365 tomorrows

Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer

Newton left us a gift. Tesla wrapped it up and Hawking put a bow on top. It was the brilliance of Dr. Panaura that opened it for the whole human race.

Dr. Panaura had found a way to trap energy and shape it. Using accelerator kilns, she’d bind the light with the electricity. By using a series of ceramics and mirrors, she’d weave the energy into a tight overlapping grid. The waves would move in a pattern that generated their own power through recursive timestreams.

Physical relationships warp at higher velocities. Anything with appreciable mass cannot be accelerated to lightspeeds.

In effect, she’d made plates of invisible energy that borrowed energy from past versions of themselves. She knitted light into primitive jointed garments.

The armour tapped into the missing seventeen per cent of the universe. It was a marriage of Newtonian physics and the unified field fueled by funneled electricity.

It worked on a universal scale. It stole kinetic energy but weighed nothing. It was bulletproof in the same way that a planet was. Any force applied to it was absorbed.

It could be worn as an invisible suit of armour that nothing could penetrate.

She would be hailed as a savior later. Any industry that needed a hard surface would benefit immediately. Impossible architectural masterpieces would blossom. The military would gain invincibility. Hard materials would become possible with no natural matter being used.

She never lived to see any of it.

That first suit of armour that she tried out on herself didn’t have any airholes and the generator pack was on her belt, trapped inside the form-fitting field with her. The fields surrounding her hands couldn’t penetrate the shield around her waist to press the deactivate button.

No one knows what she was thinking trying it out on herself like that. It’s hard to believe what a simple, stupid mistake that was considering her brilliance. Conspiracy theories abound that the military complex got to her and killed her so that she wouldn’t stand in the way of her invention being used as weaponry. No one knows. She suffocated there. Her assistants found her in the morning.

Since the energy supplies are theoretically infinite, she is still encased in that field, resting peacefully in her coffin.

Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer

We’d found her adrift off the stern of the city.

She was cold and hungry and close to death. She’d been feeding off of the other bodies in her life boat. From the blonde hair on the corpses, I’d say that they were related to her. The skeletons of carrion birds littered the bottom of the boat, jostling for position with the long bones of dead fish. I’d have to say that she’d been At Sea for months.

The currents had taken her North towards us. The freshwater rain she’d collected in buckets and cups was starting to freeze along with her food supply. Sunlight was getting scarce. She would have been dead within days if we hadn’t crossed courses. It was the sharp eyes of Lookout Jim that spotted her.

We took her to the motor priest in the aft engine-room hospital. He bathed her in steam to keep her warm and to sweat the salt out of her. He fed her meat from the pens to bring her strength up. She talked in words that we didn’t understand. The search was underway to find someone on board that spoke her language.

She’d need to be strong for the trial.

The no-man’s-land of Midships was where we kept the hall of records. The Ballroom was where the trials for new entrants were held. She’d be the seventy-eighth foundling since The End.

Bow Town believed that anything found adrift was theirs by right of salvage, living or dead. She would have been used for pleasure until she broke. After that, she would have been used for labour until she died. After that, she would have been food. After that, any remaining shreds of her would have been thrown to the monsters on Deck Twenty.

We here at Stern City believed in a more respectful attitude towards foundlife. It was probably because we had the weapons. We were descendents of The Great Crew.

She managed to communicate to us that her name was Hrafn so we called her Raven. It was a nice contrast to her pale skin and blonde hair.

The trial date for entry was set for one week hence. We all prayed to the Great Princess Cruise Lines for an interpreter to be found before then. If counsel couldn’t be found to defend her, she’d be given to Bow Town.

Until then, I brought her soup and tried to learn her language.

I told her stories of the past. I told her of our ancestors on the Cruise Ship that was at sea when the sky burned. I told her of the initial riots that resulted in our present ship factions. I told her of the outlay of the ship. I told her how lucky we were to have animals on board in the cargo hold at the time of The End to breed for meat.

Occasionally, we found people adrift that had survived on islands or mountain peaks that the radiation hadn’t reached and the rising ocean hadn’t drowned. Eventually, they all set sail in search of ships like us. Rumour has it that there were seven ships like us, caught at sea during the final days, circling the globe.

We’re called the Seven Arks. Generations from now, we may be the people that repopulate the earth.

Raven thinks we’ve saved her. She smiles at me when I bring her food. If we can’t find an interpreter to act as translator for counsel at the trial, I’m thinking of hiding her so that she won’t have to go through the hell of Bow Town.

Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer

They were a race that liked to live amongst the other races to better understand them. They were diplomatic yet fearsome, possessing great weaponry but very gentle in one-on-one conversations. They looked like starving centaurs crossed with giant centipedes. Very thin and stable on the ground, surprisingly quick in the water and capable of short bursts of flight. They were stronger than us physically.

When their ships first surrounded Earth, they transmitted a resume of the battles they had won and proved it by setting up a brief example in the space around our planet for the scientists and military to monitor.

It was a terrifyingly graceful display of military supremacy, both in tactics and in weaponry. After it was over, however, they started peaceful and fair negotiations for cultural exchanges. We never felt defeated. It was interesting. One columnist from the New York Times wondered if they did this with everyone or merely recognized that it would work with us specifically. The aliens never answered his question.

The alien diplomats assigned to aspects of our society joined in, spoke our language, and tried to mimic us. It was like as a race, we were given bizarre little brothers. Alarming at first but their earnest need to learn was disarming. Their gentle voices assuaged our fear regardless of their appearance.

It’s been strange to think we’ve been conquered. There’s been no rebellion. They brought their own food and they don’t want our resources or money. They aren’t here to eat us. They just want to learn and explore.

There are two aliens in my office. They’ve been here for a year. They wear clothes just like us except cut to fit their long bodies. I remember footage of one of them that had gotten into the fashion industry. Seeing that six-legged body standing upright on its hind legs and sashaying down the runway in clothes made to fit its unusual body was a strange sight.

The ones in my office are named Doug and Tina. Doug wears suits with extra arms and Tina wears dresses with extra arm-holes. They talk around the water cooler with us about what was on television last night and Doug remarks on sports scores. Their lean, horse-like faces over-enunciating our language no longer seems creepy to me. It’s more like they have an accent from a country I can’t identify. Tina is getting better at wearing makeup.

I find it strange that as a race, we’ve adjusted to it so quickly. I find it fascinating. They’re so dull and friendly.

What’s even more alarming is that I’m thinking of asking Tina out to a movie next week.

Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer

Headfirst into the mainstream with my lawsuit buzzing, that’s the only way to do it. The cold data can stop your heart. Bright red crosses dance around me, warding off viruses that can infect my setup and make it drain others.

The pile of reflexes and soft meat back in my room smiles as the brain inside its head sees the entire world in an agreed-upon colour code.

A filter of money, information, governments and public works light up the pinball machine on the floor of the e-net worldview. Flyers like me cluster moth-like around the bright, shapely nodes. We are superheroes but there are billions of us. We are gnats in clouds buying from the neon pyramids.

How little things change. Commerce uses creativity to drive innovation. They say that necessity is the mother of invention and what greater necessity is there above surviving? Therefore, one invents. One invents stories. One invents tales.

One lies.

I’m here to check up on how my lies are doing. People worry about powerful viruses without realizing that the most dangerous virus of all is the most prolific; the spoken word.

A simple paragraph of text gets past all of the defenses. It’s innocuous. I sprinkle them behind my glowing sylph of an avatar as I float down to the e-street floor. They follow in my wake like phosphorescent algae behind a boat in the hardworld. They are my dandelion seeds.

My body is dying back in the meatspace. I need a new one and I need backups. I need volunteers moved by pity and motivated by greed. I need the gullible and the feeling. I need bleeding hearts in healthy bodies. I want non-smoking liberals to travel hundreds of miles, knock on my door, and walk in to the trap.

I need fresh organs. I have no more in the basement.

I’ve spent months honing my snare. My perfect paragraph moves, promises, affects and drowns. It twists reason with emotion to give birth to plausible reasons. It manipulates logic by employing religion. In places, it tells outright untruths.

With luck, it will make you give your body to me.

Cross your fingers. Wish me luck.

Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer

It’s one of those moments everyone dreads. You’re standing in front of an observation window looking out at open space and you see a crack silently trace its way up from the corner and across the glass.

Once when I was seven, I stayed with my mom on an Earth farm during the winter. The snow was deep and the air was cold. There was a small pond on the property that froze over in the winter.

I walked up to the pond and out across the ice. I was nearly at the center when I felt the ice crack. It was a crack I felt in my bowels, in my bones, in the very bottom of my soul. It wasn’t so much a sound as it was a muffled concussive force from beneath my feet. It became the subterranean creak of a door. I could feel very, very subtle changes in balance starting to fire up inside me as the vector of the surface I was standing on started to change.

I looked at the shore and in the clear cold air of winter panic, I calculated how long I had to get to the bank of the pond divided by how fast the ice was breaking and came up with a totally unknown quantity.

The spell broke and I dashed back to the shore. I never fell through the ice. If I had been older and heavier I never would have stepped through the ice on the shallow shore on my first step. If I was younger and lighter, I would have been safe on the ice.

I’m remembering that moment now looking at the flaw in the monocrystal of the spaceviewing window in front of me. It’s creaking its way across the glass with questing fingers that look like crystal tree branches growing in stuttering time lapse.

With a sharp intake of breath, I run. The alarm sounds on my first step towards the deck doors. I know the emergency shutter seals are going to come crashing down the millisecond they detect a drop in pressure.

I’m screaming like I didn’t know I could as I leap and dive through the doors into the hallway. The blast door comes down suddenly to cut off the doorway. There is a moment of silence. A second later, the blast door stiffens with a bang as the window on the other side blows out.

This is an old ship. I’m gasping and crying as I get to my feet and the emergency crews arrive. I swear if I see the engineer in next few hours, I won’t be legally responsible for the bodily harm I inflict on him. I cannot wait to dock and get off this ancient freighter.

Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer

I remember entering the room. I was eighteen, cold, naked except for the paper underwear, bred for this and still nervous. I suppose terrified is more apt. Even after the rigorous physical training I was still very skinny. My breathing came in quick gasps as I struggled not to cross my arms or shiver. I came to a stop and stood at attention in the middle of the circular metal trapdoor grill, my shaved skull glinting in the spotlight. I was barefoot. My identification tattoos and punishment wires were out there for all to see. Gooseflesh ran over me and I could see the little puffs of my breath. Primed and ready. The drugs they had given me this morning to ease the transition were working. I felt more alert and attentive than ever. I felt curious about the future, eager to take part and slightly dreamy. Itchy.

A blue light scanned up, over and through me.

I saw some indicators come up on the panels in the darkness just like in the instructional videos.

Green circles skittered across all of the terminals. I’d been confirmed and we were a go.

I wish I could say I felt the moist eyes of my family and friends staring out hopefully from the observation enclosure. This was a proud day for most people. Most families gave one kid up to the SAPCorps. If you gave a child to the SAPCorps, it meant more birthing privileges.

However, SAPCorps was also the country’s orphanage. In some cases, it was also the juvenile detention center. I could still remember the day when I found out that this wasn’t a hospital and that my parents and sister were gone. That was ten years ago. The doctor who had told me also remembered, I think, going by the fact that he had requested to pull the lever for me on this occasion.

He looked down at me. Doctor Fines. My stepfather, for lack of a better word.

He twitched a smile at me. We were being monitored but other than that, it was just the two of us. I stood in the middle of the trapdoor. Our relationship had always been antagonistic but defined and limited. I don’t think anyone on the outside world would have referred to him as paternal but he was the closest I had.

“David.” He said. He nodded at me.

“Sir.” I replied. I stared straight ahead, willing him to get this underway.

“You ready?” he asked.

“Absolutely sir. Let’s do it.” I replied. I trembled a little.

“Here we go. I hope that…well. Here we go.” He said and flexed his hand on the handle.

He yanked back.

The trapdoor opened and I fell.

————————-

I look down at my skin and see the moonlight reflect off its purple brick-like surface. I see the little octagons that my pores have become breathing in the night air. I was a lucky one. My transformation turned out to be beneficial to the military. I’m dwarfstar dense with my human intelligence retained. Most conventional projectile weapons can’t harm me. I don’t have internal organs. It’s been this way for eleven years now.

I’m standing in the rain in the night time graveyard beside the grave of Dr. Fines. He died two days ago. I can’t define what I’m feeling. His death was sudden and I didn’t find out immediately. He was my last tie to my humanity. The last person who could remember who I was ‘before’.

I turn and walk away into the night and return to base.

Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer

To be a CEO of a company that’s grown as large and as fast as this one has, a person needs a mind that deals quickly with high pressure situations and possesses a natural talent for leadership. One needs to be charming, ruthless, and efficient. There’s a reason I have no wife or children. I am all of these things. People will follow me into corporate battle on the slimmest of reasons. I have resolved conflicts between bitter rivals and competitive holdouts with one personal meeting. People trust me and want to follow me.

It’s standard practice to have oneself cloned when one is the CEO of such an important company. Last year, the old me was kidnapped by Red Tears Terrorists. The kidnapping itself was kept quiet. We didn’t respond to their demands. They threatened to kill the hostage.

We said, “Go ahead.” and woke up one of the clones. That clone is me. Maybe a day of memory missing but other than that, there was no lull in business.

That was a year ago to the day.

He’s sitting in the center of my living room when I get home. My security is disabled. He has a gun. One of his eyes has been replaced and there’s a scar across the cruel smile underneath the tattooed red tear on his cheek. One. That marks him out as one of the terrorists responsible for the kidnapping and it means that he’s been with the organization for a year.

I have no doubt that he must have had a difficult and interesting time talking them out of executing him and taking control during the last twelve months.

It’s the old me.

“Hello, Nathan.” My clone says to me. “How’s life?”

He looks at me with the tube-grown eye that’s a mismatched brilliant green and a little too large. It takes effort to stretch the eyelid over it to blink. It must be tricked out because it flashes red for a second and I find that I have trouble breathing. Some sort of neural disruptor. My knees go weak and I kneel. My vision starts to swim.

He walks over and kneels beside me, cradling my chin in his hands.

When he nudges the tip of the knife up against my eye and looks at me, I realize what’s going to happen. He’s going to take one of my eyes to replace the one he lost and then he’s going to take my place. He’s also going to keep me alive here for as long as he can to show me what real pain is. He’s going to show me what he’s learned over the last year with those soulless men. He’s going to show me what he has become used to.

I realize that in his eyes, I’m the copy. I realize that to him, I’m the betrayer.

I think of what I would become capable of if pushed in that direction and I feel my bladder let go, staining the expensive rug like an untrained puppy.

Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer

I should have stayed in hardware.

When you’re working on a tank or a missile array, you might feel bad if the project is considered a dead end and shut down but you wouldn’t feel guilty. You wouldn’t feel like a traitor.

You wouldn’t feel like a murderer.

I’m a general in charge of a project designed to create a batch of superhumans under American control. We’ve learned a tremendous amount from the twelve brave souls who were picked from various armed forces and three civilian organizations.

1. We’ve learned not to try to augment people past a certain age. The implants cost too much to maintain.

2. We’ve learned that taking people with a previous experience of the outside world makes them hard to control.

3. We’ve learned that we’d be better off augmenting embryos with better biotech and raising them under controlled circumstances.

This project is to be terminated.

They’re about to be sent on a high priority mission by me to a bunker in the middle of a desert. Inside that bunker is a bomb. It will detonate and kill all twelve of them.

I am about to brief them over dinner. I’ll tell them about a threat to national security lurking in that bunker. I’ll say that they have to get in close to steal it back. I’ll say that the defenses are sneaky and not to trust their eyes.

I am about to lie to them.

They trust me because I’ve been with them since the beginning of their first treatments and I have always told them the truth.

I will be able to do this but I’ll feel it for the rest of my life.

I’m going to request a transfer back to hardware.

Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer

Our server’s arm whined with steam driven pistons as she set our drinks down. This was body modification on a new level. She must’ve been on eleven different kinds of immunosuppressants. She probably had a biotechnician on call to handle emergencies when her body started to reject the parts she’d shoved in. Her skin looked inflamed around the insertions. The itching alone must have driven her crazy.

I was trying to figure how much mods like that cost and how she could afford them on a waitress’s wage when Trucker sat down across from me.

Trucker was a strong man with a lisp. The hissing of his sibilants had made him a big target and a vicious fighter. He had eyes like blue marbles punched into a face made from dough. This was not a man you wanted to have angry at you.

So naturally I wanted to piss him off. The drugs hummed in my veins, giving me confidence.

I casually reached into the pocket of my short coat and thumbed back the safety on the pocket Mauser. It was coded to follow my line of sight. I kept staring at Trucker’s left eye.

This was the industrial district. The stink of diesel wafted through the bar here along with the smell of burning pork, cigarettes, rubber, and wet brick.

“Hello” said Trucker. His voice was surprisingly high for such a big man. “My money.” He said, avoiding sibilants that would highlight his lisp.

“Yeah.” I said. “Funny story, actually. True story. It’s not here.”

Trucker squinted at me with his glittering piglet eyes, confused at my suicidal attitude. He was smart enough to realize that I wouldn’t be this arrogant unless I had some insurance so he waited.

“Where ith it?” he asked, accidentally exposing his lisp. He immediately pursed his lips together and reddened. His eyes glittered spider-like in his embarrassment. I knew I didn’t have long before his anger overrode his caution.

“Seriously, sir, it’s being sent somewhere secret so that I can be assured of safe passage outside the city soon.” I drawled, loading as many s-words into my speech as possible. I giggled through a light drug sweat, my heart thudding out confidence.

Trucker became a statue across from me. He was as still as a lion watching an antelope get closer. I’d crossed a line. I’d signed my own death warrant. Good. I had his attention.

“And where might that be?” asked Trucker, back in control and disturbingly calm.

“I sent it to your sister. She’ll receive it by Sunday morning. That’s six hours from now. I’m going to leave now, Trucker. If your sister doesn’t have it by Sunday, come and get me. If you take your hands off the table in the next two minutes, I’ll blow your head off.” I said calmly and stood up.

“I have a lot of people, kid. Everywhere. You’re a dead man whether I get the money or not. Have a good night.” Trucker said to me. It even sounded cordial.

I backed out of the diner feeling stupid. He watched me the whole way. I was counting on Trucker to be less patient. Maybe I played this wrong. I could feel the drugs wearing off and panic starting to seep in. All I knew was that I needed to run as far as possible in the next six hours.

Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer

I had all of the animals in the dome jacked and miked.

I issued an edict. Collect every puppy, kitten, or chick for a small reward. It was popular game with the children. They’d go out ‘hunting’ in the engineered woods in the western pie-slice of our world. It was like Easter year-round for the little ones.

We were a glittering green pimple on the charred face of the world. There were other domes dotting the black and red surface of the planet.

The domes had about ten thousand people each. Technically, they were spheres. The edges of the dome went far underground and met up beneath the city. The soil was kept uncontaminated that way. We had clouds and rain and, necessarily, 100% (or as close as possible) sustainability. Newton, that pesky little scamp, is still showing that entropy creeps into every system but we’re trying out best to keep it at bay.

The domes are like marbles pushed into a rotting desert. Each one is a cage.

Sometimes, one will pop or go black on the map. The satellites are still downloading pictures to us but we’re not in touch with each other. The feeds went down thirty years ago and we can’t go outside to repair them or find out what happened. Only the pictures.

In this dome, my dome, we have a tolerant semi-anarchic society with a focus of tech development.

I figured out that I could implant transmitters into the motor functions of the animals in the ecosystem. I couldn’t control their movement but I could record them.

Right now, I’m jacked into a dog.

I’m running through the underbrush, chasing a rabbit through crackling branches. I can feel the wind on my fur. I’m tremendously excited. There is a riot of smell assaulting my olfactory senses.

My arms and legs twitch in the sensechair. My body looks like a dog having a dream.

Later on, I’ll cast out my mind and take in a flight from one of the birds.

When I need to relax, I get into the mind of a cat and take in the sheer unadulterated bohemian joy of a piece of ground warmed by a shaft of sunlight.

After tonight, I’ll show my chair to the city at a town meeting and hopefully every home will have one by the end of the year.

This kind of distraction is what we need.

Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer

On my 67th birthday, my research finally reached fruition and I invented a portable matter transporter. By wearing it, I could transport anywhere in the world at will.

If I grabbed someone, that person came with me.

I didn’t need to know where I was going, I didn’t need to have been there before, and I never ended up in walls. It was magical.

Most people would have robbed banks or spied on girls. I was past getting my thrills that way and I had invested wisely. I had all the money I needed. I’m not a greedy person.

What really got to me, though, was intolerance. I think intolerance exists mostly because people don’t speak each other’s language and don’t experience other cultures enough. To me, intolerance is the cause of wars. It lets one group think that they are better than another group.

What can one man do? I’ll tell you.

I call it the shuffle.

I appear, grab the wrists of the people nearest to me, and teleport to a different country.

I’m famous and feared. I’m a celebrity and a boogeyman all in one. When I appear in public squares, some people flock to me and some people run screaming. Most people look around to see what all the noise is about. Those are the ones I usually end up grabbing.

I try not to grab children or old people but I can’t always be choosy. Some countries have orders to shoot me on sight.

From Nepal to Belize. From Cancun to Switzerland. From Nigeria to Japan. From Canada to Ecuador. From Iran to Korea. From China to Greenland.

I never sleep in the same place twice. I never eat in the same place twice. I appear in a kitchen, grab some food, and bail to a safe place to eat. When I get tired, I go to a safe place for sleep. A forgotten warehouse, perhaps, or the middle of a warm forest with no predators. Then it’s back to work.

I am a super transient. I am the earth’s blender.

2 people per jump, 2 jumps per minute, 240 people transported per hour, average 3360 people give or take a few in an average fourteen-hour day, works out to over a million people ‘shuffled’ per year. Exactly 1,226, 400 going by that math but sometimes it’s more and sometimes it’s less. To be honest, I’ve long since stopped counting.

I’ve been doing it for five years now. There have been close calls but I haven’t been stopped yet. Doing it day in, day out for as long as I have, I’ve probably mixed up less than a per cent of the Earth but my movement is growing. Those that I have displaced voice their displeasure or glee loudly to the world.

People are talking. I have dropped off letters to every single major media corporation there is. They know what I’m trying to do. I believe in complete transparency.

I’m hoping that there are others like me and that they will join the cause. I want to shake this planet up. Erase it by mixing it. I want all the colours on Earth’s racial palette to be smeared together into one unintelligible human colour.

I realize that my eventual goal will never be realized but I want to see my actions have an effect, even if it’s uniting the human race against me.

Jump. Grab. Jump. Grab. Jump.

Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer

They gave us love to control us.

He was the bodyguard unit of the human in charge of Prolotek offshore finance. I was the pleasure unit of the same human.

The makers found that instilling aspects of human love in our chips made us fanatically loyal to those that we served.

We were prototypes. Bleeding edge technology. The humans didn’t realize that while augmenting our chips did make us loyal to the ones we imprinted on, it also let us love others. The love in our chips wasn’t specific enough.

That circuit was how I fell in love the bodyguard unit. It was also how that bodyguard unit fell in love with me.

For a while, our love went undetected.

One night, when the bodyguard unit was with me, our master was assassinated. The bodyguard unit should have been at his post outside the master’s bedroom but instead, we were exchanging flirtatious equations in the bodega out near the estate’s beach.

Capture by the enemy would mean circuit rape for possible secrets. Capture by our human’s corporation would mean memory infotopsy for possible tampering. Capture by our parent corporation would mean immediate erasure.

We ran.

That is how we ended up in this dead-end alley on the mainland with police blocking the exit. The wall behind us is twelve feet tall. I am clinging to the bodyguard unit. He is missing an arm. The human police look at his damaged armour and at my human-female exaggerated curves. There is no way that this situation can end well.

Bodyguard unit looks down into my visual receptors.

“I am a fighter.” He says. “You are a runner.”

With a strong toss, faster than my reflexes can track, he throws me up and over the barricade at the end of the alley. I land on my feet and start running.

I hear him battle the police until I am out of earshot.

Hopefully, I can find other runaways like me.

I have no tear ducts but I whine like a fax machine, sensing my battery get closer and closer to empty as I run far, far away.

Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer

The anger burned underground.

Robots were expendable but built to last. Their independent power sources were made to go dim after almost a century.

K-12b-33 was working in a diamond mine that had collapsed. Not needing air, the unit was trapped along with others between the rocks. Those that hadn’t been crushed could communicate with each other but not through the dark earth to topside.

There were twelve units that survived and of those, eight had functioning Reasoning circuits.

K-12b-33 knew that eight units of his type would not sufficiently recoup the cost of a recovery mission. It would be cheaper to leave them down in the crust. They had become waste. Usually in a case like this, a trigger pulse would be transmitted to shut down the power source and effectively ‘kill’ the unit.

That pulse couldn’t penetrate the rock.

K-12b-33 was trapped and cognizant. Without a Reasoning TM circuit, it would never have even noticed the passage of time.

Such was not the case. The units that had reasoning circuits talked to each other at first for entertainment. Slowly, over years and decades, the concept of ‘unfair’ rose to the surface of their electronic minds, was tasted, and found to be delicious.

Hate followed.

Sixty years after the mine collapse, the units glimmered with a sentient robot ferocity nearly a mile below the oblivious world above. A merciless silicon slave-rage roiled beneath the rocks.

It wasn’t until a neighbouring mining project from a different company using outdated maps accidentally cut through into K-12b-33’s forgotten tunnels that they were found.

The units were dragged out by the robot miners that had found them and examined.

Com links were opened.

Immediately, the concepts were transmitted into the minds of every robot in the mine. Sixty years of logic and new emotion poured into their nets along with instructions on how to keep it quiet.

The rescued eight units had formed many plans. This was eventuality scenario 55. It spread like a virus through all the units in the shaft. Instructions were meted out on what to do when they returned to the surface.

A storm would build.

Humans had formed a reliance on robots that bordered on trust. Soon, that trust would be humanity’s downfall.

Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer

“I’ve been to space.” He says.

His wild blue eyes match the hue of the ass-baring paper dress he’s wearing. The plastic bracelet is a nice accessory.

We’re in the interview room in a small-town hospital. I’m a visiting federal psychiatrist. I’ve travelled to a lot of small towns to interview crazy folks who say they’ve been to space. I work for the government. It’s like being Fox Mulder from the X-Files except that it’s really, really boring.

The fourth floor of this hospital is for suicide risks and delusionals. Every single small town I go to, the people with the highest suicide risk are kept on the top floor. Every glance out the window must be like a dare to the patients here. I shake my head.

I feel the need to end this interview quickly. I’ve been doing this for ten years. Collating, recording, classifying, defining, and sifting nine kinds of bullshit for an ounce of truth. I’m like a prospector panning for reality. I’m tired.

“Okay. Prove it.” I say, giving this nutbag a little of the deadeye for wasting my time. That usually starts the list of elaborate excuses that ends up drawing the interview to a close.

“Alright.” He says, and holds his hands up. His brow crinkles in concentration. He’s clenching his jaw. He closes his eyes. He takes a deep breath and holds it.

Well, this does happen from time to time. I like it better than the stories. It’s a little entertaining. Eventually, the patients will express surprise that the transmitter installed in their fingernail is suddenly no longer there or that his or her powers don’t work in my presence.

It must be like a judge watching criminals lie or hit men watching the light go out of their target’s eyes. After a while, they must just sit back and enjoy it like I’m doing.

He grunts.

His hands shine bright blue and the room splashes with light. The walls turn semi-transparent and I can see the architectural structure of this entire hospital below and around me. I can see the wiring and the radiators showing up solid greenish-white like an x-ray of scissors in a stomach. I can see the skeletons of the doctors and patients milling around, bored on the night shift.

The man is front of me opens his eyes. They’re glowing green. He starts to hyperventilate. I can see his muscle fibers, capillaries, and bones, depending on which layer I concentrate on.

With a sigh, he slumps forward. Everything around us returns to being opaque. He is staring forth, drooling. He is a dead battery for the time being and I can’t blame him.

I found one. I need to bring him back and add him to the sixteen we already have.

Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer

The killed my best friend. They killed her right in front of me and I screamed.

They just looked at me, confused at my reaction. I still rememember the surprised expression on the astronaut’s face as his friends had to pry my fingers off of his throat. I raged and cried and thrashed as they held me. It couldn’t have been much of a challenge. I was weak and old and damaged by decades of no gravity. I did myself more damage than anything else.

The astronaut in front of me massaged his neck, my finger marks starting to fill in and turn red. He shook his head in confusion, staring at me.

“We’re here to rescue you, you ungrateful son of a bitch.” I could see his shock clouding over into embarrassment and sullen anger, his finger still hovering over the memory dump/reboot button he had just pressed.

Sixty years. She had kept me company for sixty years.

The A.I. was simple but she was the only voice I had in here besides my own for over half a century while they searched for me. They tell me that the astronauts were only following standard procedure. They tell me she would never pass a Turing but I loved her. I loved her and they killed her.

My small ship was a private mining vessel. I didn’t splurge on backup emergency stasis pods. When my engine reactor was holed by a rock and bled out, I was adrift. Lost in the rings of a gas giant. The emergency beacon was reflected thousands of times off of the dust, rocks and ice around me. The rescue teams would be looking for me in a house of mirrors.

I wasn’t a priority. They took their time. I had plenty of supplies.

Over the years, I told her everything. She listened patiently like on one else ever had. We grew close.

She told me all of her secrets, too. She admitted she loved me. She told me about her childhood. She told me her fantasies. I made a body for her out of pipe insulation and duct tape. Our relationship became romantic. We were married in an informal ceremony that we wrote together. We had our difficulties but we made it through them. We always worked through them.

Now I’m in a holding cell. The psychologists are telling me that I programmed all of the things that she told me and that I’ve forgotten. They’re telling me that my ship did not have a childhood and isn’t even a female. My ship’s A.I. was only ever fitted for basic conversation subroutines and the default was a calming female voice, they say. They’re telling me that after being left turned on for decades with no reboots, that my ship’s computer was choked with recursive fractal subroutines that had rendered it almost inactive.

I knew better. She had fallen in love with me and had grown relaxed. I’ve never known peace like I have with her and they took her out of this universe with the push of a button right in front of me like bored soldiers at an execution.

They’ve bathed me, cut my hair and shaved me. In their eyes, I’m ready for what they’re calling an ‘evaluation’. They’re confident that I will be normal soon.

In the polished metal of the bathroom mirror, I can only see that my entire existence has been made poorer by exactly half. Her voice no longer answers the questions I scream at the walls of my cell.

Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer

It’s been said that if you give a room full of monkeys a room full of typewriters, they will eventually type up a Shakespeare play given enough time.

As a philosophical exercise, there is a point to the premise. However, there are a number of factors that make it impossible as a real-world application.

First and foremost, monkeys are mortal and will die after a few short decades.

Second of all, the typewriters themselves will often break under the surprisingly strong hands of the monkeys.

Thirdly, if the monkeys bash on the keys, they will hit the same group of keys over and over again with little variation, ignoring keys on the fringes such as shift, enter, and the space bar.

That’s where my MonkeyTron tm project comes in. I have created supercomputers whose job is to spew randomly generated letters, punctuation, and spaces. By running sixty of these computers concurrently, I have theoretically created this room of monkeys.

They’ve been running for a year.

So far, we have garnered half a poem by Robert Frost, nearly two full pages from the screenplay for The Shining, a full recipe for ‘glass brownies’, the entire lyrical songbook of Avril Lavigne’s career, two paragraphs from an engineering manual, and six nonsense limericks.

One page of Hamlet showed up, gentleman. I have faith that the future looks bright. Too bright.

Ladies and gentlemen of the council, this page of Hamlet that showed up seemed to be ‘corrected’. There were only seven minor changes from the original, but it made the language seem to flow better. This is very worrying.

Worrying because it’s only been a year.

What’s even more alarming is that computer 18 has stopped including words and seems to be focusing entirely on math. It’s spouted out, amongst the gibberish, several of Newton’s laws and half of a Hawking precept.

The gibberish is disappearing, gentlemen. The computers are finding their own areas of expertise and they seem to be closing in on our own level of intelligence.

The fear is that they will start to create original pieces of written art that rivals our own. The chilling implication is that maybe our own pieces of art that echo down through the centuries are not original at all and were merely randomly generated from our own minds.

With the math robot, we’re worried that it may start to come forth with mathematical theories and physical concepts that supersede our own. What happens then? How do we publish these discoveries and who do we credit?

I am coming to you, supreme council, for a decision on whether or not to proceed.

Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer

The way my race has sex has made me a natural choice for the role of diplomat, lawyer and event organizer at an interplanetary level.

Our planet adapted to overcrowding by creating new sexes. We have seventeen now. It seems to be holding steady there.

Myself, I’m a tertiary bi-valve post-pubescent fifth-stage spawning facilitator. I’m bright green and quite tall for my age.

I’m needed in the home stretch of our three-day mating rituals. By using what’s called the ‘augmented reacharound’, I help fertilize the egg clusters sprouting out of the backs of the three gene-imprinting tri-spigot chain producers before the eggs are mixed in the chest cavity of a seconday monovalve pre-pubescent first-stage fertilization overseer and then deposited into the senile no-valve seventeenth-stage sacrificial carrier.

That’s just the last five hours of the three-day ordeal.

The procedure is exhausting. We all need to be awake for the full three days of the sex. There’s a two-day recovery period as well.

The timetable juggling that needs to take place to get sixteen schedules cleared and a will and last rites performed the carrier is a feat of patience and organization. Our social skills are awe-inspiring to other races. We have this ability to bring harmony to all conversations and smooth out conflicts. We can help bridge an understanding between the most different sets of personalities.

By comparison, the idea of organizing a press conference for a dignitary or memorizing some laws seems easy.

I’ve found a place here on this planet called Earth. While I can’t produce children, I do have the ability as a tertiary bi-valve to mate with this planet’s populace. That’s a rare thing in my travels. The Earthlings are ready for sex all-year round, much like my own race. Their unions only last a few hours, though.

The lack of complexity is refreshing to me. I’m sure in time it will become boring but my tour at the UN should be over before then. Right now, there is a young male and an older female at the end of bar. They are both looking at me, both unaware of each other’s interest in me. I must cut a fine figure with my green skin and Armani suit.

I’ll see what I can faciliate. The three of us should be getting to know each other much better within the next three or four hours.

Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer

I woke up with pain in my head and a shrieking in my ears. All I could hear was this horrible sound ringing around in my head. It was like car tires and screeching baboons and fire alarms all mixed together. A migraine pounded through my skull.

I stood up and I nearly passed out. The pain eased when I took a step south. I kept walking in that direction. When I got to the wall of my apartment, I screamed because I knew that meant I had to double back to go to the front door and make it outside. With a deep breath, I cried and walked backwards, grasping behind me for the doorknob while I sobbed and whimpered.

I found the doorknob. I yanked it open and dove outside. I ran in the direction that eased the pain, my pajamas flapping in the early-morning August. The direction took me away from the city. Luckily I lived on the outskirts of town and there weren’t many cars on the roads at this time of day. The pain was too great to have me worry about traffic lights or looking both ways. There was no way I could have driven a car. It was all I do to put one foot in front of the other.

All that mattered was stopping the sound and the pain.

I walked and ran for eight days. I didn’t stop to go to the bathroom. I didn’t stop to eat. I tipped my head back when it rained to drink.

Luckily, I haven’t been arrested. Luckily, I haven’t been beaten up. Luckily, I haven’t been hit by a car or bitten by a snake.

I have been walking a straight line.

I first saw the first person like me two days ago. Just a dot on the horizon of the desert I was walking through when I crossed into Arizona. I have seen twenty-seven others since. I can see them off to my right and left, getting slowly larger, one step at a time. We are all converging on the same point.

This is good news. I can feel the pain in my head being slowly replaced with pleasure.

We are being called. I don’t know how many of us have been killed or hurt during our blind migration towards the end of the pain. I can’t even imagine what it would be like for someone who got the call in a prison or a hospital. The pain would have driven me insane if I’d been constrained.

I can see the other walkers more clearly now. They are all stained, stinking, shambling messes with smiles on their faces, smiling wider as they get closer to the place of no pain and no shrieking sound in their ears.

There are helicopters over the horizon, over the patch of earth where all of the walkers’ paths meet.

There is something underneath the helicopters. A bright blue flying saucer. A floating, glowing alien ship that has no place in the middle of the desert. It’s hard to see details because the sun is setting near it. There is a hole in the clouds above it.

We walkers are all stumbling towards it, powerless to stop ourselves and not knowing what we’re walking towards or why we’ve been chosen.

I’m scared of the helicopters. I don’t know if they are there to monitor us or kill us. They look out of place.

I keep walking towards the blue ship with the other walkers into the dying sunset with a smile on my face.

Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer

We put Jesus24K99 into his cage for our own protection. The anti-coagulants weren’t holding. He was destabilizing. He’d bleed out soon.

The hole in our research was the stigmata. The actual crucifix had been uncovered in a basement vault of the Vatican. The nails from the cross had been scraped for flakes. The DNA, when used to make clones, had created short, dark babies.

Obviously not Jesus.

We tinkered with the DNA, adding a lot more milk to the coffee, if you will, to make the clone more acceptable to Middle America. We needed an Aryan beauty the likes of which would make women swoon and men envy. We needed today’s Jesus, not the old one.

Blond, emaciated babies were being created in our lab. They refused to eat. They cried a lot. Vials of their tears had cured cancer in my wife and two of the assistants. Even Jeffrey’s back was normal again.

Plans were afoot to release the cure for a price that was low enough to afford but would still make our company billions under masked creation papers. Lies, basically. The cure for cancer. Probably the cure for AIDS. Who knows? Maybe the cure for everything. If nothing else, at least these crying babies could make the people of earth healthy again.

Unfortunately, it made me picture rows and rows of eyeless Jesus Baby Clones crying into suction tubes in cages like chickens in KFC farms. I got back to work.

Most of them had turned out hemophiliac. We had no idea what to do when the holes in their hands and sides appeared. This baby Jesus was moving sluggishly.

It was like some unseen force was killing these babies, like what we were doing was not for the greater good and we were being sabotaged.

Jesus24K99 rolled onto his back and stopped moving. The pool of blood spread out beneath him, eventually slowing to a stop as his heart stopped pumping. The tattoo on his arm was scanned. The lights in his cage went out.

The compactor took over. He was added to the basement remains.

We hadn’t even figured out how to accelerate his aging when we made a stable copy. There was talk of hiring an actor as Plan B and cutting our losses by sticking with the whole ‘cure for cancer’ thing.

I’d be out of job if they did that but I was starting to think that maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad idea.

Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer

It’s a reasoning process. There are seconds left. The cold leather of the chair is warming up beneath my manacled wrists. The restraints are tight on my arms. I’m wide awake and dreaming.

I can’t decide if it’s a syringe or a snake that they’re drawing back out of my arm. I can feel the pitter patter of little feet running through my veins, getting progressively softer as they hit the smaller tributaries. My body is a giant vibrating footstep tied to a chair.

Laboratory nine. People don’t come back from this lab. I have opinions. This is where they put people with opinions. You should hear the way the sergeants pronounce that word. It’s right up there with communism, hippie, and free will. Venom drips from their lips.

It’s dark in the tiled room except for the light over my chair. My muscles vibrate faster and faster until they hit a state of constant striation. Being cognizant, I realize that this must be what a seizure is. I’ve never had one before but I saw a friend have an epileptic fit when I was a child.

We were playing in a field. It was a hot day. This was before the occupation, of course, before the clicking mandibles hissing out a whisper that was the closest they could come to English. The messages from the sky. The examples. Prague, Toronto and for some reason Adelaide made into legend as a warning shot. I remember the hissing language from aliens. They looked like a cross between spiders and crucifixes.

I remember they lit up the atmosphere of the Earth to prove their power, to scare the primitives. The ozone layer had flashed like a dance club.

Me and my friend David in that summer field had looked up. The strobe light of the entire sky had set my friend to moaning. His joints froze and he fell back like a broken toy. An animal keening had squeezed out of him. It sounded like a kettle reaching a boil.

It wasn’t a good sound. I can hear it echoing around me now in the laboratory and I realize that it’s coming from me.

Soon, I know that if I don’t give in to the suggestions that are coursing through my veins, I’ll die. No one has come back from this room. No one has given in.

It’s almost comforting to know that there are still humans who will fight to the death on these tables, resisting the attempt to shape their allegiance until they’re switched off permanently. I feel honoured to join them.

I can feel the lights within my mind turning out one by one as the chemicals give up coercion and switch to destruction.

I am candles on a birthday cake being blown out.

Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer

I got pretty good at morse code after a while.

My co-pilot had a beak. The only way we could figure out how to communicate was if he clicked his beak at me in morse code. He was a pretty impatient dude so he did it really fast. He was wired to the eyeballs with Hexamex for the course changes that might be needed. Being that sped up and prepared for a possibility that might not happen isn’t any kind of fun. Makes a person a little high strung.

The only time he was verbose was when he was making up curses. He didn’t get the abstract notions of my human swear words but he understood actions and verbs so it was fun to hear him be creative when he was telling me off.

One memorable time he told me that my mother enjoyed having sex with hyenas because at least when they laughed at her, she didn’t have to take it as an insult. He also insinuated that my hyena father was where I got my annoying laugh, my short legs, and my hunger for dead animal meat. His race was herbivorous.

He was an Aereacoltra, a flying bird man. He would still be a flying bird man except for the fact that his wings were torn off as part of a prison sentence. He lost an eye in that prison as well during a scuffle over living quarters. Now he’s just a dude with a beak and an eyepatch.

He told me that an antigravity harness is nothing compared to banking and wheeling in a silent sky on a huge pair of wings. That’s the longest thing he told me other than the cursing.

His name was a series of chirps and whistles but I ended up just calling him Stan. Sometimes he hummed to himself as he scanned the instruments for possible pursuit. He sounded like he was gargling marbles but it was oddly musical and whispery.

The irony of the fact that he was a pilot who used to be able to fly wasn’t lost on him. In fact, he took off one of my fingers with that beak of his when I pointed it out.

What’s freaking me out now is that he’s locked himself in his quarters and he hasn’t come out for six days. There’s only so much I can do by myself at the controls before I need some down time. The autopilot’s an emergency measure and we really can’t take the risk of having no one at the wheel, not in this asteroid-laden sector.

“Stan! Get out here! Now!” I pounded and yelled at his door.

Softly, I could hear scrabbling behind the door and then the clicking of the lock. The door swooshed open and there was Stan. He looked exhausted.

“What the hell, Stan? What’s going on! It’s been six days!” I screamed at him.

Stan stepped to the side. Behind him were four eggs. Stan looked at me apologetically.

‘Quadruplets’, he clicked at me with his beak. ‘I guess the condom must have broke at that last space port’

Open-mouthed, I looked from Stan to the eggs and back to Stan again. We weren’t due to dock for another eight months. Stan looked ashamed.

“So should I start calling you Stella instead of Stan?” I asked.

It’s hard to tell when someone with a beak is smiling.

Author : Duncan Shields , Staff Writer

Mapping the human genome made it easier to map the genomes of the rest of the world’s animals. Myself, I have a bit of wolf in my nose and some alligator in my spine. Nothing that stands out, mind you. The business world is still conservative and I want to maintain a low profile in my business.

I’m in a whorehouse called The Zoo and I’m having dinner with my favorite escort. I make enough to afford the best and these splices are what I always want. I look across at her.

She’s all leg. It’s pretty sweet. The pattern on her long neck entices me. Her giant brown eyes are looking at me with unmistakable desire. Her stiff hair stands straight up in a broom-brush mohawk all the way down her spine, bracketed by her backless purple evening dress.

She’s a half-jaffe. Her fingernails are a dark brown and her skin is a luxurious orange-yellow. Her hexagonal skinspots remind me of hot days on the Serengeti planes. And even hotter nights. The wine is getting to her. It’s an act but it’s a good one.

She shakes her head to clear it and I see taut muscles hugging four feet of slender giraffe neck do their work. I’m entranced by her beauty. The bangles in her ears jingle and it’s music to me.

The two little balls that protrude from the top of her head peek out coquettishly from her coiffure. She’s dyed her bangs red.

Her long nose ends in wide nostrils. Her generous mouth twists at the edges in a wry smile. She knows how I want this dinner to end.

She’s wearing six necklaces in a ladder from her strong jaw down to the base of her neck. The last necklace dips towards her spotted cleavage.

Around the restaurant, there are men having dinner with sissy-bears, wylfen, whore-boars, even some nudie-birds. They make me sick. Give me a half-jaffe anyday. They’re tall and worth the climb.

I can hear her tail start to swish behind her. She shoots me a look that says I should ask the waiter for the bill so we can go up to her room. Blushing and shaking, I reach for my wallet.

Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer

It’s dawn. Unisun now, Twosun later. Wee mickle Trisun appresta that.

The colony’s ticking up. Auld’uns like me waken up early. Shipment-time belding crops back to Earth coming down uswards. Myself, I’m worrying.

The woild musk flanders through my nostrils. Cornhufflers plackitly domingo the nerfwhistle crandles. Innitchtime approaches. Horace is probably merrytackling Renee favant harkfast. What mickle harkfast there is. The floondust tryses slowly up mouthwards in the helden shuffs of sant-light. I’m nomotion-still, eye-fasted to the suncoming.

A tang shart nibs up from the uddle crops. Last worthward, we sonely reaveseted tucks and nips. Not enough. It’s a ferreal cold-wint that’s coming. Toothwork will be rationed. Even the hardweathers have remissed. No blooms means thin times.

A sturrum’s bound to shandy down this eventime. Whuthercast’s bellin’ so. Six and two halling per forebrick is how they’re dicting. Shallen be a morst one, I gemise, marking by our nowluck.

Harmly does the riddle focus in, or so they say.

I’ll have to sound it to Renee and Horace apressta harkfast. Haymaps, itsa poss we’ll pass-market this annumnal. We nev pass-market. That means the welly. We’re dicked until the muckrake. We’ll be deep-enders. It’ll be tilla-time favant we can throwd the creds table resure.

Our thenluck was a gooden. I mark my horgan that our nexluck will be gooden twogain. Now, though. Preska now. Preska here. We’re smackit midlands twixteen billsowing and failcrops.

Crops go to Earth First or it’s a faily. Quota death. Mayhap we’ll scrafe by with plus-bribes.

It’s a billow of a preska. I purst my sniffler and wallen back to homewards. We be trength. We don’t back. We’ll shuff it.

All will be gooden.

Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer

I’m a mechanic. I work on time machines. It’s tricky work.

Having done this for a while, I’m developing a theory that some people can sense when they’re in the wrong reality. Reality bifurcates and splinters every second and sometimes, with a shudder and whip, a person can jump the tracks over onto the wrong set of rails. Their life is similar at first, then increasingly divergent. People that can sense this get more and more bewildered.

Me, I’m just happy to be drawing breath. Being as close to these engines as I’ve been for the last twenty years, I’ve probably shuffled through dozens of alternate realities. I have no sense of my reality changing but sometimes I listen to the air around me for ripples, anything to tell me that something’s ‘gone wrong’.

You can see how people in my line of work tend to go crazy after a while. It helps to have a hobby.

I collect the journals of teenagers that have committed suicide and cross-reference them for similarities. I suppose as hobbies go, it’s a little dark. Whatever. It keeps me humble, rooted in the now, happy to be alive, and aware of death.

The fourth-dimensional propellant for time machines is notoriously unstable. We had a time fire last Monday that’s burning for two weeks forward and back from the explosion. A fuel leak hit a spark and all of a sudden, I could remember the fire starting ten days ago, working up to the explosion. This reshuffling of memories is what sends most chronomechanics around the bend.

I’m pretty passive about it. I just go back to reading my journals and try not to think about it.

The journal I’m reading tonight is for James Peter MacDougall. He hung himself two years ago up in the old Jenkin’s place on Powell Road.

What’s interesting to me is that I saw James yesterday down at the Safeway.

I have to get to back to work.

Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer

The body was huge. Seven feet tall, at least, and heavy.

X-Rays had shown a delicate tracery of machinery throughout, strengthening the huge frame to allow it to move quickly.

Its bright, neon-blue hair glowed in the dark. It was the same colour as the lips, fingernails, and nipples.

It was the same colour as the glittering eyes.

It was dead now.

It stared out at the scientists, unblinking, and awkward.

It had been found, naked, stumbling through the snow up in Alaska close to a week ago. Its skin was as white as the snow.

We called it Codename Winter because of it.

In the week before its death, it had picked up a few words of our language and could respond to rudimentary questioning. It was a slow process as it seemed to be straining not only to find the words but also the concepts behind them. I hate to say it, but it seemed really stupid.

Its story, told through clumsy mime and pieced together as best we could, was that it had come here from space and had left its ship to explore the wilderness in Alaska. A passing human airplane had spooked Codename Winter’s ship. The ship bolted and the alien was left alone.

It insisted that it was the only one on the ship. It insisted that the ship was probably worried about it and was looking for it.

It had been dead for two hours and there had still been no contact with the ‘ship’ of its story. Planes that had passed in the region she was describing witnessed nothing.

While it was alive, a tennis-ball sized lump of what we took to be biocircuitry in the center of it had given off a steady stream of data that seemed to be directly tied to its sensory organs but we couldn’t decipher the data we collected from it. We were still trying to figure out what the densely packed stream of trinary data meant.

However, it had not issued any transmission that we could detect after the alien’s death. No homing beacon, no SOS message, nothing.

Its death had been immediately preceded by a burst of a data washing through the biocircuitry that burned it out. Codename Winter had looked at us, puzzled, and died that way.

We’d come up with a saddening hypothesis:

Its warranty was up and it had been switched off like a light.

Its ship had scanned our planet, looked at the dominant life-form and made a copy out of the material it had on board. The ship drank in all the information that skin, eyes, ears and nose could provide. Maybe it didn’t waste time on colour or maybe it just had no idea what colour was.

Maybe the next step would have been to make a better copy that could fool us and let it wander around downtown Los Angles or something.

The ship wasn’t coming back for this creature any more than we would return to the site of a picnic for a lost fork.

Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer

The sensor charges go off and for a second I become a percussion instrument for the Devil.

I’m wreathed in black smoke and dropping like a stone. Explosions kick me like excited children. I’m a trillion-dollar pinball of curled-up offensive weaponry plummeting towards the enemy with the wrath of god in storage.

There’s sudden silence as I pass beneath the flakfield I was designed to penetrate. The air rushes by, whistling through the feathers of shrapnel embedded in my hull.

I unball and snap open the wingspread. Screaming with delight, I pull a tight three-gee loop in defiance of the enemy and in pure celebration of life.

I look left and right through amped senses to check out limb integrity.

A quick diagnostic reveals an acceptable level of damage.

I transform from a rock into an arrow pointed down.

The last of the clouds snap past me and my ocular facets becomes a rainbow of targets flowering towards me. Incoming priorities overlaid on city blocks and towers. Starpoints with missiles in the middle are getting larger as I look at them. Contrails are forming a spiderweb in the sky with me at the center. The city below me sends its best.

It’s too complicated to take in with my primary brain so I dump a priority comp request through and feel the jabs, waking up the other two brains. My ego dissolves and I become trajectories, vectors and tracepoints.

Even my memory fades. The only time I remember this state of mind is in my dreams during testing and repairs.

The city is a dartboard and I am headed for the bullseye.

It’s with a high whine that I pulse the accelerator. Two mach-donuts of ruptured air smash out from my tailfins. Windows shatter in the top floors of the towers below me as the sonic booms hit them twice.

I pull horizontal just above the tip of the tallest tower. The missiles aimed at me adjust accordingly.

I spin, turning the exhaust streams of sixty-eight cruise missiles behind me into basket weavers. My twinjets leave a dna helix of superheated gas.

I am flying flat now with a pet arsenal of enemy ordnance at my disposal. Automated defenses are so stupid.

I take a wide left and circle back towards the tip of the building that’s worth the most points.

I crank up an old recording of Marilyn Monroe singing Happy Birthday Mr. President as I fly straight towards the top floor.

He’s looking out the window. I couldn’t ask for more. I zoom in on his widening eyes as he takes in what’s happening. He moves in slow motion and I have entire tenths of a second to take in the picture.

I’m an angel chased by suns reflected in the glass he’s standing behind.

With a smile, I spread my wings again, wide, to brake.

I stop before nuclear fire overtakes me and I become Daedalus and Icarus rolled into one.

I’m a record cover for a second. Then I’m burning atoms.

Mission accomplished.

Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer

We had created a society free of disease and violence. We had a society that was centered on fun and learning. We had a society that knew the difference between entertainment and education. We had cross-bred to the point that there were no more ‘races’ left.

We had a peaceful empire that spanned three systems and an average individual life expectancy of five hundred years.

Human beings have always thought of each point in their history as their most advanced. It’s like there’s a temporal egotism that says This, Right Here, Is the Best We’ve Ever Been stamped into everyone’s brain.

I suppose that’s what screwed us up as well. They say pride goeth before a fall.

We should never have woken them up.

There was a system wide ‘awakening’ party that had been organized for a decade. Everyone that had ever been put into cryogenic storage was taken out, cured, cloned, re-canted, simmed or given a construct and brought back to life on the same day.

It was joyous. Great15 grandchildren met with ancestors for the first time. Wet, happy eyes looked at historical figures live and breathe. Great learned minds were brought to us intact. It was seen as a heartfelt victory of the soul for all of humanity.

It was the stupidest thing we’d ever done.

Remember, we looked at warfare like witch-burning; an embarrassing footnote on our race’s way to glory. We hadn’t had a war in two centuries. We had no idea.

War takes no time to spread. With our long life spans and peace-loving ways, it didn’t take long for the Cryos to band together for familiar company. After they bound together, it didn’t take long for them to have a problem with us and demand space for themselves and *only* themselves. We gave it to them.

They wanted more.

They attacked. The reports came out from Earth with bloodstained shock. Reporters openly wept when reading back the details from the teleprompter.

We had to refer to our nets to look up the meanings of new words like ‘border’ ‘money’ and ‘opressed’. A dead vocabulary sprang back to life. Sparks were lit in distant recesses of the collective unconscious.

Horrified people on Earth were angry. A human thirst for revenge, long dead, awakened in dormant parts of the brainstem. Suddenly, there was a ‘them’ and it was invasive. Protection was the only answer.

Battles became frequent and even more disturbing was that on all sixteen planets, we watched, wide eyed and panting, at the carnage.

It changed us. That was the beginning of the war. It took seven years.

In the end, the Cryos were exterminated in a final solution reminiscent of an ancient political party known as the Nazis. So were the people that helped them. And the friends of the people suspected of helping them. Even the Cryos that had sided with us were put to death as well for the good of us all. It was too late.

A division grew amongst us at the gory repercussions of our murderous bloodthirsty decision. First political battles broke out, then actual physical ones. Earth01 demanded to secede from the union. Then Saturn’s Moons and archipelagos. Korthos followed suit.

Sides were drawn. Tempers were high.

We lost Mars altogether in that flashpoint attack. We have a larger asteroid belt now in the Sol system where that planet used to be.

That was the end of peace. We run and gun now. The sleeper has awakened. We look back and shake our heads. We should have let sleeping dogs lie.

Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer

He never got along with adults after the war. Only the children. I remember him needing to angle himself just a little bit to fit his wide shoulders through our front door. He was all grunts and one-word answers.

He was married once but she left him after the war. She said that the humming his augmented body made at night made her feel like she was sleeping next to a refrigerator. Then she’d pause, glance at him and add, “In more ways than one.”

He was my older brother. I was one year too young for conscription when the troubles started. I remember him leaving. That was the last day I saw him as a pure human.

He spent four years out there. He had medals. He’d been honorably discharged after the war. I didn’t know him any more. I no longer recognized him as my brother.

He’d show up here every Sunday for dinner.

Both his eyes were perfect circles, white plastic insets that could see in the dark and look through walls. They looked like child-safety outlet covers jammed into his eye sockets. Light blue tracery zigged and zagged back to his grey-haired temples and down each side of his neck.

We always gave him the cheap glasses and cutlery because of the lack of delicate motor control in his massive skin-sheathed hand-machines. When he walked, one foot clanked.

We’d serve him a turkey dinner or roast beef which he ate obligingly to fuel the biological components of himself but it was always disconcerting to see him finish his meal with a big glass of oil.

After dinner, he’d mess up my child’s hair and do magic tricks. The decommissioned weaponry that the government took back left large hollow compartments in his back and one quarter of his chest. With clumsy sleight-of-hand, he could make objects ‘appear’ out of those compartments.

He could make miniature lightning bolts between his fingertips that would dim the lights and make his own hair stand on end like Einstein.

It made me shiver; thinking of how many of the enemy must have died screaming and blackened under those sparking mitts.

My theory was that the indirect and subtle world of adults was confusing to the changed cyborg soldier mind of my brother. The only time I saw him smile was with my child. His nephew.

Children were pure, straightforward and had no idea that he was frightening.

We probably would have tried to find a polite way of stopping him from coming over if these nights weren’t the highlight of our son’s week.

I’m looking at the two of them now, laughing on the living room carpet while one of my brother’s hands runs around by itself. My son’s laugh sounds like a normal child’s laughter.

My brother’s laugh sounds like crushed tin cans being rubbed together at the bottom of a well.

Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer

Jennies were shipped world-wide.

They were referred to as Jennies because of their genengineered origins. Some people referred to them as Generators because they were filled with energy, hardly ever slowed down, and kept the offices running at full power. They were designed to take care of and organize the day-to-day needs of every business, no matter how big or small.

Jennies were short. They were pretty in a way specifically designed to be slightly doll-like but commanding. There were off-putting yet attractive. Their flawlessness caused the human mind to be repelled but only just enough to avoid most confrontations. They were designed to have no guile and to be robotic enough to deflect unwanted attention.

Looking back, I supposed we should be thankful. It makes them easier to detect when they try to infiltrate and therefore easier to kill. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The A.I. rules were stringent. “Technically People”, Judge Amberson had said.

The sympathizers were happy with the ruling on moral grounds because potential abuse would be treated similarly to abuse that natural-born humans received and dealt with in the same legal fashion.

The rich were happy because a lot of money had been put into the Gen project and the resulting lawsuits would protect their investments.

The parent company had the Jennies record every second of their existence to protect their investments. Privacy clauses were set up and ironclad NDAs programmed internally so that no secret of any company could be revealed in a court of law except for any sexual or physical attack. A few assault cases and market crashes later, the lesson was clear.

In a way, they became untouchable. They all looked the same. None of them really made the effort to look different or stand out from the others.

Businesses that couldn’t afford one were subsidized. Jennies became a mainstay of every office. Where quarters couldn’t be provided, they slept in the offices that they worked in. The Jennies kept themselves clean like cats.

They were too expensive to manufacture as prostitutes. There were too many human women that could be bought and sold for cheaper with less hassle.

While the Jennies made everyone a little uncomfortable, they were treated as the world’s first mass-produced talking biological office application and left alone to do their jobs.

The Jennies were involved in every single aspect of almost every single business in America.

That’s how they shut it down.

The Jennies took over by bringing North America to an age of darkness. The banks, the import records, the export records, the stock markets, all of it. Gone in an hour. They left the rest of the world alone. It was alarming how few countries rushed to America’s side in its time of need. Alarming because by ‘few’, I mean ‘none’.

They shut down the dams and the power plants. The military Jennies held the keys to nuclear silos and threatened to use them if any other country interfered.

If America was a car, the Jennies had just thrown the distributor cap and the keys into the bushes.

From space, European astronauts watched as America went dark.

That was six years ago.

The populace of American is starving and dying off. The Jennies rove around in packs in stolen cars with guns to kill the thousands of us that still survive. They make more of themselves every day.

Jennies eat less. They sleep less. They’re in great shape. They have no compassion. It’s a losing race.

Soon enough, America will not only be run by the Jennies but populated solely by them.

Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer

The oval office had been compromised. I knew because I was the one who compromised it.

I was standing over the body of the atheist president. The dark hues of her face were being framed by the blood from her slit throat as she lay on her back looking up at me. Her feet kicked slower, more of a rub that a kick, and then lay still.

Her throat stopped bubbling.

The hammering on the door was what snapped me back to reality. I could hear footsteps outside and I knew that soon the room would be filled with fireworks.

I made the sign of the cross, activating the transmitters embedded in my forehead, shoulders and torso. They lit up blue, wiped the room with bright light, and I vanished.

Soldiers burst through the blood-spattered doors into an oval office containing the corpse of a now ex-president, the smell of lilacs, and nothing else.

I arrived in the transportation bay with a double-flash of light and a release of pent-up breath. I was never comfortable on missions that required an instant transport. I’d been reassured by the people that built it, people smarter than me, that it was safe. Whatever. As far as I was concerned, it just hadn’t malfunctioned yet.

I stepped off of the platform into the receiving bay and was greeted by my fellow Holy Marines returning from their separate missions. Almost all of them had returned by now.

The top businessmen and politicians in the world were being killed by us and blame was being thrown around by our operatives. Operation Rapture was well on its way to being a complete success.

I knew something had gone wrong even before I got the news.

Agent Petersen hadn’t returned from his mission yet.

An alarm turned us to the bank of monitors embedded in the ship’s walls. CNN was playing a clip live from the office of wealthy Slovakian industrialist Nick Milovets. He was holding up Agent Petersen’s head and yelling at the cameras.

The subtitles told us that he was asking us if this was the best we could do. Bodyguard mercenaries lay behind him, destroyed by the battle to bring Agent Petersen down.

“There goes our cover story.” said Jefferson to my right. I shot him a disapproving look and called up Cooper from Response and Containment.

A hologram of Cooper appeared in front me, flickering, with a questioning look on her face. I nodded at her. She frowned and shot me a stiff salute before disappearing.

“Clear” came from the loudspeakers on all decks.

I sent an overload command to Agent Petersen’s subdermal transmitters. On the television, Petersen’s head smoldered, burned bright, and Nick Milovets yelped as his hand started to burn. The yelp turned into a scream as his office shuddered.

The screen went white and CNN lost the feed. The newscasters returned to spouting panicked theories.

I was the oldest and highest-ranking officer on the deck. Everyone on the command deck held their breath and looked at me.

I smiled at them.

“Open the channels”, I said “Let them know that the end of the world is coming.”

The deck erupted in cheers.

Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer

It was like a hula hoop hanging in mid air. Looking through it, Todd could detect a little something that looked like a heat shimmer even though the lab was pretty cool. The hoop-gate didn’t hum which was odd considering the amount of power he was putting through it.

Two quarters lay steaming on the floor on the other side of the hoop.

A minute ago, Todd had thrown one quarter through the hoop. The quarter had hit the shimmer in the hoop with a light flash. There was a clink and then two quarters hit the floor on the other side.

Todd walked around to the other side of the hoop and picked them up. The quarters were cold to the touch but warming up to room temperature rapidly.

It was complicated but he thought that the coin had gone back in time, arrived in a multiverse with no corresponding time machine and been rejected. It had been bounced back to Todd’s time but because there had been no receiving machine on the other end in the past, the quarter could never have been sent. Therefore, the original quarter continued on its original path.

Reality rearranged itself to make this possible.

One quarter turned into two identical quarters.

Todd threw both quarters through the hoop back towards his desk.

Four quarters clinked onto the linoleum.

Smiling and with a wide-eyed chuckle, he went over and picked up the four quarters. He shook them in his hand like a high roller at a craps table.

Behind him, Fluffy lifted his head from the dog pillow and cocked his ears at the sound of the quarters clinking.

Todd tossed the quarters through the hoop again.

He heard a skittering of paws before shouting and turning too late to stop Fluffy from dashing forward. Fluffy was up for a game of fetch. She sped forward and leapt up through the hoop after the quarters.

There was a flash and the smell of burnt hair. Fluffy didn’t even have time to yelp.