Tyrania

Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer

It’s a little ticklish when the needles go in but the anesthetic keeps her from moving. It keeps her laughing on the inside.

Grown from a vat of jaguar with a splash of greyhound and a swirl of human, she’s extremely thin and toothy. This is her last treatment before she’s shipped off to Overman Ranker’s Field Farms for training.

She’ll be part of an Assassin’s Guild nick-named The Circus. All of the killers are animal hybrids. The term ‘guild’ is a bit of a misnomer. ‘Kennel’ would be more accurate. The assassins are little more than happy pets that are conditioned to be stealthy and to kill without mercy.

An animal’s nose full of the scent from the victim’s clothing is much more efficient than a photograph/dossier when it comes to tracking a man down in the dark.

Tyrania is two years old. She’s either happy or in pain. No other emotions exist within her. The pain of punishment tells her what not to do. Right now, she’s happy. The spinal tap keeps her immobilized while the nanozomes do their knitting and pearling to the building blocks of her epidermis.

After training, she’ll be able to pass for human. The skeletal creature on the table with dark spots dotting the long, grey fur will become something more akin to human when the process is finished.

She’ll be killing in the higher classes. It’s the bear-and-croc mods that they send to the poor places.

Her long nails are retracted and painted a garish red. The newborn killers always choose cosmetics that look like blood on their nails and lips. It’s comforting to them. It’s frightening to see them smile in the mirror after their first reward of makeup. More often than not, they’ve smeared a line of lipstick around their lips. The eyes glass over with the dreams of blood as they tilt their head at their reflection.

They get trained to be human on the Field Farm. I mean, they get trained to kill people in any number of ways with the aid of mental downloads and grueling days of physical training but they’re also told how to act at the dinner table and how to keep a conversation going.

We teach them to be background. They’re expendable so there’s no exit routes planned when they’re sent on missions.

I miss the ones that don’t come back. I don’t like the ones that do. They change after a successful mission.

This one here, Tyrania, is looking straight up at the ceiling as I prepare the depilatory cream. I’m in her peripheral vision. I give her a wink to reassure her.

She smiles at me.

It’s a smile I see in my nightmares for years. I won’t do that again.

My team and I get to work making her as human as we can and I try not to catch her eye again.

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Time Streams

Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer

If I was tripping, my colleagues must have been as well because we all saw it. Just us four janitors on the night shift, mops and brooms dropped, staring at the nightmare in the corner of the building. It spoke to us but I couldn’t see where its mouth was.

“There is more than one timestream. They are connected.” it said.

The alien being glowed blue like a special effect from a bad movie. It took up a corner of the warehouse in a way I didn’t understand. My eyes couldn’t focus on it properly. I could make out tentacles but then they would look like arms and then tentacles again.

“To further the analogy, one could say that there are tributaries, rapids, and rivers as well, all cascading madly in one direction towards the unknowable, distant event horizon of the future. They weave, grow fatter, splash apart and trickle, adding ‘what ifs’ to each other’s histories with the participants being none the wiser before splitting off again.

To abuse the metaphor further, I would say that I am part of a corporation that builds dams. We make time lakes. Smooth-surfaced, still and stable.”

I glanced at Stephen. He stared at me in confusion and fear. We didn’t understand what it was saying. But none of us ran away. We all stood, fascinated and rooted to the spot.

“There are beings that detest the constant motion of naturally occurring time. The sudden turns, the splashing arcs, the stop-and-go nature of it. The eddies and small whirlpools of déjà vu and karmic re-entries. They don’t like the bumpy ride.

Some of these beings build crafts to navigate the streams but only the richest can afford to make them sturdy and strong. The poor ones can only strap together the equivalent of a canoe with a paddle.

They pay to take their ships and drift slowly and softly out over the unchanging surface of our time lakes.

As a bonus, our time reservoir generates huge amounts of power as multiverse entropy fights to keep the time going. We let a small stream through near the bottom to keep the universe happy and to keep the lake at a constant level. We rent the surface time and we sell the power. We win both ways.

This is all metaphor, of course, told to you in terms you can envisage.”

The being shuddered and started to lose its consistency. It seemed to go away from us, down from us, and fade out all at the same time.

“It’s hard to talk to entropic, finite beings about this. You are trapped in time but we live on top of it. But I have to tell you what’s happening.

I’ve fallen overboard and I can’t swim. I’m drowning in your dimension. I can’t conform to your angles and time direction. I was by myself so I don’t think there’ll be much chance of a rescue.

Oh no, this is it. I can’t hold on. I’m sinking.”

The creature disappeared with a shudder and a pop and reality wobbled where it had been.

Stephen looked at Jake and Peter looked at me.

We decided filing a report wouldn’t be worth the paperwork seeing as we’d all probably get fired for using drugs on the job.

We agreed to never speak of it again.

But every now and again, I think of the time lakes while I’m cleaning.

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Birds of a Feather

Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer

There are trillions of them and they fly in layers.

The larger ones at the top interlock together during mating season, puzzle-piece continents drifting above us. The whalescoops dive down to feed on the krillsparrows below them. Turtlehawks and wolflocusts prey on rabbitdoves and deergulls. Hummingbird piranhas flit and nip at the turkey squids, producing dark puffs of ink-cloud pollen.

Insects, plants, mammals, reptiles and unclassifiable combinations of the four. All flying. The inhabitants of this planet’s entire ecosystem are airborne and they never land because there is no land, only dark, sterile ocean thousands of miles below.

Small birds roost and nest on the bigger ones. There’s a hierarchy food and waste chain based on altitude, gravity pulling leftovers down through each layer, filtering evolution. The huge ray gliders drift through schools of brilliant parrot squirrels bursting with colour. The entire world is a continually shifting miasma of hues and sound.

At night, they glow. Flourescing horse pelicans trailing long tails of feather lights. Firefly minnow finches exploding with colour en masse looking for mates. Peacock trout cry out as they display fireworks of neon-shimmering leaves along their spines. Jellyfish Condors drip glowing willow-tree stingers to attract the mothgrouse. Deep-sky angler dragons trail ribbon-like through the lower atmosphere, dangling their lures like intelligent flares. Eel geese honk in giant arrow formations, stripes running across their bodies in synchronized communication. And the fissures underneath the massive air-island floaters above us glow with algae all colours of the rainbow.

I cannot see the ocean below or the sky above. I am a scientist and my name was Walter. My research mission ended six years ago but I elected to stay. There are skytribes here. I researched them and befriended them. Their name is birdsong that I have painstakingly learned to reproduce with my whistling.

My research helped classify them as a non-threatening, level-four primitive civilization. Tagged for quarantine non-involvement until such time as they develop the technology to explore space.

Personally, I see them as stalling at a sweet spot in their evolution that needs no improvement. There has been little to no change in them in millions of years, much like crocodiles or barracudas back on Earth.

I theorized that they started as a symbiotic relationship, remora-like with larger birds. Eventually, they started steering the birds to the best food. In time, that control made the remoras dominant and the larger birds the underlings. The remoras had to band together in schooltribes to hunt. Communities formed. Societies followed.

They have insect-like iridescent chitin armour skin. They reproduce by back spores seasonally like dandelion seeds. They hatch from eggs and go through larval stages in huge tadpole flocks. They mature into their final three stages as warm-blooded and gradient from male to female to genderless over their lives.

I’ve named the second-stage one next to me Rebecah. Her legs blend and clutch with the neck of her mount perfectly, forming the illusion of a swantaur. Her mane ripples out behind her.

She looks over at me with smile that I saw as terrifying years ago with all those eyes and beak teeth but I see as endearing now.

My mount is a ravenshark. My body is smeared with the fluorescent paint needed to mock Rebecah’s chitin skin. I have proven myself to them. They are fascinated by my ability to hold onto my male ‘stage’ for longer than usual. I have entered into their oral tribal history.

Rebecah screams the hunt scream and raises her spear. I copy her and we both dive. The hunt is on.

I live here now.

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Silverfish

Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer

Wings of Night. That’s what Jeffrey thought the ship should be named. Instead, the bonehead Captain James had named her Silverfish.

Jeffrey sat at his small, cramped station going through his pre-launch checklist, face lit by the screens and buttons in front of him.

The head engineer Sparling wanted to name the ship Leap Year and the communications officer wanted to name her Screamer so Jeffrey supposed that they were getting off easy with Silverfish but it still rankled him.

Silverfish are little bugs that eat furniture back in terrestrial habitats, thought Jeffrey. They have no majesty, no sense of mystery.

Jeffrey wasn’t sure Captain James even knew what a silverfish was. He probably thought it was like a huge metallic trout or something. That was a nice image, sure, picturing the muscled fins arcing out of a stream with the dawn sunlight prisming into rainbows through the droplets in slow motion.

The only problem with the name was that this new experimental tesseractive engine housing that they were all piloting was black as a planet’s shadow. That’s why Jeffrey thought that it should be called something darker.

Like Wings of Night.

The scientists wanted to call her Tess because of the tesseract-drive. In fact, they kept making jokes about taking it out for a ‘tess drive’. Jeffrey guessed that things could be worse. At least the captain has asked for their opinion. Jeffrey wasn’t the only person a little grumpy about the choice of name but it would pass, though, as soon as the mission was underway and they had their separate jobs to do.

Jeffrey was the armament officer which, on a sleek vehicle designed for stealth like this one, mostly meant making sure that they were invisible to scanners and, if necessary, deploying the scrambling countermeasures that would fry nearby communication and detection systems so that they could make a clean getaway.

It was a new thing for Jeffrey. He’d always been in charge of what he thought of as ‘actual’ armaments before.

But the prestige that came with this trip would be immense. If they didn’t origami themselves out of existence when they turned on the engine for the first time.

“All hands. Operational stations. Silverfish is go for T minus twenty.”

Jeffrey strapped himself in. A small quiver of fear shivered through him that he stamped down on immediately. Wings of Night actually had an ominous feel to it, he thought. Silverfish sounded kind of hopeful.

Jeffrey made the sign of the cross there in his chair before giving an all-clear response to the control board. He hadn’t done that since he was seven years old.

Let’s go Silverfish, he thought. Deliver us from evil.

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Shell

Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer

Are we robot zombies or are we the pinnacle of humanity? Are we ahead of the evolutionary curve? Did we make the leap that all creatures with a finite lifespan have to or are we freaks? The universe remains as silent as it ever has on the subject.

No one dies of natural causes anymore.

We count our blessings but we’re scared. Dr Hansen saved us and doomed us all at the same time.

The year was 2020. “A year for vision”, they called it. And Dr Hansen delivered.

Immortality, eternal youth, the cure for AIDS and the Big C. All a person had to do was cease to be human.

“You see, our spirits are not our bodies. Our bodies are not our selves,” Dr. Hansen said. “Our brains are meat but our minds are something altogether different. We decay too quickly. The problem is what we’re made of, not who we are.”

He proposed a consciousness transfer into mostly artificial bodies. Sausage meat into a bullet casing. Nervous systems became calm systems. The hot red of blood became the cool blue of coolant. Neurons became nanocapacitors. Shreds of the original brain and nerves survived but were coffined into layers of hermetically-sealed exoskeletons.

The eccentric rich went for it. After that, Hansen cut corners and lowered prices, extolling his wares on telnet and oldweb. It sold well. The older folk, the terminally ill and the daredevil visionaries lined up. It created a very lively debate amongst the existentialists and religious scholars.

The military departments loved him. Living weapons were a reality; more predictable than the alien algorithms of flaky A.I.s. Unregistered mercenaries loved him as well.

Dr. Hansen became rich off of the patents involved, the factories that made the equipment, and the laboratories that made the switch. The black market, the grey market, and the legitimate downtown offices all were booming.

The thing that freaked the naysayers out was that it was a one-way switch. Just a glance at the metal skin of the warmechs or even the plastic skin of the short-lived humanomorph fad made a lot of people shut their eyes and shiver.

Sex was no longer possible in an artificial body. Orgasm programs and virtual reality were available stims for the fakebodies but it wasn’t the same. That fact made the young people stay away.

Dr Hansen was trying to figure out how to pitch to their demographic when the plague hit.

An airborne flesh-eating virus dubbed The End with a 98% communicability rate killed all the non-transferred people, Dr Hansen included. The higher primates all died as well. In one year, the population of the earth nosedived.

Everyone in Shells survived.

The earth is populated now by the minds of out-of-work soldiers, old people, and the once rich. Hulking metal weapons and artistic interpretations of the human form. Basic automaton models mixing with shining, high-end custom jobs. The population is holding at ten million, two hundred thirty thousand, and sixty-six.

Scared minds in tin cans.

We’ve been building shells again in an effort to propogate the species but we’re finding it difficult to clone new nervous systems with the virus still in the air. It hasn’t gone away. And most of Dr Hansen’s notes were lost in The End riots.

We are a closed system now. A finite population that can only get lower unless we figure out how to reproduce properly. Our scientists are working on it but not that many of them made the switch, oddly enough.

Until we can figure out how to reproduce, we wait.

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