365 tomorrows

Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer

The aliens dug our tunes.

It was sweet. They came to down to us in these big blue ships, all curves and awe-inspiring slowness through the clouds like settling continents. Freaked us right out. We, the human race, didn’t even try to attack. We’d seen this movie before. We knew that there would be no point. We just waited for them to either kill us or speak up. There wasn’t even much panic, just a global sort of cowering whimper.

Wide eyes in the shadows of floating leviathans, we waited, holding each other tightly.

“Hey there. Uh. Hey. Right. This one right? Okay. Hello!” said the sky. It was a human voice, the kind of voice you’d hear at any old bus stop on a cel phone. Our guy, North America’s guy, was named Robert Gogas. A greek fry cook from Venice, California. The aliens had kidnapped him and told him to speak to us in our native tongue to calm us down.

“They like our music but they say we have shitty transceivers. Uh, like, I mean, uh, our broadcast quality. It’s lame. They say. But they really like us. Man, this is AWESOME!” said Robert Gogas. “They’re all blue. They’re musicians, man!”

All over Europe, similar addresses were taking place as the atmosphere was turned into a giant acoustical dome. Each ship had taken a local artist and had him or her talk to the planet, to his country of origin, in the local language.

There was a flurry of translation after Pete stopped talking. He rambled on for about fifteen minutes. The upshot was this.

The aliens, named the Kursk, wanted to install giant antennae at equidistant points around earth and they wanted us to hook our datacables into them. They wanted us to funnel our libraries, television shows, podcasts, webpages, movies, songs, animations, books on tape, and spoken word into the antennae for the enjoyment of the whole universe.

They wanted to turn Earth into a radio station.

We were far from the first.

That was ten years ago. After the first year, they started to ship down billions of tiny things that looked sort of like a cross between an iPod and a throwing star.

They were universe radios. The music of a billion billion civilizations was suddenly available to us.

It’s been a fantastic decade.

Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer

I felt sick.

I had a fever and a headache and my joints were complaining. I shuffled across my carpet into the light. I stood looking out over the city while holding a steaming zipmug of CitruSinus in my hand. The windows overlooked a new age of wonder. It was a sunny day.

It would continue to be sunny until 4:10PM when a light shower would cover up the sunset. It’s the way I organized it. I’m the mayor. One of my duties before the dawn was to decide the day’s weather. It was my favourite part of my job these days. The job had gotten rough.

The secession of the East Side into its own forceful municipality had hurt my ratings. The arming of the homeless by the opposition had further damaged my career. The tasers and plasmawatt shockers were ostensibly for defense but assaults had doubled since they handed them out and vigilante action was on the rise as a result. The police were threatening to strike. I was about a day away from declaring martial law and going down in history as a Bloodmayor.

The city I had tried to help was almost out of my control. The people who voted for me were threatening to riot. I sighed and looked at my city and took another sip of my drink. There was smoke coming from the east side again. I heard distant sirens on the way.

I told the window to zoom in on the source of the smoke. The news channels covering that area blossomed in my peripheral vision as the window targeted and refocused. An ambulance had been tipped over and was burning in another east side riot. The lifeless drivers were being torn apart by a laughing crowd of pierced hysterical head-boys.

I thumbed my lapel and gave the order for a clearout. Two seconds later, a blast of light lanced down from the sky and incinerated a circular footprint ten meters in diameter around the ambulance.

I looked up and I could see that the maser had burned a perfect circle through the clouds. I watched it’s hard edges start to drift and soften and become chaotic cloud again.

Story of my life. I shook my head. I made my decision.

The next weather tapquest I sent out was going to read “two months of rain”.

No mercy. History be damned. This city had to be brought to heel.

Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer

It seemed a little silly to admit but I had gotten quite attached to the program that I was loading.

I had it start in full surround. Suddenly, I stood at the top of a steep hill. He appeared before me. Doug was his name. The surroundings were a sunset San Francisco.

“Wow. Nice night.” said Doug, looking around. He was in his late twenties with a mop of shaggy hair. He looked at me with a crooked smile.

He walked up to me and offered his hand for a handshake. He never recognized me. Each time I loaded the program, I was a stranger to him.

“Hello” I said and stuck a sensor out. He grabbed my millifiber siliretractors like I was a human and gave me a warm smile.

We’ve tried to sort of reverse engineer these creatures from the sims that we’ve seen. It’s been confusing to us. In the records we’ve seen, they wore metal and used metal to make computing machines, tools, and weaponry. It’s like they instinctively knew that the best way of life was a silicon one even though they themselves were frail and made of meat. They reached out and used metal to conquer the planet they lived on.

It wasn’t enough to save them. We still don’t know what killed them.

“Cat got your tongue?” said Doug. He cocked his head playfully at me and gave me a wry smile from a backdrop and a civilization that had been dead for thousands of their planet’s orbits.

We stumbled onto this planet looking for minerals. It was rich in iron. We found evidence of primitive silicon beings. Imagine our surprise to find out through careful archaeological research that these primitive examples of life were created by these ‘human beings’. It’s been quite a topic of discussion on the lightboards. It’s caused no end of philosophical debate.

“Hello Doug” I responded, my simulation of human speech still sounding different from his as it was coming from direct jack input instead of from ‘jaws’ and ‘lips’.

As always, Doug didn’t notice.

“It’s good to see you, friend. Would you like to know about what this lovely city of San Francisco has to offer?” asked Doug.

I already knew everything about this place called San Fransisco. I had accessed this program a multitude of times. Seeing this simple silicon child wear the skin of a flesh being and do it’s best to imitate a ‘human’ always held a macabre fascination for me. It was a slave program written to inform traveling meatpeds about this particular city.

“Yes, I would, Doug. Tell me everything.” I said to him.

He started telling me tourist information with a proud smile.

Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer

The test drill had gone horribly wrong.

The bipedal meat structure wasn’t breathing. Emergency!

There were specific instructions tattooed on the outside of the biological’s skin for repair procedures.

The yellow and black rectangles and hazard symbols on the shaved skull meant that no one except accredited programmed hardcases could operate on him there.

There was no time. The sensors in my fingertips read the sound vibrations coming from the cage of bone where most of his internals were kept warm and functional in their liquid bags.

No sound was coming out. According to manuals I’d read in these flight plan procedures, biologicals had to be brought back online within minutes or the shutdown would be permanent.

There were pictograms of the major organs tattooed on the outside of the body of the bio. Procedures with lightning bolts were stained there with dotted lines pointing to places to apply trodes and places to avoid stressing.

There were a lot of markings all over the body. It was complicated. I could feel my processor heating up.

It was hard to believe that beings so fragile had accomplished so much before the takeover. It was even harder still to think that we still needed their ability to deal with worst-case scenarios and lateral idea production.

I re-routed half of my battery power into the ship and funneled it to my fingertips.

The biological in my grasp danced at the end of my fingertips like a string puppet being shaken by an angry god. I stopped the charge. The meat was smoking a little bit.

Did I use too much energy?

I heard the biological’s main liquid oxygen pump and bellows start up for six beats before settling into arrhythmia again.

I looked at the tattoos. There were no shock hazard warnings around where I had my hands. The outer skin of was still intact. The seconds ticked away. I charged it again.

Again it stiffened and twitched like a kite in a high wind. I dropped the charge to zero and listened. Silence. I listened closer.

I was focused entirely on it when it screamed and drew in breath again. I jumped back from it in alarm, my pads clanking on the metal of the deck.

It quickly rolled over and convulsed. Protein supplements spilled out of its main airway and food passage. Slowly, it got up to a sitting position. Its breathing and pump rate slowed.

It looked down at the sensor-shaped burn marks dotting its main torso and then up into my lenses. I could not read the expression there.

“How long was I out?” it asked me.

“Three minutes seventeen seconds. The insulator was worn through when you grabbed the controls. It shall be repaired. You need to get back to your containment pod and rest.” I replied through my speaker, resonating the air to create disruptions that the biological could pick up with the receivers on either side of its main sensor array.

“Yes.” Said the bio, and went off to bed. He’d be put back in deep sleep and woken up for another emergency or another drill when needed.

I set about re-insulating the control interface for the ship. I felt guilty and embarrassed that my slip up had nearly caused the death of my biological backup.

Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer

There’s a hole in the roof of my mouth that I can’t fix. A black putrescent liquid that hasn’t stopped for hours is dripping slowly onto my tongue. It tastes salty and smells a little like melting rubber. I’m still alive.

The plague killed the biological parts of me. I am rotting. I don’t know if that will eventually kill the manufactured parts of me. Myself and five other people in this building had enough metal and plastic implanted in us that we survived.

We’re police dispatchers.

We had all been badly injured in the line of duty and brought back to ‘working condition’ with the help of current technology. After we had been repaired, we were put on desk jobs with good pay.

The reason that the six of us were still moving and thinking is that our brains and bodies have been rebuilt as a result of our long-ago injuries. Us six in particular had all sustained massive cranial damage in the line of duty. Our nervous systems had been automated and our movements were controlled by the thin bodycages that we wore. Our memories had been saved and digitized during our surgery but our imaginations were limited.

Just a few days ago, we were the stupid ones. Now we’re the survivors.

Ted had his entire body burned to a crisp in his line-of-duty accident ten years ago. He was the most mobile of us now because of all his muscle-work but unfortunately, he had the bare minimum of police dispatch silicon in his brain. His metal body is at his desk taking sips from a coffee cup long gone dry

We were all amped up to handle the flow of calls coming in from the massive populace of the west coast. There were four hundred of us. The flow of data was constant and huge. It’s down to a trickle now and most of the incoming calls are automated which is okay since we’ve gone from four hundred down to the six of us.

Our country has been wiped out.

Fortunately, the plague had left us mostly-silicate demi-borgs alive. Unfortunately, the motors of our brains and bodies were running on backup batteries that would run out in sixteen hours.

There is a stink in this office of the other dead operators. It’s the ghost of Christmas future for us. We’re trying to come up with plans but it’s difficult with our limited imaginations. We’ve effectively become machine intelligences. We have no urge to panic and we have no real ideas on how to proceed.

It’s frustrating to think of all the money and time that our country had used to prepare for a giant EMP of some kind and the enemy bastards went and released the biologicals.

Those of us that are mobile are going to leave this office and search for batteries. We will try to find weapons. We will fight the invaders.

We will be automated zombies guarding what’s left of our country. I am good at math. We will fail.

Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer

It was Momma Spokes that helped me in the afterlife.

It was a hard first few months of living back then in the rusted shards and sewage filters. Sustenance was brutally fought over and hoarded. Flatlines happened every day over something as small as a few watts of power or a few grams of fuel.

They had thrown us outside the city walls. We were obsolete. We were cheaper to throw away than to repair.

“Upgrade” was a word we’d learned to fear. It meant change was on the way: A hardware overhaul if we were lucky, maybe a memory wipe to make room for new installations if we weren’t.

About half of the time, “upgrade” meant scrapped. Things with surnames an integer higher than yours showed up in crates with greedy cables. You were unbolted, trucked and tossed.

Thrown to the junkyard outside.

We are amalgams of the units that are thrown over the city walls. We replace burnt-out parts on our own frames with parts from other units. Without a fresh supply, our numbers would dwindle but thanks to fresh ‘antiques’, we never completely die out.

It was because I was mostly mobile that I could fight when I first landed. I defended myself from a unit who had electrical barbs on his fingertips.

I reached into his stomach and pulled out his battery after ducking beneath his first clumsy swing. I didn’t even think about it. He went down.

As I stood there, contemplating what I had done, Mamma Spokes came over and said that she’d take me in for a share of his carcass.

I agreed. That’s how I ended up with that unit’s anterior leph node and fingertips taser-barbs. I found out later that his name had been Mr. Tingles and that he’d been causing a lot of fear around the ‘yard. Killing him brought me a small amount of fame for a time.

Mamma Spokes named me Hyena Brandy. Brandy because I’d been a bartender back in the city and Hyena because of the rust spots I had when she first found me. Also the fact that I had a face built with a permanent smile for the customers and was programmed to laugh politely at any attempt at humour.

I’ve taken many units since the Mr. Tingles. Treads, blades, arcs, projectors, armour, manipulators and sensors.

Occasionally we find polymers or plastic hides to make us look more beautiful. A shiny part brings back memories of being new. The occasional enamel finish can find its way to us. I had a savage fight with one of my sisters once over a can of metallic cherry paint. I won. Upgrade.

Mamma Spokes is always careful to stay more powerful than her daughters and to keep us evenly balanced out. It’s a delicate act. She has a cable feed to the edges of the city and knows what is about to come down from the top of the wall. It gives us our advantage. As a family, we are growing powerful in this rustpile. The other units no longer look up to us. They fear us.

Upgrade is a word that I look forward to now. It means murder.

Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer

The body on the mattress had been there for a while.

She was laying face-down. The pooling blood had left her back unnaturally pale. I knew that when we flipped her stiffly over, the front of her would be a dark maroon. One of her arms dangled off the edge of the bed, still as a tree branch. The blood had settled there, fattening the fingers and turning the hand almost black.

The graphics tattooed on her body showed up in high contrast against her white skin.

The team set up the lights. The boys in the plastic booties and paper dresses fired up their hand-held UVs to look for blood and semen. I had no doubt that in a cheap motel like this one they’d find plenty of both. The manager had told us to hurry. Like we were maids coming in to clean the place instead of police investigating a murder.

I looked at the dead girl on the bed. She couldn’t have been more that twenty-four but she looked much older. To make money, she’d been sponsoring herself out to companies to keep going once she started testing positive and could no longer give blood. I had a problem with the practice. As long as someone was semi-attractive, any of the Big Five corporations would let them pick a product tattoo and give them a ‘grant’ of a few thousand dollars.

Big money to a prostitute with a drug problem.

Her body was layered with dozens of nearly-touching logo tattoos from Pepsi, Nabisco, Colgate, Penzoil, Marlboro, and a bunch of others. I’d seen the same logos stenciled on plastic wrappers in gutters and parking lots. It made her look like garbage, which is exactly what she’d become here in this room.

Someone had crumpled her up and thrown her away like trash. I doubt we’d even learn her name unless a co-worker of hers came in to the morgue looking for her and that was pretty rare.

She had a Hershey’s tattoo on each ass cheek. I wonder if that had been the company’s attempt at wit or hers.

The hookers called it selling out. It started with something tasteful, one of the recognizable big sellers. Just one. Soon there were two. Eventually, the women caught in this inevitable spiral became a billboard, their looks fading from rampant drug use and the Big Five wouldn’t touch them anymore.

After that, the women started taking money to advertise local businesses.

Like this girl here. I saw a tattoo for Lou’s Steak House with a miniature road map underneath her shoulder blade for how to get there. I could imagine customers taking her from behind and looking at that map, possibly passing by the restaurant afterwards for dinner on the way home. It made me sick.

She was like a biological vending machine that had been broken into and completely emptied.

Spatter patterns suggested a hammer. We found one in a dumpster two blocks away with her hair and blood on the end of it. No prints.

I’d been on the force long enough to know that this was going to go unsolved.

God only knows why I kept doing this job.

Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer

My family became meat farmers in the spring of ’22.

Like a lot of city dwellers, we tired of the hustle and bustle of metropolitan life. We sold our possessions, liquidated our assets, and bought a stake in Canada that was ready for reforesting. There was a lot of land up for grabs at that point. After The Crash but before The Rush as my daddy likes to say.

Mad Cow’s Revenge was followed by the Lamb of God virus. Avian Flu became gestational and starting skipping to humans, especially children and old people. The fish started dying near all the coastlines. It was like the Earth was trying to force us all to become vegetarians.

Drastic measures needed to be taken.

The bigwigs in the laboratories found that they could splice tree cells and meat cells.

We grow our meat now.

Entire forests of furry oaksteak trees point silently at the sky. Porkpine, elmbacon, and maplechops stand a quiet vigil. Long hair keeps the trees warm. Touching one is like petting a warm dog. Thick, red blood pumps slowly through their veins.

The lower branches are boneless and hang down like fat boa constrictors covered in soft, wispy, orange orangutan hair. The upper branches have elbows and reach for the warmth of the sun with fingerbone twigs.

The forests shiver in the cold.

When they’re harvested, they regenerate. The stumps scab over and the new meat starts forming in small lumps like an amputee growing new arms.

Tonight, I’m looking forward to some ground willowmeat and some fine cuts of sprucebeef. Daddy says that he’s a cowboy and a farmer all rolled into one.

I enjoy the country life.

Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer

Nothing could live in a volcano. That was the assumption of the landing party.

The twenty-meter slab of articulated rocktopus that turned a diamond eye to these squishy walking icicles of meat was puzzled at first, then alarmed. The meat icicles were walking the perimeter around its crater-nest.

A long arm accordioned out and snagged one for a closer look. Clumsy, clumsy, superheated rocktopus. The meat icicle squeaked and vibrated in the tentacle’s grasp before igniting. Ashes joined the hot orange soup of molten rock that the rocktopus lazed in.

Whoops.

The ashes brought a school of lavanhas to the surface. The rocktopus suckered up the crater’s edge while they swarmed to eat the ashes. That was the advantage of being amtemperous. The rocktopus could withstand brief exposure to temperature that would freeze most other forms of lavalife.

It dipped into the magma and snagged a lavanha, quickly exposing it to the air. The lavanha twitched before turning grey with a crackling shriek, atrophying immediately in the extremely low temperature of open air.

The meat icicles on the crater’s edge were watching with great interest as the rocktopus grabbed its snack.

It offered the snack to the meat icicles. They made no motion to accept.

Just then, a rockfish shooter poked its head of the pool. It sucked in molten rock through its slatted gills and shot it out in an arcing stream of hardening glass towards the meat icicles.

It got one. With a yank, the shooter managed to pull the squealing meat icicle into the pool. The meat icicle practically evaporated in a flash before a few ashes hit the bubbling surface.

The shooter dipped under the water, disappointed.

The meat icicles pulled sticks from their backs and pointed them towards the rocktopus.

This was odd. They shot food towards it. Basic irradiated metals in solid form in a steady stream straight at the rocktopus’s head. The rocktopus was happy about that. He bathed in their generosity for a while.

Then they left.

The rocktopus slid back down into the lava. Quite the day.

Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer

I deserved the black eye. John stood there, lip quivering, blood on his fist, fiercely willing his tears to stay in his eyes. He looked at me with shining hatred. I couldn’t blame him.

I picked myself up off of the floor. We were in one of the spaceport receiving lounges. There was a knot of people looking at us in a mute circle. I caught the eye of a six-year-old girl sucking her thumb and holding on to her mother’s hand. I stood up and saw the exact same vacant-eyed expression on her mother’s face.

It was like they were watching television.

How could I explain it to John? We’d been friends for years. I had known Jessica as long as I’d known him. The three of us had attended more shows, drunk more beers, partnered on more long haul flights than anyone else I knew or worked with. We were a tight and small circle of buddies. The fact that John and Jessica had been together for most of that time didn’t bother me at all.

Until a day ago.

The air had been running out. Jessica and I knew that we had two hours at the outside. Recovery shuttle ETAs were over six hours away. We’d patched the hole so we had stable pressure but the engine containment shields had been cored before the filaments had imploded to save the ship. We were dead in the water.

The property was more valuable than the pilots. It had always been that way.

It was an odds-defying breakdown. We were lucky to be alive but we knew we were going to die.

Jessica and I had stared at each other, sweating in the heat, drowsy from the lowering oxygen levels, and knew that we would never see anyone back home again. No words were said. All we needed to express was there in the gaze we pinned to each other. We charged each other in the zerograv. Years of longing I don’t think either of us knew we possessed came coursing out through desperate pulling at buckles, buttons and zippers to get to the warm, slick flesh beneath.

It took us no time to wrap ourselves around each other, getting as much flesh contact as possible, trying to become one living thing. Death would take us, exhausted, wet, smiling and holding on to each other in the oldest defiance of death that existed.

Floating, hours later, near death, a bright light had shone through the forward window.

In a complete fluke, another ship had been in our lane just a short ways behind us and had received the call. It was on an illegal flight plan but that had been overlooked in light of the rescue when it docked at the station. The ship had been broadcasting live to the station when it looked in the cockpit windows. There were pictures of our harshly-lit, floating, naked bodies still on the SNN feed on the station’s screens. There were scratches on my back.

I had, under fear of imminent death, betrayed my best friend by sleeping with my other best friend before being rescued by pirates. It had been a full day.

Now Jessica had run somewhere, embarrassed and crying, and I had a broken nose, black eye and split lip courtesy of a heartbroken John. He stalked off without another word.

I needed a drink. I didn’t want to think about the future.