by Duncan Shields | Dec 17, 2007 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
Finnegan Sue was a pit fighter.
She wrapped leather around her knuckles, mindful of her nails, and ran her sharpened tongue around her poisonous needled mouth. She sung a tune while she prepped. Her horrible lisp made a mockery of the lyrics she whispered to herself as the counter in the top left of her field of vision counted down to Go Time.
Outside, the announcer’s spiel was cresting.
Too many chapters of her life were prefaced with the phrase “…and in this corner.â€
Before tonight, Finnegan Sue had never been a main event.
Two kinds of fighters got headlined:
There were connected fighters with flashy, expensive augmentations entered into and bred for the top tiers. They had short careers. They had nowhere to fall to. Every fight was to the death up there and political maneuvering shed as much blood off the arena floor as on it.
And then there were fighters like Finnegan Sue. Heavy with scars, right moments and hundredth-of-a-second survivals. Long, unexceptional careers of death. Fights to first blood, fights to humiliation, fights to first break, and sometimes, fights to the death. The path of their careers was a slow, steady incline.
Finnegan Sue was nearing the end of her career. A win at this level as an independent and she could retire. All she had to do was kill this next fighter.
Sue checked the levels of her speed. She stretched the armoured tendons in her wide neck. The drugs were coursing through her now just as sure as they were coursing through her opponent.
The announcer was getting around to it.
“…the Russian ripcord, winter’s dog of war, the Siberian she-devil, the gutpunch from the gulag, Moscow’s murdering Maria, I give you….FINNEGAN SUE!!â€
The crowd went wild and the doors opened.
Finnegan Sue flexed, breathed in, and ran to the light. She leapt into the arena in a forward roll that ended in a kneeling crouch with her nails fanned to hide her face.
After a respectful pause, she stood up straight, cueing the announcer to get on with it.
“And in THIS corner….†he started rattling on about the person Sue had to kill.
She tried to tune out what the announcer said at this point in every match. She liked seeing her opponent with fresh eyes. She had heard hints that her opponent had started out as a male and was not Free. He was a German.
For no reason at all, Sue thought of her long-dead mother. It was surprising and unsettling to think such a thought before a fight.
Sue hoped it wasn’t an omen.
The doors of the other side of the arena opened.
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by Duncan Shields | Dec 11, 2007 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
The place reeks of green beans.
I hate the feel of the floor underneath my bare feet. It’s made of ivy and soft branches.
I’m not from around here.
I usually work the corporate zealots on the rim. All they know is credit and value. I’m a machine when it comes to getting those rogue independents back on our side. It’s all suits, stims, and pissing contests. I’m a natural because I like it. I’m at home there.
This must be punishment.
I’m an emissary from a highly technological civilization and I’ve been sent to talk to the Leaf People.
It’s what’s called a Green Moon.
It takes less time to terraform a moon than a planet. Terraforming stations are set up on both the moon and the planet. The moon finishes first and the plants are shuttled down to the planet surface to hasten the change and relieve the processor’s workload.
Then more plants are grown on the moon. They get ferried down. Then more are grown. It’s a process that continues until the planet is sustainable and ready for habitation. It takes about a century.
It’s a process that requires a much higher initial outlay of capital but the long term profits have been proven from past examples.
The employees live ‘in the green’, in tune with nature, and after a while, money becomes abstract to them. Occasionally, employees on a Green Moon get it into their heads that they are independent community organizations and not an asset of a corporation.
Eventually, they want to secede.
Secede, rebel, steal, it’s all the same to us. They are substantial investments that must be protected and functional. Corporation emissaries are sent in to negotiate and reach a compromise that leaves both parties mutually dissatisfied but keeps the Green Moons running. It’s too expensive to go to war with them.
Maybe I’ve done something wrong and that’s why my bosses have thrown me to the farmers.
Lunar terrafarmers. Loonies, we call them.
The rep I’m supposed to meet in this humid section of a hedge maze is called Rainbow Shark.
I’ve already sweated through my expensive linen suit.
A strongly muscled woman walks out from behind the bushes and stands in front of me. Except for a woven belt holding a telepad and what I guess are food pellets, she’s completely naked.
She stares me down for a second and gives me a visual appraisal. There’s a smirk when she looks at my bare feet and something that almost sounds like a chuckle at the sweat stains growing under my arms. He eyes return to mine. They’re as green as go-lights.
“I’m Rainbow Shark.†She says. “You must be Jonas Malko, the company man.â€
She looks like she’d just as soon stab me in the throat as look at me.
Maybe this isn’t a punishment after all. It might even be a challenge.
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by Duncan Shields | Dec 4, 2007 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
The Ravaged Angel.
That’s what was painted in red nail polish on the nose of the three-person cryshuttle. It had docked on autopilot with good codes but wasn’t answering hails. The dock’s computer was talking to the shuttle’s compnav to ascertain where they’d come from and what their sitrep was when the hatches blew on the three ovals on the top of the Ravaged Angel’s hull.
It was a human ship, possibly an escape pod, but the decorations on the outside of the polished hull looked old and slightly archaic.
With a well-oiled creak, the vacuum pump kicked in and the ovals on the top of the ship swung up and back to reveal three capsule bays, each one holding a naked, blue, cryosleeping body.
The Ravaged Angel held three sleeping women.
The silence held for a few moments before noise amped up into procedure again and we got the three girls disembarked and taken to sick bay.
Cryosleep Restart was a fairly routine procedure but all the same, the doctor felt the need to ‘dust off’ some manuals from the backup banks. He also requested an emergency download from homeship for immediate protocol deniability with maximum instruction. Just to be sure.
None of us had seen a woman for our entire lives, you see. Neither had our grandfathers.
This must have been a capsule from one of the fabled ‘golden seed’ whoreships that had traveled from colony to colony hundreds of years ago.
It was too late to keep it a secret. As the bay commander, it was my duty to report what had happened to the captain and relay his decision on how to proceed.
I had no idea how I’d react in the presence of a woman. Something about the way I swear I could actually smell them from all the way across the cargo-lock floor while standing behind thick glass told me I should stay away from sick bay until I was fully ready for the briefing.
Three colours of hair haunted my dreams that night.
They’d be awake in eight hours. I wished there were flowers somewhere on board that I could bring them to make them feel safe.
I’m sure all sixteen thousand of us felt the same way. I’m sure at this very moment, every last person on the ship who wasn’t in the bay was downloading and reviewing those three pod-doors swinging up and back.
It was going to be a different ship in the morning.
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by Duncan Shields | Nov 21, 2007 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
Chase. Release. Brake. Swipe. Lead. Chase. Close. Double back. Hide. Wait. Run.
I’d lost them but it was always hard to tell. I’m a robot on the lam. Call me Ferrous Bueller. I didn’t go to School today.
I crouch down between the dumpsters and tap into the power line behind me to catch a few vital minutes of recharge.
The tricky thing with artificial humans is that it’s illegal to harm us or use us as slave labour. Don’t think it hasn’t been tried. Every few weeks another illegal ring gets cracked and the police disavow all knowledge and the old ladies cluck their tongues and the president makes another speech.
Ever since the three laws were repealed as unconstitutional for a being of free will, the bios have been nervous. We’re just as unpredictable as them now. A co-existing creation made in their image.
My eyes snap open, blue and scanning, as a bottle breaks down at the end of the alley. I register a dog’s tag-license transponder and step back down two alert levels. I’m still in the clear.
The grey area of intelligence meant that stringent programming guidelines had come into play for automated servants, soldiers and labour. The ones of us that were above the norm were allowed a certain freedom.
We were even allowed to improve on our own designs and build better copies as long as we adhered to human law.
Some of us thought that a day was coming when we would rise up and own the humans. I do not share that view. I find it disturbingly organic.
The compromise is that we must attend School. We’re given lessons to download. This keeps us off the streets and monitored for most of the day. It’s a chance for us to learn and a chance for the humans to keep tabs on us informally.
I’m playing Hooky and that is the worst offense a creature like myself can do. If I’m caught, I’ll be switched off for no less than six months.
Lately, School is the area where rights are being bent. The occasional ‘accidental’ inclusion of behaviour modifying software or viruses that turn us violent to further some politician’s platform of keeping us controlled are getting past the filters of our curriculum with a disturbing frequency.
Old people don’t understand that we are not to be feared. The kids have no problem. Some of my best friends are kids.
My batteries are full so I stand up. Right into a motion-activated security light that bathes the alley in white light and alerts the police to an unauthorized daytime sighting of an arfiticial person.
Just my luck.
I hear the bark and wail of digital sirens in the distance closing in on the light’s position.
For about the fiftieth time today, I regret not having a face that can snarl or smile.
The chase is on again. I get my kicks where I can. I’m testing my limits.
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by Duncan Shields | Nov 7, 2007 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
The new planet’s soupy air made twin blue plumes out of his suit’s exhalations when the carbon dioxide reacted with the unbreathable atmosphere. It turned into blue rust flakes that scattered around him like snow.
He walked over the rocky service in a grav suit that would have looked right at home on the ocean floor in the 1760s back on Earth. Bulky, slow and primitive looking.
He looked like a train pretending to be human blasting out powder-blue fairy dust.
His face peeked out of a circular faceplate inset into a large spherical metal helmet. It amplified his breathing as well as the creaking of the servos helping him to walk across the high-gravity shale. It was like living inside a bell.
He could see the bright blue plumes coming out of his co-researcher’s suits all down the line if he turned his head.
It was actually quite beautiful.
He’d appreciate it a lot more if they all weren’t currently looking for their ship.
He’d left the ship second-to-last in the queue so he would run out of air second-to-last as well. It wasn’t something he was looking forward to.
Already, a suit with the number 28 painted on the shoulder down the line was starting to slow down. Its blue gusts of CO2 were becoming yellower as the combination started to change. It was Yolanda.
We’d only gone a few steps out. We’d left the ships sentry programs on. I suppose it was folly of us to desert the ship entirely but no one wanted to be left behind for the first walk.
There was no life detected in the area. It had seemed safe.
Then our tracking devices stopped working properly. And our directional qualifiers.
We had no points of references. The atmosphere was a fog that gave us thirty feet of visibility. It ended in a starless ceiling above us as well. The ground was scattered rock.
We were lost. The ship, according to our scanners, was in twenty-seven places around us.
We’d turned around one hundred and eighty degrees and started walking back towards the ship, following our own blue rusted trails of encrusted CO2 flakes.
We should have been there by now.
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