by Duncan Shields | Oct 29, 2013 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
YOUNG DOMESTICATED HAND-RAISED HUMAN BEINGS
FREE TO A GOOD HOME
I have 5 young (13 Earth Years) DOMESTICATED pet humans that are looking for loving nest hives. These humans have been handled since birth, have no problem with tentacles, and love us blogdors. Humans make great pets for blogdors of all ages, are very affordable to care for and their short (60-80 Earth Years) life span leaves no long term commitment. These humans are extremely social and love to cuddle. They are (mostly) litter box trained, and will eat nearly anything you feed them. Humans do best in pairs, and can get very depressed without a friend. Although, if you have a lot of spare time, humans make lovely solo pets as well.
These humans ARE NOT KORRA FOOD. I understand that korras need to eat, too, but so much time and energy has went into raising and domesticating these little ones that it would be a waste of such precious tiny lives.
Experience with offworld animals is recommended, but as long as you are willing to provide a loving home, they can be a great beginner pet.
Supplies needed to adopt pet humans
-Airtight, pressurized cage (at least 10 square tentacle-lengths)
-Water bottle
-Oxygen/nitrogen mix with transposer
-Litter box (with litter obviously)
If interested, leave pheromone trail near the pupae farms before second moonrise.
by Duncan Shields | Oct 25, 2013 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
A gas giant named Zeus in the Organa cluster is so big that even its moons have moons. These mini-moons are called moonlets. There are 45 moons and over three hundred moonlets. It makes for very complicated diplomacy.
Resources were too scarce for outright war between all the moons but skirmishes broke out all the time. Diplomats became necessary. The Moon Council consisted of 352 representatives, one from each inhabited moon and moonlet.
One diplomat stood out from all the rest and not just by reputation. He dressed in leaves and rags and had a long beard.
His moonlet was known only as the Swamp Moon and it had a population of one: him. It was the smallest moonlet, just barely over the asteroid line.
He had proclaimed himself the Swamp Moon King. He was so ridiculous that the rest of the Moon System decided to go with Prime Ministers, Presidents, High Masters, Council Heads and Representatives rather than name themselves kings or queens. Ironically, in their attempt to avoid being anything like him, they made him the only king in the council.
He was quite old now. Many of the other diplomats here on the Moon Council had come and gone due to elections, border disputes and death yet the Swamp Moon King remained.
The Moon Council was called to order and The Swamp Moon King sat down.
“The council is called to order, by the shadow of Zeus.” Said Pretoriat Minister Reddia Morecombe, presider of Fiddler’s Moon and speaker of the house. “Firstly, let’s tackle new business. Anyone have anything to bring to the council?”
The Swamp Moon King raised his shaking, elderly hand with a rustle of leaves. The last time he’d brought something up had been three years earlier. It had been a motion to legally recognize plants as family members. It was struck down with a good deal of laughter but it was remembered fondly. The King raising his hand as always a welcome departure from the usual boredom of diplomacy.
“My time grows short and kings need an heir.” He began. The gathered diplomats smirked, entertained anew by his always ridiculous attempt at regality.
“I would like to introduce my daughter.” The council fell silent, intrigued. Daughter? Everyone knew he lived alone. “The Swamp Moon Princess.” He continued.
He opened his coms and the giant televiews pinged to life with an image of a beautiful young woman. Comely, curvy, and head held high.
But her eyes were the orange of autumns leaves and her skin was the bright green of the inside of a sapling. Her ivy hair spilled over her shoulders.
“Her mother passed away last year. She is all I have left.” Mother? A rustle of whispers blew through the hall as the gathered council talked in confusion to each other. Viewer counts from the moon network climbed as news of an actual princess spread and people switched over to see.
“Her name is Petal. But in a short time, you will come to know her as the Swamp Moon Queen. I hope you will afford her every courtesy and accept her reign as you have mine.”
“But you live alone! How on earth did you produce a daughter?” asked Leviah Miranda, Second Minister of the moonlet Mecon.
“I am a xenbotanist first and foremost. A human biologist second. Her mother, you see, was a tree.” Said the Swamp Moon King, and smiled serenely, eyes tinged with sadness.
“We hope to find a decent suitor for her before I die.” He said.
The flurry of activity that followed pleased them both greatly.
by Duncan Shields | Oct 16, 2013 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
The worst thing about their weapons was the silence. They flickered like a strobe light but anyone caught in that beam had a layer of meat burned off for every flash. They melted like snowmen in a microwave but snowmen didn’t have bones or blood. And they didn’t scream like my daughter did. I’m all that’s left of my family now and this group of starving, dead-eyed refugees might be all that’s left of the human race for all I know. Communication devices have been black for over a year.
The aliens themselves didn’t scream, grunt, or shout. They didn’t even breathe. They appeared to communicate through sheer intuition or a form of telepathy that our scientists didn’t have time to figure out before the world ended.
The blue creatures moved quickly and silently. The ones that we’d managed to cut open were a dark blue, dense sponge of meat all the way through. No internal organs or circulatory system. It was a mystery why they’d assumed human form. Without bones or organs, they could probably be whatever shape they liked. They even had five fingers and toes. Maybe they were fabricated and we were used as a blueprint.
No face, though. Or Ears. Just a smooth blue skin covering their sexless bodies as they silently found us and exterminated us with those silent, horrifying weapons.
The sixteen of us huddling here in the dark underneath a shattered highway are starving. We haven’t seen a living plant or animal in a week. There’s plenty of rain to drink but I can’t be sure that it isn’t poisoning us. We aren’t military. We’re just a random group of people that ended up together after fleeing attacks. Mice that hid in the same place. Labourers, cooks, store-clerks, a data entry technician and me, a retired teacher. Well, I guess we’re all retired now.
If the aliens are prioritizing their victims by threat, we are low on the list. Sometimes I think that’s the only reason we’re still alive. Simply too pathetic to expend effort on at the moment. But they’ll get around to us soon enough.
There weren’t any demands when they showed up. Just a routing of our planet.
As we sit here under the jut of ruined asphalt listening to the rain, I think back to the battles I’ve seen, the people I’ve lost, and wonder how long we have left. I don’t feel like I’ll ever be full or dry or warm again.
I remember the first battle footage; our soldiers dying and screaming, our weapons making a frightening amount of noise. Our bullets just sank a few inches into their flesh and stopped. The ones we did manage to destroy didn’t panic the others. They kept coming like animated scarecrows. The aliens’ silent weapons and quiet advance worked against us morale wise. At first we seemed fierce but after the tide turned and it was only us crying and moaning, they seemed like the living embodiment of the end of our time here. Like a living eraser come to quietly smother us, to put our race to sleep.
Then I remember them working their way through our apartment and I have to stop thinking.
I don’t know if we’re being terraformed, mined, or just destroyed.
Perhaps they are the equivalent of oven cleaner and their makers will come down to live on a fresh planet.
The aliens could be standing right around the corner and we’d never know because they don’t make a sound.
I listen for silence and wait for the death that silence will bring.
by Duncan Shields | Oct 10, 2013 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
In a city this size, a dozen or so beaming errors a year were acceptable.
In each gigantic waystation structure, the building blocks of life were kept in vats and tubs. There were huge enclosed swimming pools filled with chromosomes and proteins and cell juice. Vast, layered skin farms were rotated underneath mile-long sunlamp tubes on the upper levels.
Each facility jutted up like an architect’s dying wish on the outskirts of the major cities. They were effectively airports in a universe that had done away with air travel.
Those initial millennia of colonization were tortuous but this was the new age. All was well. To travel between the stars no longer required a spaceship.
It was found that information could be pushed faster than light while mass could not. Coded streams of electrons could be bent around the straightness of space. We made paper airplanes out of the impossible.
A person was put, naked, shivering and afraid, into a bathtub cubicle chamber on one end. The lid was closed and the dissassemblers were let in. It was fast acting acid swamped with tiny nanos that took the person apart piece by piece while recording every bit of it.
They always screamed. It was painful.
The nanos were set on ‘record’ as they tore the person apart. That information was coded into a hardbase of data which was then threaded onto an electron batch. With a focused squirt, the person’s breakdown was sent to his or her destination.
It went behind the closets of the universe, in between the cracks.
It was received seconds later by one of the mentioned white structures outside the destination city.
There, using the building blocks available, they put the coded instructions into a machine, set them to ‘reverse’, and then hit play.
It was like watching a film of melting wax being run backwards.
The person was re-built without the last ten agonizing minutes of memory from the breakdown process. The rebuilding took weeks.
Angela’s electron burst must have skirted a star because she woke up skinless, missing her legs, six of her fingers and a fair portion of her brain.
She never fully recovered. They did what they could but humans were still a little hit and miss when it came to creating people from scratch with no nanorecords.
She was taken care of wonderfully in the basements of the building. Her relatives signed waivers and become richer. She learned a few words of English to communicate. She never got the hang of her new fingers and legs. She died happily in a diaper five years later.
In a city this size, a dozen or so beaming errors a year were acceptable.
by Duncan Shields | Oct 8, 2013 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
Randolph Beaucoup of the Terran Diplomacy Wing had been selected from fifty candidates for this particular First Contact mission. Little was known about the Marenko other than they were anamorphic pseudopods without discernible features. Smooth gelatinous bags that had the ability to form as many multi-fingered tentacles as needed to build or manipulate technology. The Terrans were still trying to figure out how they saw without eyes and thought without detectable brains.
There were large ones and small ones although that seemed to have no bearing on age. There was talk of one the size of an ocean but it may have been a god myth of some kind. All was unclear at this stage other than the fact that they had space-travel capability and were, by and large, peaceful.
The math constructs had been sent and received as proof of intelligence and no weaponry was detected at the landing site.
Randolph stood on the plateau a few steps away from the Terran landing plank beneath his ship, clad in a fishbowl helmet to clearly display his face and wearing a tight spacesuit that showed his musculature to curious species. It was known as the ‘nothing-to-hide’ approach. The stars twinkled above him. The Marenko balanced in front of him like a transparent slug rearing to impersonate a capital S. Unlike slugs, however, the Marenko were unnervingly quick and this one was the size of an elephant seal.
The Marenko extended a glittering flower-tipped pseudopod towards Randoplh and paused. Randolph extended his own hand and grasped the pod tip in what, in his experience, was a universal sign of greeting. A sharp pinprick zeroed in on his palm. His suit easily patched the tiny rupture as Randolph withdrew his stinging hand with an involuntary hiss of shock.
Before he could move, the Marenko extended another tentacled pad that slapped wetly up against Randolph’s helmet and stuck there.
“Hello Randolph. The earth-name I have chosen for myself is Mary.” said a pleasantly-modulated voice. The tentacle was vibrating against Randolph’s helmet to produce the sound. “It is a pleasure to meet you. This has been a delightful first contact and I am honored to be the first to produce our communication.”
Randolph thought that was an odd choice of words.
“The pleasure is mine, Mary.” he replied. “I’m happy to meet you too. I’m curious, what was the purpose of poking me like that?” he asked, tentatively hopeful that the answer would be benign.
“I needed a small tissue sample to produce our communication. You are in me now, growing. Soon you will be large enough to leave yourself here and then we can talk after you leave.”
Randolph couldn’t understand the words. The sentence must been parsed wrong in the alien’s nascent attempt at translation. “I’m afraid I don’t understand, Mary.” he said.
“Look closely at my center, Randolph.” said Mary.
Randolph looked closer at the core of the huge alien’s wavering, smooth body. There, in the center, curled up and twitching, was what looked like a tiny human baby.
A tiny baby with transparent skin and gelatinous bones. A tiny baby with dark hair and dark eyes, just like Randolph. It grew as he looked at it. A Meranko-Human hybrid of some kind.
“This version of you will stay here. We will converse. It will have your memories but it will be of my race as well. After a short amount of time, you may come to collect him and talk to him as well to gather your own information.”
“Uh…..what?”responded Randolph eloquently.
“I am, as you say, pregnant.” said Mary.
