said.
“Screw you, bolt-fucker.†She said.
I buzzed for the flatfoots to come in and escort her out.
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by Duncan Shields | Feb 26, 2008 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
When we were both sixteen, we made a pact. We said to each other that we would never race ahead without each other. Now we’re eighteen and I barely see you.
I’ve had a whole arsenal installed in my arms and head. You cook the food in the cafeteria. You weren’t picked. Something in the genes, they said. I pleaded your case but they didn’t listen. We drifted. I got the full scholarship.
I stand in front of you and there’s an awkward pause after you’ve squeezed the ice cream scoop of mashed potatoes onto my plate. You’re looking at me with an eyebrow playfully raised. I scan you and I can see that while you’re acting nonchalant, your heart rate is triple what it usually is.
One of the reasons we drifted is because it became obvious to me after my augmentation that you were in love with me and you always had been. I’m not a good actor so it became obvious to you that I knew how you felt and didn’t feel the same way.
After the classification process terminated and we were put in different categories, I didn’t have a chance to explore how I felt about you. I might have loved you back, given time. Well, that’s kind of weak, I suppose. If you know, you know. That’s what I hear in the pop songs. So I guess I didn’t love you. Luckily I was too busy to ever have ‘the talk’ with you.
I heard you’d decided to stay in the school and major in science. You’d never see any field work but you’d probably design weapons I’d be using one day.
Now here you are. Working in the cafeteria so that you can pay the bills and looking at me and you still want me. All of a sudden I feel like I’m standing in a soup line.
I guess neither of us were very smart.
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by Duncan Shields | Feb 18, 2008 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
I’ve gone over and over that time with the shrinks here on the ground. It was a time-sensitive mission to repair satellite Oricus-11. We were on schedule and nothing was in the red. We were in the pipe, five by five and on target.
Jackie and Maria were locked in and reading the specs back as we arrowed in on the airlock. Reverse thrusters fired as Maria cushioned our lateral descent to the docking clamps. There was a light bump through the whole ship as we touched the edge of the collar.
Halfway there.
Maria raised a hand up to her hair and died that way. Her eyes just unfocused and the animal side in me knew right away that she’s been turned off like a light switch.
I looked over at Jackie and that’s the last linear-time memory I have except three other things.
One.
The hatch blew. Vacuum scoured the entire cigar tube of our ship with a greedy inhalation of breath from god’s lungs. Papers, pens, experiments, everything that wasn’t tethered or taped went fast-forward panicking out the door into the cold embrace. The air turned to crystals.
Two.
I don’t know if this was some time later or in the next second but I remember looking forward at my outstretched hand. My fingernails were brightly glowing blue. Beyond my hand was a forest. The trees and leaves were mostly red and I still can’t tell if it was Earth in the autumn or if it was summer on a different planet.
Three.
The last thing I remember is talking to a child. The child was much smarter than me and it seemed like he was intentionally using simple language to communicate with me. A little boy about seven years old with eyes glowing exactly the same blue as my fingertips had been glowing in the previous memory. We were both dressed in white and sitting in a red room.
I don’t remember what we talked about but I’ve been a lot calmer ever since.
I was found in a swamp by a couple of Louisiana fishermen. I was looking at the rot-resistant bark of a cypress and tracing the lines on the trunk with my hands. Their greeting is the first thing I remember. Turning my head to see who made that noise and then realizing that I was ankle deep in a swamp.
I still had my uniform on. It was freshly washed and felt like it was still slightly warm from the dryer. I felt freshly showered as well.
It didn’t take long for me to get taken into the basements of NASA and questioned. I’ve been here for weeks now.
I’m not sure if they’ll give me a memwipe or just cut me loose. I am surprised to feel that I am now in possession of something that they’ll never be able to take from me. I’m different inside.
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