Issue One
What Scares You?
October 2024
Duncan
Michael Conley
First of all, the guys working for VeriTech in Lab 14b kept sneaking these little wasplike things into our lunchboxes that would screech out towards our faces and explode in a shower of pink glitter, rendering our food inedible. So then naturally we’d retaliate with these little segmented wormy things that we hid under their toilet seats, that would squirt black ink into their underwear as soon as they sat down. We’d bump into them in the car park after work and get them into gentle headlocks, saying things like, “Grr, don’t ever ruin my lunch again, ha ha.” They’d present us with their laundry bills and say things like, “Seriously guys, we can’t afford another pair of ruined pants,” and we’d all laugh together. Our Supervisors tolerated it because it was mostly done on our own time, and it helped us all hone our engineering skills for our actual project work.
Of course it escalated: the building was home to some of the brightest, most mischievous young minds in the nation. The whizz-kids from BioSurge in 12c got wind of the pranks and so one morning our entire second-floor corridor was carpeted with thousands of ultra-realistic slugs which, when you stood too close to them, honked like foghorns.
There was no way to clear them up and we had to promise to clean their lab every night for two weeks to get the deactivation codes.
The farting Robo-Bats—self-explanatory—that was us. The cockroaches programmed to seek out human buttocks and latch themselves on with their tickly, feathery mandibles. The tadpoles released into our watercoolers that made everything taste like bubblegum for several months. The goose-stepping Barbie dolls with kitchen knives instead of arms, which caused serious injury to Widdowson’s shins. He was signed off for several weeks, and a shroud of comradely silence descended upon every lab when the Supervisors launched their investigation.
Then at Halloween, the final straw: as the sun went down, the deadbolts on the front doors clicked shut and, staggering out of Lab 14b: four children, their silicone faces smiling, cherubic in their fine detail, their heads balanced precariously as lollipops on chrome skeleton bodies. ‘Mama, mama,’ they cried, ‘papa, papa,’ as they chased us up and down the staircases, occasionally catching us and gripping us in bruising embraces, smothering us with wet kisses. They were relentless, and none of us slept that night. They hurled themselves, shrieking, off the roof just before work the next morning.
That was when we decided it was incumbent upon us to do the definitive one: the one that would end it all, the one that would be so incredible, nobody else would even try to top it. Thus, Duncan.
We built him as an actual-size replica of a giant Coconut Crab, the creature with the strongest pound-for-pound grip in the animal kingdom—one metre from pincer to pincer, four kilograms heavy. Bullet-proof, bomb-proof. His grip was painful and firm—he could easily snap bone, but we programmed him to stop squeezing just before that point. In each claw, three tiny syringes, which released pheromones designed to induce temporary feelings of impending doom and muscle paralysis. We tested it on ourselves, for only a few minutes each. It felt like eternal hell.
Photo: Igor Omilaev @ Unsplash
We also wanted to make his face stupid, so right in the centre of his body was the drooping, outraged gawp of a blobfish. We covered him with fine, blonde hair and nailed on a tiny stovepipe hat.
Our AI engineers wanted to use him to test their latest updates, so we connected him to the internet and installed a personality, allowing him to decide how to respond to basic commands.
Our favourite feature was his uncanny ability to navigate in the dark. We isolated a hormone found in moths and created a huge maze in one of the building’s basement warehouses—a huge, pitch-black labyrinth whose walls and dead ends we rigged to trigger Duncan’s pain receptors. At the far end, a single lightbulb. The first time we put him in there, it took him under a minute to reach the bulb, despite the fact that it had taken the quickest of us at least ten, in full light.
The plan on reveal day was to cut the power to the building and release Duncan so that he would sneak up on people in the dark and surprise them, maybe even give them one or two small nips here and there. Then we’d remotely activate the disco lights around his shell, revealing his stupid blobfish face. It worked perfectly—everyone screamed, then ran, then laughed. With the dubstep from the speakers we’d built into Duncan’s back legs, the evening was a perfect balance of hilarity and terror, like a wonderful fairground ride—much better than 14b and their hacky, one-note skeleton-children.
The next morning, we returned to the lab under a barrage of congratulatory messages and fawning adulation. “The game is over, bros,” Strootman from MicroMegaMech shouted at us from the open window of 11e, “You guys nailed it!”
It was lunchtime when we unlocked the back room to check on Duncan. He was bunched up in one corner, like a poorly-arranged pile of novelty Popeye arms.
“Was I born to be a joke?” Duncan asked.
None of us could meet any of his eyes as he drew himself up to his full height and advanced.
“Which of you is my father?” he asked.
Unable to think of anything else, one of us pushed Delancey the intern forward. Duncan snipped his outstretched arm clean off.
“What of beauty? Happiness? Who could love me?” he shouted. “Why would you give me pain receptors? Do I have a soul? I hate you. I hate you all.”
We didn’t know how to begin to answer him. We just stepped aside and let him leave, then gathered at the window to watch him scuttling down the freeway, towards the city.
About the author
Michael Conley is a poet and prose writer from Manchester, UK. His work has appeared in a variety of magazines and his prose collection, Flare and Falter, was longlisted for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize.