365 tomorrows

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.

Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer

I hunt the Time Killers.

I am the person they call in when they have a chronovore infestation. These creatures are bright blue and frog-like with the giant faceted eyes of an insect. Millilocular lenses, each one seeing progressively further forward and back in time.

The smaller a beast is, the less it can see into time. The babies can see ten minutes in either direction. The big ones can see for days. I heard of one giant beast that saw a week and a half in either direction.

It’s like how a fly’s eyes are giant hemispheres, giving it a nearly 360 degree field of view for warning of incoming danger. These chronovores see a lenticular time-field to give them warning of imminent attacks.

These chronovores, being quantum animals, need to see the chunk of time that they are going to eat. If they can only see five minutes forward and five minutes back, then they can only fit that ten minutes of time into their gullets before moving on. If they eat more than they can see, they untether from the timeline and are never seen again. Greed keeps their numbers down.

It’s when a pack of them get together and start grazing that the problems really start.

The fields they emanate can take up entire city blocks. The area where they eat gets shuffled back in time and their bellies get full.

Most humans blame their dodgy memories on inattention or drugs or lack of sleep. One day looks pretty much like the next in most people’s numbing drudgery of an existence. The small chronovores pass without much damage. A few minutes here, an hour there. If people notice a discrepancy, they figure they just dozed off or zoned out for a second. It’s the big ‘C-vores’ that cause problems with history and create timefaults.

I’m from the Core. I have perfect recall. When a chunk of my time goes missing, I know it. My scanner says that there are ripples here. The beast must be close. I warm up the looptrap and place it near –

- Wednesday for lunch. It’s not much but I’m hoping that they don’t linger. Wait. Wait. What day is it? I check inside and compare streams. I lost a month. That can’t be! A month-eater would be the size of a shuttlecraft! I’ve heard no reports.

Wait. The television. It’s talking about a giant blue frog in the downtown core. The helicopters of this era are circling. Jesus. The chronovore’s field emanation must be the size –

- tranquil, almost summertime breeze. I’m looking forward to the barbeque and seeing Marie. Damn. It’s happened again. I wonder if it’s yanking the entire city backwards a month at a time. It’s going to continue on its path, leaving month-sized holes across the seaboard like a ravenous moth making its way through a closet of expensive clothes.

Maybe they can drive it into the ocean. In the depths, a month of time isn’t going to make too much of a difference one way or the –

-peanut butter. I can’t even be sure that the supermarket is open. The queue is taking a long time. How did I –

- given my orders. Apparently there’s a large chronovore in LA. I’m not looking forward to it. I don’t like the heat in that city.

Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer

The old man was a genius but kept it to himself. He lived in an old house outside of the city. He didn’t have friends. He kept himself busy with hobbies. His latest project had been a frustrating one.

The problem was material. By his calculations, he would have needed a dish over six miles in diameter. Tin or lead-lined steel would have been best.

He didn’t have the money to afford that much metal, let alone get a grant from city council to build something so huge that close to the city. He was stuck.

Until he thought smaller instead of bigger. He bought an old television picture tube and a faulty electron microscope from the university that they were going to throw out anyway. He bought thirty magnets from the hardware store, salted them, and aligned them all in a very unique and specific way on a chunk of stolen chain-link fence. By pulsing the electrons from the busted television through those magnets with the electron microscope turned on to observe them to make them collapse, he created a tachyon spray gun.

With it, he could mark a radius of five miles around his house with an invisible web of time-retarding, mostly-stable tachyon nets with its focus ending in the middle of his basement.

Totally harmless to the normal population.

To time travelers, it might as well have been a brick wall.

The first traveler arrived five minutes after the old man turned the time-net on.

There was a flash and there he was. Dressed in blue and with goggles. He had a bright orange plastic fin on the top of his head. He was wearing black rubber gloves and his chest had a tangle of monitors on it. His whole setup looked pretty homemade. He had what looked like a motorcycle throttle in his left hand and some sort of blender in the other.

“Sweet! It worked! Where am I?” he asked. Looking at the old man and then at his surroundings with a wide, goofy smile on his face.

“1958.” the old man lied.

“What? That doesn’t make any sense.” He looked down at one of his dials.

The old man raised his gun and shot the traveler through his left eye.

The old man turned off the time-net. He took off the traveler’s clothes and looked at the equipment strapped to his body. There had to be about six patents in the chest equipment alone. And judging by the traveler’s inexperience and naiveté, he probably wasn’t even that advanced.

The old man would rob more travelers and steal their technology. He’d leak the patents out on the market. He’d be rich.

Seeing as no temporal police had showed up at his house yet, the old man figured that he had already gotten away with the crime.

The old man smiled in the darkness of his basement.

Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer

She left me for a space trucker. I wasn’t even mad. Hell, I understood.

The thing about space truckers is that they drive space trucks. They go from place to place. They come in to port, drop some stuff off and then, and this is the important part, they leave.

I liked it here. She didn’t. I thought that marrying her might change that. She was eighteen when we married. I was thirty-one. She was my second wife.

Susan grew up here. Ever since her fourteenth birthday, she couldn’t face a single day without illicit drugs to make her feel like it wasn’t so bad. Her doses were increasing. Her late-night searches for anything to distract her from her existence were becoming more frequent.

This rock isn’t a very big place. There are only six bars.

I’d heard stories about her late-night carousing with other men. I put it down to being young. Given time, she’d adjust. I forgave her. It’s not like her behavior was unusual. Anyone in their teens here tended to go a little insane for a while.

Anyone can watch the screens and see that there’s a whole connected universe out there with excitement and input. For teenagers, it’s the biggest tease there is.

For us folks over thirty, it’s a little reassuring to know that we’re safe from all that noise down here in the rock, away from the noisy universe.

Here, we have the rock, each other, and a perpetual night sky. If I were to wear an outsuit and walk around the entire asteroid, I’d be back home in a month. It’s not a big place.

Mining runs in my family. I honestly don’t know what else I would do.

Susan was the soft body that took the edge off of my constant world of grease, dust, and machinery.

Turns out she was doing more than just carousing in the bars with other men. She was, like a lot of the girls and boys here, looking to trade sex for transportation and get the hell away from here. The prettiest ones succeeded.

It’s a shame. It seems like our second highest export besides the ore is beautiful teenagers.

I’ll always remember Susan.

Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer

It’s late. I’m smoking a cigarette in the ruins of a burned-down orphanage.

I’m standing in what used to be a room full of cradles. The scorched floor is cluttered with little black bones and black charcoal cribs.

It’s all I can do to stand there. The dome’s supports make black ribs miles above this city cutting the sky into pie slices down to the horizon. I haven’t seen the sun since I got here.

I remember Earth. I haven’t been back to there in over twenty years now. I remember blue sky. I remember not living in domes. I hate this place.

I hate the ignorant first-wave colonists and their ignorant lives. I hate their aversion to learning anything not needed to run the machines. I hate their lack of imagination and lack of originality. They’re augmented slightly to see better in the dark and withstand a few more seconds of vacuum in case of a decomp. Owl eyes that glow in the dark and hard bodies for hard work. All physical. Nothing mental.

I’m a cop. I pissed off my boss and caught a transfer out here to the gulag. The boondocks. Long time ago now. The only way I’m going back to Earth is after I retire which is in five years. Five long years.

I have the standard cop upgrades: total recall, overextended acuity, critical stat sensitivity that makes me into a human lie detector, and bumped-up lateral reasoning.

It all just adds to the torture. Time doesn’t ‘fly’ for me. With my photographic memory, I’m aware of every second going by exactly as long as a second is supposed to take. I hate it. Drinking does nothing to mute it. Believe me, I’ve tried.

To fool a lie detector like me, perpetrators have to be careful about the evidence they leave at crime scenes or at least passably devious during an interview. That would at least lend a little spice to my interrogations. No such luck. I swear that almost all of the population here is legally retarded.

For instance, I’m staring down at a wallet and a gas can right now. It looks like maybe the arsonist must have squatted down to light the fire and dropped his wallet out of his back pocket.

And more than that, he’ll be shocked when I trace it back to him.

I look at my partner. His eyes reflect the starlight back at me in big orange circles and his strong, thick skin blends into the night. He’s a local. Him and I are the only ranking detectives in the colony.

“Don’t you hate it here, son?” I ask him.

Completely stoic about my non-sequitur, he answers, “I grew up here, sir. Don’t know no different.”

I keep standing, staring down at the wallet. My partner stands with me, still as a statue, endlessly patient as only the truly stupid or enlightened can be.

I sigh and pick up the wallet. Time to go make an arrest.

Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer

We lived in a tribe outside the main disc. The arm struts of the cogshield branched out above us like a gear. Where we lived was all angles. It had been this way ever since our creation.

My little one was sick. I’d built him according to the proper specs using the proper tools. I’d been licensed and refitted for programs to propagate. Even with all the shielding and over-protective parenting I’d put in as a precaution, a recursive virus had still gotten into his wiring.

My little one had a stutter that was getting worse. Soon he’d be locked in a loop with too little time between the repeats to do anything but power him down. No backup, complete wipe, start over. He’d be dephased and I would lose my right to build for another cycle.

Our lattice had a central nexus that our main struts grew out from like crystals. We took up a square block of vacuum equal to what The Human’s library called a hydrogen atom.

The Human had come to us several cycles ago. He communicated with us by beams of binary light flashes. We set up nets to capture the particle waves and record the frequencies.

At first, we thought that the strobing sun was another one of us giving us a first contact. After The Human had downloaded a small repository of his own knowledge to us called Encyclopedia, we realized that humans were a race of creators made of complex structures to big for us to see.

Our creators.

The revelation was astounding. There were many debates on how to treat the situation.

He continued to download information to us.

We gathered a concept of ‘male’ and ‘female’. It’s a fad that’s still popular to build little ones in an image that conforms to one or the other. I made mine a male.

They have an understanding of an art called psychology that they use for organic minds. I was hoping that this art might help my boy before I had to shut him down permanently.

I needed to take my stuttering boy to Contact Point out on the Proto-Spur from whence we all came. There, I need to stand on the endless plateau and walk into the light underneath the Viewing Plate.

With the particles of light falling around me like hail, I need to speak to them by using binary flashes of my headlamp.

I need to ask the Human for advice on how to fix my boy.

Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer

“Man, we got ripped off.” said Manuel.

He was watching an old tri-D of a Flash Gordon serial made in the fifties. In the show, the year was 1998, just like now. It was hilarious and depressing all at the same time.

Manuel’s robot servant brought him another drink. “Will there be anything else?” D-11B intoned.

“No.” answered Manuel through his thought-amplification helmet. “That will be all.”

D-11B went back to the kitchen dispensary to prepare the dinner pills. Manuel continued watching Flash Gordon.

On the tri-D, Flash Gordon got into his ‘internal combustion’ ground car, put something called a cigarette into his mouth and drove to his ‘apartment’ using what he referred to as an ‘onboard navigational computer’ that told him exactly where to go.

In this series, there were little robots in space that took pictures of earth that everyone could see and use as a map. They called them satellites. No tethers! Amazing.

“Imagine how easy it would be to fly around without having to avoid all the tethers,” Manuel said to himself, “my personal jetpack would have a few less scratches, that’s for sure.”

Flash Gordon’s friend, Dr. Zarkov, had something called a pacemaker. It used metal wires to stimulate his heart with electricity!

Complete flights of fancy. The miracle material called ‘plastic’, for instance, made from the magic ‘oil’ liquid that came out of the ground, or electricity that was only in wires and not the free-floating Tesla storms that we had so many problems with.

“We hadn’t been able to live on the ground since 1938,” said Manuel to himself, “that’s why we all lived in nuclear-powered levitating houses. It was a matter of survival after The World War.”

Manuel could hear his wife’s flying car come in for a landing outside on the inner rim. He turned off the tri-D and stood up. “She’d kill me if she caught me watching this old claptrap,” he murmured, “it always makes me cranky.”

The bio-coral bone-thickeners helped Mauel’s hips as he stood up. He was wishing for a pair of those magnificent ‘plastic’ hips like in the Flash Gordon film.

No ground cars, no satellites, no shuttles, no gasoline, no plastic.

Manuel sighed. “Man, we got ripped off.” he said again.

“Honey, I’m home!” said his wife as she came in the front vacutube elevator.

Manuel forced a smile and went to greet his wife before dinner.

Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer

It was the physical changes that were the hardest to get used to.

I’m not just talking about the year of physiotherapy. I’m talking about the grey hairs. I’m talking about the soft skin. That and the gradual discovery that life had passed you by. People looked at you and nodded but that close trust was gone. The connection was severed. Parties, deaths, deals, power struggles, marriages, births. They’d all gone on while you slept. You showed up years later with canes and an older body.

There were no prison visits. There were no gyms. It was a snap of the fingers and they took years away. Parole for good behaviour didn’t exist. For guys that had been sentenced to really hard time, it was a slow execution.

You get caught, you go under. That had become the answer to the prison crisis. People were put on trial, sentenced, and given a shot. They were slotted into a sleep chamber in a penal hotel somewhere to carry out their sentence in a dreamless sleep. The liberals loved the humane aspect of it all, the conservatives loved the cruelty of it all, and the general populace had a nice, happy image of cons sleeping like babies. Everyone wins.

When a criminal’s time was done, they were woken up. The light on the front of their chamber changed from red to green with a little ‘ding’ sound, just like a toaster oven telling the cook that the pizza inside was done.

Muscles do a little shrinkage if you don’t move them for a few years, even with the electrical stimulus in the coffins. It’s really painful to get those muscles working again. It takes a long time.

But like I said, that wasn’t the hard part. I’d been under for twenty years. I went in when I was twenty-six. I’m forty-six now. When I went in, I had the body of an athlete. My memories were full of sex, murder, fights, and running from the cops in a body that did it easily. Those memories end, in my mind, about eight weeks ago.

I don’t recognize the cars or the fashions. I walk so slow.

I looked up my old gang friends. All dead except for three of them. Those three took pity on me and gave me some cash but I could tell from the look in their eyes that they’d never let me back into the syndicate.

I looked up my old girlfriends. Couldn’t find any of them. Names changed because they got married or they’d died as well. None of us led a good life out here. We all wanted to die young and most of us got our wish granted.

I feel like a ghost. Time to make some new friends. I don’t have the faintest idea where to begin.

I could feel the need to commit a crime and go back to sleep twisting around inside my head like a hot wire.

I felt too weak to deal with this new life.

Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer

We called the rich kids ‘Upgrades’.

They were the ones that had been born with all of the benevolent tweaks and cellular advantages that money could buy. Longer life spans, all possible congenital defects erased, optimum health, even faster mental response times.

You’d think that we would envy them. Well, we certainly envied their bodies. They looked like gods. Like they’d stepped out of commercials and into real life.

What we didn’t envy, though, were the mental changes that the parents felt justified in doing to their children.

The Pixelator was one such augmentation. The rods and cones on the back of the eye were enhanced for better-than-perfect vision. However, a filter was placed between the brain and eye to make sure that all nudity was seen as pixelated blocks of colour. It was put there to keep the kids from seeing naked flesh before they reached the age of majority or until the parents deemed it acceptable to remove the block.

Of course, it didn’t work. Kids were having sex anyway. The entire experience for them visually became a jumble of oversized flesh-tone boxes. They lied to their parents about being virgins.

When the mental/visual block was lifted, some of the kids went and had it secretly reinstated. One glimpse of actual nudity, of actual sex, and they were turned off. Their entire sexual awakening had been in a haze of blurry cubism and they wanted it back.

Playing with the body is one thing, but playing with the mind was always something I felt uneasy about.

I’m grateful that my parents never had enough money to change me.

Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer

The tattoos writhed.

The tattoos strobed through creatures and colours in time to the music and the backbeat of her heart. They’d flash up in blues and purples, mapping out her internal organs before slashing to a zoom-in of Hercules battling the Hydras across the bladed bones of her hips. Stories unfolded down her legs. Reels of film patterened across her shoulder blades. Home movies from Old Earth flashed nostalgia across her buoyant breasts. A burning python lazily wound underneath it all down from the hairline of her neck, around her waist, between her thighs and around one leg to the ankle.

After ten minutes of watching her, one could detect patches that would repeat, see loops start to form, pick up on what images were generated by her consciously and what was being influenced by the music but still, the artistry and complexity involved was breathtaking.

I can’t even imagine how much it must have cost to get the whole back done up like that, let alone the legs and arms as well. She was one of the hottest dancers in the club and rumour said that for the right price she’d cook you breakfast. But still, even if she was the highest-paid hooker in the spaceport, she must have saved every penny to get that kind of work done. The level of detail was amazing.

All I knew was that the six-frame animation of the purple butterfly on my shoulder looked pretty weak in comparison and that tattoo alone had cost me a month’s pay.

I sucked back another beer. For the first time in a long time, I wasn’t looking forward to what I’d been sent here to do. The puzzle pieces were falling into place.

She must have borrowed heavily to get the work done. Borrowed from my boss. I guess she’d defaulted on that loan a few times too many.

I was the one they sent in when things got physical. I was there to make sure that she wouldn’t be able to dance anymore. I was here to make her into an example.

She caught my eye. There was a rabbit-warren terror there. She recognized my job in my stare. She recognized what I was there to do and she knew that she could try to run. Both of us knew nothing was going to happen until after her songs finished.

She danced like it was the last time she would ever dance. I watched with a respectful awe. I’m no art expert I never saw anything like it. I didn’t want it to end.

I suppose that’s why she and I are here, in Devil’s End, two planet-hops away from that backwater moon. We have fake IDs and watch our backs.

She tells me she’s in love with me but I don’t buy it. I know I’m only around for protection. I don’t care. I know I love her. As long she needs me, I’m having the time of my life here. The days are a chase, I have someone to protect, I’m living in the moment, and every night is heaven.

I feel like I matter.

Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer

The soundwaves are so short that they actually shatter meat.

Bones shudder but remain intact. Cloth turns to ash. Skin goes translucent and turns into a fragile carapace that break like ice on a puddle.

Then gravity takes over.

When people get hit by the invaders, it’s not pretty. That’s all I’m saying.

The invaders have no eyes. As far as we can tell, their entire bodies are one giant ear, a resonance cage that detects sound for miles around in the air. Their weapons are grown from the grey flesh-skirts that surround their pointed dunce-cap bodies. Weapons that baffle and focus every decibel into whatever they want.

They’re like church spires come to life. They have one giant foot like a slug at the base but they move so very fast. They’re from a volcanic planet where life evolved from a silicate form. They operate at a sizzling operating temperature.

They are living rock with lava for blood from a high-gravity planet and their entire technology is based on sound manipulation.

They have sounds that can drill holes through apartment support beams. They have sounds that can solidify air. They have sounds that separate anything made from metal or rock into separate molecular components.

They have sounds that turn people into what looks like a spilled strawberry dessert.

People like my children. And my wife.

Their groups sound like orchestras of death coming for us. There’s a heat haze in the air above their formations as the sounds distort the very air. Echolocation. We only move when it’s silent. They give off huge plumes of steam like underwater eruptions.

One good thing is that if enough water is spilled on them, they crack wide open and their blood cools into rock as soon as it hits the air. It looks like a horrific death from the way they thrash around. It’s addictive.

I imagine fighting naked in the middle of winter and I think I can get a feeling for how the invaders must feel fighting here on Earth. They must hate it here.

That thought keeps me comfortable at night when I try to sleep.

Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer

Aside from the “more-arms-than-us” thing and the blue colour of their skin, they weren’t as alien as they could have been. They didn’t look like insects or floating blobs, for instance.

At first contact, we all conceitedly thought it just chance that they looked somewhat human. I mean, we’re great, right? Why shouldn’t our form be on other planets as well? Sheer self-centered assumption.

The aliens were bred in tanks in giant arkships.

Remember the hype over the last fifteen years or so about rednecks being kidnapped by aliens and experimented on? All those anal probes and skin samples and implants and all that?

Well, it all happened. It was all true.

The aliens went from planet to planet and kidnapped intelligent life. They studied the inhabitants, bred their own genes into dominant splices and grew the results to maturity.

All of these blue-skinned creatures with black eyes, wide mouths and too many arms were grown from a half-human base.

The aliens’ “true” shape on their homeworld was like a cross between a centipede and an octopus and they were used to an atmosphere that would corrode a human in seconds. They needed our genes to survive here.

And to be ‘compatible’ with us.

Half a million aliens were put down in each capital city. They knew English, Mandarin, and were fluent in the language of the city into which they were dropped. They had food and clothing to last them six months.

Males and Females. There was an exactly equal number of each sex. For a full week, nothing happened. There was an uneasy peace.

But humans are humans. There were attacks on the aliens. A worldwide panic started to build. It looked like a mass genocide was about to take place but immediately, their leader talked to us. I say ‘talked’ but it was more of a telepathic shout that brought every human to a quivering standstill.

The leader of the aliens made us an offer that we couldn’t refuse: let them breed with us and become part of our society or face certain extinction.

He made an example of Paris.

We took the offer.

That was over a decade ago.

There are nearly a billion children now with eyes that have no whites. Their skin has a bluish cast and they have smaller sets of arms poking out at random around their ribcage.

They are polite. They study. They word hard. They are creative.

Their race has shared their knowledge with us.

The entire planet is now on a schedule of the aliens’ devising. We are overcrowded but we’ve been assured that we will be a space-faring race within the decade. This is a plan that has worked hundreds of times before, they say.

There is an even split between us who are repulsed by what they see as invaders and people that have welcomed them and volunteered for marriage and babies.

Religion is taking a beating and a lot of politicians seem to be pretty depressed. The aliens have let us keep our elections and our money-based economy but there’s a general feeling on Earth that we’re children eating at the adult’s table.

Children that have been allowed to keep their toys so that they’ll be quiet.

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.