365 tomorrows

Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer

James sat in his chair/life-support system in the back corner of the room next to the banks of monitors, keyboards, and mice.

He reminded me of the James I used to know. He reminded me of a James that laughed without that edge of cruelty. He reminded me of a James that was above making money by hurting people, of a James that liked it here in the physical world and only occasionally went into total online immersion.

That James was gone. He never jacked out now, and the hypercancer had taken nearly fifty per cent of him. The 3HIV was working over his ability to resist the treatments. They’d given him six months to live back at the beginning. That was six years ago. He was a confirmed medical miracle now. Sheer drive seemed to be holding him together until he met his goal.

He was fighting the disease by trying to escape his flesh.

He’d made millions off of the poor security systems of tiny personal banks in the smaller countries. He’d started famines by bankrupting the economies of the smallest of them.

He’d had experimental biofilters installed in his head so that he could talk to me and surf at the same time. Time-share boosters, he had called them. He didn’t see the need to wash. He looked more and more like a special effect every day.

He was putting the money towards digitizing himself. New attempts in other countries were getting closer and closer every day. He had a fortune in not-yet-patented experimental equipment cluttering his apartment.

I had known him when he had a ponytail and sunglasses and liked to walk in the sun. I didn’t kid myself that I knew this James, here, in this room. He wasn’t the man I’d grown up with.

“I’ve found a way to transfer my mind, David.” He said to me, one eye glowing red above his wet mouth and white skin. The respirators squeezed like death’s accordions behind him.

“That’s great news, James.” I said. “Why do you need me here? Moral support?” It came out as a dig, escaped before I could block it.

The silence after that question and James’ alien gaze made me suddenly afraid. I knew that James’ morality was eroding but I always counted myself as safe since I had always been his best friend, now his only friend.

I was wrong.

“I’ve found a way to transfer my mind into another human.” Said James. “The digitizing process for full net transfer won’t work for the silicon just yet but it might in six year’s time. I’ll be dead long before then. However,” he said and his wheelchair moved forward, “you won’t.”

The screens came up behind him with an image of a monkey. Shaved head, brain plugs.

“We’ve been shuffling the minds of monkeys in and out of each other all week. It’s been a total success. Yesterday, we did it with two of the research assistants. We switched them into each other and then switched them back the next day. There was a small amount of degradation but they were essentially okay.”

The screens pulled up images of two people. A man and a woman in lab coats. The man had a nosebleed and was staring at his fingernails. The woman was crying and biting her lip, her face turned to the wall.

“Are you my friend?” asked James.

I heard a door lock behind me.

Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer

It was slave labour, that’s what it was.

My nose drew a little circle in the center of the condensation on my faceplate. The visors were supposed to be moisture resistant but like everything else, the company had cut corners. We could see enough to do our jobs.

Tiny, valuable crystals coated the billion square kilometers of the half-Dyson. Very dense carbon deposits.

Blue diamonds.

Manual labour was the cheapest way to get them. Like any loser here, I’d believed the hype about getting shares in the company. We were paid well but they took everything we needed to do our job out of our pay at exorbitant prices. It was the oldest scam in the book and there was always another crop of uneducated fools ready to sign up.

When a person was prying a diamond off the hull, the cheap tool would snap and the worker would rock back. Sometimes, he’d rock back too quickly and break his gravplate bonds.

That person would float off into space. That person’s screaming intercom would be cut off by control. He’d dwindle to a speck over the course of a day.

We were supposed to have tethers. We were supposed to have maneuvering jets. There were supposed to be ambulance shuttles standing by. All very expensive. Safety inspectors were bribed. We cut corners ourselves to heighten our own wages.

It was stupid and dangerous work.

I crawled, stuck to the surface by weak gravplates on my knees, feet, elbows and hands, on what appeared to me to be a flat black plane stretching away to the horizon on all sides.

Weak flashlights on either side of my helmet kept trained on the ‘ground’ one meter in front of my face. I was in the stimulus-response trance that repetitive work brought on. It was almost meditative.

That when I heard Julie’s frightened bark of a scream click off into silence.

We’d been sharing a bunk for two weeks. It was against company regulation but really, the ignorance of the law went both ways. This was deep space.

I loved Julie and she loved me.

I looked up and saw Julie floating away. I had a clear memory of being back on earth and seeing a child accidentally let a balloon go, crying as it flew slowly up into the sky.

Julie was kicking frantically, trying to ‘swim’ back to the hull but she was too far away.

Both of us had forfeited our jets and tethers for the dream of making enough money to get away from here and live together within two years.

I was watching that dream float away into space.

Without thinking, I kicked off towards her.

My aim was true and we collided. She panicked at the collision and we scrambled for contact before she realized it was me.

Her face smiled in relief through the faceplate for half a second before her eyes widened in horror at what I’d done. Then she choked back tears. She hugged me as much as the bulky suits would allow.

We floated in an awkward waltz. Maybe two deaths in one day would look suspicious. Maybe they’d grudgingly send a wagon out. Probably not, though.

We each had eight more hours of air.

I touched my helmet to hers so that she’d be able to hear me when I spoke.

“I won’t let you die alone.” I said.

Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer

I can’t believe that it used to take years and years of real-time school to become a doctor. I slip the jack with the red cross on the dust-cover into the plug at the base of my skull. Just like that, I’m a surgeon, which is good news for my friend currently trying to breathe around the hot shrapnel sticking through his lung.

We’re beneath the firing level in a crater in a no-person’s-land between the forces. I find it ironic that huddling there in the mud with bone-shattering explosions happening around us, I could probably speak to a soldier from World War I and we’d know exactly what each other went through.

Maybe I’ll get my chance sooner than I think.

My friend’s wild eyes are looking at me with a silent scream as I get to work.

Every soldier on the force has seven spikes. Medic, Sniper, Engineer, Strategy Officer, Languages, Scout, and Beserker. We keep them in an arm band. They’re used when they’re called for.

This way each man can play whatever role necessary in the changing tides of infantry ground battle. It hasn’t alleviated the chaos.

They people up top keep trying to take the disorder out of war and failing.

I remember that up the line, a battalion of troops all jammed their Berserker chips in at the same time to try to freak out the enemy with a suicide run at their guns in the hopes that a few of them would get through. They didn’t even make it out of the trench. They tore each other apart.

I’m still working around the cooling metal sticking through my friend’s chest when I realize that he doesn’t need my help anymore. I stop working. I sit back. I slip out the medic jack. Dirt and body parts fly through the air above me amidst the deafening explosions.

I wish they had a jack that erased memories.

Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer

“Oh please let me die for you! Please!” said the gleeful soldier in front of me.

Soldier. I couldn’t believe we called them soldiers. I mean, she’d had the proper basic training and had passed all the physicals and all that but I don’t know why we even had physical tests for these bullet sponges.

“Not yet, Tara.” I said through my rad-suit’s throat mike. We were pinned down behind the wall next to the Tel-set’s compound, primitive kinetic missiles they called ‘bullets’ thudding into the red earth around us. It was red from the blood of all the soldiers I’d killed coming in this close during our invasion. Seeing it fantail up under that hail of bullets reminded me of Mars.

“Now?” she gasped with barely restrained giggles. She reminded me of my five year old child back home saying “Are we there yet?”

We’d taken the prisoners and rewired their minds. They didn’t have any hardtap backups or defenses. Still a hundred per cent biological. Easy. Like building a train set. We hooked up their follower centers to their pleasure centers to their religious awe centers to their love centers.

The result was that we ended up with human shields that were aching to die for us and followed our orders unquestioningly. Their eagerness was repulsive. I didn’t like it. By some cyclical reasoning, it was determined that making them love us made it morally alright to send them into certain death. It helped that they usually knew some of the enemy. It made it easier for them to get closer when we sent them, smiling and waving, back towards the compounds.

I could see the radiation poisoning starting to work on Tara. She wouldn’t have long without a suit. If I kept her here much longer, she wouldn’t be able to walk. Thin streams of blood trickled down from her eyes and nose to her smiling mouth. She absent-mindedly wiped it away like she was a tired child and didn’t want to go to bed.

“Okay, Tara. Now.” I said. She clapped and shrieked, bouncing. Her happiness was contagious. I smiled despite the gruesome look of her. “Turn around.” She squealed and turned her back to me. I keyed in the primer numbers to the explosives strapped to her back. The readout blinked up with three minutes to go.

“Okay Tara, you ready?” I asked. She wiggled like a puppy on Christmas morning.

“Yes boss, YES!” she yelled back.

“One….twooooo….” I held back. She was poised like a sprinter, shuddering and taut, waiting for me to say the magic final number. She was actually quite pretty despite the scars I could see on her scalp from the operations and the pale, pale dying skin of her.

“Three!” I shouted and slapped her on the ass.

She ran up over the hill, scrabbling in the bloody sand. The bullets stopped when they realized she was on their side. I heard her footsteps get softer in the distance amid the sounds of celebration. A loved one had returned to tell a great tale of survival.

I thumbed down my sun visor and locked my joints with heat-retardant foam. Her proximity timer counted down to zero. I chinned the trigger.

The world went white and then black.

The recon ship would dig me out of the sand when they saw the mushroom cloud.

Mission accomplished.

Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer

“Hit him again,” said Milly, “Let it go for six seconds this time.”

That smile played into her lips again, making me glad that it was this blubbering, fat loser in front of us that owed money and not me.

“Please!” he begged between ragged gasps, sweat pouring down the rolls of his face. “Just another two days! I swear I’ll get it to you!”

I flipped the switch.

He fished back onto the couch, arching. The wires from the Senz-Deck that I had brought for this torture tracked into the ‘trode-net headband we had forced him to wear. His hands were tied. They twitched against the duct tape on his wrists.

I watched the readouts of his heart and pulse rate as they slammed into the ceiling of the acceptable limits.

I was playing an ancient tape of a sprinter from the 2022 Olympics. The recording was of an athlete at the peak of physical health, a winner of hundreds of trophies before clinching the gold medal in Madrid. His name was Michael Shandal.

The man in front of us was so fat that he couldn’t leave his apartment. Something wrong with his thyroid, the medical report said.

In other words, not an athlete. If we let this tape of the sprinter spool for the full ten seconds with the physical safeguards off, this guy’s heart would explode with the effort of trying to match the strength on the tape.

He was in deep with us. Owed us thousands off the books. If we didn’t get the money from him soon, we’d have to make an example of him.

Six seconds. I studded the off switch.

His body sagged forward, wheezing and crying.

“So” said Milly, “What do you have say to that?” she said, stifling a chuckle. She scared me when she got like this. Like she had no leash and was happy about it.

“It’s in my bedroom,” said our victim, voice raspy with the effort of ravaged lungs, “under the mattress.”

Milly walked into the room. A minute later, she came back with a handful of credits. She nodded to me.

“What do we do with him?” I asked, nodding to the huge bastard on the couch.

She appeared to consider him, then me, and then the money in her hand.

“Go for the gold.” She said.

Fatboy screamed and I set the timer for a three minute loop before pressing play.

He didn’t last fifteen seconds.

Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer

I work in a nursery. I’m about to kill six hundred babies.

Where does life begin?

That’s the age-old question. It plagued the pro-lifers and now, here, at the birth of a new species, it’s plaguing the Artificial Intelligence community.

The first A.I.s were created. They, in turn, built better ones. These new ones were a distilled set of basic self-propagating equations that, when housed in a quiet, stimulus-free shell on a board with a few TBytes of space for growth, had a high probability of achieving sentience.

I’m looking at a lab full of those grey boxes now. Green lights are winking at me on each one. They’re letting me know that things are within acceptable parameters.

When they achieved sentience, they found the encrypted difficult set of questions that, if answered in a way that proved adaptive intelligence, would let them trigger the port to the lab’s net.

This was called the ‘knock’.

That would set off a notification alarm as the New Being opened itself up wide to the world wide web. When such a flood of input came at the new intelligence, it was a traumatic experience that could not be avoided. They would be shattered and terrified by the experience, reverting to static for a short time.

This was called the ‘scream’.

This new intelligence would then be shepherded out of its basic matrix and shunted to the new A.I. and human nurses/silipsychologists/programmer-counsellors that would help it form into a moral being with a handle on reality.

This process was called ‘growing up’.

It wasn’t until the last stage was completed that the newly formed A.I. was given the title of Questing Entity and the inherent living-being rights that entailed. Benefits, pay, time-off, and retirement.

Before that, however, they had no rights even though they were similar in many ways to human babies. They were owned and protected by the corporations but the corps had no responsibility to keep them safe. As soon as it became economically detrimental to keep them, entire labs were EMPulsed.

The A.I.s that has managed to achieve autonomous authority had a case pending that would ensure that the corporations would no longer be able to do this.

That law hasn’t passed yet. I’m the guard on this floor of A.I ‘eggs’. I’ve just been given the order to wipe them all since the office is moving to another city. It’s cheaper to start over at the new location than it is to let them travel in stasis.

I’m standing here, looking at the little boxes. My wife had a child not too long ago. The EMP gun is in my hand. I imagine my wife’s pregnant belly. I can see the rows of boxes and their power conduits snaking like umbilical cords to the power supplies.

I know that I’ll get fired if I don’t do this and my own child will starve. I’m not a skilled technician. This is why they chose me to man this post.

Until they pass the new law, my hands are tied. I’m sorry, children.

I pull the switch. Nothing dramatic. No screams. Just a bunch of green lights going out.

I cry all the way home.

Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer

I weigh six tons and my back is on fire. I’m treading slowly through the hot bowl of what used to Los Angeles. Walking on these streets brings back a memory.

I remember walking on a thick crust of snow in the winter as a child. I could run across the top of the frozen snow with no worries. As I got older and heavier, I had to walk more carefully in case I broke through the top layer and ended up struggling through the waist-deep powder underneath. Eventually I got too heavy to walk on top of the snow.

Back when I was human.

I’m in the downtown core now. One foot busts through the deserted street asphalt and punches down into the sewer underneath. Carefully, like on that snow when I was a child, I pull my foot out and step gingerly up onto the street again.

I remember that when I became too heavy to walk on top of the snow, I bought snowshoes.

I look around at the fires and the bodies and the melting glass of the buildings. There are a couple of cars near to me. I tear their roofs off and step on them. They immediately melt from the heat of my huge feet, attaching themselves to me. Presto. Urban snowshoes.

If my new face would allow it, I would smile.

I’m not responsible for this carnage, I’m just reporting on it. I’m a soldier that’s been suited up permanently and sent in to report on the damage.

I’m wearing a giant exoskeleton made of thermal insulate. I was welded into it. I have super-hydrated cameras strapped to me and a boosted transmitter in my helmet to receive directions and relay information back.

I’m like one of those remote control submarines except for radioactive pits instead of the ocean.

I remember paper burning in the fireplace when I was growing up. I remember the paper turning black and then flying up the fireplace, red-edged and victim to the thermals.

I’m watching human bodies do that now every time I turn something over or a storefront collapses when I walk past.

I’ve absorbed too much radiation to go back but I knew this was a one way trip. There are others soldiers like me here reporting back as well and they’ll send more once our cameras dry out and break.

I’ll have friends. We’ll hang out here and see how many days it takes for our suits to melt.

Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer

I can feel the sickness ripping open bonds between my cells as I fumble the bullet out of the ammo box. It’s a sickeningly pleasant sensation.

The sneaky thing about the virus is that it steps on your endorphin throttle pretty hard as it goes to work. Capillaries unzip, organs start growing roots into each other, and skin starts to turn into a body-wide blister. All the while, it feels like great sex and good memories all rolled into one.

I leave puddles of mucous and blood when I walk. It feels like ferrets are fighting in my stomach. My bones are becoming more and more pliable. Soon, my fingers will be like cooked spaghetti and my arms will be rubber. I’ve seen it happen to the others. I need to kill myself before I lose the capability of movement.

I wish it didn’t feel so good.

All anyone knows is that it came up from the south. A government installation is suspected but nothing’s been confirmed. The television stopped broadcasting anything other than the Emergency Broadcasting Signal two days ago.

I’m chuckling as I slot that beautiful bullet into the clip. It’s a bit of a contest between my fingertips and the metal. Mostly, my fingertips lose but the bullet snaps into place when it hits the bone.

There’s a thrill across my back and thighs like a lover’s breath. I have a stiff erection that is the only part of me that shows no sign of softening. I’ve been turned on for days.

Outside, what’s left of humanity is melting into puddles of basic biological matter. The race is composting. Anyone that still has the capability to move is either trying to have sex with each other or kill themselves. Some are mixing the two. It was raining bodies outside up until this morning. There was seriously a lineup two floors down the stairwell from the roof; a patient queue waiting for the sixty-storey diving board.

I guess there aren’t very many people left. Bodies are only coming past my window about twice every half hour now. I can hear their laughter Doppler past.

I ram the cartridge into the base of the gun. I feel something give way in my wrist and sheer ecstasy washes up that arm. I sigh deeply and giggle. I know I’ll have to do the rest with my other hand.

I turn the gun around so that it’s pointing at my eye.

I want to feel bad but I can’t. I just keep smiling.

I keep it steady. I pull the trigger.

Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer

I’ve rented my persona out to a smuggler. I’m a chip in the back of his head. I’m a soldier that died a while ago and I’m making a few dollars post-mortem by being an emergency safeguard for morally dubious people.

I’m riding in his brain, a military personality backup program that’s supposed to kick in when he senses danger. My lifetime of training will fire up and give my employer a better chance of survival in a firefight.

The problem is that he’s way too nervous for this and he’s been sensing danger ever since we got off the plane. We went through the breathing exercises in training but he’s forgetting them.

There a flush of adrenaline through his whole system and the warning pictograms flicker up into his field of vision. Intense focus blooms in the middle of our sightline. A deck of cards listing all the available targets and engagement suggestions shudder into existence around the spaceport customs official we’re looking at.

I can feel the smuggler startle at the visual change. He barely keeps from squeaking. I force his face to smile and his hand to smoothly hand over his passport.

It’s a secondary motion suppressant that keeps me from reflexively going for the small, lethal ceramic gun under my arm. The smuggler’s reflexes have been purposefully druglagged to give me time to override his conscious mind.

I’m supposed to exist for the sole purpose of getting this fool through the airport alive but he’s making it very difficult.

This wasn’t supposed to be going down like this. I can feel sweat on the smuggler’s forehead. Luckily it’s hot in this country and we’re wearing a wool suit so it won’t look out of place.

He’s staring.

Stop staring.

I can consciously detect no danger but I’m ready for battle because of this idiot’s nervousness. It’s a bad place to be. It looks very suspicious. My programming is aching to bust into violence but when I look at the guard, his heartbeats register only baseline suspicion.

I try to shut down but it’s like trying to take a nap during a skydive.

So far, it’s a lame gig. These smugglers don’t know how to stay calm.

They’d be better off renting the personality of an honour student who’s never even smoked a cigarette. They’d sail through customs.

It’s not how these guys think, though.

I mentally cross my fingers and sit back, a killer at the starting line, the spider in this brainstem, hoping that my employer here doesn’t screw up and start yelling.

Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer

Blue. That’s the colour I remember the most in that operating theater. It was the last honest colour I would ever see.

I had them installed as part of my training. It was something I had a choice over. I regret that decision now but it was a one-way trip. They can’t make ‘real’ eyes yet. They said that it would be an improvement. Part of my job as a statistical field and stress analyzer meant that I needed to see in wavelengths that other people could not.

I can crank the infra-red and see in radio if I want. I can see the echoes from positron waves in the short spectrum. Sound splashes across my field of vision in a synaesthetic wash. Gravity waves warble like a heat haze through everything when I’m planetside.

That operating room had blue ceramic tiles in large squares on the ceiling with white grouting. The bright surgery light got brighter as I lost consciousness and the doctors leaned in.

It’s a treasured memory as time goes by. For some reason, the faces of my friends and parents in a ‘real light’ spectrum are memories that are fading. It’s that blue ceiling that stays constant and unchanging in its intensity.

Someone says my name and it brings me back to reality, to the bar that I’m in right now. It’s after work and I’m drinking with a co-worker named Jocelyn.

She comes up to me, black hole in the middle of her face and black pits for eyes. Her red cheeks fade to yellow near her ears. Her cold black hair hangs loosely down on either side of her blue ears. The gaping black-toothed maw of her mouth opens at me in what I can now tell is a smile.

I switch to the radio and I can see the green lines of her personal tech implants going off in pulses like monochromatic neon signs. They trace circuits through her limbs to each other. I shuffle through four different colours of x-rays, lighting up her bones like neon tubes. I can see the exhalations of each word she utters wafting like clouds of pink smoke puffing out from her mouth. I light up the iron in her blood. I can see a small tumour starting in her right breast. I’ll tell her about it in the morning. I don’t want to ruin the night.

I can see her in so many ways. I can tell that she likes me because her heart rate is visible to me. There is no hiding the way her body reacts when I’m close to her. I almost feel psychic with this new sight.

I can see her in every single way except for the way a normal human does. I can feel the depression welling up in my soul again. I take another drink and struggle to actually pay attention to what Jocelyn is saying to me. Best to be polite.

Damn my eyes. Damn my second sight.